Squawk squawk says raven Zisel.

This earns him one of her rare smiles.

She's also wearing one when she comes back two days later! She waves excitedly when she spots him, which she hasn't really ever done before.

He's plucking a bird. "You're looking well."

"I can cast spells, now! The non-orison kinds. The Forest's magic is beautiful." She's practically glowing.

"Lovely! Which did you get?"

"I got Speak with Animals but I ended up dropping it for Cure Light Wounds, I ran into a huge boar with a broken leg and there was no way I could have set the wound for it to heal."

"...huh. I have to prep my cures."

"...huh." Perhaps this means the Forest agrees that a Kaitiaki is for healing its creatures.

She shrugs, and absentmindedly scritches Damisa.

YESSS scritches he LOVES scritches!!!

"I can do summonses on the fly though."

Oh! "Ah, I don't think I can do that. There was just the one thing to reach for, and I knew it was healing, it felt... warm, like Virtue, but a lot more so? ...rainy season sunlight, instead of fireside embers." (Kaitiaki uses metaphors a lot, when she's talking about magic. It's basically the only time she does.)

It's a perfectly understandable impulse, magic isn't built out of the same things as everything else. "Well, guess you're a different kind. There's kinds of everything, even druids."

Happy nodding. She likes being a Healing Druid. 

It will be autumn before he'll bring her to meet any other druids. There aren't that many in this forest, and they don't hang out much, and also her Druidic needs polish.

She'll work on it! And also on her spellcasting, and her foraging, and with Damisa. (He helps her hunt, now, and is happy to feed himself, though he still sometimes will gently nudge her towards the river when he wants some fish.)

She continues to not be very expressive, usually, but when the time comes to meet other Druids, she's practically vibrating with some combination of excitement and anxiety.

"You want to memorize all their names in advance or something?"

-she starts, then thinks about it. "...Maybe?" She shrugs awkwardly. "People don't usually like me." (And it didn't matter, usually, because most people in her life haven't been worth worrying about, not really, but she cares about this!)

"Huh. Why? Is it the feathers? I could see that if they'd never met a bird but don't even farm folk have... chickens?"

Another shrug, a bit sadder this time. "The feathers, my voice, my size..." (She's almost six feet tall, solidly built, and still growing.)

"...just because they're used to seeing something doesn't mean they think it belongs on a person." Her father's wife hated the feathers, would hit her if she didn't clean up any that fell off.

"Huh. Well, fuck 'em."

-she nods, smiling a bit. 

They have to take a big swooping route around some dangerous areas - "I might be able to walk away from a herne, but you wouldn't" - to get to the place where the druids of the forest meet up in the fall. It takes days, overland; perhaps he normally flies.

She can't wait to turn into a bird - but wait, then how would Damisa come?

She ponders this question as they walk, in the periods of silence punctured by Druidic practice (mostly her asking for words about the new flora and fauna they're seeing, in this part of the Forest). After a few hours, she asks him about the hernes.

"Would've been before you were born. Some reckless idiots - druids, but reckless idiots - decided to hit back against an interloper and turn him into a thing that'd defend the forest. He killed them all and turned out to remember enough about how they did it to repeat it, so now there's a herd of them. Sometimes they're all right, really, but they're touchy as fuck."

Kait seems to be rotating that around in her brain. 

"Do you know what the interloper had done to anger them?" she asks, after a few minutes.