“Don’t hurt me!” cried the boy, trying to thrash again.
“It won’t hurt,” Aris said, “if we get them straight in the first place.” He wished he had Gurith’s power of charming the pain away; this would hurt until the healing was well begun. “Come now—we’ll be quick.” He nodded to Kevre and to the adults who would help hold the boy still.
As Kevre moved the boy’s legs to a more normal position, the broken ends of bone disappeared back into the wounds; he yelped but quieted quickly as slight tension kept the ends from wiggling. Aris laid his hands on the boy’s thighs, and let the power take over.
His years of training and experience melded with that power so that now he knew what he had not known in his boyhood: he knew how the broken bones lay, how the thin strands of tendon and ligament had twisted, which of the little blood vessels had torn. He could direct his power more precisely, even into both legs at the same time, working down from the knee-joints, first aligning all the damaged bits of tissue, then forcing them to grow together, to heal as if they had not been broken. The bones were the easiest; they were easy to visualize, and being rigid were more easily controlled. Harder were the blood vessels and tendons, the torn muscles and ripped skin. Hardest of all were the innumerable bits of dirt, any speck of which could cause woundfever. Slowly, methodically, Aris directed the flow of power, concentrating on each minute adjustment. He knew by the boy’s relaxation when the healing had progressed enough to ease the pain, but he was far from finished.
When the power left him, the child lay silent, watching him with bright brown eyes. Dark had come; magelight glowed around him from a dozen watching adults. Aris drew a long breath. He had not quite completed the healing before his power ran out; the bones and other tissues were aligned and firmly knit together, but he had not been able to replace all the lost blood. “Wiggle your toes,” he said to the boy. A frightened look, that said will it hurt? as clearly as words, then both feet moved, and all ten toes wiggled. He looked at Irieste. “He’ll need a lot of your good soup,” he said. “As much liquid as he’ll drink, and good meat to help replace his blood. I’m sorry; my power ended before I could replace that.” He felt dizzy and sick, as usual, but he knew he would be all right. Kev helped him stand; his knees felt as if someone had hammered on them.
“Lord Aris, you need to eat something…”
I need to sleep, he thought. But he could not fall asleep here; he must not worry the family. “We’ll go back, Kevre.” He leaned on Kev’s arm more than he liked, and yet he could walk… how was it that he had used all his power, but had not fainted from it? his mind worried at the question, as if it had importance just out of reach. The family followed him into the tunnel, which he suddenly saw as an orifice in the body of some vast animal. Like walking into a blood vessel, or a heart… the prick of fear woke him enough to make walking easier. In that light, the red rock streaked with darker red and orange looked entirely too much like something’s insides. He staggered, climbing down to the creek, and Kevre steadied him. In the stronghold, he wanted only a bed. Seri appeared, and started to ask a question, but her face changed.
“Ari! What happened?”
Kevre answered for him. “A healing, Marshal Seri; two broken legs. He’s just tired…”
“He’s more than tired.” Seri’s arms around him renewed his strength; he could lift his head, now, and focus on the faces around him. She helped him to his own room, and pushed him onto his bed.
“I’m better,” he said, smiling at her. She did not smile back; she was chewing her lip.
“You look half-dead,” she said. “Kev says your power ran out before you finished the healing?”
Shame washed over him. “Yes. The boy will be all right; I finished the main part of it, but I couldn’t do it all… it was just gone.” Exhaustion clouded his vision; now that he was down, he could not imagine how he had stood and walked so far. “Sorry…” he murmured, and let himself slide into blackness.
When he woke, Seri sat curled in the corner of his room, wrapped in blankets. He tried to throw back his own covers, and she woke up and blinked at him. “So—you’re alive after all.”
“Of course I’m alive. You know I sleep after a difficult healing.”
“I know that ten years ago you would not have called a child’s broken legs a difficult healing.”
Aris frowned, trying to remember. “I suppose… it’s part of getting older. I don’t have the strength I had.”
Seri unwrapped herself and stood up. “I think it’s something more. Remember what we were talking about yesterday?” He didn’t; he felt that his head was full of wet cloth, heavy and impenetrable. “Luap,” she said, leaning close to him. “Luap staying the same as the rest of us aged.”
The conversation came back to him dimly, like something heard years before. “That can’t be right,” he said. He wanted to yawn; he wanted to go back to sleep.
“It is,” she said “Come on—get up and eat.” She pulled the blanket off him, and yanked on his arm. Aris stood, stiff and sore, and let himself be prodded down the passage, in and out of a bath, and into the kitchen.
“Breakfast’s long past,” said the cook on duty. “Where’ve you been?”
“He was healing last night,” Seri said firmly. “He exhausted himself, and we let him sleep it out.”
“Oh. Sorry.” She spoke to Seri and not to Aris. “What does he need? Something hearty, or something bland?”
“He’s hungry, not sick. Meat, if you have it.”
“I’ve the backstrap off that stag; I was saving it for the prince.” The cook looked at Seri again, and said, “But Lord Aris can have it; it’ll give him strength.” She pulled a slice from the deep bowl where it had been soaking in wine and spices. “There’s soup, as well, in that kettle there—” She nodded at it. Seri filled two bowls, and brought them back to the table as the cook worked on the venison steak. She grabbed a half-loaf of bread from the stack on another table and tore it in two pieces.
“Here. Ari—get this into you.” Aris sipped the hot soup, and felt its warmth begin to restore him. The fog before his eyes thinned; by the time the cook laid a sizzling steak in front of him, he was alert and hungry. He began to feel connected again. Seri said nothing, just watched him eat, and when he had finished the steak she handed him another hunk of bread. “Come on, now, we’re going out.”
“Out?”
“Yes.” With a cheery thank-you to the cook, she led Aris out into the passage that led to the lower entrance.
“I should tell Garin where I am,” Aris said. He had no idea how late it was, or if Seri had told his assistants and prentices where he would be.
“Not now,” Seri said. Her grip on his arm might have been steel. He strode along beside her, more confused than worried. She slowed a little as they neared the entrance, and nodded casually to the guard she had insisted on posting there. She led Aris downstream toward the main canyon, but turned off the trail to a hollow between two trees. They had often sat there to talk in privacy; the stream’s noisy burling in the rocks just below ensured that. Aris curled up in his usual place, with the tree-trunk behind him and a twisted root as an armrest; Seri stretched out, her head near his knees, her booted feet on a rock. “You went looking for Luap after we talked,” she said. “Did you find him?”
“Not before they called me for the healing,” he said. Suddenly tears filled his eyes. “I failed, Seri: I didn’t have enough power. And who will follow when my power fails completely?”
“You did not fail,” she said. “Something stole your power.”
“What?”
“Listen. Yesterday, I felt something dire, remember? I’ve felt it before; I’ve never found anything I could point to. But when I started thinking about it, I realized that you’ve been having more trouble with your healings in the past few years—since we quit travelling, in fact. I looked up your records last night. Garin helped.”
“You?” Seri’s dislike of poring over a
rchives had long been a joke between them.
“Yes. And since you insisted that I keep accurate notes of guard reports, I could put those together. I hadn’t really noticed, but my comments about feeling an evil influence have been more and more frequent—and correlate with your most difficult healings. No—” She held up her hand as he opened his mouth to speak. “Wait and hear the rest. Think about it. Why haven’t we noticed that Luap was not growing older? And how can he do that? You told me once that for the body, aging meant injuries unrepaired, illnesses not completely healed. You said that of course healing couldn’t keep someone young—but what if it could? Suppose Luap gets his power from you—and that’s why he’s not aging, and you cannot heal as you did five years ago?”
“It can’t be,” breathed Aris. He closed his eyes; he felt as if he’d been kicked; his breath came short. It could not be; it was impossible. But inwardly he was not sure… or rather, he sure that in some way Seri was right. “Not on purpose,” he murmured. “He couldn’t—he wouldn’t—”
“Aris, you cannot stay young forever without knowing it. He must know what he’s doing. I’ll grant this might not be the only way. It could be his own magery, or something the elves granted him. Something else could be sapping your strength. But taking these things together… why couldn’t you find him yesterday, and why did someone need your healing just then?“
Aris stared at her, even more shocked. “You don’t think he made that child fall!”
Seri reddened. “No—I suppose I don’t, really. But it happened just when you were about to confront him, and I have not seen you so drained since you were a child. And I must tell you, I have had a prickling all along my bones since yesterday. There’s danger coming.”
Aris stirred restlessly. He knew something was wrong; when he thought about it he had to admit he had been losing strength for several years. He had thought of that as age, when he thought of it at all. He had shrugged it off; his powers mattered only as they served the community, not in themselves. But he could not imagine Luap deliberately risking him—the most powerful healer—the way Seri suggested. Luap might be willful, even devious, but he had never been stupid.
“How could it be?” he asked. “I don’t think it’s true, but if it were true, how would it work?”
“I don’t know. If we knew when it started—”
“We do.” Aris realized that he had known that without knowing what the sign meant. “Remember the first time the king’s ambassador came?” Seri nodded. “He commented then on how young Luap looked for his age; he said something about those who do not grow older being the wisest. I thought he meant the elves.”
“I think he did. He meant the ones who built the stronghold.”
“Well, I heard Luap talking to the Rosemage after Arranha died, and saying how lucky he was to look younger than he was—that it gave him an advantage in dealing with the Khartazh. He asked what I thought, and I said that age seemed to be loss of resilience— the skin stretches out, the joints stiffen. It might, I said, be like a failure to heal. We know that those badly wounded often seem older, even if they live. If it were possible to heal all injuries, even those so small we don’t notice them, wouldn’t that hold off age?”
“I doubt it,” Seri said, scuffing the pineduff with her boot. “If it worked that way, everyone you healed would get younger.”
“And you’re right; they don’t. I said so then, and the Rosemage said the gods meant time to flow one way, not slosh back and forth like water in a pan. But it might have given Luap an idea. If you’re right about him, I think that’s where it started.”
Seri frowned. “But he doesn’t have the healing magery. At least, you never thought so.”
“No. The royal magery, yes: you saw him carve the canyon with it, and he can do many other things. But I’ve never seen him heal.”
“Because healing is giving,” Seri said, as if she’d just thought of it. “You pour out your own strength; Gird recognized that. Luap doesn’t. He conserves; he withholds. He tries to do right; we’ve both seen him do the right thing where someone else might not. But it’s calculation—he must figure out the right thing and then try to do it—he can’t just feel it and do it, as Gird did.”
“He’s not selfish,” Aris said quickly. Then, as Seri watched him without saying anything, he said, “Not in the usual ways, I mean. In times of shortage, he takes no more than his share. He lives simply, compared to any of the Khartazh officers.”
“Would you give a wolf credit that he eats less grass than a sheep?” Seri asked. “And I am convinced he took your power, made you less able than you were, risked not only you but all who depend on you for healing. For that matter—” She rolled over and stabbed at the soft duff with a twig. “For that matter, how do we know that no children have the healing magery? Suppose he’s stealing it from them? Before you could detect it, perhaps without knowing it—”
Aris shivered. He had a sudden vision of a hole in the bottom of the great water chamber… all the water swirling out that hole, eventually, if it were not refilled by rain. Had that happened to his power? Had Luap known, had he thought he was taking only a little, the overflow, and unwittingly taken from the very source? Or had he known—no. He could not believe that. He studied his hands, aware now of the signs of middle-age as clear in him as in Seri. “I think,” he said slowly, “that something never existed in Luap that Gird had… as if a young tree grew with a hollow core, as those giant canes do, but then thickened around it. No one could see, from outside, but if that inside were what Gird gave from, then Luap might have nothing to give. He might try—as he has— but no one can bring water from a dry well.”
“Whatever the cause, it was wrong,” Seri said. Then she sighed, and scraped her hair back, looking at him with worry in her eyes. “And there’s you. What are we going to do to restore your power? And the others; how are we going to find out how much else is wrong?”
Aris squirmed against the tree’s bark. It felt comforting, that great vegetable existence at his back. “If you’re right, the first thing to try would be the freeing of my own power. You say you noticed a change after we quit travelling?”
“Yes—within a year or so, at least.”
“Then we should travel.”
“But we can’t—we can’t leave the stronghold now!” He had never seen her so anxious. “I told you, I sense some evil. We can’t leave them here, without help—”
Aris tried to feel around inside himself, the self he had thought so familiar, and find the hole out of which his power fled. He could not; he felt opaque to himself, and wondered how long that had been going on. Years? He could not tell. “I don’t think I can free it here, so near him—and I don’t know how far we’d have to go.” When had they last been as far as the western canyons, the town beyond? He could not remember. Seri reached out and took his hand.
“You will do it, Aris. Look—let’s try the mountaintop.”
Exhaustion washed over him. “Today? Now?”
“Yes.” She held both his hands; he felt as if warmth and strength poured out of her and into him. Very strange; he was used to that process going the other way. “Now,” she said, pulling him up.
They reached the foot of the stairs without anyone commenting. Aris looked up the spiral. “All those steps,” he said. Then he grinned at Seri. “I know. Gird wouldn’t put up with whiners. If you’re beside me, and old Father Gird will help—” He felt better, ready to face the long climb to the first plateau.
They came out into the midday light, another day of blowing cloud. Aris felt the wind pushing him sideways, but fought with it until he reached the trail to the high forest. He looked up, wondering if the rocks meant to look unclimbable, or if it was his fault.
He made it up, grunting and puffing. The backs of his legs ached. Seri came up as lightly as a deer, he thought. She spent more time out of doors than he did… and why? he wondered. When had that started? It wasn’t as if the mageborn were sickly, alwa
ys needing him. But the accidents seemed to come just as Seri was starting somewhere, or when they’d planned a day away.
He headed off into the trees, taking the short way to the western watchpost. Seri caught up with him. “Let’s go north, to Arranha’s cairn.
“It’s a long way,” Aris said; he didn’t feel like walking that far. Hard to remember that at first they’d come up every Evener to lay a stone on the pile.
“So? We’re trying to find out if either of us can come out of the fog up here.”
They had walked some distance when Aris realized he was moving more easily. He had warmed up, he thought… but it was more than that. He was breathing deeper, without strain; his head felt clearer. The racing patterns of light and cloud no longer seemed ominous, but playful. He noticed flowers in bloom up here that had gone to seed in the canyon below; he remembered years when they had always climbed the mountain to see the last wild-flowers bloom.
Seri swung her arms and did a skip-step. “It may have nothing to do with Luap, but I still feel happier up here.”
“And I.” With renewed strength, he probed at himself, feeling again for anything wrong with his power. Vaguely, fuzzily, he sensed something wrong there. He prodded it as he would have a sore spot: how deep, how big, how inflamed? The familiar sense of something resisting the flow of healing magery… but this time resisting the flow in… he wondered if patients felt this.
He did not realize he had stopped, until Seri took his hand to tug him on. “Don’t stop—it’s getting better.”
“Yes, but I—”
“A little farther. I’m feeling it too.” She went on, and he followed, until his head cleared with an almost audible snap. He blinked; everything seemed brighter, the colors of leaf and bark and stone more sharply defined. Seri slowed. They had been walking in mature pine forest, the trees spaced well apart, with the sun slanting in between them. When they stopped, Aris could hear nothing but the wind in the pine boughs overhead. There before them was the pile of stones; some had fallen in the years when no one came. Aris stooped to replace them.
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