by Sharon Shinn
“But, Chandran—”
He kissed her again. “The minute Mally was taken, this was the only outcome,” he said gently. “Accept it and be at peace.”
She couldn’t. She collapsed against his chest, sobbing uncontrollably. Around her she heard the murmur of voices as Jaker and Barlow and other bystanders debated what to do. None of them were rash enough to offer comfort. There was no comfort anywhere in the world.
It was Chandran who eventually tugged on her sleeve and put his hand under her chin and tilted her head up. “It looks like everyone is making camp for the night,” he said. “Let us go to our tent and rest and talk of happier things.”
She pushed herself off of him and shakily climbed out of the wagon. Her body was sore all over, cramped from clinging to Chandran, bruised from her sojourn up and down the hillside. She couldn’t even imagine how dreadful her face looked, red and puffy, or her disordered hair. As she waited for Chandran to disembark, her eyes sought Jaker in the small group of onlookers.
“What will happen?” she demanded. “What will his symptoms be?”
Jaker still looked as wretched as any accidental murderer could be. “He’ll grow tired and lethargic. He’ll still be lucid and very much himself tonight, but by morning he will be hard to rouse and he may have bouts of amnesia. Tomorrow he will drift in and out of consciousness, becoming a bit more forgetful all the while. He will develop difficulty breathing. The day after tomorrow he will mostly sleep. And then—” He hunched his shoulders.
“Will he be in pain?”
“No. Corvier offers a kind exit from this world. The old and weary, or those who are very sick and in unrelenting pain, will often take it to ease them on their way.”
“So I have tonight, then,” she said.
“And bits of tomorrow.”
She wiped her sleeve across her face and nodded. “All right.” She took hold of Chandran’s arm. “Let’s go to the tent.”
He leaned on her, or she leaned on him, as they wove their way through the orderly camp. Yori had made a small fire just outside their tent, and she crouched in front of it, settling two small clay containers in the coals.
“You’re probably not hungry,” Yori said, “but I brought you something to eat anyway.”
“Thank you,” Leah said.
“How thoughtful of you,” Chandran said. “I do have an appetite, as it happens.”
Leah glanced around. “Where’s Mally?”
“With Rhan. He thought— He wasn’t sure you were up for watching her tonight.”
Chandran settled himself in front of the fire, sitting cross-legged on the rocky ground. “I would like to visit with her, at least for a while,” he said to Leah. “Unless that would be too hard on you.”
She stared down at him hopelessly. “Seeing the two people I love the most together for one last hour?” she said. “I think I want that more than anything in the world.”
Yori slipped to her feet. “I’ll go find her.”
Leah knelt beside Chandran. “How are you feeling?”
“Good. A little tired,” he said. “My thought is to stay awake as long as I can tonight, since apparently I will spend most of tomorrow sleeping.”
Leah nodded. “I expect the troops will move out early in the morning, since Darien is impatient to get back, but we can leave later if we feel like it.”
“Whatever is easiest on you,” Chandran said.
None of this is easy on me. “Maybe Darien would let us use one of the bigger transports. So you can lie down in comfort while we travel.”
“I don’t expect it matters much,” he replied.
A brief silence fell between them. Leah felt panic and sadness and resentment spike through her body. My last few hours to tell Chandran everything I need to let him know and I can’t think of anything to say. It took all her willpower not to start crying again.
She was almost relieved to see Yori returning with Mally in tow, even though Rhan accompanied them. I should have told her to leave him behind, she thought. But she didn’t have enough energy to be truly irritated.
He seemed to sense he wasn’t wanted, though, because he halted a few paces from the campfire and stood there uncertainly. Yori said something to him and disappeared into the gathering dark, but Mally came forward without hesitation.
Leah took her hand and pulled her down so they were sitting next to Chandran on the patchy grass. The fire snapped with bright enthusiasm, but did little to dispel the chill of the evening. Or maybe the chill had just come to permanently reside in Leah’s bones. “Do you remember my friend Chandran?” she asked, trying for a cheerful tone. “You met him at the shop a while ago.”
Mally nodded. “We sat in the window and built things out of rocks.”
Chandran smiled at her. “Just so. You made towers almost as tall as you are.”
“Did you find out yet?”
“Find out what?”
“Your affiliation.”
“I did not. I have not had a chance to ask your friend Taro what he thinks I might be.”
“Maybe I could tell you,” Mally said.
Chandran glanced at Leah, a question in his eyes. She said, “It turns out—none of us knew, but—Mally is the heir to the torz prime. She has started to exhibit some of his particular powers.”
“Ah,” Chandran said. “Thus your facility with stones.”
“And landslides,” Leah said dryly.
“That is a very exciting development,” Chandran said to Mally.
She wrinkled her nose. “Maybe,” she said. “I don’t feel any different. I just feel like me.”
“And that is a good thing,” he said firmly. “It is always good to know who you are, what matters to you, and what you are capable of.”
Leah glanced down at Mally. “Do you really think you can tell what his affiliation is?”
“Maybe,” Mally repeated. “If I touch him.”
Chandran held out his hand. “I would be curious to see.”
Mally laced her fingers with his and concentrated for a moment. When she looked up at his face, she was frowning. “There’s something wrong with you,” she said.
“Because I do not have an elemental affiliation that you can detect?”
“No, something else. Something bad.”
“Ah,” he said again. “Yes. I am dying.”
“But you’re not sick.”
“No,” he said. “There is poison in my body, and it will kill me in a day or two.”
“Do you want to die?” Mally asked solemnly. “Seka Mardis did.”
“I did want to,” Chandran said softly. “Now I do not.”
“Then make the poison stop,” Mally said.
“I would,” Chandran said. “But I cannot. No one can.”
“I can.”
There was a moment of utter silence. A log shifted within the campfire, falling into the embers with a crash that seemed as loud as a mountain coming down.
“Darling,” Leah said finally, “what do you think you can do?”
Mally was still holding Chandran’s hand in one of hers, but she pointed at him with her other one. “I can make the poison go away.”
Leah felt dizzy. “No you can’t,” she whispered.
Rhan had hung back all this time, but clearly he had been near enough to eavesdrop. Now he came closer and dropped to his knees on the other side of the fire. “Maybe she can,” he said, his voice low and excited. “I’ve seen my father put his hand on a madman’s head and bring him straight to sanity. I’ve seen Mirti Serlast press her fingers against a woman’s shattered rib cage and heal every last bone.”
“She’s a child,” Leah said. “She has no training. She doesn’t even know what she’s talking about! And what if she tries something—and it goes wrong—and she is the one who ends up p
oisoned?” She couldn’t bear to hope that Mally could save Chandran—and she certainly couldn’t allow Mally to exercise her newfound powers in a way that might bring harm to herself. No matter how much she wanted Chandran to live.
But Mally was shaking her head. “That’s not how it works,” she said.
“You don’t even know how it works!” Leah exclaimed.
“Yes I do,” Mally said. She extended her other hand to Chandran, and after a moment’s hesitation, he slipped his fingers between hers.
“What should I do?” he asked.
“Just sit there,” she said.
They all just sat there, hardly moving, barely breathing, glancing at each other and then looking away. I shouldn’t let her do this, I should make Rhan carry her away, I am putting her at risk, and all because I love him! Leah thought. But Mally seemed so calm, so sure of herself, as she held his big hands in her tiny ones and appeared to concentrate on the shape of his knuckles beneath the skin. She’s been kidnapped—taken away—held by strangers, Leah thought, hysteria rising despite her attempts to keep it in check. She’s seen a woman killed in front of her. She’s caused a mountain to come down! And now she’s trying to heal a stranger using power she doesn’t even understand. I cannot let her do this. I have to protect her—
“Darling,” she said, wrapping her arms around the small body and tugging it toward her. “It is so very generous of you to try to help him, but—”
Mally wriggled free of Leah’s hold and closer to Chandran. “I’m almost done,” she said.
“Let her finish,” Rhan murmured.
“But she—”
“She wants to,” he said simply. “And he deserves it.”
Leah shook her head but had no other answer. Just in case it could help, just in case Mally needed her support, she put her hands on the small hunched shoulders and tried to feed her own heat and energy into Mally’s little body. She could feel the slight tension in Mally’s neck and back, then the coil and release of her muscles as Mally dropped Chandran’s hands and sat back.
“I fixed you,” she said.
Chandran rolled his shoulders and moved his head experimentally from side to side. “How odd,” he said. “I feel—quite good. As if I have just woken from a very long sleep. Or eaten two keitzee balls. Or plunged into a cold mountain stream and climbed out on the other side.”
“The torz prime has an affinity for the body and the earth,” Rhan said, his voice subdued but threaded with excitement. “If Mally really did go in and heal you—”
“At this moment, I feel as if she did,” Chandran said.
“I did,” Mally said. “But I’m so hungry. Can we eat something now?”
Leah was in shock, staring between her daughter and her lover and trying to make herself believe that both of them were out of danger. He tried to save her and she ended up saving him, she thought, almost too dazed to put the thoughts together. If she did. If she really did.
Chandran pushed to his knees and began poking at the clay pots Yori had left in the fire. “I believe this food was meant for us,” he said. “Could you hand me that long spoon? Good. Let us take the lids off and see what we have.”
Rhan climbed hastily to his feet and motioned to Leah, so she stood up and followed him into the darkness just outside the circle of firelight. “I think she did it,” he said in a low voice. “I think she cured him.”
“Maybe,” she said. “I hope so. But did it take too much out of her? I need Zoe or your father or someone to explain this to me—”
“We’ll talk to them as soon as we get back to Chialto,” he promised. “But, Leah. I think what this means is—I’ve never seen Kurtis do anything like this. Nothing like playing tricks with a man’s brain. I wonder if—I hope not, but I’m afraid—”
Leah nodded and whispered, “Taro’s dead.”
• • •
They accomplished the trip back to Chialto with almost as much speed as the outbound journey, despite the fact that the circumstances weren’t quite as dire. But Darien Serlast, as Jaker observed, didn’t like to waste anything, and that included time. In fact, Darien and a contingent of soldiers departed the minute the sky was light enough to make out the terrain. The rest of them followed as quickly as they could break camp.
Jaker served as the driver for Leah and Mally, while Barlow and Chandran occupied the elaymotive just behind them, and Rhan rode with Yori. Jaker could not have been more delighted with Chandran’s recovery if he himself had stumbled on the antidote. “And he was wide awake this morning? Lucid?” he asked three times during the first hour of their journey.
Leah didn’t mind repeating the details as often as he wanted to hear them. “Wide awake, full of energy. Said he hadn’t felt this well in years.” Leah squeezed Mally, who sat on her lap and watched with interest as the barren countryside rolled by. Leah supposed that, to the torz prime, even the most monotonous landscape was full of hidden beauty. “I think Mally must have rummaged around inside his body and healed old scars and repaired damaged tissues. Or something.”
She could feel Mally’s shoulders rise and fall in a slight shrug. “I just fixed everything,” she said. “It wasn’t very hard.”
“That’s amazing,” Jaker said.
Leah leaned over and whispered in Mally’s ear. “Did you hear that? You’re amazing. Everybody thinks so.”
About a dozen times an hour, she turned around to make sure Chandran was still sitting upright next to Barlow, still exhibiting signs of his miraculous recovery. Whenever she looked, he smiled and waved; once he clasped his hands together and raised them over his head in a gesture of triumph. Every time they stopped for food or water, she hurried to his side and demanded, “How are you feeling?” Every time, he replied, “Healthy and whole.”
Every time, she touched him, just to be sure.
By sunset, they were only a few hours from the city, but road conditions were poor enough that the sergeant in charge decided they should stop for the night. There was no sign of Darien, and Rhan speculated that the regent had pushed on despite the hazards. There wasn’t even enough moonlight to show the rutted road before them.
“But the newest elaymotives come with lighting systems,” Rhan told Leah. “I have to assume Darien’s in one of those.”
“I wonder if he’s heard anything about Taro,” she said. “He sent a messenger to Chialto the minute we rescued Mally. If the messenger has had time to make it back to Darien—”
“Well, everyone will know the news soon enough,” Rhan said with a sigh.
Dinner was hasty but unexpectedly flavorful, as Barlow did the cooking and threw in a few specialty spices. Halfway through the meal, Leah caught herself looking at the faces of the people who had gathered at her fire. It was an odd collection, to be sure: Mally, Chandran, Rhan, Yori, Jaker, and Barlow. Two that she loved, one that she had loved, three that she considered friends so close she would trust them with her life. With her daughter’s life. How did this become my circle? she asked herself. And then, an even more surprising question: How did I manage before I found them?
TWENTY-EIGHT
By noon the next day, the whole caravan was crossing the canal into the city. Yori waved goodbye and headed off with the soldiers, turning her elaymotive onto the Cinque in the direction of the palace. Rhan crammed himself into the vehicle with Jaker and Mally and Leah as they made their way toward the wealthy residential district where Darien had his house.
They found the whole street blockaded with horse-drawn carriages and smoker cars; guards clustered at the front door. Rhan and Leah exchanged sober looks. The guards meant Darien was inside. The presence of so many visitors meant something momentous had occurred on the property. Most likely, the death of a prime.
“People are going to be curious about Mally,” Rhan said to Leah in a low voice as they climbed out of the elaymotive and gathered in
the street. Chandran and Barlow came over to huddle with them. “Staring at her. Trying to get close to her. We need to shield her. Give her time to adjust to all this before—”
Leah nodded. “I’ll take her straight upstairs. You can handle any questions.”
Rhan jerked his head in Chandran’s direction. “They’ll be curious about him, too.”
“I will also go upstairs and hide,” Chandran said. “Mally and I will amuse ourselves. I am sure she has boxes of stones somewhere in her room.”
“Yes,” Mally said.
“What you should both be doing is sleeping,” Leah retorted. “You’ve had a very challenging set of days.”
“I’m not tired,” Mally said.
“I feel quite energetic,” Chandran said.
Jaker touched Leah’s sleeve. “I don’t see that you have much need for us anymore,” he said. “So we’ll retrieve our own car and be off.”
“I’m sure Darien will want to express his thanks in some impressive way, so you could wait around for that,” she suggested.
“We didn’t do anything special,” Barlow said.
“And we have lives of our own to return to,” Jaker said. “But we’ll be back in Chialto in a few ninedays. We’ll be in touch.”
She threw her arms around Jaker, then turned and hugged Barlow. The men all exchanged respectful nods, and then Jaker leaned down to pat Mally on the head. “I have a soft spot for Zoe,” he said, “but I think you’re going to be my favorite prime.”
A few more farewells, another round of hugs, and they were gone. Chandran and Leah took hold of Mally’s hands, and Leah shared another quick glance with Rhan before he straightened his shoulders and strode up the walkway. The three of them followed behind him, nodded at the soldiers, and pushed through the door and into the kierten of Darien’s house.