Fire Kin

by M. J. Scott

  He blinked and looked at me for a moment. I held the vial of potion in front of his face. “This will take the pain away. But you have to stop screaming long enough to drink it. Do you understand me?”

  He nodded. His skin was an unpleasant grayish shade beneath its olive tones, and sweat beaded on his forehead. He pressed his lips together, so hard the edges of them turned white. The echoes of his pain battered at me, making my nerves twinge in sympathy. I pushed the sensation away before it could distract me, using my training to close my mind to the pain as much as possible.

  “Good.” I held the vial to his lips. “I know it hurts. But drink.”

  He nodded again and his hand came up around mine, painfully tight. He tilted his head back and tipped the contents of the vial into his mouth, swallowing desperately. Then his lips clamped shut again.

  “Well done. Now lie back. Carefully. We’ll support your arm.” The orderly was, thankfully, several steps ahead of me and was busily placing pillows so that the man didn’t have far to slump backward. I put a cushion of power around his arm, shielding it from the contact of the mattress and the rest of his body, counting silently in my head. By the time I reached fifteen, the man’s face relaxed into slack insensibility.

  With the patient now rendered unable to resist, I set to work. Heat fairly radiated from his arm, and the protesting nerves and dying flesh called out to me. I drew on my power and sent it into him again, hoping like hell that his blood wouldn’t resist my healing in this as it did the command to sleep. If it did, and if it resisted the human mages as well, then he was likely to lose part of the use of his arm. The burn was deep and the muscle would warp beneath the scar tissue. His Beast Kind heritage would, if he was lucky, defend him from infection and prevent him from losing the arm entirely. But it wouldn’t save him from being partly crippled if my magic didn’t work.

  Several seconds passed as I poured power into him, trying to push past the hints of resistance I felt. I was beginning to think that it wasn’t going to work, that I should ask the orderly to bring Simon over, when something gave inside him and his body began to respond. Heat receded. Tiny vessels began to mend, flesh to heal. I breathed relief and focused again, lessening the flow of power to a steady stream rather than a torrent. No point draining myself when there were many more patients to come after this.

  I nodded to Bard and told him to move on to another patient and settled myself for a long night’s work.

  • • •

  It was a long night—or a very early morning—I was never sure which to call it. In the Veiled Court and the Veiled World, time is more flexible than it is in the City. Night and day do not necessarily follow strict rules, depending on who holds sway in any given realm. The Veiled Queen, seemingly fond as she was of humans, had let the Fae mostly have free rein in that respect. And in the court itself, more than just time bent to her will. It was hard to keep track of time when the mere mood of the queen could change the land from night to day.

  As the sky outside the windows began to show the first hints of light, we had tended to almost all our patients. I left the other healers working on the last few–those with the most minor injuries who’d been able to wait for treatment—and made my way around the wards and the waiting areas, soothing anxious relatives and friends.

  By the time the cathedral bell tolled eight, I was ensconced in my office, occupied with the records and logistics the frantic night had left in its wake. I filled in forms and gave directions to the staff to ensure we were restocked and to adjust the schedules to accommodate the new patients during the sleepless night. We needed to be ready for whatever this new day would bring.

  I took comfort from the familiar surroundings of my office and from the feel of the hospital around me. St. Giles was part of me now, sunk deep in my bones. I don’t know if I’d been thinking straight when I left Summerdale thirty years ago and come here, seeking a place where things were different. Different from the self-absorbed, self-willed, restricted world of Summerdale. The world that used people’s lives as pawns.

  I’d wanted to use my healing abilities for good, to make a difference rather than tending to minor hurts incurred by pampered Fae in pointless challenges. I’d wanted meaning. And I’d found it, much to my surprise. The humans had welcomed me, taught me as much as I taught them, taught me more perhaps. They’d changed me for the better. They too were part of me now.

  And I would do my best to help keep them safe and to mend their hurts if safety became impossible.

  I was just giving instructions to the hospital’s head housekeeper, a short, wiry woman who’d worked at St. Giles as long as I had and had the all-too-human gray hairs to show for it, when someone knocked on the door. This time there was no urgency to the sound and I finished speaking to Agatha before I acknowledged the knock. She bobbed her head to let me know she had all my instructions clear—she never wrote anything down—and Liam stepped through the door to replace her when she left.

  “Good morning, Lady Bryony.” He bowed courteously.

  “Good morning.” I picked up the pile of papers in front of me. The patient names and details of what had happened during the fire that we’d gleaned from those we’d treated. I assumed the Templars would want to talk to some of them, particularly the three survivors of the group who’d started the trouble. “These are the notes on last night.” I offered them to him.

  Liam held up a hand. “That’s not what I came for, my lady.”

  “Is something wrong?” I asked, coming to my feet. I’d thought I’d managed to dispel all the tension of the night before, but his words sent it winding around my muscles again, which, strangely, made the fatigue I’d been ignoring even more apparent. I hadn’t been getting more than a few hours of sleep a night for weeks now and I was starting to feel it. Maybe that was why I had been so rattled by Asharic’s unanticipated reappearance last night.

  Liam tilted his head. “Not wrong exactly.”

  He looked tired too. He didn’t patrol anymore. Even though he was still a fierce swordsman—I had seen him in training—and a sunmage of no little power, his missing arm was a liability when facing opponents as fast as Blood and Beast Kind. But when his brother knights were out patrolling I knew that he busied himself making sure they had everything they needed. And then I recalled that Guy had set him the potentially frustrating task of trying to wrangle Asharic’s forces into some semblance of order.

  “What is it?” Were Ash’s soldiers causing trouble already? I had no doubt he was a skilled commander and that his men were formidable fighters—the Templars would never have sent for them were that not true—but I couldn’t imagine that he ran his little army with the sort of fierce discipline the Templars instilled in their knights.

  “It’s the Fae, my lady. There’s a group of them at the Brother House. They say that Captain Pellar has to come with them to Summerdale. He sent me to fetch you.”

  I stared at him for a moment. Shal e’tan mei and double that. I hadn’t seen that one coming. Where was Fen when I needed him? But obviously our resident seer hadn’t seen it either or he would have warned me. What did the Fae want with Ash so urgently? And who had sent word so swiftly to Summerdale to let them know that he had returned?

  I could think of a number of possibilities. He’d been exiled—unable to set foot over the borders of the lands the queen had claimed—but the queen had died and it was tradition that exiles could return when the ruler who’d sentenced them was no longer ruler. In practical terms that meant that most exiles lasted the equivalent of several human lifetimes at least. Usually more. The Fae did not change rulers very often.

  And then there was the simple fact that Ash was Ash. Drawing trouble. He’d certainly not been popular with certain Families and factions at court. Unpopular enough, in fact, that I was certain his enemies had engineered the duel that had led to his banishment. Even though those who I suspected were behind it had been related to Stellan sa’Oriel, whom Ash had killed during the figh
t.

  Ash had only been gone thirty years. A long time for a human to be banished, but for one of us, barely time for tempers to cool, let alone for sentiments to change.

  Were there those in the court who still wished him ill? Undoubtedly. There was hardly a Fae amongst the High Families who didn’t have enemies. I had a few myself, though I didn’t think any of them wanted me dead. They were satisfied with—and probably considerably cheered by—the fact that I spent almost all my time far away from court in this crazy iron-bound city. Ash, on the other hand, had been good at making enemies of the serious kind. He’d been too strong, too brash, and too full of his own sense of how he was going to live his life not to.

  Not to mention that his Family was related to the queen herself. But now the queen was dead and that connection wouldn’t protect him when he did return to the court. Damn. Why had he come back? Couldn’t he have seen that this was going to happen?

  Or, even worse, was he looking for trouble?

  “My lady? Will you come?” Liam’s words interrupted my reverie.

  I straightened my shoulders. I couldn’t stay out of it, as much as my instincts warned me that that was the smart thing to do. The Templars needed Asharic’s army, which meant they needed Asharic. So I couldn’t let him be dragged off to Summerdale and become the subject of some obscure Fae machinations. We didn’t have time for that right now. Time enough to settle old scores once the city was safe again.

  “Of course,” I said.

  Chapter Five

  ASH

  I spent the night on a flat piece of roof atop one of the square towers of the Brother House. I’d been tired before the Templars’ meeting, but seeing Bryony had taken care of that. Nothing like a good adrenaline surge of nerves, nostalgia, and regret to burn away fatigue.

  So instead of resting, I alternatively tried to clear my mind with the disciplines I’d been taught as a youngster and stared out over the darkened City, trying to convince myself that I was actually home again.

  Or close enough to home. As close as I was going to get for now. The lights of the City seemed subdued; not as many lanterns and gas lamps breaking the night into the pools of light and darkness as I remembered. Except, that is, for the long clear line of sunlamps and guard fires that edged the winding borders between the human world and the Night World.

  Those were not as I remembered them either. They had shifted with the ending of the treaty. There was no longer the no-man’s-land of the border boroughs standing between the humans and the Night World. No. From what I’d been told, all the border boroughs had chosen their allegiance now. Some had joined the humans—Gillygate, Brighttown, Westerbray, and Oldberry—while Seven Harbors, Mickleskin, and Larks Fall were now under the sway of the Night World. Which meant the line of guardian lights swooped and curved and made strange detours along its path.

  I wondered how the new borders had affected the railway. The main rail line of the City bisected it neatly along its north and south accesses, a path that used to take it mainly through human and border boroughs with only a few of the offshoot branch lines heading into Night World territory and then, mostly, into the Beast Kind boroughs rather than the Bloods’ domain. Now the Great Northern Line would cut through at least three Night World boroughs.

  Had the railway come to a halt? That would be a strain on the City. The railway, which had just been nearing completion when I left, was one of the City’s main supply lines to the markets and farms and smaller towns that provided the bulk of the raw materials for the food its inhabitants ate and the clothes they wore.

  Guy hadn’t mentioned the trains to me, so I was assuming they were still running. The Templars had stockpiles of food and ammunition and weapons, but he would surely have told me about something as vital as the City’s supplies being cut off. If that had happened, restoring them would need to be a priority.

  I was still on the roof when Rhian came to find me an hour or so past dawn to discuss the arrangements she’d made with Liam. She brought Charles Simpson, the most senior of my lieutenants, with her.

  Both of them looked more rested than the previous day. From my vantage point, the night had been relatively quiet. There’d been a fire in one of the former border boroughs that had caused a flurry of activity and I’d sent a thread of power to help the fire die as fast as possible. From such distance, with all the iron in the City affecting my powers, it was as much as I could do. I watched the distant movement of men and horses and carriages ferrying the injured back to the hospital. I’d been tempted to go and offer my assistance, but Bryony would be there and I doubted she’d welcome my help.

  Apparently the Templars hadn’t sought assistance from any of my soldiers and Rhian and Charles had both slept through the commotion. Charles was his usual quiet, solid self, his reddish hair cropped close to his head, clothes neat, face clean shaven. Rhian, in contrast, still looked rumpled, but her braids were tamed against her head, the blue and red strands bright in the early light.

  They’d earned their sleep. They’d spent the rest of the previous day and evening working hard to get our men bedded down and liaising with the Templars on the mundane but vital details of housing, food, supplies, and command structures here in the City. They filled me in as we breakfasted with the Templars and then, after I dismissed them both to get on with settling the men in, Guy came to brief me on the night’s activities before he went to bed.

  After Guy left, I got Liam to take me back to the map of the City in the Templar’s vast conference room and made him drill me on the streets and lanes that had grown less clear in my memory than they had been before I went away.

  And it was there that Father Cho came to find me to tell me that there was a delegation of Fae at the Brother House gates, requesting that I accompany them to Summerdale.

  Fuck. “Get Bryony,” I hissed at Liam, and he wheeled and set off with speed.

  Father Cho tapped his chin as he watched him go. “Problem?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Do you have to let them in?”

  He shook his head. “No. The Brother House is a Haven, so if they request sanctuary I would have to grant it, but otherwise they don’t have a right to enter. Do you have reason to believe they mean you ill?”

  I shrugged. “That largely depends on who they are. Did they give any names?”

  “The man who made the request said he was Tomar sa’Uriel. Does that mean anything to you?”

  Tomar? “He’s one of my cousins,” I said. More like a brother than a cousin. My parents hadn’t been blessed with any children other than me. Though after having me, they might have thought it a blessing that there were no others to trouble them as I did. Tomar and I had grown up together, along with his sisters, Roslyn and Rowan. Our Families had shared a territory, and the houses were close together by Fae standards.

  But Tomar had not sided with me in the trouble that had led to my exile, and I had no idea where I might stand with him now. “Was there anyone else with him?”

  “Four other men. No women. Three of the men have Family rings that are red and orange and yellow. The other’s is black and dark blue. He’s older than the rest of them.”

  Older? Bearing black and blue Family colors. That sounded disturbingly like someone from Bryony’s Family. They definitely hadn’t been on my side. Lord sa’Eleniel had not approved of Bryony associating with a troublemaker like me. And I doubted I’d done anything to improve his opinion of me when I’d been exiled and broken his daughter’s heart.

  But it seemed unlikely that Lord sa’Eleniel himself would come for me. The other three, red and orange and yellow, were sa’Peniel’istar, a minor Family related to the sa’Uriels. My own Family ring was ruby and topaz and diamond. Theirs would be ruby, topaz, and citrine.

  But whether or not they would support me would depend largely on the current state of affairs between the various branches of the Family, and that was something I knew nothing about.

  Regardless of whether they were
friends or foe, I had no desire to return to Summerdale now. I had a job to do here in the City and was more than willing to put off facing my past.

  “I’d better go down and talk to them,” I said finally. “If Liam gets back with Bryony, send her to me.”

  “Do you want me to ask the gate guards to let them in?”

  “No.” I would feel safer with iron between me and them. For a start, it would put a crimp in their style if they tried to use any form of magical compulsion on me. As would a couple of Templar knights at my back.

  I walked out of the Brother House with nerves prickling my skin and twisting my guts. I was used to fear. It’s a given in battle, no matter how many times you experience fighting. I knew how to master it in the moment. But to tell the truth, it was a long time since I’d felt a weight of dread like the one I did now. There were Fae amongst my men. Exiles like me or a few who chose to leave the Veiled World of their own accord. But while they were friends in some cases, none of them were High Family. Not from the world I had grown up in or from any of the clans that made up the Veiled Court.

  Not my blood and my memories. Not like what Tomar was. Or had been.

  Bryony hadn’t exactly welcomed me home with open arms, and I was beginning to wonder if anyone would.

  Hadn’t anyone missed me in the time that I was gone? I had been young and foolish, yes, and caused my share of trouble, but I had thought I had true friends.

  None of them followed me into exile, nor had I expected them to. But I didn’t like to think that they had forgotten me. Or worse, that they felt ill will toward me for what had happened. I knew that there would be those of Stellan’s Family who did, of course. Though he was the one who’d challenged me to the duel, I had been the victor and he had paid the ultimate price.