Valor of the Healer

by Angela Highland

  On their heels strode a fourth man with a pistol in his right hand and a candle held high in his left. Around this man the guards fanned out, two of them flanking him, and the third moved between his lord and their prey. Julian flashed a look from face to face, cursing the candle that played havoc with his depth perception as it forced him to adjust to the flickering light now falling across the room. He couldn’t ignore the guards, not when he was so outnumbered, but all depended upon what Holvirr Kilmerredes would do with the gun he brandished—whether he would risk harming his wife by shooting at such close range, or simply order his men to charge.

  With tawny eyes, a loose mane of golden hair, and a powerful frame, the duke looked an apt master for a Hall named for a lion’s heart. Moreover, he looked a man who held absolute control over the situation at hand. He studied the dagger pressed against the duchess’s throat, and then Julian himself. “You can’t imagine that threatening my lady wife will get you anything but an extremely painful death?”

  “I’ve been told overweening ambition is one of my primary faults,” Julian drawled. His only ambition at that instant was reaching the window behind him before someone shot or stabbed him, but the man he’d been sent to Lomhannor to kill didn’t need to know that. Inch by inch, never easing his grip on the writhing duchess, he edged backward. “I can’t say I’ve observed it, but I’ve never had any pretensions of modesty.”

  The duke sneered, taking aim with his pistol. “Nor, apparently, of honor. I’ve never clapped eyes on you, and yet one of my footmen informs me that you entered my Hall tonight to kill me.” Distaste rumbled through his baritone, and his gaze sparked with ire. “So I’ll assume you’ve been paid. You’ve no exits out of this room, and no options. Release the duchess, surrender the name of your employer, and the Bhandreid may grant you a pardon.”

  Julian had never heard a more bored-sounding invocation of the queen of the realm in his life—but then, it wasn’t as if that ploy would work on him regardless. His smile flashed broad and cold as he pressed his knife into the duchess’s neck, enough to pierce her skin. “With all due respect to Her Imperial Majesty, I’d just as soon expect sheep to spit dragon fire. But I’ll leave you your lady. Your second, I understand? Wouldn’t want to make you hunt for a third.” He shoved Khamsin forward, letting her stumble away from him—and crumple to the floor as the drug that coated his knife took hold.

  It wasn’t as potent as the mixture in the ampoule hidden in his hand. It wouldn’t kill her, and it didn’t need to. Distraction was all he needed now.

  The guards cried out, the dark-skinned one in an unintelligible burst of Tantiu, and the duke started. In those few moments Julian sprang to the window and with his false hand he smacked the latch. With his living one, he thrust the dagger into its sheath and plucked another item from a pocket. Blithely he tossed the raven feather into the room and then threw open the window and hurled himself out into the night.

  “Bloody hells!”

  “Is he mad? It’s three stories down!”

  “Get Her Grace to her chambers, idiots! The cur is mine!”

  It took only seconds for the duke and his men to shake off their surprise, but by the time Kilmerredes lunged halfway out the window, Julian was rappelling down the side of the building toward the ground below.

  A maimed Rook might not be able to climb a wall, he thought in satisfaction, but he can damned well fly down it.

  Two ropes, one for winding about his right forearm and letting out all the way down, the other for gripping as he descended, did the job. A grappling hook secured those ropes to the wall, just far enough below the window of the duke’s quarters that someone reaching out couldn’t find it unless he knew exactly where to look. Julian had, which meant that Rab had done his job. Unlike the footman, but he’d worry about that later. Right then he had to flee.

  Kilmerredes roared an oath. The light of his candle flickered wildly in the still-damp breeze, yet he needed but a moment to aim down with his pistol and fire.

  The shot ricocheted off Julian’s shoulder, and the pain of the bullet’s impact drove all else from his consciousness. In panic he clutched at the rope, but his left shoulder had taken the hit, and agony shot up his arm to loosen his hold. When his body slammed against the house’s granite wall, he dropped like a stone for the last fifteen feet before crashing into a gorse bush.

  High overhead, voices bellowed. Julian barely heard them. Fog whirled through his senses, swallowing everything except the fire in his arm and the wail in the back of his mind. Tykhe, not this one too!

  “Julian!”

  A much closer voice, younger than his. Male. Familiar, though he couldn’t focus enough to see his partner as anything more than a vague form leaning over him in the darkness. Rab’s hands he registered more clearly, the left with the usual complement of five digits, the right missing the ring finger. When they jostled his wounded shoulder he bit back a scream and croaked, “Shot...pistol. Get me out of here, Rab.”

  “Shall I presume that something went awry with the plan?” Even with his voice pitched to a whisper, even as he looped Julian’s right arm over his shoulders and levered him up out of the gorse, Nine-fingered Rab sounded sardonic. For Rab, sarcasm was normal. Particularly as a cover for worry.

  A spot above his left knee shrieked a protest at his body being pulled vertical, and Julian’s vision went red with agony. “Bugger the plan!”

  Rab’s arms tightened around him, keeping him upright. “Where else are you hurt?”

  “L-leg.” Bones shifted in his thigh, almost driving Julian into unconsciousness. “Broken.”

  Rab swore. “You won’t get far on that. Where’d you put the òrennel?”

  The pouch their elven employers had given them didn’t hold much, just a handful of bits of innocuous-seeming bread rolled into compact spheres for easy carrying, easy eating—and easy hiding of the paste of charmed herbs in the center of each one. It bore just enough healing power to grant an injured man stamina and strength to reach a safe haven. Rab had taken one look at the pouch and point-blank ordered Julian to be its bearer, though the Rook was the leader, Rab the follower. Julian had grumbled but acquiesced. He couldn’t deny that he was the more physically vulnerable of the pair of them. Slumping broken and bleeding in his partner’s arms drove that lesson home with unmistakable force.

  “Right side,” he muttered in woozy disgust. “Can’t move my blasted hand to get to it.”

  Rab leaned him against the wall of the Hall and reached into the pouch for two of the òrennel spheres. The Rook clenched his teeth to keep from howling at the movement, but then the younger man’s hand found his mouth despite the dark and fed him the bread.

  Julian chewed, swallowed and almost retched at the earthy, prickly sensation that fell like a landslide through his chest, as though he’d gulped down a fistful of mud and twigs. For an instant he envisioned exactly that, the night blurring into unreality around him, till he saw himself pitching facedown into the dirt of a forest glade and choking as he inhaled—

  “You won’t like the taste, human,” Alarrah’s voice informed him in the swirl of dazed memory. “But humor me and take it. Consider it my contribution to your success—”

  Then watery coolness sluiced across Julian’s awareness, opening an unsteady core of clarity within the fog. The pain retreated to the borders of his thoughts. He half-fancied it circled him, looking for an opportunity to lunge at his throat.

  Focus, man.

  It still required effort, but to his amazement, Julian found that he could. Light-headed, he peered up at Rab. Like his own, Rab’s face was streaked with ash, his telltale fair hair hidden beneath a black woolen cap. Even up close, very little of Nine-fingered Rab could be discerned in the darkness. But at least now the Rook could begin to make him out.

  “Is it working?”

  “A little. I can think. We’ve got to move.”

  “Only if that leg can hold up.”

  “Clean break,” Juli
an grunted. He’d broken bones before, and while his leg pulsed with undeniable fire, it lacked the exquisite pain of bone piercing outward through flesh. Or so he hoped. The òrennel gave him clarity, but it also distanced him from his battered body, and he didn’t trust his own perceptions. “If I can’t keep up, you keep moving.”

  They’d had this argument before. But this time Rab held back his usual sallies—“I’d abandon you with a ready heart, but you still owe me fifteen quid” or “Leave you in the midst of such a lively engagement? And miss the quadrille?” As his partner hobbled away with him into the night, uneasiness shot through him. Had Rab seen something about his injuries he couldn’t sense himself?

  Best not to think about it. They had horses hidden, ready and waiting for their escape. But to ride them, they had to reach them. Julian narrowed his focus till nothing remained but the need to get to those mounts.

  It wasn’t enough.

  Blood staining his garments from the bullet wound, his damaged leg trembling alarmingly, he collapsed just before they reached the terrace where Lomhannor’s southeastern wing joined its heart. Rab fed him two more of the òrennel spheres, but as Julian swallowed them down he could tell that his second rally wouldn’t be as great as the first. His haven of clarity grew smaller by the instant, fog lapping at its edges, broadening the distance between him and the world. Pain pulled farther away, but so did conscious thought.

  The numbing of his thoughts undid him. Julian never remembered afterward what happened, whether he’d put weight on his left foot or if the broken bones shifted enough to hit a nerve. All he knew was that in one moment he was striving to keep moving—and in the next his leg was convulsing.

  Thundering pain tilted the world on its axis, hurling him, and Rab along with him, down to the earth. Fragile branches of another bush snapped as he fell through it to a wall beyond. There was a hole too, a window perhaps, right at the level of the ground. Blind with agony, he registered the opening only by the absence of stone in that part of the wall, by the musty air that wafted through it, and by the iron bars against which his body collided.

  Somewhere outside the fog Rab breathed a frantic curse, and his hands swept over him, searching for further hurt.

  Then another hand entirely reached through the window and closed upon his wounded shoulder.

  A voice whispered, “I beg your forgiveness, akreshi, but I have no choice.”

  And everything vanished in lightning.

  Chapter Two

  Faanshi had no warning. Fire ignited in her shoulder and leg, throwing her so violently out of the calm of meditation that she fell sideways onto the cellar floor. For a few heartbeats she thought she’d been dreaming, that she’d dozed off kneeling there upon her tattered prayer cushion—but no. Her entire left side was awash in pain and, with a mewling little moan, she saw her power roaring in response. A nimbus of light bathed her hands. Her palms were hot, the skin pulled unbearably taut, as if threatening to split from the pressure of what roiled within them. Through this, there could be no sleeping, only a brief frantic prayer to Djashtet, and panic that drove the air from her lungs.

  Then a body fell across the bars of the cellar window, and she knew that the fire’s source had reached her.

  Blood’s sharp scent punctuated the aches she could sense in that flesh, and inexorable need urged her up to put her hands on that pain and let the fire surge forth to obliterate it. In her terror Faanshi barely marked the second figure beyond the bars, leaning over the fallen one, for the energy flooding her was a merciless lash. It goaded her to her feet and to the empty crate beneath the window. Up onto this she climbed, almost slipping before she found her balance on her perch.

  One of her hands caught the window’s rightmost bar, while the other connected with the black-clad form sprawled on the ground, little higher than her head. Magic rolled through her palm, leaving her scarcely enough strength for an apology before it began to consume the pain and her consciousness with it.

  “I beg your forgiveness, akreshi, but I have no choice,” she gasped out into the night.

  A storm of dizzied thoughts overwhelmed her own.

  They were dead, Rab, you idiot, get out of here, gods, no not his other hand too—new pain in his leg—dear gods, his leg was convulsing—old pain at his wrist why could he feel it his hand was gone—fire blazed in his skull like the poker that had taken his eye—I didn’t do it, Cleon, I swear I didn’t do it, don’t, brother, don’t!

  Golden flame engulfed the form beyond the bars, drowning the convulsions of the shuddering leg, mending the sundered bone. It coursed along the shoulder where a bullet had struck, and there too bone smoothed out as splinters and fragments rejoined the whole. Flesh followed bone, rippling and settling beneath torn cloth, and strength flowed out of her with the fire. Helpless to stop it, Faanshi regained a minute corner of herself only with a second, desperate prayer.

  Almighty Djashtet, forgive me, I can’t keep it in!

  The fire erupted back upon itself in twin bolts of pain. Her left eye seemed to turn to ash within her head, her right hand to disintegrate in a halo of flame. Faanshi heard herself shriek, and her hand jerked back as though true fire raged through the stranger along with the magic. Her legs buckled, slapping her body into the cellar’s wall. Before she could slump to the floor, a hand shot between the bars, seizing her by her rough woolen sari and the choli she wore beneath.

  Her power fluttered. In its wavering light she saw the stranger’s face, pale skin peeking through a coating of dark ash in streaks of sweat. One blue eye stared down at her, thunderstruck. A dull black patch hid the other from her view.

  “What the devil are you, girl?” the stranger whispered.

  “I’m only a slave, akreshi, I didn’t mean to, forgive me!” The craven apology was a reflex, as uncontrolled as her magic—Faanshi was conscious only of blurting out the Tantiu honorific, the one word that usually stood between her and her master’s wrath. She drooped low against the wall, all the retreat she could manage. Her hand still clung to the window bar, but she couldn’t make her fingers move or summon the strength to pull out of his grip.

  His gloved hand pressed upon the back of her head, swift and light. Through the wool that covered her hair, she sensed the leather on the palm, the fingertips left bare. Through her power’s echoes, even that fleeting contact burned. “You don’t need to apologize,” he murmured, and she looked back up in shock. “Not for this.”

  “Damn it, Rook, we’ve got to move,” urged another voice just beyond the bars.

  The hand retreated, and the man she’d healed barked as he scrambled to his feet, “I know, I know. Go!”

  The hurried exchange gave over to scuffling sounds, which in turn became running footsteps that faded into the night. Faanshi heard nothing more before she pitched sideways off the crate and down into oblivion.

  * * *

  “Foolish, headstrong child. What have you done?”

  Tantiu words whispered in reedy tones called Faanshi back to herself. Hands swathed a damp cloth across her face and throat, and she shuddered as the coolness leached away the heat within her flesh. Faanshi took refuge in the ministration, but with that crumb of awareness came others.

  The cellar whose walls bounded her existence took shape in her sight, along with what pitiful furnishings it contained. A short shelf bore what few books were allowed her, all in Adalonic, on the sects of the Church of Four Gods and the known sightings of the Anreulag, their Voice, who carried out their will and hunted users of magic. Beside it, a basket held neatly folded, half-done mending, along with a delicate doily she was painstakingly knitting when time permitted—but no needles, for even the fragile needles she needed for the lacework were forbidden her when she was alone.

  She’d been moved back to her cot, and the cloth against her face meant that her veil had been removed. Only one person in Lomhannor Hall would attend her so, and without surprise, Faanshi opened her eyes to find her great-aunt Ulima beside her,
visible in an oil lamp’s wan light.

  “You shouldn’t have moved me, okinya,” Faanshi said. It was a relief to answer in their native tongue. Only to her, in this room, could she speak Tantiu freely. And only in this room could she call the old woman by that word of kinship, rather than the akresha that honor and rank would have demanded beyond the cellar door. “I’m too heavy for you.”

  Wispy black brows almost invisible against cinnamon-hued skin rose. “Age doesn’t excuse one from the exercise of compassion, child.” Dark eyes in a nest of wrinkles searched Faanshi’s face. “The gift the Lady of Time gave you has been used this night, has it not?”

  “I...” Faanshi scowled. She didn’t want to weep, didn’t want to yield to the weakness the magic had left her—weakness was shameful. But her head swam with the one-eyed stranger’s thoughts, and she couldn’t find the words she needed to speak among them.

  “You’d best tell me, Faanshi. There is much afoot this night. The duke is roused, and the Hall with him.” Ulima’s gnarled hands remained gentle with the cloth, but her voice held steel. “Who have you healed?”

  “The akreshi is coming?” Fright swelled through Faanshi, and chagrin followed. She was a slave, casteless by the laws of Tantiulo and Adalonia both, but this meant that she had to work all the harder to uphold Djashtet’s sacred ridahs. Panic, too, was shameful. So Ulima had always taught her. Yet she couldn’t keep it in any more than she’d done the magic.

  For once her kinswoman didn’t chastise her. “Something has stirred the Hall tonight. Guardsmen are in every corridor. The duke bellows orders and the duchess...” Ulima frowned. “She lies ailing in her chambers. The duke may summon you to attend her. If you have no power tonight because you’ve already healed, he’ll want to know why.”