Valor of the Healer

by Angela Highland

  Malcolm snorted. “That’s too much for the likes of me. But I’ll take silver if you’ve got it.” He grabbed both Julian and Rab by their shoulders, maneuvering them to the table where his family took their meals. “And you’ll take that food now. Whatever you need to know can wait till after dinner.”

  Roki came in from the forge as his father set out a meal of meat pies and ale, day-old bread from the nearest baker, and a salted potato mash that was the apex of Malcolm’s humble cooking. The smells of food drew Elette out of hiding, but the little girl made no noise creeping down the stairs, and only when she appeared at his elbow did Julian realize she’d joined them. As he’d pledged, he said nothing before the children of the connection between his and Rab’s presence and the swarming of the watch on the streets. Instead he occupied the eager Roki with gossip of the nobility of Shalridan and Dareli, the exploits of the last ship’s crew he’d encountered, and stories of the battles fought with the warrior clans of Tantiulo. Julian noted with satisfaction that the boy had inherited his sire’s canny sense. Entertained though his broad smiles pronounced him, the knowing gleam in his eyes spoke even more clearly of his awareness of what was truth and what was improvised.

  Afterward Malcolm set his offspring to clearing away the dishes, and at Julian’s look, Rab strolled after the youngsters. “So then,” he slyly inquired, “who wants to see me juggle my knives?”

  Roki lit up, and even his sister found this suggestion worthy of comment, fixing her huge solemn gaze upon Rab. “You only got nine fingers.”

  “That I do, young miss, but therein lies the challenge. Any ordinary man, with ordinary hands, may juggle proficiently. But take one finger away—” Rab splayed his hands before his face, letting the children see all nine of his digits. “And you give him a special perception, an edge, the ability to do...this.”

  He whipped out four daggers in rapid succession, and as the blades began to twirl through the air, Julian couldn’t quite hide his own half smile. Rab’s agile hands made him invaluable. His showmanship made him Rab. The sight of both, though, made him more aware than he liked of the false hand at his wrist. The stump beneath his sleeve hadn’t stopped tingling, hadn’t stopped reminding him of the girl in Lomhannor Hall.

  “Seems you know more about what’s going on in Camden than I do,” Malcolm said beneath Rab’s banter. “What could I tell you?”

  The throbbing in his wrist provoked an answering pulse deep within his skull, and it was all Julian could do to keep his hand relaxed and away from his brow. His mug of ale beckoned. But he ignored it, needing a clear head for the night to come. “There’s a mage in Lomhannor Hall. Has she been seen in the town at all, with or without her master?”

  “Mage? The duke’s got elf slaves, aye. But he’s never had ’em here. Too close to the northern shore, too easy for slaves to escape.”

  “He has at least one here now. I’ve seen her. And I’ve...” Julian forced his countenance to remain neutral, his strangely active nerves to settle. But speaking of Holvirr Kilmerredes’s captive brought her veiled face into sharp relief in his memory, and he felt a muscle twitch in his cheek. “I’ve experienced her power personally.”

  The big blacksmith stared at him, indecision and fear crossing his face. Then he cast a long look at his children and another at the door, as if expecting the watch to burst through at any moment. “Sweet Allmother,” he whispered.

  “If this goes against your faith, man, say the word and Rab and I’ll be gone and trouble you no further.”

  Across the room Roki piped, “Do it with five!”

  “What, young master, am I a walking armory?” Rab drawled, his daggers flying in an intricate dance back and forth through his fingers. “What makes you believe I have another blade?”

  “I remember from the last time we saw you.”

  “More daggers,” chimed in Elette.

  The rapt interest on her tiny face turned her father’s eyes warm and full. He then looked back to Julian and sighed. “My faith stands there, and with the man who gave my son and daughter a chance to grow up in peace. I’ll tell you what I can.”

  Julian smiled just a bit. Malcolm was a living example of exactly why he’d abandoned the Church of the Four Gods. He was an honest man, who worked hard and loved his children, and who’d still been branded a criminal for nothing more than revering the gods of his Nirrivan ancestors—for in Dareli, the capital, heresy was almost as great a crime as magic.

  When the Church could persecute and arrest such a man, when the so-called all-seeing Anreulag could turn a blind eye to this and many other injustices, Julian would withhold his allegiance. Men like Malcolm deserved it far more.

  “Thank you, my friend,” he said.

  “Not that I’ve much to tell.” Malcolm returned Julian’s smile, but his gaze was thoughtful. “Your mage may not be in Lomhannor anymore. There are Hawks in Camden, Richard.”

  “Hawks?” Julian scowled, alarmed, but welcoming the added urgent news. It would keep him focused. “How many? Where? When?”

  “Two that I’ve seen in the past two days, headed to the church with Father Enverly this afternoon. This girl at Lomhannor—is she Tantiu?”

  “Yes,” Julian breathed.

  “I saw a girl in a veil and a sari riding with the Hawks. If she’s your mage, you’re too late. The Church already has her.”

  * * *

  “You did hit your head,” Rab muttered in Julian’s ear.

  Night had fallen, but the muffled clop of hooves and quiet calls in the distance signaled that the watch was still on alert. Warned by Malcolm of extra patrols on the streets, Julian had sent Roki with his and Rab’s horses to the town saddler to get them closer to the church. The blacksmith had permitted this only when Roki had volunteered a cover story that a gentleman had arrived to get his horses shod, and that he needed new tack as well. It was plausible enough to hold up should Malcolm or Roki be questioned, and would keep both of them out of trouble. Or at least so Julian hoped.

  In the meantime he and Rab had lain low at the smithy, swapping out their disguises for their working attire, and waiting for the safety of nightfall before they emerged. For three hours they’d stalked through the shadows toward the church, Rab shimmying up drainpipes to reach vantage points on rooftops, while Julian made use of unlocked doors or windows to find his own places to hide. It required patience and time, neither of which they had in abundance, but he kept to a dogged, cautious pace. He’d accomplish nothing for the girl if the Hawks captured him as well.

  During their slow progress, however, Rab’s irritation grew.

  They lurked now in the alley between a tailor’s shop and a bookseller’s, not far from the saddler where their horses awaited. All that lay between them and Camden’s Church of the Four Gods was an open square, paved with cobblestones and flanked by quiescent lampposts and the shuttered windows of the shops. The watch wouldn’t pass by for ten minutes, and Julian took the time to seek the least obtrusive route to the church. Rab stuck like a burr to his side, a dagger at the ready in either hand, close enough to voice his ire without being overheard.

  “You must have,” he gritted out, “because I can’t fathom why else you’re trying to get us killed.”

  “Rab, we’ve been over this.”

  “And I still wonder what the bloody hell we’re doing!”

  His temper spiking, Julian rounded on him and pushed him up hard against the brick wall. Rab’s hands flashed up in self-defense, his blades gleaming palely in the gloom, and only the fact that it was Rab before him kept Julian from doing anything else. Only the need for stealth kept him from bellowing as he pressed his arm against his partner’s chest. “Now isn’t the time for interrogations. Guard my back or go!”

  Rab didn’t flinch. “You know me better than that, and I know you better than this. Why are you risking yourself for this girl?”

  Yourself, not us. That one word struck home as keenly as any of Rab’s daggers, and a hot flush floode
d Julian’s cheeks beneath the ash he’d smeared across them. “Because I owe her, damn your eyes! If you have such problems with the discharging of a debt, would you have preferred I never have come back for you when you stole that horse?”

  Horror spread across Rab’s own ash-darkened features. His hands dropped to his sides, and after a moment his gaze lowered as well. “I deserved that. Forgive me.”

  Julian instantly released him, unable to suppress a surge of dismay. Had he just given away their location? No shouts sounded in the square or nearby buildings. No running footsteps slapped against the cobblestones, and no watchmen came charging up out of the darkness. No one had heard him. Tykhe, the old Nirrivan goddess of luck—and the only deity Julian cared to follow—was giving them good fortune tonight. But relief couldn’t dispel his chagrin, and he couldn’t meet Rab’s eyes. “I forgot myself,” he muttered. “There’s nothing to forgive.”

  “You don’t regret our association?” Rab’s voice held not the slightest tremor, but all at once he looked very, very young.

  “Nonsense. You’re my other eye, my good right hand.”

  “As well as your witty repartee and healthy sense of self-preservation?”

  “Don’t press your advantage.” Allowing himself a crooked little grin, Julian considered what else Rab was to him—his partner, his friend, and the son of the man who’d trained him as a thief and an assassin. You’d be proud of him, Jacob. Then he smirked at himself. The healer girl must have affected him more than he’d known. He was dangerously sentimental tonight, and he needed to bring it to heel. “I need you sharp. We have a church to infiltrate.”

  Rab gestured graciously with a dagger ahead into the square. “After you.”

  From that point, it wasn’t difficult. With one last sweep of their surroundings, they sprinted on noiseless feet through the deepest shadows around the square’s edge. That won them the church’s front entrance, but they couldn’t stay there. The next patrol was due in a few more minutes, and Julian had no intention of staying in sight even for the scant moments required to pass through those weighty wooden doors. Doors that size couldn’t be opened silently, even by him.

  But there were other doors into the church.

  They circled the building, pausing behind the shelter of a tower on its northwestern corner until the watch patrol went by, out of sight but not out of hearing. Two horses’ hooves clumped along the cobblestones of the square, while a woman’s tired voice called out, “Three o’ clock and all’s well!” Only when the assassins heard nothing around them but the chirp of nocturnal insects did they move once more, completing their dash to the rear of the church.

  The forerunner for the meadows and fields on the town’s southern side, a garden stood as a green barrier between the holy building itself and the churchyard that lay beyond a low stone fence. Rosebushes cast delicate scents into the air, announcing their presence even as the darkness leached them of their color. Among them, just beneath the branches of a linden tree, stood a granite statue of a slender figure with outstretched hands: the Mother, keeping gentle vigil over the churchyard’s headstones. She was the only witness to the pair of shadows along the church wall, and Julian saluted her before he tried the door.

  “She looks the other way,” Rab murmured at his back.

  “May She continue to do so. Tykhe’s the only goddess we need watching over us tonight.”

  Malcolm himself had made the hinges on the church’s garden door. As the blacksmith had promised, they made no noise. The door was silent opening, and silent as Julian waved Rab in ahead of him and pulled it closed behind them.

  A stained-glass window high on the wall admitted light from outside, tingeing the narrow corridor with faint traces of red, blue and green. In that meager illumination they made out a second nearby door standing slightly ajar, just enough for thin slits of weaker darkness to mark its edges and location—and to let a barely audible voice reach their ears. When Julian inched the door a finger-width wider, a second voice answered the first.

  “She’ll tell us nothing, Kes.”

  “Not if we give her no chance. Quiet, Cel, let her talk.”

  Male voices, young, pitched in the hoarse whispers of men striving to keep from being overheard. Julian frowned. Who else, he wondered, would seek a captured mage in a church in the middle of the night? He fingered two rapid signs to Rab, who gave a single nod and traded out his wielded daggers for a slim blowgun and darts. Julian drew one of his own blades with his living hand and, with the false one, nudged the door open far enough for him to slip through.

  Ethereal light from below revealed a stairway leading down beneath the church. Cool air brushed his cheeks as he crept down the steps, Rab keeping close behind him. It made him think of the window at Lomhannor, through which musty chill and a slender hand had touched him. And when a stoic whisper wafted to his ears, he knew who the healer girl’s unexpected callers must be.

  “Akreshi, I beg you, let me pray in peace. You’ve delivered me to your priest. Isn’t that what Hawks do? Forgive me, but I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  Her. The voice that had apologized for saving his life now sounded thin and strained, on the verge of tears. Hearing it, Julian found he didn’t care why two Knights of the Hawk were questioning the mage they’d apprehended at this odd hour. All he needed to know was that they were Hawks.

  And that they stood between him and the payment of his debt.

  The first Hawk said, “You told me something on my horse—that your master’s always known that you have much sin to Cleanse away. Do you remember?”

  “Yes, akreshi.”

  Julian reached a bend in the stairs and signaled for Rab to freeze. Then he leaned forward to peer around the bend at what awaited below.

  The stairway opened into a cellar filled from wall to wall with shelves laden with sacramental wines and the dusty tomes of the church’s archives. But Julian had no interest in what objects the cellar contained. Its occupants commanded all his attention: two young men, one tall and rangy, the other not precisely short, but wiry and compact. Both wore swords at their sides and the uniform of their Order, though their clothing was incidental. The amulets alone, glimmering with cold, clear light, proclaimed them Hawks.

  “Then tell me one thing. How long have you had your power?”

  His frame taut with unease, the taller Hawk lingered at the foot of the stairs. The other leaned against the door of a cell in the left-hand wall, whispering through the door’s narrow, barred aperture. That one’s brow furrowed at the frightened answer he received.

  “Four years, akreshi.”

  The smaller Hawk cried, “You’ve been a practicing mage all that time, and your master’s said nothing?”

  “Yes. He said that my magic was for him alone.”

  Julian’s mind seized that information and tucked it away while he pulled back around the bend of the stairs—and gave his partner one more swift, signed command.

  Murmuring a shocked oath, the Hawk at the door shoved a hand through his straight dark hair. Then his features settled into determined lines. “Maiden, my partner and I need you to tell this to others. We’ll get you out of—”

  Nine-fingered Rab jumped adroitly past Julian into position, raised his blowgun to his mouth and fired. With a cry the taller Hawk slapped at his neck and staggered. Before he could reach the dart that had struck him, Rab somersaulted down the stairs and kicked the man’s feet out from under him.

  “Cel!” The other Hawk whirled, his sword whipping out of its sheath, and sprang forward even as Rab straddled his now insensible opponent and thrust a dagger at his throat. “Release him, or by all the gods I’ll run you through!”

  “Do have at me,” Rab invited, with all the suave, polished politeness of one nobleman inviting another to borrow his carriage. “If you think you can reach me before I spill his life’s blood all over the stone of this humble floor.”

  “I’d listen to him.” His knife still drawn, Ju
lian rounded the bend in the stairs. At his movement the Hawk snapped up his head, and Julian took his measure as he came down the steps. He was shorter than he by four or five inches and younger as well, though not as young as Rab. His weight shifted forward onto his booted toes in a fighter’s ready stance. His green eyes flashed back and forth between the assassins, and darkened in perceptible dismay as he took in the sight of Rab’s blade against his companion’s neck.

  Observant, then, and honorable enough to hold back from engaging an enemy if another life was at stake—but Julian wasn’t about to gamble on that till he got the Hawk disarmed. “We’ve been denied our last prey,” he drawled, circling in front of the other man, just out of reach. “And my friend’s hungry. I wouldn’t give him an excuse to sate himself now, were I you. I’d give up my weapon.”

  “And let you kill Celoren and me?”

  “As long as you give us no cause, we’ve no intention of killing you.” Velvet and steel twined together in Julian’s voice. “No one’s paid us to do so. Come now. Your sword.” He nodded once toward the blade clenched in the knight’s hand. “Before I change my mind.”

  The Hawk’s stare locked on his fallen partner. Bared by the open collar of his coat and faintly lit by his amulet’s gleam, the muscles of his throat flexed as he swallowed hard. Then, without a word, he dropped his weapon to the floor.

  In a liquid blur of motion Rab pounced, snatching up the sword and shooting to his feet. With the bigger blade in one hand and his dagger in the other, he advanced on the Hawk and backed him toward the wall. “A good sword,” he crooned, winking over the weapons. “Nicely balanced.”

  “For the proper hand,” the other man replied.

  There was nothing more than that, no threats to hunt them down like vermin, no overconfident bluster—just the Hawk’s watchful regard and a tense set to his broadly chiseled mouth that told the Rook this man would leap at him or Rab the instant he saw an opportunity. But the lack of banal remarks made him almost kindly disposed to their captive. “Rab, make the gentleman a little more comfortable. Be gentle. We don’t want him to get the wrong idea.”