Rab’s devilish smile blossomed forth. With a twist of his wrist he spun the sword about and slammed its pommel across its owner’s brow. Alertness drained from the Hawk’s eyes as they rolled back in his head, and he spilled like grain from a torn sack to the floor. As Rab kept him covered, Julian sheathed his dagger and leaped over to search the knight’s slumped form. He found only one other weapon, a knife sheathed at the young man’s back, which he tossed away out of reach. One other find, however, made him grin as mischievously as his partner.
A key.
On the verge of fainting, the Hawk blinked up at him. Julian leaned over him and showed him the key. “A word of advice. Leave the stealing of maidens to the professionals.”
He rapped the man himself, with the stout weight of his false hand, to send him the rest of the way into unconsciousness.
“Well done. Now what, my fearless leader?” Rab shot him an approving look as he straightened up again and pivoted back to the cell door by which the Hawk had stood.
“Tie them up.”
“With what?”
“Find something. Rope...shackles...I don’t care what. Slice up their coats if you must.”
Rab nodded and jumped to the nearest shelf, just discernible in the light of the Hawks’ amulets, glowing even with their bearers lying sprawled and inert. Julian left him to it. Satisfaction hummed through his veins at the skirmish, brief though it had been. Part of him wanted more fighting, and that too was dangerous sentiment, as perilous as memories of the past. With a stern will, he fought it all down.
Then and only then did he thrust the key into the lock and turn it to liberate the girl.
Chapter Eight
When the Hawks came to take Faanshi away, she thought Ulima was mistaken, and the deliverance her okinya promised was nothing more than death. She could fathom no other outcome; death was what happened when the Knights of the Hawk claimed those such as her. The servants of the Hall had whispered it, with every tale of the Anreulag hurling fire into the armies of Tantiulo. The duke himself had told her so. His priest, Father Enverly, had threatened it as her fate if she didn’t submit to the prayers he insisted on saying over her each time he came to Lomhannor Hall. He said them again tonight after the Hawks delivered her to the church. With the prayers, harsh and guttural syllables in a language she didn’t know, he took a knife to both her hands and drew her blood into a syringe of glass and iron.
She knew of no rite or ridah that called for the spilling of blood. Terror of the Cleansing, of the priest and of her master, made her struggle. To no avail, for Father Enverly clouted her, and she’d had no food since the duke had beaten her. Hunger and the throb of her magic along her palms dropped her to the floor of her new cell. He intoned one last chant, sketched the sign of the star above her and abandoned her to the dark.
But he hadn’t killed her, and she could think of nothing to do but pray to Djashtet that she’d have a chance to see her okinya again. Then the Hawks returned—and the one on whose horse she’d ridden, the one who’d treated her with actual kindness, disturbed her with his questions.
Yet she had no chance to learn his intentions, for voices lashed beyond the door that barred her from freedom. The dull sounds of blows and the shadowed figures she could just make out through the slit in the door drove her back against the far wall, shaking, sweating and wondering if death was about to come for her at last.
The bare little room offered no shelter. There was nothing she could hide beneath or behind, no cot or table, shelf or chair. A star symbol on the wall glinted with merciless reflected light as her hands began to glow, far more strongly than when the hurts the priest had dealt her disappeared. The magic drenched her in phantom sensations—a jab in the back of her neck, two red blooms of pain along her brow and the top of her head, weakness in her limbs. They pulled her close to unconsciousness and yet blocked her from it, chaining her awareness instead to the heat building in her palms. She didn’t know who was fighting with the Hawks or how many were hurt beyond the door, though it felt like more than one.
What she could do about it, Faanshi couldn’t tell. Her senses blurred, reeling away from the echoes of pain. Her knees trembled. All that kept her upright was the recollection of her struggle to defy the duke as he’d beaten her. He hadn’t killed her—a little victory—but he’d given her to the priest and the Hawks, and ultimately that was no different. She was no warrior. She had no weapons to drive away the men outside if they came for her. Nor could she see how she could make the magic—the treacherous, volatile magic—defend her. The idea of trying made her every nerve shriek, and so she prayed, with raw and desperate strength.
Lady of Time, let me do it. I do not want to die.
She found no reassurance when the sounds of the scuffle ebbed, for none of the agonies flooding through her subsided with them. When she heard the rattle of a key in the lock, when the door swung open on a tall figure dressed in black, she nearly swallowed her tongue in the effort to keep from screaming.
“Tykhe,” a voice swore. Left hand extending, the figure edged closer and added more softly, “Easy. Easy, girl, I won’t hurt you.”
It was the man she’d healed—the man who’d tried to kill the duke. His face was harsh in the light from her hands, much the same as the first time she’d seen it, up to the single eye that stood out a vivid, dusky blue against the ash that darkened his features.
“Djashtet be praised,” she blurted. The pain and weakness igniting her power dimmed for an instant as something else shot through her, so fierce and strange that she scarcely recognized it as joy. “They didn’t kill you. They didn’t catch you, akreshi!”
The stranger’s lone eye blinked, with as much amazement as he’d shown when she’d mended his wounds. His hand darted forward to take one of hers, lifting it up to shine like a lamp between his face and her own. “You’re here because of this. Do you want to be elsewhere?”
The question stopped all Faanshi’s breath, blocking out all trace of the reflex that should have driven her gaze down and away from a man’s. Her head spun. Her heart pounded. But none of it obscured her abrupt elation. Her prayers had been answered. Ulima hadn’t been lying or mistaken. The promised deliverance had come.
“Yes! Great Lady, yes!”
She might have whispered it, or shouted. Faanshi couldn’t tell which. Her hands were growing hotter, the magic snarling to be set free, and the prospect of her own imminent freedom vanished in the rising wash of heat and light. Before she realized what she was doing she was stumbling for the doorway and the two prone figures beyond it. After only three steps out of the cell she toppled to the floor, but it didn’t matter, for she was nearer to where she needed to be to release the fire—
Her liberator caught her, fingers closing around her shoulder in an iron grip. “What the hells are you doing, girl? Out’s the other way!”
She wasn’t as strong as he, and conditioned to submit to a male hand besides. For a blind moment Faanshi struggled, conscious only that something kept her from reaching her goal. Then the stranger hauled her close against him, immobilizing one of her arms while his hand clamped around her other wrist. The magic had latched on the pair of bodies on the floor, blotting out the echoes of the last healing she’d wrought. She remembered it nonetheless, her power pouring through this man, rejoining shattered bone and smoothing away rents in his flesh. Though she’d never heard it in truth, she remembered his voice, younger, crying out in terror.
I didn’t do it, Cleon, I swear I didn’t do it!
“He shouldn’t have hurt you,” Faanshi murmured as the roaring in her head parted, just long enough for her to stare in horror and sorrow up at him. Her control was gone, and she had nothing left to hold back the words that tumbled forth. “Cleon shouldn’t have harmed you if you didn’t—”
As though her body had burst into flame, the man jolted violently, jolting her with him, for his hand clenched her wrist with force enough to snap her bone. “Stop it,” he ord
ered. His eye was wide in his darkened face. No sign of it showed in his voice, but his expression, already urgent, took on a cast of fear. “Whatever this is, douse it, or the moment we step outside every man, woman and child in Camden is going to know you’re free.”
Free. The word hammered at her awareness, urging her to run, to do whatever she must to reach the open air. Her limbs, though, were still in the sway of her power. Straining against the stranger’s hold, she writhed again, flailing toward the nearer of the two fallen Hawks. The one she’d ridden with. The one called Lord Vaarsen, the one who’d questioned her. She couldn’t take her eyes away from the blaze of the pendant around his neck, and she couldn’t rid herself of the growing mad need to reach him. Her head ached where his had been struck. Beyond him, his companion lay flattened by a poison in his blood, a weakness she could almost see straddling his chest and pressing him down into darkness.
Next to that Hawk a third young man crouched. He was tying the Hawk’s hands with long strips of torn linen, but he snapped up his blond head as Faanshi’s stranger called, “A hand here if you please, Rab!”
“What in Tykhe’s name—”
“Now, Rab!”
Panic surged through Faanshi, yet she knew what she had to do. “Strike me, akreshis!” she shrilled. “Silence my magic and take me from this place!”
The maimed man’s grasp loosened in surprise. The young one gaped at her as he shot to his feet, but paused for only an instant before springing forward, a hand upraised. “Far be it from us to deny a lady’s wishes. Hold her still, Rook.”
“I’m trying. Gods damn it, girl, don’t make us hurt you!”
Faanshi tried to brace herself for the blow she knew was to come, but the magic’s grip on her was stronger than her rescuer’s hand. It kept her thrashing, and as she struggled, bright golden wisps of light hurtled out to bridge the distance between her and the men crumpled nearby.
Since her eyes were already on the Hawk called Vaarsen, she was looking his way when he leaped unsteadily up off the floor. In the mingled light of her magic and his amulet she glimpsed his dazed, angry eyes—all she had time to see before he tackled the younger of her rescuers.
Afterward she was never certain what happened next, for the light nearly blinded her now, gold blending with silver-white to limn the men around her in brilliance. She marked them only by their motions, by one body slamming into another and driving it into the wall, and two pairs of hands grabbing for the same blade. Voices shouted, before her and behind. The man who’d tried to kill the duke shoved her away, and she thought she saw him lunging to the aid of his friend.
Then white-hot agony burned everything away from her sight.
Her chest seemed to collapse in on itself. Hard, bright fire deep within it stole away every scrap of air she breathed. Someone shouted, someone screamed, and she couldn’t tell which sound came from her. There was only her magic, lashing her like her master’s riding crop. Surely the duke would find her, beat her, perhaps even kill her for healing without his bidding—surely the Anreulag Herself would come at any moment and strike her down. But even in the rush of these twin terrors, she could no longer withstand the golden fire’s fury.
It threw her at the source of that maelstrom of pain, and when her fingers found a knife’s hilt, she noted it only as a barrier to what she had to do. Sobbing, gasping, she pulled with all her might at the weapon. Its edge sliced at her palms and fingertips, just as the priest had done with his own knife earlier that night. She didn’t care. She tossed the blade away and pressed her hands where it had been, upon cloth and flesh and the slick, damp warmth of blood bubbling up around her fingers. The smell of it, thick and hot and metallic, choked off her breath—but not her magic. For the second time in two days a stranger’s thoughts obliterated hers.
Cel! Blessed gods, no, got to fight, got to free the girl. Anreulag, help me, I can’t breathe, I can’t see—the light, dear gods, the light!
Something, the same inexorable force that had tugged her hands to the wound in his chest, riveted Faanshi’s gaze on the Hawk’s face. Though the incandescence blinded her to all else, his taut features stood out with piercing clarity. Thick dark brows shot up over pain-darkened eyes; his mouth quivered, their corners reddening with yet more blood, though no sound escaped him that she could hear. As his stare locked into hers, all her senses swam—and suddenly became his.
She felt his head pounding, his lungs heaving for air, and how he struggled to rise or move his hands to the pressure against his chest. As his flesh rejoined to staunch the blood welling out from within him, he fought frantically to hold back his own howl. Faanshi cringed when it erupted, for she’d never before heard a man scream. The hoarse, ragged cry and the fire of his agony threatened to split her mind apart.
Even as her radiance drowned his pain, bringing back his breath while it knitted cracked bone and sealed the place where the knife had jabbed through, she sensed something in him latching on to the magic in a surge of bone-deep comprehension. When that happened, her awareness flared with answering light from him. His entire world narrowed down to the girl who was the sunlight from the mountain; hers became Kestar Eyrian Vaarsen, above and beyond all else, until one panicked corner of her brain rebelled.
“Nei! Ilh anna Faanshi! Ilh anna Faanshi!”
Through the Hawk’s eyes she saw her own frame spasm, her head thrashing back and her face contorting in panic beneath her veil. She heard her own voice through his ears, screaming in the Tantiu tongue.
Someone grabbed her then, breaking the connection about to devour her very being. A strong, lean hand yanked her back and up from the floor, and through two sets of senses at once she glimpsed him. The murderer who’d tried to assassinate the duke loomed over him, and his entire body writhed in protest. He fought once more to leap to his feet, but he couldn’t shake the weakness that crushed him to the floor—no, no, he was the man who’d come to save her, and she tried to cling to him even as she struggled in his insistent arms.
“Don’t fight me, girl.”
She felt Kestar’s senses spinning, everything going black for him save one last glimpse of light—and then she was Faanshi once more. As her power drained away, all her resistance ebbed with it. Her vision blurred and then refocused through hot, exhausted tears, showing her the pair of ash-smudged faces looking down at her in shock and dread. From what seemed an immeasurable distance away she heard her own voice babbling, once more in Adalonic, this time through her ears alone.
“I didn’t mean to, forgive me, I heal on his command, I heal on his command...”
“Dear gods,” breathed the younger of her rescuers. “Julian, what she did to you didn’t look like that.”
Murderer assassin intruding on the church—no, he’s here to set me free jangled through Faanshi’s mind, but the name anchored her in the storm of doubled perceptions. Julian. The one-eyed stranger was Julian. Faanshi seized on that—and on him, with all her remaining strength, pressing her eyes shut and her face against his shoulder. “Take me from this place,” she whispered.
“We will,” he said, a certain hollow numbness to the tenor voice that spoke just above her hair. His stance changed as he ordered his companion, “Tie this feisty one and lock them both in the cell. We must get moving—and they’ll be the first to track us. If she’s got this kind of power—”
“Gods and goddesses, if she’s got this kind of power they’re going to kill her on sight, and us along with her.”
A tremor shot through Julian, palpable to Faanshi against her own shuddering form, and then emerged in a soft bark of sardonic laughter. “The last I checked, we’re already wanted men. What’s one stolen girl weighed against everything else we’ve taken, including lives, eh?”
“Confound it, Julian, I detest it when you have a point.”
“Then get our two friends bedded down for the night, and hurry.”
The light continued to fade, dwindling to a weak yellow wash across the darkness. But i
t was enough for her to see. Julian eased her down at the foot of the stairs, shifting her weight against the arm with which he’d grabbed her. He turned her chin up toward his face and stared down into hers. “Gods. What are you, then?”
She’d heard disquiet like that in his voice before. That was no surprise, but the way he held her was. There was strength in it, enough to still her struggles. Yet it felt almost gentle, like comfort, and it soothed a part of her that had been scoured and flayed—for how long, she couldn’t begin to tell. But it didn’t banish the ghostly feel of another’s frame and form imposed on her nerves, or the sense, bypassing her sight and hearing alike, of a body that didn’t belong to her being dragged along the cellar’s stone floor.
“Kestar,” she groaned. Her head twisted without her willing it toward Julian’s companion, and the limp shape he was pulling into the cell. Before she could stop it, the name burst out of her again, high and thin and laced with another’s pain. “Kestar!”
“Never mind him now,” Julian commanded. “Tell me what he is to you after we’re out of here.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know him, akreshi, I don’t—”
And yet, she did. Kestar Eyrian Vaarsen glowed like a star within her being, twin to the star he wore on a silver chain about his neck, and flashes of him burst in rapid succession through her thoughts. Concern for her fear. Horror at the way she cringed before the duke. Pure righteous wrath that Kilmerredes and Father Enverly had sinned against the gods and the Anreulag. Something shining deep within him, answering the light in her. Her head whirled at the barrage, and she whimpered aloud. He was a Hawk. Why didn’t he want her dead?
“Bloody hells, girl, stay on your feet. Can you move or can’t you?” came Julian’s frustrated growl as she swayed at his side. Then over her head he bellowed, “Rab!”
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