Valor of the Healer

by Angela Highland

  His fair-haired companion emerged from the cell and, with a metallic clink, flung the door shut and locked it. “All is secured, Rook,” he said, tossing the key away into a far corner of the cellar. “Let’s take flight with our little dove.”

  Phantom pain bloomed in Faanshi’s chest at the sight of him; alarm, real and potent, clenched every muscle in her frame. He stabbed me. With that thought came rage, so strong that it astonished her. In its grip she began to lunge, and only when fear that felt far more hers flared did she stop and stumble. Despite Julian’s bracing arm, she nearly collapsed.

  “Not me,” she protested. Her voice sounded strange, too weak even for her breath to stir her veil. “He stabbed Kestar, not—”

  “Save it,” Julian bade her, and without warning he plucked her off her feet.

  The motion dizzied her. For a few moments she couldn’t tell whether she was being carried away, or whether she lay in an ungainly heap on a floor of stone. Faanshi squeezed her eyes shut, struggled not to retch on her rescuer’s shoulder and thought desperately of the open air, of sunrise. Past that she couldn’t focus on much, neither the faint stirring of air that betrayed Rab’s passing nor Julian’s swift, light footsteps as he bore her up the stairs and out of the cellar.

  But when Rab rasped a warning at the very top of the steps, when she heard cold words bellowed somewhere ahead in the corridor, new fear burst through the haze of her exhaustion. She recognized that voice. “Halt in the name of the Father and Mother, Son and Daughter, and the Anreulag who is Their Eternal Voice!”

  Father Enverly. The priest who’d come to the akreshi duke’s hall to take her away.

  Faanshi writhed, but the arms around her tightened, and Julian barked in her ear, “Be still!”

  New light like the amulets of the Hawks rose to blot out the last few flickering gleams of her power, streaming out from the priest’s robed form. In that brilliance Rab pivoted sideways, his hands blurring too fast for her to follow, and the last thing she remembered seeing was the blades that leaped as if of their own willing accord into his fingers.

  The last thing she remembered hearing was his playful, airy chuckle. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Father. Perhaps I’ll just have to become an atheist.”

  And the last thing she felt was the piercing of sharpened steel into aging flesh, setting off a flare of relayed pain through nerves already overburdened with sun-bright magic. Faanshi had no time to shriek. Her body thrashed a single time in Julian’s grasp.

  Then her mind fled in retreat and sent her plummeting into a pool of starlight waiting in the center of her soul.

  Chapter Nine

  He remembered lurching to his feet, every fiber of his body screaming to defend Celoren—and the girl—from the attackers who’d violated the holy sanctity of the church. He remembered raging agony spearing into his chest. Thought, strength and breath all vanished; he collapsed despite the vital need to keep fighting. Then hands touched him, and incandescence swept through every corner of his being, engulfing him, until all that made up Kestar Eyrian Vaarsen buckled beneath its weight...

  * * *

  He was small and frail, his form swathed in garments to hide him from the eyes of men, as his very existence affronted those he served. The voices of those he could never look in the eye told him over and over again of the taint in his blood, but all he could sense inside himself was the magic. It choked him in a merciless wave, pulling his helpless hands to the injury and sickness it demanded to mend.

  His master locked him in darkness. The sky, wind and trees were denied him, and in the cellar’s confines, the only light was the glow of his hands as he was commanded to use his power. When it failed to rise as bidden, the akreshi seized him, and with a shining blade cut both his ears.

  Terror strangled him, given form not by the duke’s tawny hair and powerful frame, but rather by the hunger behind his golden eyes. It sought to devour him, to make his magic its own. And he had no choice but to obey, for if he didn’t his master would turn him over to be put to death by the Anreulag and Her Hawks—

  I am a Hawk. He tried to shout the protest, to surface from beneath the flood of light. I’m Kestar, son of Dorvid—son of Ganniwer—Kestar Eyrian Vaarsen—I’m—

  Panic erupted through him at the tide of recollections that weren’t his own. Craving release, his mind wrenched away from the gloomy prison of that tiny cellar and toward the first things that spoke of freedom to his soul. Open air. High, clear skies of a matchless blue. A breeze that tasted of heather and firs upon the hilltops, wafting over a meadow high in the Brannaligh Hills, a thousand feet above the village of Hawksvale.

  Kestar hadn’t seen that meadow since he was a boy, a cadet in the Order of the Hawk. But it was something from the past that was rightfully his, and in frantic, stubborn determination he built it in his mind, detail by detail, until he felt himself sprawling in its grasses. The earth’s sturdy solidity was beneath his back. Clean air braced his lungs with each grateful breath. Sunlight streamed down like a blessing upon his face, warming him, soothing away the blind rush of fear.

  Wait a minute—

  Sunlight.

  His eyes snapped open, and even in his shock he was somehow not surprised to find the girl kneeling in the grass beside him. At first he made out no more of her than a slender form. As he sat up, however, she came into better focus. Everything around him glowed, not just the girl. It gave his surroundings an air of unreality, of insubstantial translucence.

  “I’m asleep. I’m dreaming.”

  “I think, akreshi, we both must be.”

  She looked different than she had in Lomhannor Hall or the cell in the church. No veil hid her face, and the top of her sari hung in loose folds about her shoulders, baring coal-black hair to the all-pervasive light. Delicate features that could only have come from elven blood but which were a golden brown met his sight. Her eyes, green as spring leaves, were wise, innocent and sorrowful all together. Marveling, too, gazing at him with the same wonderment that overwhelmed him now.

  “Then why are you...?” He couldn’t finish the question for the absence of pain struck him, and he pawed at his chest. No wound rent his flesh. No blood stained his uniform shirt. Fear slashed through him, right where the assassin’s knife had pierced him, and he realized he was trembling. “I remember magic. What did you do to me?”

  “I healed you.” The girl leaned forward, an anxious flush darkening her cheeks. “Please don’t be frightened. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  She hadn’t. Kestar saw it as clearly as he’d seen her—as he’d felt her—in the cellar’s darkness, flinching from the knife of Holvirr Kilmerredes. Blessed Mother, no wonder she’s terrified of the duke. Another memory flickered across his thoughts, of that nobleman calling her by name, and of a stern-featured old Tantiu woman doing the same. Faanshi. He couldn’t utter it. Whatever bond had risen between them pulsed through him with every heartbeat, promising to seal the instant he spoke her name.

  But what could he call her? Akresha was a title of honor among the Tantiu, but she was a slave; she’d reject it. No other form of address seemed to fit her, here in this otherworldly meadow. “Maiden,” he began, “you know what I am...”

  “A knight of the Order of the Hawk. And you’re supposed to take me away and let the priests Cleanse me, because my father was an elf and because I have magic.”

  There was no accusation in her voice, which left him thunderstruck. “Magic unlike any I’ve ever seen,” he admitted. “Yet you healed me. You knew what I am, and you healed me.”

  But the magic hadn’t given her a choice. He knew this too, and as he stared at her, wide-eyed, she gave him a wistful smile. “You were in pain. That’s the way of it. I’m sorry I couldn’t finish, and that I couldn’t heal your friend.” Tears dampened Faanshi’s eyes, though oddly her smile grew larger. “I didn’t know what it felt like to love someone as a brother; I’m glad to know that now. And I’m glad I healed you. I didn’t know eith
er that this could happen when I heal someone.”

  “Glad,” he echoed, agape. “You know what I am, you know what I must do, and you’re glad?”

  She lifted a hand by way of reply, and as her fingers neared Kestar’s amulet, the silver glowed along with everything around him, including himself. He blinked down at one of his own hands, and then unthinkingly drew it close to the maiden’s. His was pale, hers bronzed, but each bore such a luminous sheen that Kestar wondered if the glow that suffused this all-too-real dream emanated from them both.

  Faanshi’s fingers curled around his. “Your mind is full of light,” she murmured, tears trickling down her cheeks unchecked, without dimming the quiet joy in her eyes. “If you must come after me and take my magic, then I’ll remember this gift Almighty Djashtet has given me, and know that you’ll treat me with mercy. Thank you for that.”

  The sight of her earnest smile drove through Kestar’s chest just as his attacker’s dagger had done, with an almost greater pain. “Of course I will,” he rasped, horror gripping him. Others in his Order would grant no mercy to a girl considered anathema by two different nations. But he could never abuse her as she’d been abused in the memories he’d sensed, and for the first time since he was ordained he shied back from his own duty. Sworn to the Anreulag though he was, the thought of Her holy fire destroying this maiden made him ill. “I couldn’t hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you. But I must come after you, I’m sworn—”

  “I know,” she said, nodding. “You’ll do it because you’re commanded. I do know about that. It seems to me, akreshi, you’re like me in more ways than one.”

  Then the healer raised her hands to his head, cupping her palms gently against his ears. They prickled sharply in reply, and for an instant Kestar could think of nothing but a knife striking. But that thought dissolved as something in him surged in reaction to that touch. And around them the glow began to brighten, till everything turned a dazzling white...

  * * *

  Shaymis Enverly woke to pain and panic. His head throbbed where the intruder’s blow had struck, his shoulder where the knife hurled at him through the glare of his amulet lodged. He remembered ordering the figure emerging from the cellar to halt. A mocking reply. Then, oblivion.

  Dread eclipsed the fire in his shoulder, though, as he regained consciousness. His amulet had roused with a force he hadn’t felt in over forty years, throwing forth both light and heat, nearly singeing his skin even through his robes. Wielding a cudgel and the short sword he still kept out of the habit of Hawk training, he’d come running from his cottage behind the church, right into an ambush. As his body screamed at its wounds, his mind shot to the only possible conclusion. Armed strangers in the middle of the night could only have come for the duke’s pet healer—which meant he was doomed unless he retrieved her. Never mind the punishment he’d suffer if the Church ever learned that he’d hidden the presence of an active mage in his parish. If he didn’t recover Faanshi, all the use he’d made of her to further his lord’s goals would be in vain. The blood he’d drawn from her this night would serve him, but only just, and it wouldn’t be enough to set their work in true motion.

  All of which would be moot regardless, for Holvirr Kilmerredes would have his head long before the Church sacrificed him to the Anreulag.

  Clenching his teeth, Enverly hauled himself to his feet. He knew better than to try to pull the dagger from his shoulder; it’d keep more of his blood inside him where it belonged until he could summon assistance. The irony of bleeding from a knife wound sustained during the escape of a healer from his illicit custody didn’t elude him, and he smirked as he made his way up the stairs to the church’s bell tower. Even in the night’s smallest hour the bronze bell would be heard pealing all over Camden. With the town watch already on high alert searching for the escaped assassins, a warning ringing from the tower would bring them running to the church in a matter of minutes. He could wait.

  The priest dropped to his knees once he’d pulled with all his strength on the bell rope, letting the breeze keep him awake. With one hand he gingerly supported the knife thrust into his flesh. With the other, he reached for his amulet. Only then did he realize it was still alight.

  Not so blindingly as when it had jolted him from slumber, warning of active magic, but alight nonetheless. The glow was subtler, hinting at elven blood somewhere nearby, perhaps even within the church.

  That gave him a second wind. With the same determination with which he’d climbed the tower stairs, Shaymis Enverly descended them. As his amulet nudged him unerringly back to the hallway where he’d been attacked and wounded, he heard distant voices shouting outside. Hooves thudded. A horse neighed. He paid the sounds of the watch’s approach scant mind, for his strength waned with every moment he remained on his feet, and he needed all his wits to make it into the cellar.

  When he got there, he found that the slave was long gone from the little cell that all churches in Adalonia kept for the confinement of mages. But the cellar wasn’t empty.

  The two Hawks who should have been in the village of Tolton by now on their continued patrol lay sprawled before his startled eyes. Celoren Valleford was tied hand and foot, a dart protruding from his neck, his rangy form slung across most of the cell’s floor. Covered in blood, one hand fumbling at a ragged hole in the breast of his shirt, his partner blinked with unseeing eyes into the glowing air.

  Both their amulets were awake, as active as Enverly’s own, and the young men were the only occupants of the cellar. The priest could spare no strength for a search, but he didn’t need it. His amulet brightened with each shuffling step he took closer to the fallen forms, until it matched the radiance cast forth by Kestar Vaarsen’s. He stopped when he reached him, and even as voices and footsteps announced the watch’s arrival, he stared down at Vaarsen in thoughtful interest.

  Ever since the war with Tantiulo, after which he’d retired from field service, Enverly had been a priest. For many years before that, he’d been one of the Anreulag’s holy knights, a servant of the Voice of the Gods. Not a single one of his fellow Hawks, priests or priestesses had ever discovered that he had no true love for, or faith in, the Four Gods.

  Only the Anreulag Herself, power incarnate, commanded his respect—and then only because he understood how, with Her at its beck and call, Adalonia and the Church held their dominant place upon the great stage of the world. Elisiya, the lost homeland of the elves, had fallen before them and now lay in ruins to the east. Nirrivy had let herself be subjugated and absorbed into the empire rather than suffer Elisiya’s fate. Only by virtue of its own size and power had Tantiulo narrowly escaped the same domination.

  His cynicism and lack of faith, though, had never kept him from learning every nuance of the power of his Order’s amulets. Enverly knew at once what his was telling him now.

  Elven blood and elven magic—in a Knight of the Hawk.

  * * *

  “Easy there, m’lord, don’t try to move. You’ve taken some nasty stuff into you with that dart.”

  What dart? That was the only thought Celoren could form while his eyes flickered open to find a man in his middle years crouched beside him. The fellow had a face like a hatchet. Its only width came from the whiskers that spread all over his jaw, from one ear to the other, leaving only a pointed nose and a pair of dark eyes to be made out in their midst. But he also wore the bright yellow armband of Camden’s town watch, and when that vivid hue seized his gaze, Celoren’s mind came into clear and urgent focus.

  “Intruders,” he muttered, lurching into a sitting position, making everything around him whirl. One of his hands shot to the pain in the side of his neck, while the other reached for the sword that should have been sheathed at his side. The weapon’s absence only magnified his alarm. “My sword, where’s my—”

  Only then, as he hauled himself to his feet, did Celoren register everything else around him.

  He was still in the church cellar, but someone had moved him into the cel
l where the mage from Lomhannor Hall had been confined. Three more watchmen were beyond the cell’s open door. One stood guard at the foot of the stairs, while another loomed over a kneeling woman whose hands were moving with brisk efficiency over a body on the floor.

  Father Enverly oversaw them with a cold mien undiminished by the bandage the third watchman was wrapping about his shoulder. “Will he live?” the priest was saying, none too gently.

  “If you allow me to do my job, Father,” the woman replied, “then I’ll be able to answer that with greater assurance.”

  “Kes!” Celoren pushed forward into the cellar proper for a better look. Kestar lay unmoving, his bloodied shirt pulled open to reveal a wound the woman was stitching closed with thin, fine sinew. Before he could reach Kestar’s side, the guardsman beside him took his arm in a firm grip, just enough to stop him in his tracks. Celoren glowered, struggling not to let his dizziness show. “Let me go to him.”

  The watchman’s hirsute visage showed no rancor, but neither was it entirely friendly. “Please don’t interfere with the Father’s orders, m’lord. You of all people should know we’re bound to give him all aid.”

  His gaze fell to the Hawk’s amulet, and in a rush of disquiet Cel finally realized it was glowing. Brightly. And the girl they’d taken from Lomhannor Hall was nowhere in sight.

  Shaking off the watchman’s hand, Celoren dropped to his knees by Kestar’s side. The woman—the physician, he supposed blankly—ignored him as she kept up her task, and that left him a few moments to take in his partner’s condition. Kestar’s face was gray from shock and strain, his eyes open but without comprehension. In a second deep surge of dismay, Celoren marked that not only were Kestar’s and Father Enverly’s amulets both alight, the blaze of his own was brighter now. Unable to make sense of what he saw, he croaked, “What...what is this?”

  His voice far more frigid than the guard’s, Enverly said, “I shouldn’t need to explain the speaking of your own amulet to you, Valleford. Doctor Lannedes, I want him in that cell.”