Valor of the Healer

by Angela Highland

  Tykhe. “Faanshi,” he began, and then stopped himself, for he couldn’t think what to say to her to offer comfort.

  She pulled in a breath. “We should count now.”

  They should indeed, he thought, wrestling back a pernicious desire to sheathe his dagger so that he might squeeze her shoulder or her hand. And he counted, forcing himself into the steady rhythm of his breathing as he ticked off each number in his thoughts. When he reached one hundred ninety-eight, Faanshi set out across the courtyard for the chapel doors.

  Julian swore, jammed his blade home into its sheath, and reached for her, only to think better of it as he took in Faanshi’s expression. It had sharpened with an alertness that belonged not on the face of a slave girl, but rather on that of a soldier about to engage in battle. Her strides lengthened and grew surer, taking her five paces ahead of Julian before he sprang to catch up with her.

  “Tactics, girl,” he snapped. “If you’re infiltrating a hostile location, you damned well don’t stride right through the middle of it where anyone can see you.”

  “Unless you can behave as though you belong,” Faanshi replied, surprise at her own words coloring her voice. But she didn’t halt, and only when they reached the chapel doors did she turn a distant-eyed stare up to him. “Besides, there’s no danger to us out here.”

  She sounded weary beyond the limits of a single person’s strength. Her eyes squeezed shut in what looked like pain, and her hand pressed to her chest. Only then did Julian realize what he was seeing—the Hawk’s influence, once more.

  “Can you do this?” If the man was within the chapel, still suffering from a half-healed wound, what would that do to her control? Would those shields Kirinil had taught her in her every waking moment since they’d left Dolmerrath hold?

  “I must.” Faanshi lifted her head, reached for the chapel door and hauled it open. Before she could step within, Julian thrust out his arm to block her way; this time, she held back to follow his lead. His hand returning to his nearest knife, poised to draw at the slightest hint of a threat, he slipped into the chapel. The closing of the door told him Faanshi was right behind him, and he didn’t need to see her to sense her moving up beside him on his blind side.

  Five candles stood upon the altar at the front of the chapel, casting forth enough flickering golden light to show him a smaller and humbler place of worship than the church in Camden. None of the windows boasted stained glass, none of the pews any fine engraving or scrollwork along their backs or bases. The only ornamentation in sight was the stonework on the wall behind the altar, carved with evident care and skill into an image of the Mother. Even She was different here than She’d been as a statue watching over the Camden church garden. Here She was rendered in a more rustic style, and one small part of Julian’s mind marked that difference with interest, for it was unlike any he’d ever seen in a chapel.

  The lone man kneeling before the altar, his dark head bowed in prayer or contemplation, seized the rest of his attention.

  Vaarsen had traded his Hawk’s uniform for more nondescript attire, yet Julian didn’t trust for an instant that this signified any change in his allegiances. His head turned at the sound of their entrance, and the motion seemed to unbalance him, for he sagged where he kneeled. Then he caught himself and, with awkward effort, rose. He looked barely able to stand, his features white and drawn under three days’ growth of beard, though his attention still flickered over Julian first. Sizing him up, and sparking with recognition despite his distinct exhaustion.

  “Kestar?” Faanshi called, moving forward, and Julian threw his arm out before her again to make her keep her distance.

  Vaarsen’s gaze dragged as if against his will to the girl, and he swallowed in what looked like both relief and dread.

  “Faanshi,” he croaked, his head drooping forward in a ghost of mannerly grace. “I was wondering when you would get here.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  It took every last scrap of Faanshi’s will to follow Kirinil’s lessons, for as soon as she passed through the door of the chapel, Kestar Vaarsen drove her blind and breathless.

  What she remembered of him at Lomhannor Hall, of riding with him on his horse, collided with the memory of his lying covered in blood beneath her hands. Her body clenched with the recollection of a wound she’d never sustained, and even from several feet away his pain and weariness threatened to topple her. Heat spiked up in her hands in reaction, her magic’s glow augmenting the candlelight in the chapel. Julian caught her arm as she staggered. In gratitude she clung to his hand to keep herself on her feet.

  With all her strength she fought to maintain the hearth that Kirinil had taught her to picture, and to contain her power with it. To her surprise, it began to work. The radiance flooding her vision dimmed, letting her see the fear stamped into the Hawk’s haggard countenance, and she had to wince at the sight. “You knew I was coming.” She couldn’t manage much above a whisper, yet her words echoed across the chapel nonetheless. “You know I will not—cannot do you harm?”

  “While I,” Julian said, “am quite capable of harming you if you attempt to prevent this girl from leaving this place of her own free will. So don’t try it.”

  “What is she to you?” Kestar demanded. “You’ve racked up half a dozen crimes on her behalf—attempted murder, trespass of private property, violation of holy ground, aiding and abetting the escape of a slave, assault of a priest, consorting with the enemies of the realm—”

  “You forgot ruffling the feathers of the Church’s pet birds.”

  “—and assault upon the Anreulag’s appointed Hawks! For what you did to Celoren alone, I should arrest you.”

  “If you think you can take me in your state, without your strapping partner to aid you, be my guest. Where is your partner, by the way?”

  “Where’s yours?”

  Julian’s expression darkened, and with a frantic thought for the fight he’d had with the now-departed Rab, Faanshi threw herself between the two men. “In Djashtet’s name, don’t quarrel, not now, not when we’ve come so far!” As her grasp on her fledgling shields faltered, the light of her right hand, the one closest to Kestar, brightened. Of him she pleaded, “Surely you know why I’ve come?”

  He didn’t answer her. “You’re her protector?” he asked Julian, raggedly, as though that one demand was all that kept him standing.

  “I am,” Julian said, and Faanshi’s heart leaped.

  “As are we,” Alarrah called from the shadows to one side of the altar.

  The Hawk jolted, whipping his head left and right as he sought the hidden elves, his right hand shooting beneath the shapeless brown coat he wore. He drew forth no weapon, however, which bolstered Faanshi’s hope.

  From the other, Kirinil spoke up. “And we’re all armed, human. Faanshi vouches for you, but we’ll defend her if you give us any reason to judge you more of a threat than you already are. Faanshi, valannè, are you all right?”

  “I can do this.” That she could hear her own voice quavering was a goad to her resolve. Let me do this, great Djashtet.

  She eased closer to the Hawk, careful to keep from reaching for the unfamiliar weight of the knife Alarrah had given her, riding upon her hip. That wasn’t hard. If anything, she had to fight to keep her glowing, trembling hands from latching upon Kestar’s unsteady frame. Sweat dampened her hair beneath her hat, trickling down either side of her face, threatening to blind her anew.

  Kestar’s bare, raw gaze locked back on to her. He’d looked at her thus in the meadow in their dreams, in that too-real place where she’d somehow known each word she had to say, each thought behind his eyes as well as her own. Here in the waking world such wisdom eluded her. She didn’t know how to banish the mistrust in his face, or whether she could do as he’d begged and sever the tie her magic had woven between them. Yet the others had helped her reach this holy ground to do just that.

  “You haven’t brought these others to kill me. You wouldn’t do that.
” The Hawk’s voice was level, but Faanshi sensed the uncertainty beneath it.

  “No,” she agreed. “You asked me in the meadow to undo what my magic did to us. Do you remember?”

  “You said you didn’t know how.” Dismayed comprehension flashed across his eyes. Despite the weakness she felt stealing through his limbs, he surged within arm’s reach to meet her. “And you said you were going to hide. Faanshi, you shouldn’t be here!”

  “I said as much to her myself,” Julian snapped. “But she has it in her head that you need her help.”

  “Let me heal you, Kestar!” Blessed Lady of Time, it was surpassing strange to say his name aloud, to remember him bathed in a meadow’s sunlit glory when he stood before her in candlelight, disheveled and haunted, exhausted past the point of pain. Her magic churned, ready to burn away that contradiction, but Faanshi didn’t dare hold out her hands to him. Not yet. “Kirinil and Alarrah can help break what I did. They’re teaching me. Please!”

  Julian thrust his arm across her path once more. “This is how it’ll be if she touches you. She restores you to working order. Our companions help her put your thoughts back into the heads where they belong. And you’ll raise no alarm about our presence in this place until dawn.”

  Kestar’s gaze flashed from the assassin back to Faanshi, and his mouth worked for a moment, until at last he found his voice. “Doctor Lannedes took the stitches out before I left.” Neither granting nor denying her leave, he paused, need and pain and panic burning in his eyes as brightly as the magic crackling around her hands.

  Faanshi understood. He was a Hawk; he might as well try to command the sun to rise in the north as ask her to work her magic. This was as close to permission as he could come. With a tiny cry she reached for him, and the barest brush of her fingertips against the front of his coat was all the contact she needed. For the first time in her life, she was overjoyed to set her power free.

  The magic was a thunderbolt, shattering exhaustion and weakness into a thousand pieces as it struck. Whose—his or hers—no longer mattered. Breath and strength and an urge to scream vanished in the wash of white-hot flame. Muscles held clenched against pain gave way, making legs stumble forward, making arms reach blindly forth for connection.

  “You’re healing him, enorrè, but you’re not him! You must remember to let him go!”

  Alarrah’s voice rippled through the magic. Faanshi heard, but balked at its urging, not wanting to abandon the radiance. It was too pure, too deep, and the new healing didn’t douse it—if anything, bolstered by the Hawk’s real and living presence, it made the connection between them stronger. Knowledge of him flooded her being, a river coursing into a new path cut into the very land. He wasn’t as tall as Julian, and barely taller than she. His right palm bore the calluses of a swordsman, his left hand’s fingers those of a musician. Within his veins flowed blood that made him like her. She knew how he moved and stood and breathed, and the sheer fact that he stood free of pain because of her choosing and her magic was a dizzying, potent joy she couldn’t bear to yield.

  Kirinil called for her then, and that pricked her with guilt, for his voice reminded her of the lessons she’d been fighting to master. Not until she heard Julian too, though, did she begin to remember that those lessons had been hers alone.

  “Gods damn it, girl, come back to us. Faanshi!”

  All at once it was too much, Kestar crowding all her senses so thoroughly that she had little cognizance of the others. Yet they were all there too, anxious voices and anxious hands demanding her attention, all of them blurring together until she could no longer distinguish any of them. In mind and body alike, she had to howl for breath and space.

  I have to put the magic back.

  Her mind was too full, pushing her inner hearth beyond her reach. All Faanshi could manage was that fragile scrap of resolve, and with it the ghost of a grate in her mind’s eye. Desperately she shoved her power behind it.

  To her profound surprise, it went.

  As the magic’s light faded completely, as her proper senses returned, she found she was all that was keeping Kestar from falling. With both arms wrapped around her, with his head slumped against her own, he clung to her. No one had ever clung to her before. And so she held him, waiting for his trembling and hers alike to subside, aware only vaguely that her arms ached with the force of her embrace, her throat from screaming. Both their faces were soaked with tears.

  His head lifted as his gaze sought hers, his eyes wide and dazed, but at least now without fear. As were hers, Faanshi knew. For a few last lingering moments, through Kestar’s perceptions blending with hers, she saw them.

  Then even that faded. She could tell it was Kestar, not she, who staggered in Kirinil’s grasp. Her hands, not Kestar’s, latched on to Alarrah’s supporting arms. The Hawk was before her, the Rook behind.

  Whose voices she heard shouting in the distance, then, she couldn’t begin to guess.

  The elves reacted first, both their gazes snapping up in alarm and horror. Apprehension she could now dazedly call her own—though she still saw its reflection in Kestar’s face—flared through her and drove her hand to her new knife. But she was too shaken to unsheathe it, and before she could do more than grasp the hilt, Julian pulled her to him.

  “With me, girl.” His free arm pushed her several steps toward the altar, while his drawn blade shifted in his hand, poised and ready. “Alarrah, cover, if you please!”

  Alarrah had already nocked an arrow to her bow and was moving with them, backward, facing the doors at the other end of the chapel. Kirinil flanked her. His hands were empty, though his fingers clenched, as if he sought to seize the very air. Only Kestar remained rooted where he stood, flinging a stricken glance from Faanshi to the doors and back again. More voices shouted, the urgent voices of men, punctuated by heavy running feet and one long, loud neighing from an agitated horse. The footsteps echoed out of the doorways to either side of the altar, making Alarrah swivel her nocked arrow in that direction. “We’re surrounded,” she hissed.

  “Brace yourselves,” Kirinil ordered them all. He didn’t move, but his eyes went bright and pitiless, and something Faanshi couldn’t see rolled out from him like an oncoming storm. It crackled across her skin, kindling a gnawing fear in her blood, one that felt disturbingly familiar. It felt like Dolmerrath’s Wards.

  The magic staggered Julian and Kestar as it swelled through the chapel, sending the latter man stumbling, closer to Faanshi and the others. Blanching almost as white as the Hawk, Julian pivoted to him, thrusting his knife at Kestar’s neck, stopping a hair’s width short of piercing skin. “Are they here for us,” he asked, low and lethal, “or for you?”

  “Does it matter if you’re going to kill me anyway?” Kestar barked. Unsteady as he was, somewhere he found the strength and speed to whip a pistol forth from beneath his coat.

  “Don’t fight here!” Faanshi shrilled. Kirinil’s magic roiled, churning up panic in her and in the features of the men, who each had far more human blood than she. Sweat gleamed on Kestar’s brow. Julian’s face was immutable stone, but the knife in his hand wavered. “It’s the magic. Please, please don’t—”

  The chapel doors crashed open, and the words withered in her throat.

  Armed men streamed into the chapel, and two wore amulets blazing brightly enough that she couldn’t see their faces. Yet she needed to see but one face among them all. Holvirr Kilmerredes, her former master, was their nexus and their heart.

  “Take them,” he bellowed.

  The guardsmen surged forward, only to falter as Kirinil’s power reached them. They were, however, little more than ghosts on the edge of Faanshi’s senses. There was only the duke, and terror that had nothing to do with magic pierced her with a blade of ice when his eyes met hers.

  “Hello, Faanshi. Are you doing this, my girl? Are you keeping me away from you?” Though he didn’t shout, his voice carried to her nonetheless. With his features outlined in the amulets’ light, he
stepped forward a few paces from the doors—but no farther. He flung out his hand, indicating Faanshi and all her companions in one sweeping gesture. “Or is it one of these with you? It won’t work, you know. There are ten men with me, and the entire abbey is awake now besides. You won’t make it past us.”

  She hadn’t forgotten his voice. He spoke with that dangerous quiet that went with the bricking over of her cellar window, with the lash of a riding crop against her flesh, with the hungry, jagged hole within his mind. But something in it rang falsely now. A muscle twitched in his cheek, and for the first time Faanshi could remember, he looked almost...frightened.

  A great weight fell away inside her at the sight.

  “Almighty Djashtet has willed me to walk beneath the sun,” she called. “I will not go back into darkness.”

  The Crone of Night Herself might as well have shouted through her. Alarrah shot her a look of ardent pride. Kirinil kept his attention on the men at the doors, and his magic’s weight in the air didn’t diminish, but a light of fierce resolve kindled in his eyes. With a smile unfurling like a banner of war, Julian shouted his own challenge to the nobleman whose men stood against them.

  “You’ll have to do without her, Your Grace. The lady chooses against your harness.”

  What Kestar did astonished Faanshi most of all. His right hand brandished his pistol, but his left caught her arm. “I won’t let him take you,” he said. Assurance rang in his voice despite its tired rasp. Julian, Alarrah and Kirinil all glanced his way, their eyes wide with shock that must have mirrored Faanshi’s own, for the Hawk added with a tiny curl of his mouth, “Your protector says you’re to have a head start. I don’t think this is the time to argue with him.”