Valor of the Healer

by Angela Highland

  The captain grimaced but without argument followed the abbot to the injured duke. Grenham shouted orders to clear the way for the abbey physician, and Kestar finally turned to those just behind him.

  On her knees at Faanshi’s side, frowning, the elf woman had her hand on the girl’s brow. Her male companion stood behind her, his stance protective, and as Kestar met his eyes, he said, “Well, human? Will you give us all now to your gods?”

  “Kes,” Celoren moaned.

  Not daring to spare Cel a single look, Kestar focused instead on the heat of his amulet against his chest. He couldn’t discern it in the midst of Faanshi’s power, yet some nuance in the blessed silver’s warmth told him the elf woman was working magic as well—lesser magic than the girl’s, but magic nonetheless. As if she sensed his scrutiny, she lifted her head and looked at him, saying nothing. He was grateful for that. His head ached with the weight of the choice before him, and any words would have pierced him like knives.

  Not one, not two, but three elf-blooded mages, and a human collaborator as well. The Anreulag hadn’t destroyed them, or him. Kestar couldn’t fathom why, when elven blood in his veins made him as culpable as the girl he was supposed to apprehend. Did it change anything at all?

  Did it change his avowed duty?

  “You,” he said at last to the woman, nodding toward Faanshi, “you’re a healer? Like her?”

  “A healer,” she affirmed. “But not like her.” Pride briefly lit her eyes. Or perhaps it was challenge, for her gaze flickered to Kestar’s chest, to the place where his wound had been.

  “Not like her,” he murmured. The absence of pain was an ache in and of itself, searing him from within, tangible enough to brush against his skin and change the taste of the air. It didn’t banish the oppressive sense that a great doom had only just missed him and would soon descend upon him in earnest. But it did illumine a course for him to take.

  “When they can leave this place under their own power,” he said to the elves, nodding down to Faanshi and Julian, “you’ll have that head start.”

  * * *

  In the end they moved Faanshi and the assassin to one of the storerooms—the very one, it turned out, through which she and her companions had infiltrated the abbey in the first place. No one seemed brave enough to approach them after Abbot Grenham’s order, and the two elves at any rate would allow none but Kestar himself to assist them with their charges. He sent Celoren to make certain that a pallet was prepared for them, while he lingered in the ruined chapel and helped the she-elf move the two limp forms onto a makeshift litter. It took care, for the grip of the maiden’s arms around the man could not be broken. Nor was Kestar at ease touching them, for fear that he might somehow disrupt the magic.

  But the thing was done at last. At the storeroom door Kestar watched as the elf woman kneeled beside the still figures and reached with a strangely deferential touch for the assassin’s head. Her fingers drew forth from his skull something that gleamed in the healing light—a glass eye. Then, drawing a knife, she sliced through the black cloth of his sleeve and the leather straps beneath. When the shape of a gloved hand fell away from his empty wrist, she caught it. Kestar wasn’t surprised. He’d seen the man fight only with his left hand, and he’d felt the weight of the false one on his own skull.

  A footstep beside him proclaimed that he was no longer alone, but he didn’t turn his head. “I know his name, Cel,” Kestar whispered. Julian. Whatever he was, assassin or thief, Faanshi’s abductor or her liberator, his name had meaning to her, though he grasped only its echo. “Because she does.”

  “Are they going to be all right?” Celoren asked.

  With a pang, mindful of what that question must have cost, Kestar turned to meet his eyes. “Her magic’s keeping him from death.” He paused. The elves’ names hadn’t come to him through Faanshi as the assassin’s had, and he didn’t know what to call them. Prisoners didn’t suit. Nor did guests, and the thought of simply asking their names seemed awkward beyond measure. Finally he settled for nodding toward the pair keeping vigil over the entwined forms upon the pallet. “Or so they tell me. His flesh has been burned from within...”

  With that Kestar’s voice died in his throat, for he still couldn’t credit why the Anreulag had left any of them alive.

  “Abbot Grenham’s given orders that they...we...aren’t to be disturbed.” Celoren’s brow furrowed. “And he’s confiscated Father Enverly’s amulet...on top of what the priests have done to him.”

  “Which reminds me.” Kestar reached beneath his shirt for his hidden pouch. Then he shook his knotwork pendant out and held it up, aglow in his grasp. “Are you going to ask me for mine?”

  His partner straightened to his full height, comprehension dark and heavy in his eyes, aging him past his years. “The Order would call it my duty.”

  “And what do you say your duty is?”

  “You asked me in Camden if I trusted you.” Celoren blew out a slow breath. “Kes, my answer hasn’t changed.”

  “Hasn’t it? I drugged you. I took Pasga.”

  “And I let Father Enverly make me think you’d lost your mind even when I knew better—when I should have kept on trusting you. I think that makes us even.”

  Relief he could barely acknowledge, much less express, stole through him. He stared at his partner, and his partner stared back, apologies unspoken yet accepted palpable between them. It wasn’t the uncanny attunement he’d achieved with Faanshi, but it was strong and it was honest, and Kestar welcomed it with all his heart.

  Tentatively, Celoren asked then, “What will you do?”

  Kestar dropped his gaze to his amulet, still hanging from his hand. “Once...” His voice hitched, for he’d not yet accustomed himself to uttering the names that had so thoroughly upended his existence. “Once Faanshi and Julian are able to move, the elves will take them away from this place. I promised them they’d have until the next morning before anyone launches a search.”

  “Will you go with them?”

  “You and I both know I can’t be in the Order anymore.” That was no answer, though Kestar could think of none other to offer. He couldn’t fathom any chance that the elves or Julian would welcome his presence, even if they’d risked their lives along with Faanshi’s so that she could heal him. “More than that I don’t know.”

  “Well, know this, my friend.” Celoren plucked Kestar’s amulet from his fingers and slid it back into its pouch, then pressed that back into his partner’s grasp. “Whatever you decide, I have your back.”

  * * *

  No matter how he railed, no matter how much he threatened to call the Anreulag back down upon their heads, Arlitham Abbey’s priests refused to set Shaymis Enverly free. They hauled him instead, with unflinching hands, out of the chapel’s ruins and off to one of the abbey’s guest chambers. They bound him hand and foot to a chair, and with a blade sanctified with holy water, prayer and fire, they sliced off his tongue as their abbot had commanded.

  He couldn’t pretend that he lamented the guard he’d chosen to sacrifice on the spot. In truth, he barely remembered which man he’d killed. None of it signified, for with his own voice, he had called the Anreulag. She’d taken shape and flesh before them all because of the words he’d thundered. And because he hadn’t been able to contain Her, the deepest fear he’d ever known clawed through his heart even as white-hot pain burned away the edges of his world. After that, he had no choice but to submit to whatever tending his jailers permitted. Another of their number arrived to dose him with laudanum, and once that was done, he tumbled down into unconsciousness.

  Nightmares of unearthly radiance and the debris falling down from the chapel ceiling intruded upon his slumber, too fierce and bright to grant him any peace. How had the summoning ritual gone awry? Why hadn’t he been able to keep the Anreulag in the abbey, so that Her wrath could strike down the girl—as by all rights it should have done? How had Faanshi driven Her away?

  When his confinement was inter
rupted, it should have been a mercy. But with no voice or knock to give him warning, the door flew open to admit Abbot Grenham and the abbey physician. Behind them came two more priests bearing a slack, stumbling figure between them. When he recognized the bowed, bandaged head of the wounded man, Enverly’s doubt swelled with new and alarming strength.

  He couldn’t rise from the chair in which he was tied; he couldn’t even call out for his patron, not now. He could do nothing but watch and listen as the priests assisted Holvirr Kilmerredes to bed. “Get him lying down at once,” the physician commanded. “He shouldn’t be on his feet an instant longer than necessary.”

  Only Abbot Grenham paused to pay him any heed, and then only to look down at him with unrelenting eyes. “See what more you’ve wrought tonight.”

  With far too much concentration for so small a motion, the duke turned his head in Enverly’s direction, and the sepulchral tone of his normally resonant voice pierced through his pain-hazed awareness. “She blazes. A slip of a thing, and she shines, and not even the Voice can speak against her...” His eyes held a febrile gleam that jarred against his lopsided smile. “She should be mine, Shaymis. I’m the only one who can master her—she shines because of me. She heals on my command. She heals on my command!”

  On his last few words his voice rose, and he tried to rise with it. But the physician gestured for his assistants to pin the duke to the bed, while he, with brisk and ungentle motions, pinched his nose and poured more laudanum straight down his throat.

  “We’ll send His Grace home as soon as Brother Orlin affirms he’s fit to travel,” Grenham told Enverly, nodding toward the physician. “Take in this sight of him well, sir, for it’s the least of your sins—and you’ll be remanded into the custody of Captain Follingsen to answer for them. Five of my people and one other of His Grace’s guards, besides the one you slew, are dead because of you.”

  Enverly could say nothing to that, not anymore, and he couldn’t even laugh at the bitter suspicion that Grenham hadn’t confiscated the amulets of Kestar Vaarsen and Celoren Valleford along with his own. He could do nothing but endure his pain and rest his sight on the raving form of his patron. As the drug seized hold of him, Kilmerredes’s cries grew weaker, but not before he threw him one last look, his eyes crazed, wild. Only then did the full, final import of what had occurred in the chapel sink in at last, chilling Shaymis Enverly with the beginnings of despair.

  * * *

  It took nine days for the duke to return to Lomhannor Hall, and Ulima had counted every hour as a weight of stone upon her life and breath. When one of His Grace’s guardsmen arrived, on a horse as exhausted as he, murmurs filled the house at the news he brought. The duke had found his runaway slave—but had lost her to the Hawks and to the abbot of Arlitham Abbey. Two among the company were dead, slain by Father Enverly, and Kilmerredes himself was gravely wounded. Even now he rode toward Lomhannor in his coach rather than upon his own horse.

  They had, or so went the whispers, seen the Anreulag. And Father Enverly himself had Called Her, only to earn the swift retribution of the abbey for defiling their chapel with blood.

  Ulima believed it, for the guardsman’s haunted eyes were those of a man who’d beheld a truth he could not bear. Rather than brag to his fellows or to the people in the town at the foot of the mountain, he sequestered himself in his cot in the guard barracks and prayed for a night and a day.

  Before he was done, the duke’s slower-riding entourage reached Lomhannor Hall at last. A bandage wreathing his brow, his motions dulled from their usual vigor and grace, Holvirr Kilmerredes stepped across the threshold of his ancient home and looked at it as if he’d never seen it before. His wife’s embrace and the faces of his children sparked recognition in his eyes, but he spoke no more than a few disjointed words to the servants. The duchess instead took command, issuing orders that sent maids and footmen scurrying in all directions and which left the route to her husband’s private chambers clear.

  Ulima witnessed the homecoming but held back from the furor that swirled around their lord and master, and wished in her heart of hearts that the Anreulag had struck him down. As Khamsin guided him toward the stairs, his glance roved over her, and the old priestess went cold. His eyes were flat, empty as though scoured clean by a desert wind. They were the eyes of a ghost, and of her doom.

  Shaken to her bones, Ulima retreated to her room to whisper what prayers she could for Djashtet’s all-hearing ears. This time she had no orisons for the Dawnmaiden or Noonmother; this time she prayed to the Crone of Night alone. She could almost feel Her, a gray presence on the edge of her perceptions, waiting for a final price to be paid before she could reach Her side and rest at last.

  If I must shed my blood for hers, Ancient One, let it be so. Let me lay down my life to keep Faanshi free.

  Khamsin didn’t call her to the duke’s chambers, for which Ulima was dourly grateful. She wouldn’t have to tell her kinswoman that no tisane or potion would return the light to her husband’s eyes. It would do no good, not now, not when she knew that her niece wouldn’t welcome such wisdom, and not when her final hours would end before the coming of dawn. She heard no upraised voices, no tramping feet to alert her that the household was in turmoil. Yet as night fell she drew tension in with every breath, as though her chamber’s very walls exuded it, and only the focus of her meditation let her transmute that apprehension to a solemn kind of peace.

  In the night’s deepest hours the door opened at last. Unshod feet made far less noise than a booted tread, but Ulima still caught the creak of the floorboards as he stole into the room. Her heart constricted, but she didn’t rise from where she knelt before her altar. She wouldn’t show her fear before a prowling wolf.

  “You succored her. You fed her light even when I hid her away in darkness.”

  He sounded almost lucid, save for the strain in his voice, the first signs of rot at the heart of a tree, the first cracks in a wall about to fall. Ulima watched his reflection shimmer across the altar’s golden trim as he loomed closer, into the candlelight that was her haven in the otherwise darkened room. Blocked from his line of sight, she held her knife low and ready before her. Her gaze focused upon its edge—her ears, upon the duke’s harsh and ragged breaths.

  “I did,” she said, pride ringing through her voice like a sword whipping free of its scabbard. Eighteen years she had kept silent, hiding her contempt for this northern barbarian lord for the sake of the alliance he’d forged with her clan, but no longer. “In Almighty Djashtet’s name, by the will of the Dawnmaiden and Noonmother and the great Crone of Night, I defy you, jackal. Through the child of my clan’s blood, the Lady of Time will bathe this land in fire!”

  He giggled in splinters of laughter that held no mirth. “Gods,” he breathed, and then laughed harder, fell and dark. “The Blessed One couldn’t destroy her. Couldn’t quench the light. The gods have no power!” His big hands locked on to her throat, squeezing, and his laughter didn’t stop. “Neither does yours, old witch!”

  Ulima shot to her feet, ignoring the shrieking of her aged joints and muscles. It wasn’t enough to break the duke’s hold, but it didn’t need to. She’d already marked the place she needed to strike, and she needed only to raise her knife and thrust it home.

  His golden eyes went wide beneath the bandage on his brow, and his bellow of pain and rage drove all else from Ulima’s hearing. Just beyond the candlelight figures with weapons drawn rushed into the room, but she didn’t struggle, for Khamsin and the household guards were too late. Her foe’s face was ashen, his grip faltering even as he crushed her throat between his palms. She was Ulima elif-Jaroun Sarazen, daughter of kings and warriors, priestess of the Lady of Time. Even with her years, though it cost her strength and breath and life, she could drive a dagger into a man’s heart. And she could watch, smiling in fierce triumph, as the knowledge of his own doom flooded Holvirr Kilmerredes’s eyes.

  “Behold the power of my god,” she whispered as she let herself
fall.

  * * *

  Many hours passed before Semai escaped Lomhannor Hall, hours in which word of the deaths of the duke and the akresha Ulima spread rampant through the ranks of the guards and servants. The Lady Khamsin became a tigress, snarling commands that her terrified children be kept from their father’s bloodied body, and taking charge of moving him to where he might be prepared to be laid to rest. Ulima she would have consigned to the rubbish heap, but for Semai. She was Djashtethi, he reminded her, and the akresha duchess’s own kin. To dishonor her body was to dishonor the Lady of Time Herself.

  Khamsin flushed crimson with wrath at his resistance, but couldn’t gainsay him before the other Tantiu of the household. “Do what you will with her, then, but do it out of my sight.”

  And so he led the last few of their people still faithful to Djashtet in taking the body of the old priestess away. While the women washed her and anointed her in sacred oils, he took the men and built a pyre in the loneliest corner of the estate. There they conveyed her, and there they spoke the words to consign her soul into Djashtet’s keeping. When nothing remained of her but cooling ash, he ordered it gathered into a jar of the finest clay. Holding it high, he proclaimed that he would bear it safely home to Tantiulo, so that the Nobi would return to the sands of the land that had given her life.

  No one, not even the duchess, thought twice of his taking on this task. No one barred him from choosing a younger warrior to accompany him down to the town, or from buying passage on the first vessel that would carry them westward down the river to Shalridan, where they could find a ship to carry them home.

  No one, then, was there to witness when Semai took his young companion aside, swore him to secrecy, and commanded him to bear the jar of ashes on to Tantiulo alone. And no one at all marked his passing as he stole back into the city in search of the things he would need to carry out the task with which the akresha Ulima herself had entrusted him.