Before the duchess could order her recaptured, before the infidel Church could put her to death, he would find the maiden Faanshi—and with her, the assassin and the knight who had given her freedom and life.
* * *
“They’re going to live, aren’t they? They’re going to be all right?”
She and Kirinil had not, in theory, been prisoners—yet Alarrah hadn’t dared to venture out of the storeroom where they’d taken their dubious shelter. From this hiding place they couldn’t see the sky, and so she’d had to rely upon the pattern of noises beyond its walls, distant yet still distinct in her hearing, to set the pattern of the hours. Beyond that, the flow of time had little meaning, for she couldn’t bear to leave her charges. She stayed at the side of their valannè and the Rook, while the glow pouring from Faanshi filled their haven with golden light. Her own power was but a fraction of its strength, yet she offered it unstintingly, and sang what airs of comfort and grace she knew besides—as much for herself and Kirinil as for Faanshi’s and Julian’s unhearing ears.
Now, at the sound of her heart-brother’s voice, she looked up. Kirinil wasn’t a healer, and couldn’t attune himself as well as she to the ebb and flow of Faanshi’s far greater magic. He’d been the one to risk leaving the storeroom, when it was safest in the dead of night, to attend to their horses and hold Kestar Vaarsen to the promise that none of them would be harmed.
Thus he’d missed what Alarrah had seen when she’d taken the assassin’s false hand from his arm. She hadn’t had to touch the human to sense the magic that engulfed him—but once she did, it felt like dipping her hand into a river of fire. And one touch was all she required to know that the girl who shared her father’s blood, untaught as she was, was guiding that river’s current with every last fiber of her being.
Yet over the past several hours, Alarrah had felt her surfacing out of the magic. Now, before she could answer Kirinil’s worried query, Faanshi stirred. One golden hand shifted in the barest of movements, its fingers curling around the place where Julian’s bare wrist had been, on a new shape of flesh and blood and bone.
In all the years she’d known him, Alarrah had never seen Kirinil gape. He did so now, and truth be told, she felt like joining him. A little cry she didn’t bother to suppress flew out of her as Faanshi opened her eyes.
At the brilliant flare of joy in her young sister’s face, Alarrah laughed in outright wonder.
“Yes,” she breathed. “I think they will.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Julian was drowning in fire.
His flesh scorched in its heat; his blood boiled within him, and agony filled his veins. His bones turned to molten flame, cracking and curling and flowing, until the shape he knew as his could no longer hold its form. He screamed, but it was a small and futile noise, and he couldn’t hear it through the fire’s roar. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t breathe.
Yet two small spots of coolness touched him, somewhere in the midst of the inferno, and as they made contact they forced a shape back upon him. He was a brand-new sword, a blade flowing into place upon the forge, hardening into his rightful form—
No. He was the Rook, damn it, he was Richard and Mikkel and half a dozen other names he’d used in every province in the realm—
He was Julian Nemeides, except he’d turned his back on that years ago and damned if he was going to let that haunt him now—
He was Julian—
He was—
With a scream that nearly choked him as he fought to hold it back, he was awake. All his senses swam, and he couldn’t remember where he was or what had happened to put them there. Blinding, burning pain filled his skull, threatening to devour him from within, and all he could make out through its flare were hands holding him down. He thrashed beneath them, for they weren’t her hands. A terrible dread rolled through him along with the pain. There’d been fire—that much he could recall. It had been about to engulf her.
“Faanshi,” he croaked, and he couldn’t figure out why his voice was so hoarse and raw.
“Not Faanshi,” said a voice just above him. One hand closed around his right arm, the other rested upon his brow, and both washed a layer of faint, watery coolness over the edges of his agony. It didn’t help much. “But she’s very near.”
Then a second pair of hands connected with him, and unthinkingly he pressed into their touch. “I’m here, Julian.” That second voice, her voice, rang with hope.
His relief wasn’t enough to make him forget the pain, but with that reassurance reaching his ears, he could at least ignore it. “Faanshi,” he muttered again. His voice cracked, but he ignored that too. Nothing mattered but the overwhelming need to maintain that soothing contact, a need that pulsed along his every nerve, and along with it was the equally powerful need to hear the girl speak again. “Are you all right?”
“I need more sleep,” she promptly replied. “I think we both do. But Kirinil’s gone to get the horses. We need to go.”
She sounded shy. That was nothing new, but he frowned nonetheless at what she told him. Something tugged at his instincts, warning of something important in her words, but he couldn’t quite remember what. Nor could he tell why, no matter how hard he squinted, he couldn’t bring her face into focus.
Why couldn’t he see her properly?
Featherlight, her hands cupped his face, and his eyelids shuddered in reaction, first on one side, then the other. The other hands were still there, too, and their owner said, “You’ve slept for eight days. We are yet at the abbey, and Faanshi’s Hawk has kept us from becoming prisoners, but we must leave this place as soon as you’re able. What befell us in the chapel can’t escape the attention of the rest of the Church for much longer. Do you remember what happened?”
Alarrah. He had to think about what she asked, and even that hurt, for his last memory was one of incandescence engulfing him, burning him alive. Leery of the pain, he inched backward through his mind, away from the memory, seeking out what had come before. He’d tried to stop...something—fire—called up by the wrath of a silver-white being with a voice like doom descending. The Anreulag. Fear jabbed him, deep and primal. Dear gods. She’s real.
And he’d hurled himself into Her fire’s path to keep it from destroying the girl.
A cry burst out of him as he writhed toward her again, fighting to rise, to pull her to him and make certain she was safe and whole. But the effort to sit up was too much. He sagged hard to his right, and only when Faanshi’s gentle fingers closed low around the very end of his arm did he realize something had changed.
The straps that usually held his false hand in place were gone, and yet there was still a weight on his wrist, too light to be made of wood and metal. It ached, horrendously, the source of a river of tiny knives that seemed to slice along the muscles of his entire limb. He could even feel it shuddering in Faanshi’s grasp, his palm against hers.
A reaction he couldn’t begin to name welled up, blanketing all his thoughts in white-golden shock. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d wept, whether he’d wept at all since his brother Cleon had taken his hand, but tears stung the edges of his vision now. They hurt. Julian pawed with his left hand at each side of his face, trying to clear away the wetness and the pain. But as he did, a second shock blasted through his brain in the wake of the first.
He could see around both sides of his hand. Not well—everything still swam in nauseating circles above and around him, and pain spiked through his skull as he fought to focus. His fingers, feebly probing, found something warm and living where an empty hole had been.
It felt like an eye. His eye.
“Faanshi? W...what did you do?”
* * *
What had she done, indeed?
Every last portion of Faanshi was aware of Julian. Her right hand trembled as one with his, and phantom pain hung in a cloud she could almost see all along the left side of her face. Not new sensations, these, for she’d felt them the first time she’d hea
led him. But they were stronger now and deeper, resonating down into her bones toward the echo of Kestar Vaarsen, still singing within her for all that she’d mostly tamped it down. Now that she’d finally healed the Hawk, the absence of his pain made the assassin’s all the clearer.
Lady of Time, how was she to answer him?
She caught him as he flailed against her, cradling him in a gesture that felt so natural that it raised a flush of heat in her cheeks. Her thoughts bent with weariness, and she wanted nothing more than to burrow into Julian’s side and sleep. Which was, it seemed, exactly what she’d done for the past several days. She’d held the Rook close and bathed him in her magic as she’d done for no one else, not even Kestar. And she was far too tired, even now, to fathom what that meant.
Mercifully, Alarrah stepped in to answer what she could not. “She’s changed you, and it’ll take you time to adjust. But it’s time we can’t take, not now.” With that, she pressed something small and soft against Julian’s lips. “We need you on your feet and moving. Eat this.”
It was bread rolled into bullet-sized spheres, and with a pungent, earthy scent. Alarrah handed three more of the spheres to Faanshi as well. “They’re òrennel, mixed with venison and cheese. They’ll get you both to where we’ll be safer. Enorrè...” She paused. “Are you all right? Will you be up to riding so soon?”
“I’ll do what must be done.” After eight days of sleep as deep as death, the thought of riding through the open air promised joy beyond measure. For that, and for the elves who’d risked their lives for her, Faanshi swore to the Lady of Time that she’d do everything they required of her.
For Julian, there was not even a need to make the vow.
He looked himself, and yet not. She hadn’t even begun to absorb the reality of what she’d done, despite the evidence of her senses—and of her magic. The scent and shape and substance of him, oh yes, all these things she now knew, so deep within herself that surely Djashtet had engraved them upon her very bones. But none of it rang true until he downed Alarrah’s òrennel spheres and struggled within her arms to sit up. Only then, with grim determination breaking through the pain in his face, did he truly seem like himself in her eyes. Only then did he seem like the Rook.
“Human,” Alarrah asked, “will you let her help you?”
“You said you trusted my hands,” Faanshi said, offering Julian her upturned fingers.
“Steady enough for the task.” No strength was in the assassin’s voice. “You’re going to have to be steady for me again, girl.”
“I will,” she murmured. His left hand groped first for hers, and she seized it gratefully, comforted almost beyond telling by even that small contact. With far less certainty, the right hand, the new hand, came forward too. Faanshi touched it, palm to palm, and had to remind herself to breathe. “I’ll help you. I promise.”
His chin dipped once in the barest trace of a nod, but that small assent was enough. She leaned in to draw Julian’s arm around her shoulders. It shivered against her, and he clung to her even as she cautiously hoisted him up.
Like Kestar, when she’d healed him.
Through her magic and through every part of him that touched her, Faanshi felt the effort Julian expended to make it to his feet; he had nothing to spare for anything else. Alarrah had already laden herself with their packed supplies and was waiting to lead them away. Faanshi thus turned to her ridah prayers, chanting them to herself with the rhythm of her every step.
Wisdom and grace got her to the storeroom door with Julian stumbling along beside her. Cleverness and compassion saw her and the Rook down the hidden corridor through which they’d crept into Arlitham Abbey to begin with, and out into the night. When Alarrah looked at her strangely, it occurred to her that she was doing her chanting aloud, spending breath she couldn’t spare. She kept going regardless. It took the rest of the ridahs to see Julian all the way to where Kirinil lurked in the nearest trees with their horses. Strength and courage she saved for the last, to get the assassin to his black stallion Morrigh.
And only when she’d accomplished that did she see that Kirinil wasn’t alone.
Kestar and his Hawk partner were waiting with him.
* * *
Kestar had known even before Celoren had come in search of him that Faanshi was awake. Even after she’d healed him, though the contact was a pale remnant of what they’d shared before, she glimmered at the heart of his awareness. It drove him to seek out the elves watching over Faanshi and Julian, and offer assistance in preparing their horses for their escape. Soon enough he’d no longer be a Hawk—if in truth he hadn’t already forfeited his right to that title—but he was still Kestar Vaarsen. And he would, by all the gods, keep his word.
That Celoren kept to his side was a comfort, and it gave him hope that no matter what else might befall him in the coming days, he’d also keep his friend.
He clung to that resolve as Faanshi and Alarrah, with the assassin leaning heavily on the younger healer’s shoulder, reached them among the trees that overlooked the abbey. Alarrah called out first, in Elvish syllables so soft that if he hadn’t been listening for them, Kestar might have mistaken them for a passing breeze. Kirinil replied in kind. But in truth, all Kestar’s regard was for Faanshi herself.
The battered brown hat she’d worn in the chapel was back on her head, incongruous with the clothes she wore, simple garb of green and gold and brown that matched that of her elven companions. Her clothing fit her. The hat did not. It swallowed the short black hair beneath it, and her face, framed by its brim, seemed thinner and frailer than Kestar remembered. He could still feel her magic in his blood, but it was tenuous now, the light of an early spring morning rather than a summer’s noon.
She didn’t look like a mage who’d shielded them all against the Anreulag; she looked like a weary young woman. Lines of effort stood out in her features as she supported the man who’d called himself her protector. All Kestar could think about was holding her like that, embracing her in the chapel as though his life had depended on it. The memory of it kindled heat in his cheeks. “Will he be all right?” he called, trying to ignore the blush.
The assassin raised his head. His arm draped limply around the girl’s shoulders—the arm Kestar had last seen ending in a false hand. It now bore a hand of living flesh. Julian’s face was gray with strain beneath days’ worth of beard, but two dark blue eyes, not one, dominated that face now. They regarded Kestar with a wary mistrust that not even the man’s apparent exhaustion could blunt.
“I’ll live,” Julian rasped.
The elves cast glances from Kestar to Faanshi and back again. They said nothing, but their intention was clear enough when Faanshi, with distinct reluctance, slid out from under the assassin’s arm. Smoothly Kirinil stepped in to help Alarrah keep the man on his feet, leaving the girl to venture toward Kestar, wringing her hands nervously.
“What of you?” she asked. “Will you be all right when we leave?”
“I don’t know,” Kestar admitted, unable to hedge with her earnest regard upon him. Nor was he able to hold back another question, even though part of him already knew the answer. “Are you well?”
Her mouth curved in a small, tired smile. “I’ll persevere. But I think we’ll both fare better if Kirinil helps me finish what you asked for...” With that she paused, her more normal shyness flaring, her gaze dipping down and back up again before she finished, “If it still troubles you.”
For a moment Kestar almost laughed; the girl had a gift for understatement. She knew, of course. She had to know how she’d mercifully muted the bond between them, but not enough to drive it into silence. How the echoes of her perceptions through his were bearable now, though her sheer proximity threatened to stoke them back into life. And how that part of him that craved clean wind and sunlight was reluctant to let go of the link with her, even now. “It would probably be best,” he said, not bothering to mask the ruefulness in his voice.
“In truth, there’s
not much more I need do,” Kirinil said. “I’ve given Faanshi basic lessons in shielding. She’ll improve with practice, and she’s already done most of what was needed. I could put a temporary shield on you, but it would be best if you learned to shield yourself.”
That suggestion stopped Kestar cold.
It was one thing for him to have premonitions that passively came to him without his seeking, and even for him to have allowed Faanshi to heal him with her power. To actively learn something magical, though... Can I do that?
“You know about my hearth,” Faanshi said softly. “You were part of it when I built it in my mind.”
She was right. Her memories no longer threatened to overwhelm his own—but now they were becoming his in truth, because he’d seen. He’d witnessed. And he remembered.
And if she’d learned to protect her innermost self, then surely he could too. The maiden had her hearth, and he’d had a place like it all along. Even before he closed his eyes, Kestar saw the meadow from his dreams, and with a rueful little chuckle deep in his throat, he claimed it as his. It would need trees, he decided. Tall ones, where a hawk could nest in safety, but with the open air no farther away than a single strong beat of wings.
The meadow’s heart, though, he kept open even as he ringed it on all sides by protective forest. There and there alone the sunlight would still reach. With a pang he saw Faanshi lingering there, but she was a shade now, gently fading into the light with every new tree that sprang up within his thoughts.
When she vanished at last, he opened his eyes to find her still standing before him, warm and solid, smiling just like the echo of her had done. Faanshi hadn’t moved any farther away from him, yet there was a new and subtle distance between them, an easing of the pressure against the boundaries of his very self. She no longer crowded the space within his skull, and he breathed with lungs that once more felt like his own. “Did it work?” With a frisson of dismay he found himself still acutely aware of her, and so he wasn’t entirely sure.
Valor of the Healer Page 35