Healer's Touch

by Amy Raby

  Chapter 21

  Based on the number of faces Isolda saw in the city’s underground, she estimated that about half of her people had survived the explosion and escaped the deportation roundup. It was a relief to see that she and Rory would not be the only Sardossians in the city henceforth—but that was not why she had come here.

  At Marius’s villa, she’d let her desires carry her away, but her conscience had intervened. She wanted Marius in a way she’d never wanted a man before, and it was clear that he wanted her too, but she was not a free woman. She was married, and until she got herself unmarried, she couldn’t sleep with him.

  Telling him the truth about Jauld wouldn’t be enough. Marius would forgive her for having lied before, she was certain, but that wouldn’t salvage the romantic side of their relationship; he would put an end to it at once. He was forgiving, but he was also principled. Marius would not sleep with a married woman.

  Ahead, a sign hung drunkenly on a door: The Pilgrim. In its distant past, this building had been an inn. Now sunk below ground, it moldered away in the dark. How it had come to be here was a mystery even to her people, but Riat’s sewers weren’t just underground passages for wastewater. There were structures down here, shops and storefronts from a previous age. Though old and rotten, they made excellent shelters for refugees in hiding.

  The door was wedged open by a sunken ceiling and warped girders. She crept through the doorway, circling around the standing water on the floor. “Caz?”

  “Isolda?”

  She followed his voice to the farthest bedroom, which was also the highest and driest.

  The room’s original furnishings had been looted long ago. Now bags and blankets hid almost every inch of floor space.

  Caz, a tall, strong, yellow-haired Sardossian, hovered possessively over one such pile of blankets. “Good for you, dodging the reds. Is your boy all right?”

  She nodded as she picked her way across the floor. “He’s at work.”

  “Good for him.”

  Caz was unusual among Sardossian refugees in that he spoke the Kjallan language and had a legitimate job working alongside Kjallan laborers, and from what she understood, that job paid well. She hadn’t met him until she came to Riat. Before he’d emigrated from Sardos, he’d been one of the strays, a disinherited third son of a second wife. Abhorring violence, he’d declined to join the army and had eked out a living as a farm laborer. His size, strength, and amiable nature had made him a valued employee. Now instead of slinging hay bales, he slung crates and casks at the Riat shipyard.

  He had remained staunchly single, and for a while she’d wondered why. In Sardos, marriage would have been out of the question for a stray such as himself, but here in Kjall marriage was a possibility, and casual affairs were common among the refugees. He did not lack for female admirers, but he’d encouraged none of them. Isolda suspected his tastes lay in another direction.

  Isolda valued him as a friend because he was more knowledgeable about Kjallans and their ways than any other Sardossian she knew. “I’ve a question. How does one get a divorce in Kjall?”

  “First, one has to be Kjallan,” said Caz.

  “Are you sure?”

  “If you go to the authorities, they’re going to arrest you. Unless you’ve got plenty of bribe money.”

  “They won’t arrest me. Look.” She pulled the writ from her pocket and unfolded it for him, feeling as giddy as a child showing off a new toy.

  Caz’s brow lowered. “You know I can’t read.”

  She’d forgotten. Caz spoke beautiful Kjallan, and with only a slight accent, but he couldn’t read or write in any language. “Right, I’m sorry. It says I’m authorized to stay here in Riat, with my family, for one month, and the guards can’t arrest me.”

  “Really?” Caz whistled. “That’s worth more than gold. Don’t let anyone here see it.”

  “It has my name on it. And it works! A guard stopped me on the way here. I almost wet myself, but I pulled this out and showed it to him, and he read it and kind of sniffed at me, and then he walked away.”

  “Oh, I believe that,” said Caz. “Kjallans love their papers.”

  Isolda smiled. “It’s not papers they love—”

  “Oh, but they do! More than wine, more than women. It’s a good thing they worship the Three, because otherwise I think they’d erect a statue of a writing desk and worship that. Where’d you get it?”

  “From my boss at the surgery.”

  “He’s more than just your boss, I’ll wager,” said Caz.

  “Perhaps.” Isolda’s cheeks warmed. “And that’s why I need a divorce, because legally I’m still married to Jauld, and I don’t want to be. How do I get one?”

  “At the apparitor’s office. But I think your husband has to go too.”

  Oh, gods. Jauld was an ocean away, and even if he were here in Riat, he would never grant her permission to divorce him. “Do you think I could maybe forge a document saying—”

  “I’ve a better idea,” said Caz. “I’ll go with you and pretend to be your husband.”

  What a perfect notion that was! But so very risky for Caz. “I can’t ask you to do that. What if the guardsmen see you?”

  “That’s the beauty of it.” He grinned. “They can’t arrest me. I’m family, so your holy writ protects me.”

  “But after we’re divorced, you won’t be family anymore.”

  “If you don’t tell them, I won’t,” said Caz. “But just in case—you got five tetrals on you?”

  Isolda reached into her pocket. “Why?”

  “Give it here.”

  “What for?”

  “Bribe money.”

  Isolda blinked. “Who takes bribes in Kjall?”

  Caz folded his arms. “Everybody. How do you think I’ve survived here for so long, working in the open with this hair and this accent?”

  Isolda handed him the five tetrals. “Why have I never known this?”

  “Because you’re good-natured and you think everyone else is the same way.”

  “I do not think that,” said Isolda, with indignance.

  “And you were too poor, working at that gunpowder factory.”

  “Your bribes may have worked before, but now that the imperial order’s come down—”

  “Makes no difference,” said Caz. “Since the explosion, I’ve bribed two guardsmen already.”

  “It’s different for you. Everyone likes you.” It amazed Isolda how Caz seemed to skate through life, relying on his personal charm to get him out of trouble. He seemed to be able to draw a smile out of anybody, even a city guardsman.

  Caz shrugged. “Why do you want a divorce? This man you want to be with will never know about your old husband, and who cares what the Kjallans write in their moldy books? As far as I’m concerned, you were unmarried the moment you stepped off the boat.”

  “The law doesn’t see it that way,” said Isolda. “Marius won’t want to sleep with a married woman.”

  “So he’s a self-righteous ass. Who cares what he thinks?” said Caz. “He’s just using you.”

  “He’s not. And he’s not a self-righteous ass.”

  “Is he going to marry you?”

  “No.”

  “Then he’s using you.”

  Isolda shook her head. “His feelings for me are genuine, as are mine for him.”

  “And when it’s time for him to get married to somebody else, he’ll toss you out the door like yesterday’s old straw.”

  “Probably,” said Isolda.

  “You’re making a mistake, getting involved with a Kjallan. Even if he does give you a writ worth its weight in gold.”

  Perhaps she was. For all that she’d meant to keep her distance, she was in love with Marius. When he showed her the door someday, as he ultimately must, he would break her heart. And yet every fiber of her being pushed her toward this inevitable anguish. She could no more stop herself from loving Marius than the sun could stop its march through the sky—a
nd its inevitable sinking beneath the horizon.

  “You’re not going to listen, are you?” Caz rose to his feet. “I knew you wouldn’t. Let’s go to the apparitor and play husband and wife.”

  ∞

  Isolda looked at the sign on the building with trepidation: Imperial Apparitor. Never before had she sought out someone as potentially hostile to her people and to her interests as an official clerk of the Kjallan Empire. But Caz said this was the man they had to see, and the writ in her pocket gave her the power to be here.

  A bell rang over the door as they stepped inside.

  The office was small and dusty. A gray-haired man with a Kjallan hawk nose peered at her from behind a desk in the corner. A closed door led to some sort of back room.

  “Are you the apparitor?” she asked.

  He stared at them. “You’re Sardossians. You can’t be here. There’s—”

  “We’re here legally. Look.” She took the writ from her pocket, unfolded it, and laid it on the desk for him to read, keeping her finger on it because it was too precious to entrust to a stranger.

  The apparitor studied it. “Have friends in high places, do you?”

  Isolda supposed he meant Marius’s benefactor. She nodded.

  “This expires in a month.”

  “But it’s good for now.” She picked up the writ and pocketed it.

  Caz slid into one of the chairs on the other side of the desk. “I’m here to divorce my bitch of a wife.”

  Isolda glared at him as she took the seat beside him. Embellishment was not necessary.

  “Your name?” asked the apparitor.

  “Jauld Morbel.”

  “Spell it.”

  Caz gave Isolda a blank look, and she spelled it for him. The apparitor wrote it down and turned to Isolda. “Your name?”

  “Isolda.”

  “Isolda Morbel?”

  She shook her head. “Just Isolda. Sardossian women do not have surnames.”

  The apparitor’s brow furrowed. He hesitated, and a drop of ink fell from his quill to the paper. “Women in Kjall do have surnames, so I’m going to put down Isolda Morbel.” He blotted the ink spot and began to write. “Reason for the divorce?”

  “Um...adultery,” said Caz.

  “Yours or hers?” asked the apparitor.

  Isolda said, “His.”

  At the same time, Caz said, “Hers.”

  They glanced at each other. Isolda had rehearsed some of the questions with Caz before coming in, but she had not expected that one, given that men in Kjall seemed to be able to divorce without a reason.

  “We were both getting the bull’s feather on the side,” said Caz. “Also, she snores.”

  Isolda gave him a discreet kick.

  “Adultery,” recited the apparitor as he wrote. “Both parties. Any children in the marriage?”

  “A boy, Rory, eight years old,” said Isolda.

  “Custody to you?” the apparitor asked Caz.

  “No, to her,” said Caz. “I don’t want that brat. Who knows if he’s even mine?”

  “He’s legitimate,” put in Isolda quickly, worried that Caz’s embroidery of the facts might somehow end up in the apparitor’s official record.

  “Custody of the son to the mother,” said the apparitor dubiously. He wrote some more and looked up at Isolda. “What was your name before your marriage?”

  “Just Isolda.”

  “I can’t put down just Isolda,” said the apparitor. “In this country, a legal name has at least two parts, more often three. It should be your name, followed by your father’s name, followed by your grandfather’s name. If you didn’t have a surname before, you’re going to have one from now on, so come up with something.”

  Her father’s surname had been Tanem. It seemed silly to take her father’s name, given that she would probably never see him again, and it wasn’t Sardossian custom anyway. “I can choose any name I want?”

  “I don’t care what you put down.”

  She thought for a moment, and combined two Sardossian words: ang, meaning woman, and helm, meaning free. “Isolda Anghelm,” she told the apparitor.

  Caz, sitting next to her, raised a brow. He knew the meaning, even if the apparitor didn’t. Isolda, woman who is free.

  The apparitor’s quill scratched on the paper.

  Chapter 22

  When Isolda knocked at the door to Marius’s villa, there was no immediate answer. She waited a little while, wondering if Marius might have gone to the surgery after all. She’d walked right by the surgery on her way here, but hadn’t given it much of a glance. Her mind was so full: Caz and the clerk, her divorce that was all of thirty minutes old, her newfound freedom that would allow her to indulge in an affair with the man she’d admired for years.

  She knocked again, in case no one had heard her the first time, and the door opened.

  Marius stood before her, clad in a light silk robe.

  Isolda swallowed. His hair was wet, suggesting he’d just come out of a bath, and the robe clinging to his damp body left nothing to the imagination, with the silk outlining every muscle on his shoulders and torso. She forgot sometimes that Marius was a big man, in part because he was always in the company of the slightly larger Drusus, but also because Marius never used his size and strength to intimidate. Looking at him now reminded her that his gentleness was a choice.

  She realized, suddenly, that they were alone. Marius seldom answered the door himself; usually Drusus or a servant did it. “Where’s Drusus?”

  “He’s around, but making himself scarce.” Marius smiled. “Did you take care of the detail you spoke of?”

  “Yes, it’s done.” Thank the gods.

  Marius held out his arm. “I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me about it?”

  “I’d really rather not.” She took his arm, and he led her inside.

  “Are you hungry at all?” he asked. “Tired?”

  “No, I...” She swallowed. He’d arranged privacy for them, so he knew perfectly well what she was after. “I’d like to see your bedroom.”

  “Then I’ll show you.”

  Marius’s bedroom was the only room in the villa she hadn’t yet seen. It was much as she’d expected: a utilitarian space, neat and tidy, lacking in pretension. His furnishings included two chests, a table and chairs, and a bed in the center of the room, the mere presence of which caused her cheeks to flush. The pieces appeared to be a matched set, carved from the same red-brown wood and upholstered in blue. While they lacked showy damask, silk, or gold accents, their quality was evident in the artistic swoop of their lines and the heaviness of the wood.

  Marius followed her gaze to the furnishings. “My father made those.”

  She looked up in surprise. “Your father?” Given Marius’s wealth, she’d thought his father would be military, or a business owner, or an imperial official; not somebody who worked with his hands.

  “I was thinking we should talk a little,” said Marius. “Before we take things much further.”

  “Talk,” she repeated, uncertain about this.

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about me. And much I’d like to know about you.”

  She nodded. What could she safely tell him? Now that she was officially divorced, she saw no reason she couldn’t share with him most of her history with Jauld, if Marius wanted to hear that awful story. But the crimes she’d committed in order to emigrate to Kjall—stealing the store’s money and her son, running away in violation of half a dozen laws—those were acts that shamed her. Could this wealthy Kjallan who’d always had family sheltering and protecting him understand the desperation that had driven her here?

  “I come from a noble family,” said Marius. “But I wasn’t raised in one. My mother, as a young woman, was promised to a legatus in an arranged marriage. She didn’t want to marry him, so she fled Riat and eloped with my father, a craftsman named Anton.”

  Isolda ran her hand along the curve of a chair arm. “His work is exquisi
te.”

  Marius nodded. “He’s meticulous. On some of the jobs he had when I was growing up, the people who hired him would complain that he was slow. But that was only because he cared enough to do things right.”

  Isolda felt a twinge of jealousy. Her father, too, had been a conscientious, meticulous man, and she had always admired him. But she hadn’t seen him, or her mother, since her marriage to Jauld. In Sardos it was customary for fathers to make a clean cut from their daughters when they married so that there would be no conflict between the husband and his father-in-law. Marius’s father, it seemed, had remained part of his adult son’s life. “He must love you very much.”

  Marius sat on the bed. “He and my mother live in Riat now. They’re across town, so I just have to saddle up Gambler when I want to see them.”

  Isolda’s throat tightened. What a luxury that must be, to see one’s parents whenever one desired. Even if she had a horse to saddle up and cross town with, she had nobody to visit. Her family was just herself and Rory now.

  “Will you sit with me?” asked Marius.

  She was feeling shy despite having come here with the express aim of sleeping with him. Nonetheless, she crossed the room and sat by his side, sinking into the goosefeathers.

  Marius slipped an arm around her. “After my mother eloped, she concealed everything that might give away her identity. She dressed humbly and adopted the local accent. Despite her efforts at blending in, she was discovered by my uncle. He left her where she was, with my father, but took away her firstborn daughter—”

  “Wait, why would he leave her and take the daughter?”

  “He was concerned about heirs and preserving the bloodline for future generations. Because my parents were afraid to have more children after that, I didn’t come along for another ten years. They let me believe I was the eldest—my missing sister, a decade my senior, was never mentioned. My parents had gone deeper into hiding by then, living in obscure rural towns. My father was originally an upholsterer, but he feared his profession might identify him, so he worked as a carpenter instead. When we were discovered again, this time by my cousin, I was twenty-two years old and a journeyman apothecary. Until that moment, I’d had no idea my family was anything out of the ordinary.”