Blades Of Illusion: Crown Service #2

by Terah Edun

  Sara nodded.

  “Then there are spirit healers. Healers who can work with a person’s aura and energy to heal them from within of mental ailments and sometimes physical manifestations.”

  Captain Simon muttered something about running out of time, but the healer persisted.

  “Then there are kith and reiki healers,” the healer continued, “A kith healer is an inhuman being with various gifts that allow them to heal both physical bodies and metaphysical souls. They come in many forms. I, however, am a reiki healer. A human healer with an inhuman gift.” Before Sara could open her mouth to question what that gift was, he said, “A gift that I have no intention of explaining to you. No offense, but it would be like me asking what your thoughts are on going berserk.”

  Sara shut her mouth, words unspoken. He had a point.

  “Just know that I can accomplish this task,” the healer said. “That is, if you would stop interrupting.”

  Sara bit her lip. For the first time, she was uncertain about her next step. It’s not that she didn’t trust him personally. It was that she didn’t trust anybody. Did she take him at his word, or did she force him to back down?

  Sweat beaded on her spine as she thought her choice through.

  Fortunately for the healer, the decision was taken out of Sara’s hands when Ezekiel surged up with a gasp. Sara tightened her grip on the curator, not sure if he was having a seizure, fighting a panic attack, or enduring the something she couldn’t imagine...like a transition into the realm of the gods.

  “It’s alright,” the healer assured cautiously while pressing Ezekiel back done into her arms, “This is him fighting to live. It’s my job to help him in that battle.”

  Sara pursed her bloodless lips and nodded.

  “Now let him do his job, Fairchild, before we all regret this delay,” interrupted her captain in a rushed tone. “We’re certainly paying him enough for it.”

  Both the healer and Sara decided not to pay her blathering captain a spare glance. She held the healer’s gaze and he held hers.

  The healer finally sighed, released his hold on Ezekiel, and said, “As for your first question, why am I searching for a cure when if surely it’s obvious what ailment he has? Well, that answer will come in due time. Just know that if I could have healed with the thinnest touch and no repercussions, I would have already done it.”

  Sara gritted her teeth, detecting the overt sarcasm in the healer’s voice, but she chalked it up to weariness...and fear.

  “I appreciate your...forthrightness. But I still need to know...what are you searching for? And why?” she replied.

  Barthis Simon threw his hands up in irritation. He started to storm off, but then turned back around to loom over them again. “Did no one ever tell you not to look a gift horse in the mouth?”

  Again, he was soundly ignored by the healer and the slip of battle-hardened young woman in front of him.

  “Because,” the healer explained with a tired sigh, “the Kades are craftier, more advanced magical tacticians than the imperial courts give them credit for.”

  Sara’s mouth curled into a grimace. “Everyone knows they’re the most powerful mages in this empire.”

  “Power and practice are two different things, young battle mage,” the healer said, “The Kade mages have both...in abundance. They’ve been known to layer and weave their spells with booby traps that surprise mages attempting to tamper with them with unpleasant consequences.”

  “Tamper?” said Barthis Simon in surprise.

  “Consequences?” said Sara Fairchild at the same time.

  “The kind you don’t walk away from,” the airship captain said to Sara with an impatient wave of her hand. “Healer Farn, if you’d please continue. Other patients await you.”

  Healer Farn nodded. “In either case, this is neither here nor there for this patient. Mr. Crane is only infected with the one magical ailment not more than underlie it like a kraken waiting to break the still waters and drag an unsuspecting captain and ship down.”

  “You being the captain, I take it?” Sara said dryly. She didn’t mean it in a snarky way. Wit and levity was one way she was able to come down from the tense anger that knotted her shoulders. Bloodshed was another. She preferred the former over the latter.

  Healer Farn looked up at her again with the bloodshot appearance of his eyes fading as he spoke, “And your friend being the ship.”

  Sara let out a small breath as she said, “Then I hope you’re just as good a captain as I think you are.”

  This time, the healer let a smirk show on his face as he immodestly said, “Better.”

  Chapter 14

  Sara harrumphed in acknowledgement, but otherwise didn’t respond. She could see that the healer’s focus was no longer on her. It was on his patient, with the steady gaze of a man confident in his work. Sara backed off. She didn’t think she had much choice, and besides, she believed him. She believed he knew the cause of Ezekiel’s ailment, as well as the cure. She could only hope that this would be enough, because she didn’t have anything else up her sleeve except more threats. And while threats might give her the satisfaction of seeing someone quiver, it wouldn’t bring Ezekiel back from the brink of death or save any of the other poor, stricken souls around them.

  After a few moments the man drew his hands back and said, “The infection has spread and is perilously close to dragging him through death’s door.”

  “We already knew that,” Sara sniped.

  The healer threw her an unreadable glance as he said, “Did you also know that the only way to cure these unnatural afflictions grafted to very natural predators by Kade mages is also through a natural remedy?”

  Sara loosened her tight jaw and acknowledged, “I did not.” Admitting her lack of knowledge didn’t hurt as much as she thought it might.

  The man nodded and traced a finger on Ezekiel’s cheek, leaving a visibly glowing mark.

  “What’s that?” the captain of the Corcoran guard asked with narrowed eyes.

  Sara was just glad she hadn’t been the one forced to question the action.

  “A monitoring spell,” said the healer. “If he grows worse, this mark will shine bright blue. As he grows better, the glow will fade into his cheek as if it were never there.”

  Sara nodded, helpless, and not at all enjoying the feeling.

  “The next step?” Barthis Simon asked with an impatient wave of his hand.

  “My next step is to administer the antidote to all of your fallen mercenaries and hope they are not too far gone for the cure to take,” the healer said. He gestured to Ezekiel. “What happens with him next is up to you.”

  “I thought you were the only one who could cure him,” Sara said, confusion clear in her voice. She was neither questioning his remedy nor his competence, just clarifying an unspoken point.

  “If it came to that, I could,” the healer said simply. “But I’d prefer to save those skills for the battlefield. This we have slaved over a natural cure for. I would hate to see it go to waste.”

  Just as calmly, Sara replied, “I’d hate to see your blood soaking these grounds once I give you a red smile from ear-to-ear if he dies and you didn’t do all you could save him.”

  “As would we both,” said Captain Barthis Simon from her left, where he was still looming. The warning in his tone was clear, if the glare he leveled at Sara wasn’t enough of a threat.

  Stop threatening the healer, Sara deciphered in her head.

  Then the female captain spoke up. “I assure you, on my honor and the work of my healing crew, we have perfected this cure. If Ezekiel Crane has the paralyzing sickness, and the monitoring spell the healer has performed assured us he does, then this will be his cure.”

  Sara pursed her mouth together and carefully nodded in response. It was all she could do to keep herself from saying or doing something she’d regret.

  Internally, Sara’s heart constricted. That was not what she wanted to hear. The cure was supp
osed to be complete and instantaneous. What use was it if Ezekiel died anyway?

  Before she could say a word the healer looked directly in her eyes and said, “All we can do is try our best and hope that it is enough.”

  Sara grimaced and tightened her grip on Ezekiel’s shoulder before she nodded. That wasn’t the response she had been waiting for. She preferred decisive actions with ready results. Hope didn’t belong much in her world. Hard work did.

  Still, she had no choice but to put her hope in the man kneeling before her.

  And so she did. She even bowed her head in respect.

  “May the elements help the sick and the winds guide the gravely ill on winged backs,” she said quietly. It was an old battle prayer, and sometimes a curse. She had never had cause to use it until now.

  “May the elements help us all,” the healer said in the traditional response as he once more reached for Ezekiel’s head and opened a small, clear vial of brown liquid.

  Lifting up Ezekiel’s head by his chin, he asked Sara, “Brace him, please. He’s too weak to drink and raise his head on his own.”

  Without a word, she sheathed her knife she had momentarily pulled and supported Ezekiel’s head. From the look in Captain Martha Simmons eyes, Sara had sheathed the knife not a moment too soon. It wouldn’t due if Sara cut open her best healer after all.

  The healer poured the liquid between his open lips as he gently massaged the curator’s throat. “There, lad, drink it all. The more you can keep down and in your system, the faster the recovery.”

  Ezekiel began to cough and splutter, and the healer paused his ministrations to let the curator catch his breath. Sara felt as if her own breath was stopping and starting in time with Ezekiel’s.

  Then Ezekiel’s eyes turned to the healer, and he hoarsely whispered, “More.”

  The healer complied, and Ezekiel finished the contents of the vial in seconds.

  The healer stoppered the empty casing with cautious eyes taking in his patient’s reaction. Ezekiel sighed. His eyes closed, and his head rolled back heavily in Sara’s arms. She frantically looked to the mark to make sure it hadn’t turned blue—it hadn’t. In fact, the slightly bronzed mark was fading before her eyes.

  She looked up into the healer’s gaze with her mouth slightly open and hope in her heart—hope she couldn’t voice, but let spill with desperation into her gaze.

  The healer smiled and said, “It’s working.”

  Sara let out a startled laugh as her shoulders drooped as the tension eased away. “Thank you,” she said. Her voice was a tiny whisper, but she felt like guffawing in nervous relief. She repeated her thanks to the healer.

  He nodded and stood. “I must attend to other patients. The mark on his cheek will allow Mr. Crane to be borne up to the ship without problems.”

  She nodded and watched as he walked away to the next nearest patient, too overcome to speak anymore. Her hands trembled as she rested Ezekiel’s head back on her shoulder and brought her fingers gently to his face. Sara traced the boundaries of the glowing mark on his cheek and waited for him to open his eyes. It wasn’t long before his closed gaze flickered open once more, and Sara felt as if it was the most extraordinarily action taken all day. In her mind, she felt irritation at the feelings in her heart. To care for someone other than family as deeply as she did for Ezekiel Crane was to show weakness.

  If he had been anyone else, she would have left them in the swamp to die without shedding a tear.

  “Except for Nissa,” Sara muttered to herself. That choice was more out of practicality than anything else. The woman was a valuable prisoner to the empire. Sara knew that Nissa was still alive as her captain had, in his esteem wisdom, made it a priority both to secure her from escaping and protect her from harm, as well as making sure she ate enough to stay alive. A walking dead person but alive...for the moment.

  Ezekiel opened his mouth and tried to speak. He ended up wheezing out a coughing breath and nothing more.

  “Shhh,” Sara whispered, “Don’t try to talk.” She watched as two men bearing a stretcher came forward. They set about moving Ezekiel from her grasp, lifting his body onto the taut white sheet.

  Ezekiel, lips clammy and skin pale, continued his mumbling, heedless of her words. What he was mumbling, Sara couldn’t tell. His eyes weren’t even open. His breath quickened as he wheezed harder, insistently trying to talk as the stretcher bearers lifted him. Sara rose quickly, wincing at the painful tingles she felt as circulation suddenly returned to her legs. “One moment,” she told them.

  The stretcher bearers said nothing; they simply paused and stared, with Ezekiel stretched between at waist height.

  Sara leaned over her friend and asked, “What are you saying?”

  Ezekiel’s eyelids fluttered, but his piercing gaze didn’t catch hold of hers. Instead, his lips moved again, and Sara caught a whisper. Just a whisper.

  “Louder,” she demanded of Ezekiel. She turned her head impatiently and put the shell of her ear to his lips.

  Ezekiel took in a gasping breath, one that sounded like the rattle of an old man dying. Before her heart could assume the worst, Ezekiel let out a coughing wheeze straight into her ear, and said, “I was wrong.”

  Sara leaned back and glared at his unseeing face, irritated at the spittle in her ear and the completely unhelpful assertion that had crossed his lips.

  “About what?” she demanded.

  He didn’t answer.

  A moment passed, and with an apologetic tone, one of the stretcher bearers said, “Ma’am, we need to get to the airships. There are only so many stretchers, and a lot of your mercenaries need to be moved.”

  Sara knew they were right. She grimaced in frustration at not knowing. In some cases, things were better left unsaid, but she was tired. Tired of not knowing, tired of secrets, tired of being one step behind everyone else. It was more than curiosity. It was more than frustration. It was pent-up resentment. Resentment that everyone and everything had an answer to an endless round of questions.

  “Ma’am,” prompted the stretcher bearer.

  Sara flicked cool eyes to him, and he grimaced, pressing his lips into a thin, silent line. She said, “One more moment. Just one more. Ezekiel,” she said, leaning over him. “What were you wrong about?”

  Ezekiel’s lips moved again. Sara watched his eyes twitch as well. It reminded her as nothing so much as a dog in a sleep. Dogs dreamed. Not many people knew that. But they did, and Sara had had a particularly small terrier as a child that had loved to chase her prey in her sleep. Her little legs would move like she was running after it in leaps and bounds. Her ears would twitch back and forth when her legs paused, listening for the prey’s movements. And when she had caught the scent again or heard the little rabbit’s feet hit the ground running again in her dream hunt, she would sometimes vocalize the tiniest bark. Nothing like her normal voice, which could be heard across the courtyard. But a bark nonetheless.

  Ezekiel’s twitching eyes and moving lips told her the same story. He was dreaming.

  “Can people sleep-talk?” Sara Fairchild asked no one in particular. It was clear that whatever this was—and she was almost certain it was a dream—it had no answers for her. She was holding up the crew for a fool’s errand.

  Regardless, the other stretcher bearer answered her. “My brother was a sleepwalker his whole life. Hell, he did anything and everything in his sleep. Caught him once walking down the middle of the street at half past midnight. Two blocks, I tell ya. Didn’t stop for anything until he got into his favorite bar, sat down on his stool, and drank a whole tankard of mead.”

  Sara gave him a slightly impressed look. “Really?”

  She wasn’t easily surprised. This, however, surprised her. If she could have seen herself through the bearer’s eyes, she would have seen that the open emotion on her face transformed her from a hardened warrior back into what she was—a seventeen-year-old girl covered in swamp water.

  Whatever the bearer saw in
her face must have encouraged him to go on, because he said, “Really. He drank himself under the table.”

  The original bearer scoffed. “And how’d he do that? Pay with dream money as well?”

  “Nah,” said the tale-telling carrier with a grin, “I paid for more drinks. Funniest thing I’ve ever seen. He drank and drank. Came back home, went to bed, and woke up to my sister-in-law’s blistering tongue. He still hasn’t lived it down.”

  Sara laughed—her first laugh since entering the swamp. Perhaps her first laugh since this hellish month had begun. She didn’t know, but she did know it felt damned good.

  It could have been the laugh. It could have been the story. But Ezekiel’s hand raised out of the catatonic state he laid in and Sara automatically gripped it. This time, when Ezekiel began whispering in his sleep, she leaned forward and heard the full whisper.

  “I’m sorry. I was wrong. I killed Vincent Fairchild.”

  Sara reared back in surprise, and her hand shot to the pommel of her knife. She didn’t draw it...yet. Just gripping it cautiously, like a child latching onto its mother’s teat. For comfort.

  Because Ezekiel could only mean one person—her father. Commander Vincent Fairchild.

  Ezekiel’s muttering ceased, and his hand dropped limply from her grip. Not that she tried to prevent it. His eyes stilled, and she watched as he fell back into the deep coma-like sleep he had inhabited before. As if by whispering those words, his conscious had stilled—his debt absolved.

  Sara’s lipped curled into a snarl at the very thought of absolution by confession. The absolution she gave him or anyone else would be at the tip of her sword. But Ezekiel was defenseless now. Defenseless, and quite possibly hallucinating. Not that that was a known property of the poisoned bite, but it was the only other explanation for his words.

  Sara hoped it was.

  She raised up her face and caught the two stretcher bearers exchanging silent glances. She wasn’t sure if they were worried that she’d attack Ezekiel or she’d attack them. She was plenty sure they hadn’t heard what Ezekiel Crane had said, because she’d barely heard even after leaning back down to hear what he had said.