“I have not hurt myself for nine days,” Sara said. “I did not fall down the hill yesterday. I did not bite my tongue. I did not stab my leg or set my hair on fire. I did not poke my eye with the needle—”
Lance flinched.
“—or stick my hand in the ant hill. Or break my fingers. Or—”
“Enough.” She would give him nightmares. Poking her eye? Setting her hair on fire? “I won’t make love to you until you are yourself again.” On that issue he would not budge. “But perhaps for every ten days you are good we could have an extra kissing session.”
Sara considered the offer. “No.”
“I won’t let you hurt yourself,” he warned. Despair threatened. If she threw herself in the fire, how could he stop her? What could he do? Refuse to heal her? Never.
“Every five days that I do not hurt myself, not ten,” Sara negotiated. “And I don’t want more kisses, I want you to touch me here.” Without self-consciousness Sara cupped her own breasts. While she’d been on his lap, he’d felt them pressed against his chest, but he’d resisted the temptation to touch them.
Mostly. Except for a couple of times when he’d gotten carried away.
His mouth dried. “Agreed,” he said quickly. It wouldn’t really kill him to take things one step further and then stop.
Sara’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Touch them with your hands and mouth.”
Goddess help him. He nodded tightly. “In five days, if you’re good.”
“No. Tomorrow will be the tenth day. That is two times five days.”
“Agreed,” he said quickly, before she could start bargaining for two sessions.
To his everlasting gratitude Rhiain returned just then, bounding into camp like a frisky kitten. “I found a town and hearrrd some trrravellers call it Tolium. We’ll rrreach it tomorrrow.”
Chapter Ten
“I smell blood,” Rhiain said, slowing to a stop just below a small hill.
Lance slid off her back, grateful to be on solid ground. Rhiain had a smooth gait, but his latest affliction was an ear infection. It had started with itching, and then progressed to aching, until now his head spun as if he’d turned in circles. He’d had to keep tight hold of Rhiain’s mane to keep from falling off.
Pain could be endured, but he was finding the dizziness unexpectedly difficult to deal with.
Sara stood beside him, silent. He waited with his legs braced apart and flexed his cramped fingers while Rhiain sniffed the wind from the north. During the journey, he’d learned to rely on her superior senses.
If only she could sniff out the rebels, they’d be set.
They’d stopped in Tolium and given Bertramus’s widow the news of his death. To Lance’s relief, her tears seemed more caused by anxiety than deep grief, and he’d salved his conscience by quietly healing Bertramus’s daughter of both her shortsightedness and the sickness tainting her blood.
His careful questions about Bertramus’s “cousin” Fitch had met with blank stares from the wife, but the son had looked first scared, then sly. Lance had followed the son’s beckoning to the courtyard, but all the young man had known was that Bertramus had met with Fitch in a Temple of Wine. Since Tolium was named after Tol, the God of Wine, this didn’t narrow things down much.
“So you don’t know where I can find the rebels?” Lance had asked, disappointed. Randomly asking after rebels in Temples of Wine seemed like a good way to get arrested.
The pudgy young man shook his head, then lowered his voice. “The rebels are said to hide in the Undying Forest.”
Lance questioned him further, but only gleaned a little more, learning that the forest was “unlucky” and that the Republicans were “fools to think they could build a road through it.”
Lance thanked him and started to leave, only to turn back with one more question. “How big is the forest?”
“It stretches from the mountains in the east all the way to the ocean as well as north to the Grasslands.” He frowned. “Not all of that is the Undying, though. The forest by the mountains is just a forest.”
Dismayed, Lance took his leave. Finding the rebels in a forest the size of a province was going to be like searching for a barley plant in a field of wheat.
All they could do was go on. Lance and Sara crossed the bridge out of Tolium while Rhiain forded the rushing Tolus River below, then the three of them headed north, paralleling the arrow-straight Republican road running through the wood.
To Lance’s discomfort and awe the Undying Forest made the scrubby laurels and sycamores of Kandrith look like stalks of grass. Towering firs and cedars reached hundreds of feet into the sky and cast a perpetual cool twilight over the forest floor.
“The blood smell’s coming from that direction.” Rhiain lifted a paw, pointing toward the hill. “It’s verrry strrrong.”
“Let’s investigate,” Lance said. If there was blood, there might be need for a healer. An injured person would be less able to run at the sight of a shandy, and gratitude might even net them a little information about where to find the mysterious Chief Fitch.
Both good reasons, but Lance was guiltily aware neither was the true one. For most of their journey they’d been travelling at night to avoid other people. The most healing he’d done was a few cuts and scratches from thornbushes and fatigue—while he himself had suffered diarrhea, fever, dropsy, and a swollen jaw.
His sacrifice felt wasted. It verged on disrespectful not to use the Goddess’s gifts.
Yesterday’s healing of Bertramus’s little daughter had made him realize how much he missed feeling the Goddess’s hands over his own. Healing brought him a feeling of peace, of...grace.
Without waiting for Rhiain’s agreement, Lance began to walk the stiffness out of his legs. After his third dizzy stumble, Sara ducked under his arm to provide some balance.
The closer they got, the more Rhiain wrinkled her muzzle. Lance caught a whiff of blood and excrement. Something bad had happened here.
Keeping to the trees for cover, they crested the hill—and looked down on carnage.
It took Lance’s shocked eyes a few moments to sort it out. A small battle had taken place about a half a mile away where a marsh intersected the road. Recently, because only a few ravens had started to circle.
From the looks of it, the rebels had ambushed some infantry while they were crossing the log bridge bisecting the swamp. He could see half a dozen legionnaires floating facedown in the muck, with arrows sticking out of them, but most of the score of bodies strewn across the road wore the green-and-yellow plaids of some Gotian tribe. From the churn of muddy hoofprints, Lance inferred that the rebels had been ambushed in turn by Republican cavalry.
The victors had left the field, but for one mounted legionnaire trampling his horse over the fallen. Occasionally, one would move or cry out until the legionnaire stabbed down with his spear.
Rhiain growled, her chest vibrating.
Lance agreed with the sentiment. “Go,” he said. His lips drew back in a grimace of hatred.
Rhiain bounded down the forested slope, only touching down every twelve feet. Her progress was predator silent, but the horse heard or smelt something and bugled a warning.
Shandies terrified most horses, but the battle-trained gray stallion shied back only one step before calming under the hands of its rider. Likewise, the legionnaire brought up his spear to meet Rhiain’s charge.
Cursing, Lance started to run down the hill, clutching at Sara’s arm for balance. If that six-foot shaft impaled Rhiain’s chest,
she could die before he reached her.
At the last moment, Rhiain dodged sideways. She crouched by the horse’s flank and leapt straight at the rider.
The legionnaire tried to bring the spear around, but only grazed her shoulder before she knocked him off his horse. Her weight bore him to the ground. Lance heard the man’s spine snap.
That proved too much for the horse. It neighed and galloped off.
A riderless horse would alert the cavalry unit that something had gone wrong.
Lance cupped his hand around his mouth. “Get the horse!”
Obediently, Rhiain bounded off in pursuit. She angled forward, cutting the stallion off at the log bridge across the marsh. The horse reared up, one hoof striking Rhiain’s skull, before it thumped back down and veered sharply away.
Rhiain shook her head as if confused. Did she have a concussion?
Abandoning the bridge, the stallion thundered back up the hill, following the road.
Rhiain’s head swung around. Her tail lashed once and then she bounded off into the woods. What—? Lance caught a glimpse of her chasing a second mounted legionnaire. He prayed she caught him before he warned the rest of the cavalry.
The riderless horse was going to escape, but at least it was heading back to Tolium, the opposite direction to where the cavalry had gone.
Lance took a step forward and stumbled because Sara wasn’t there to support him. He grabbed at a spindly sapling and saw her sprinting toward the road, her split skirts swinging. She’d set her path to intersect with the stallion’s.
* * *
The horse had greater mass and velocity. Sara knew if she tried to block its way, the stallion would trample her. So she stood to the side, and, as it thundered by, she took a running jump. She grabbed the pommel, and mounted on the fly, swinging her leg over the saddle.
The move was a Grasslander trick she’d practiced and practiced as a girl.
She’d only ever succeeded a handful of times. The forty other times she’d ended up on the ground, usually bruised. Felicia and the other slaves had told her it was too dangerous and begged her to stop, but she hadn’t until she moved to Temborium.
Her girl-self had ridden horses whenever possible.
Sara bent low over the neck of the gray horse. The reins flapped by out of reach. She persisted, knowing that if the horse tripped, it would send her somersaulting to the ground.
Her body moved up and down in harmony with the stallion’s gallop. Her thigh muscles tightened around the horse’s wide barrel as the forest blurred by. Their speed made her hair stream out behind her, and she could feel wind and sunshine on her face. Even though every stride carried her farther away from Lance, together the sensations combined to give Sara an odd feeling in her chest of...lightness.
Of their own accord, her lips curved up.
* * *
“Sara!” Lance yelled as she and the gray stallion vanished from sight over the hill.
Watching her mount the galloping horse had stupefied him. He’d lost his breath. His heart had stuttered, at first with fear, but then...She and the horse had looked so wild and free, beauty in motion. Here was the Sara he’d been missing.
Worry kicked his stomach when she didn’t immediately return. What if she ran into more legionnaires or fell off? The stallion was a trained war steed. He might buck her off.
Lance took one stride in the direction of the road, then stopped, grimacing. He couldn’t catch Sara on foot. But there were wounded men below, dying men, whom he could reach. Lance turned back downhill and prayed to Loma to keep Sara safe.
Five steps later, another surge of dizziness seized him. He put his foot down on the spinning earth and tripped on a dead sapling. He hit the ground hard, a branch stabbing his cheek just below his eyesocket.
Cursing, Lance pulled himself back to his feet and picked his way down the slope with greater care. When he finally reached the road, he began to trot. A fall here would only bruise him, not blind him for life.
The moans of the wounded spurred him on.
Lance tried to pinpoint where the noise was coming from. He’d reached the edge of the battle and found two dead bodies, before movement a little farther in caught his eye.
A homely, scarred man with an arrow through his chest and a dead horse crushing his legs tried to wave off a raven that wanted to feast on the entrails of the man sprawled next to him.
Lance heaved aside the dead horse, then knelt and placed one hand on the scarred man with the crushed legs and another on the man with his guts showing.
He closed his eyes, and the Goddess stepped inside him. He’d been half afraid in his weeks of inactivity that he had lost the knack of doing it, but the transition was as smooth as ever, the slow unfurling of a spring flower.
The fractured leg bones straightened and reformed.
“What are you doing?” The words were not a demand, but a whisper, tinged with awe.
In answer, Lance jerked the crossbow bolt out of the scarred man’s chest before it healed over. His patient gasped, blood bubbling from his lips, but his scream died into a look of wonder as his flesh healed.
The second man didn’t respond, already dead.
“Let me see the next one,” the Goddess said.
Lance lurched to his feet, his head reeling. The next two sprawled bodies, a rebel and a legionnaire, were also dead. While he was staggering on to a third, Rhiain reappeared at the edges of the forest, a bright yellow flame against the reddish tree trunks.
From the proud way she held up her head, he gathered that she’d hunted down and killed the second cavalryman. He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Sara! On a horse! That way!” He pointed.
Rhiain raced off before he could warn her not to frighten Sara’s mount. Lance ground his teeth together, then took a deep breath. If Sara was injured, he had to trust that Rhiain would fetch him. In the meantime he had a job to do.
“What was that?” the scarred man asked, brown eyes wide.
“A shandy.” Lance laid hands on the spear pinning a youth with a fuzzy beard to the ground. Just touching the shaft made the boy scream. From his white face, he was very close to death. Lance hesitated.
The scarred rebel took the youth’s hand. “Hold on, Jenas.” He turned desperate eyes on Lance. “He’s my boy. Can you help him, like you did me?”
“With your assistnace. Pull out the spear when I say.”
The scarred man nodded, scared but determined. Lance knelt and placed his hands on Jenas’s stomach. “Now!”
The boy’s father jerked the spear out, and the Goddess poured her healing power into the gaping wound, slowing the hot rush of blood.
“Who are you?” the scarred man asked as they both watched the flesh of the boy’s stomach knit back together.
“I’m just a man. The Goddess of Mercy is working through me to heal them.” Lance finished healing Jenas and stumbled on.
After a quick embrace and a few words to his healed son, the scarred man slipped his shoulder under Lance’s arm and helped him walk to the next body. This man appeared to have been run over by a horse. “Find out which ones are dead and which are in most need of healing,” Lance told the father and son.
Mangled limbs, fractured bones, gut wounds, crushed ribs, broken jaws...They all began to run together. If a spark of life remained, the Goddess fanned it into a flame, but far too often the rebels were already dead and no amount of pleading from the
survivors to “heal my brother” or “cousin” or “friend” changed the outcome.
When Lance finally finished close to half an hour later, he’d saved twelve men. Four others had perished by the time Lance reached them, and the sole Republican survivor had been quietly executed at the scarred man’s order.
Exhausted, Lance sank back on his heels. The only thing more draining than a battle was tending a cholera attack. It was always a jolt when the Goddess left him after inhabiting his body for so long.
“We need to get off the road,” the scarred man insisted. A disproportionate number of the soldiers had been boys or young men. The scarred man was in his thirties, which made him the veteran of the party and the undisputed leader. Lance wondered if he was Chief Fitch. “We can’t bury the others. I’m sorry for it, but they would understand. We have to go now, before the Legion sends a patrol to look for their missing cavalrymen or the scent of blood draws predators.”
“Did you see that huge yellow cat?” Jenas asked with a shiver.
Lance roused himself. “She’s not a beast.”
Everyone stared blankly at him. Despite his oft-repeated explanation of being the instrument of the Goddess of Mercy, they persisted in looking at him with awe—and some unease.
Lance tried again. “The big golden cat? Her name is Rhiain. She’s a shandy.” Except they wouldn’t know what a shandy was. He kept it simple. “She’s tame. Don’t shoot her.” Lance made sure to look them each in the eye.
The scarred man nodded. “We still need to go. I suggest you come with us. If the Republicans find out you helped us, they’ll be unhappy with you, priest of Loma or not.”
Lance hesitated, caught. If he said no, he might never find the rebels again. But he was growing quietly frantic over Sara’s absence. Wenda should have chosen someone else for this mission, because when it came down to Sara’s safety versus matters of state, he would always choose her. He wasn’t Kandrith. “Thanks for the offer, but I must find my companions. Where’s your camp? Perhaps we could catch up to you later.”
Soul of Kandrith (The Kandrith Series) Page 15