Heroes at Risk

by Moore, Moira J.

  He shrugged.

  “I just didn’t feel comfortable having you out and about without knowing someone had been killed because they were thought lucky.”

  “But you couldn’t wait until I got home?”

  “Apparently not.” Thinking back, I couldn’t remember why I was so sure he had to know immediately. Even if he were a potential target, he’d been out with friends, in daylight, and he rarely spent the entire day out. Why didn’t I think it could wait until he got home?

  “That doesn’t explain why you were hysterical.”

  “I wasn’t hysterical,” I objected. “I was upset.” And why was that, again? Oh, right. “I got in the carriage expecting to go to the racetrack and ended up here. I didn’t know where I was at the time.” I didn’t think I’d ever been to this hospital before. “People pulled me out of the carriage and were pulling me this way and that. They tied me down—”

  “They tied you?”

  “Aye. I was angry.” But I remembered screaming, and not making much sense. How humiliating. Why had I been unable to express, calmly, rationally, why I couldn’t stay? All I’d had to say was that yes, I was a little unwell, but it was nothing serious, and it was vital that I find Taro. My Source. They would have left me alone. Instead, I’d shrieked and struck out like a mad-woman. What was wrong with me?

  After a brisk knock, the door opened and a healer walked into the tiny room, his bald head scraping the ceiling. He had oddly sunken eyes, and while I usually enjoyed prominent cheekbones, his appeared more like squarish blocks of bone pressing right up through his pale skin. His shoulders were freakishly broad, too broad for his body, so his long arms hung down as though they were attached just to the underside of his shoulders, and not the rest of his body. His hands were huge, with prominent knuckles. His loose trousers hid the shape of his legs, but they were long in proportion to his body.

  I couldn’t recall ever being so disturbed by someone’s appearance before. It was as though he’d been too carelessly thrown together and no one had taken the time to sand down all the edges.

  “You’re looking better,” he said. His voice was as deep as his height would suggest, and oddly slurred, as though he’d been drinking. He’d better not have been. “Sort of.”

  “And you are?” Taro asked coolly.

  “Healer Pearson,” he answered in an absent tone as he unwrapped my right hand. “This isn’t healing as it should be. Is this dressing changed daily?”

  “Aye,” I said.

  “With what kind of compound?”

  “I have no idea,” I admitted.

  “That seems careless.” He left my hand unwrapped. “All right, now.” He fixed me with a stern eye that seemed too small for its socket. “Time for some honesty. Were you drunk when you first arrived here?” He pressed two thick fingers against my throat as he waited for my answer.

  “Of course not.”

  “Had you taken any nonmedicinal drugs?”

  “No.”

  “Any medicinal drugs?”

  “Just this.” I raised my right hand. “But I have been under the weather lately. Nausea and headache, mostly.”

  “That wouldn’t explain your hysteria when you got here.”

  “I wasn’t hysterical,” I objected snappishly. “People were yanking me this way and that and tying me down and they wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “Because you were incoherent. Are you sure you weren’t drunk?”

  Prat, calling me a liar. “Yes.” I let the sibilant stretch out.

  From the bag he’d carried in with him, he picked out some short strips of cream-colored cloth. One he briefly placed over my temple, another on my tongue, and a third over the burn on my palm. “You can rest here while I test these,” he said, placing each strip into its own small bowl.

  “How long will that take?” I asked. “We have watch tonight.”

  For the first time, the healer appeared surprised. “You’re still on the roster?”

  “Of course.” Why shouldn’t we be? Whatever this illness was, it didn’t seem to be too serious.

  I remembered then the difficulty I’d had Shielding Taro recently. Was that because of me, rather than because of the nature of the events or how he was channeling? Hell, I could be so stupid.

  “How disappointingly irresponsible of you,” he said. “You’re off the roster now.”

  “You may not be aware of how few Pairs we have in High Scape right now,” said Taro. “We’re stretched quite thin. I don’t think we can afford to lose another Pair.”

  “You will take yourselves off the roster, or I will take you off myself. And if I do it, it will take you much longer to get back on it.”

  I found this healer off-putting, and I felt inclined to do the opposite of whatever he was ordering regardless of how much sense he made. It really irked that this stranger, a regular, could have any impact on my ability to perform my duties, regardless of how right he might be. But it alarmed me that he thought an upset stomach and some headaches were serious enough to necessitate such a drastic step.

  “All right,” I said.

  “Good decision. I’ll be a couple of hours with these.”

  The room felt much larger once he left.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Taro folded the racing circular, then he unfolded it and flattened it on his thigh. Then he folded it again, along different lines, and then he unfolded it again.

  I watched him for a little while in silence. Now that the creepy healer had left, I was content to lie still and try to will my stomach into settling down. There was something almost soothing about Taro’s movements, and I could watch him for a while without getting bored.

  In time, though, it flittered into my sluggish mind that Taro had to be agitated if he was fiddling like that. “What’s wrong?”

  He looked up at me with an expression of shock. “What’s wrong?” he demanded. “Are you serious?”

  “Oh.” I was so stupid. “Are you worried that this is something fatal?” Because if it were, he’d be dying, too, and I remembered what it was like to be in that position. Walking around, feeling fine, no way of knowing whether I’d suddenly die from one breath to the next. It nearly made me crazy.

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I don’t think it’s anything that serious.” Maybe it was ridiculous to be of that opinion, but I couldn’t help believing that if I were dying, I would know it, or at least be worrying about it somewhere in the back of my mind. But I wasn’t. I’d never heard of anyone dying just because they were tired all the time.

  “Jek saw you at the Loft. He said you were a complete wreck.”

  “I was not.” My manners had been perfectly correct. And Jek could mind his own damned business.

  “Tell me the truth!” he practically shouted.

  I blinked in shock. What had just happened? “Excuse me?”

  “You’ve been trying to hide how ill you’ve been,” he accused me.

  “I have not. I’m not going to complain every time I get a headache. You’d find that pretty tiresome after a while.”

  “You collapsed today!”

  “I did not.” I took a deep breath and continued in my most soothing tone. “For some reason, today I felt particularly bad. But this has been the first time I’ve felt light-headed. And I’m here now, and they’ll—”

  “It should have never gotten this far. You should have told me what was going on immediately. Why are you always hiding things from me?”

  “I’m not hiding things from you,” I said in my most soothing tone. “Please calm down.”

  “Stop pretending you’re the rational one!” he shouted.

  I stared at him. What was going on with him?

  “Why are you doing this?” he demanded.

  “Doing what?” Getting ill? Totally wasn’t deliberate.

  “Playing these games.”

  “What games?” Why did he have to pick this moment to go crazy?

  Oh, and there wen
t the hands, right into the hair. “What games?” he bellowed. “You’re making time with Laidley. And you don’t want to go about town with me, and you won’t let me go out with you.”

  Why in the world was he dragging all this up again?

  I wasn’t making time with Doran. I hadn’t seen him since our picnic, which Taro knew all about. “I haven’t been with Doran that you haven’t known about it.” And I resented having to tell him that. “What is wrong with you?”

  “On Flatwell and the whole trip back here you were all over me.”

  I wouldn’t have described myself that way.

  “And then we’re back in High Scape, and suddenly it’s a whole new set of rules. And you’re the only one who gets to decide what the rules are.”

  Rules? There were no rules. Certainly none that I had made up.

  “Are you embarrassed by me?”

  There was a long, stunned silence after that question. I felt like I was scrambling to come up with a response. “No, of course not.” He didn’t really think that I could possibly find him embarrassing, did he?

  “Then what? What is it?”

  I sighed. “There is no ‘it.’” But that wasn’t true. Zaire, I didn’t want this conversation now. Or ever, really, but especially not right now. I was too tired and my head was still cloudy. Yet I couldn’t deny that my behavior had changed, and I couldn’t let Taro continue to think there was something wrong with him. That just wasn’t fair. “I believe that now we are back . . . home . . . you will no longer wish me to have the role I had during our travels.” There. It was out. Something I’d hoped I’d never have to say. It was humiliating to say. That should be enough.

  But, of course, it was not. “Role?” he said, and from his tone, I had somehow made things worse. “Role? That was all just some act?”

  “No!” All right. I was going to have to tell him the whole thing, flat out, and it would end things. I wasn’t ready for this. “You’re used to variety, Taro.”

  “What the hell do you know what I’m used to?” he demanded. “You’ve never bothered to find out.”

  What could he mean by that? I’d been living with him for three years. What further investigation was required? “There’s nothing wrong with enjoying multiple partners,” I said, and I meant it. It wasn’t for me, but I could understand why it would be appealing for others. “As long as everyone knows the circumstances and they are willing. But I’m not willing to be part of a crowd. It’s just not who I am.”

  He twisted the racing circular into a crumpled stick and tossed it aside, resuming his preferred manner of expressing anger and frustration: pacing. The room really didn’t have the space for it, allowing him only three strides each way. He looked a little silly, really, constantly stepping and turning. “I’m to tell you everything while you tell me nothing, is that it?”

  “I’m not asking you to tell me anything.” To be honest, I’d rather not hear him be brutally honest. I wouldn’t be able to keep my expression serene in the face of his true opinion, I was sure.

  “So you can so nobly claim,” he scoffed, “but then you can make all these ridiculous assumptions, and you can be all smug about how reasonable you are.”

  “Why are you yelling at me?” I asked plaintively.

  “It’s the only way I can ever get you to listen to me.”

  “That’s not true,” I muttered.

  “I’ve not slept with anyone since I met you.”

  I was sure my shock was written clearly all over my face. Shock that he had just said that, so bluntly. Shock that he could have endured such abstinence, and for no reason.

  He swore suddenly. “No, that’s not exactly true,” he amended.

  Hah. I knew it. Though if he’d slept with someone else since we’d started sleeping together, I’d have to kill him.

  Or just curl up and die myself.

  “A couple of times, in our first few months in High Scape,” he admitted through clenched teeth. Then he kicked the door.

  I wondered if he’d hurt himself. “There’s nothing wrong with that.” But, only two? I couldn’t believe it. Not that I thought he was lying. Perhaps, as at first he hadn’t remembered those first two incidents, he wasn’t remembering others. Though I really couldn’t imagine being unable to remember everyone I’d slept with.

  I had no intention of interrogating him about it. It was none of my business. And I really didn’t need to hear a list of his conquests.

  “I know there’s nothing wrong with that!” he snapped. “Listen to me! Not dozens! Not hundreds!”

  Not even I had been thinking in terms of hundreds.

  “Two!”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “And that doesn’t change the way you think at all?” he pressed.

  Oh. That was what he wanted.

  Well, to be honest, even if he were forgetting some encounters, that was a lot fewer than I ever would have guessed. “How about before we bonded?”

  “You really think you have any right to ask about what I did before we bonded?”

  “No, not really. I guess I’m just trying to understand.”

  “What’s to understand? I just told you!”

  Gods, he was confusing. “Are you trying to tell me that you did not enjoy a variety of lovers before we met?”

  He opened his mouth several times to give me an answer that he clearly changed his mind about, because he finally pressed his lips together without saying anything.

  “Are you trying to claim that somehow meeting me changed all that?”

  “No!” was his immediate answer, much to my private disappointment. “Damn it, Lee, that was three years ago!”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” Three years wasn’t that long a time, once one was an adult.

  “When people are bonded, it is time to put aside childish things,” he said.

  “I don’t know that many would call sex a childish pursuit.”

  “Will you stop with the word games!” he roared.

  “I’m not playing games,” I insisted. “I’m just saying that no one expects you to change your personality once you bond.”

  Unexpectedly, he laughed. It wasn’t a happy sound.

  Just as unexpectedly, the door swung open. It was not Healer Pearson but a young woman wearing the colors of the cleaning staff, poking her head and shoulders just beyond the door without actually stepping into the room. “Will you be quiet?” she hissed at Taro.

  He sniffed. “I was assured we could not be heard beyond the walls of this room,” he said with a pronounced roll to his r’s.

  “Not when you make such efforts to shout at the top of your voice.” Without waiting for any further response, she was back out of the room, closing the door behind her with a soft, but firm, rebuking snick.

  Taro scooped the circular up from the floor and sat back on the chair, untwisting the paper and flattening it on his thigh. He stared down at it as though he hadn’t already read the whole thing while waiting for me to wake up. So I guessed the argument was over, without having really accomplished anything. But that was the usual nature of arguments, wasn’t it?

  Two people? That couldn’t really be possible, could it? And why would he restrict himself that way? He’d made it clear that it had nothing to do with me, and I believed him. There had been no reason to change his habits so completely from before we’d bonded to after we’d bonded. Unless he was claiming that he’d barely slept with anyone before we’d bonded, a question he’d avoided.

  So perhaps he didn’t require the kind of variety I’d suspected. At least, not all the time. Then again, it had been a chaotic three years. Maybe things just needed to settle down into a regular schedule for more than a week or so in order for him to resume his former activities.

  I didn’t know what to think and my head still hurt. I had a feeling things would get worse if I continued to talk, so I let myself fall asleep instead. I woke when Healer Pearson came back in, jerking into consciousness
at the sound of his abrupt knock. “Well, it’s nothing contagious,” he announced.

  We knew that. “But what is it?” I asked.

  “Niyacin powder. It’s a common means of fighting infection, but there are those who have a strong reaction to it. Reactions can be anything from light nausea to death.”

  There had been too many bizarre surprises that day. “Death?”

  “Aye.”

  “But I wouldn’t have died.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. It looks like the effects have been building up over time. It’s possible that you would have died if this had continued.”

  My gods. This was unbelievable.

  And he was so cavalier about it. The tone he’d used was appropriate for announcing it was raining. What was it about healers that they could be so cold? “I see.”

  It didn’t seem possible. A few headaches, some fatigue, nausea now and then. How could such innocuous symptoms add up to possible death? It was just too melodramatic. “Are you sure?”

  He stiffened. “I would thank you not to question my competence.”

  I was not going to apologize for asking legitimate questions. “I’m not doing that.”

  “Would you like to hear the treatment or is there a traveling man you’d like to consult?”

  “I’d like to hear your treatment for comparison purposes,” I snapped back.

  He glared at me. “Drink as much mint and anise tea as you can,” he said. “For the next two weeks, the only reason you should be without a cup of tea in your hand is because you’re asleep.”

  “And what will that do?”

  The question seemed to irritate him. “It will flush the adulteration out.”

  “Really.” It sounded a little fantastic to me. I was on my way to dying, and tea was going to fix it?

  “My, Shield Mallorough, I wasn’t aware you were a healer as well as everything else you do,” he commented with crude sarcasm. “How do you find the time?”

  I didn’t bother to hide the rolling of my eyes, as he was being a prat and I didn’t have to worry about managing his feelings. I was sick. I could get away with it.

  “You need to eat as much beef as you can, as rare as you can tolerate, to build up the healthy elements in your blood. And I want you to bathe in hot water at least twice a day, to clear away the toxins as they rise from your skin.”