At the pony’s other end, Ilya plopped down in the snow too, chest heaving. Another stop to rest, thank the Mother. My feet were numb and the damp crept in despite my oiled leather boots. Head throbbing, I tipped back and lay on the powdery snow. My eyes fell shut. Perhaps I could get a little sleep before Kiefan started us marching again. Perhaps…
“Dame Kate? Are you hurt?” Kiefan landed on his knees beside me, pulling my hood open.
Startled, I batted his hand away and half sat up. “No, no, I’m sorry. Only tired and sore and…” I pulled off my mitten before it got to my forehead. The headache needled out from the foremost nubs of my Blessing, and kneading them helped.
“Headache? Me too. Take a drink, it helps.” Kiefan offered the skin of kir-water.
I pulled the stopper and drank. “You said that Master Parselev wouldn’t have told me about headaches? Your headaches?”
There was a tightness around his grey eyes and a crease in his brow, I could see now that he was close. “There are larger things to worry about,” he said. “Frostbite. Storms.”
The sky overhead was as blue as if clouds did not exist.
“You worry about the storms and I’ll worry about the frostbite. And your headaches. They strike often?”
“Often enough. But since we left the city, not a one until we were snowed in.”
“Does Master Parselev give you something or use kir?”
“I don’t trouble the Elect with my headaches, most of the time. Don’t trouble yourself with them either. One more sip and it’s Anders’ turn.” He indicated the water skin.
“If you won’t trust me with the truth, I’m no use as a physician.” I took one more sip.
Kiefan considered that for a moment, and glanced toward Ilya who watched as he lounged in a snowbank. In Arceal, the prince murmured, “It’s unwise for a leader to be weak. If there’s a private moment, ask again.”
That would have to do for a promise. I passed the skin back and he carried it down the line to Sir Anders, who seemed to have fallen straight into a nap the moment he sat down. Kiefan lightly cuffed him and held out the skin.
A bit of wind was all the warning we got; icy needles crackled on my cloak and a curtain of snow swept through the pass. All but the rocky slope an arm’s reach away disappeared. Acorn stopped. The wind rose further, whistling, then shrieking. I put my hands on Acorn’s packs and pulled myself between the pony and the stone wall, slogging through the unbroken snow as best I could. I got as far as his shoulder and threw my arm over to hug him. I met Ilya’s arm, there, as he’d done the same from the other side.
My head pounded as the wind wailed on and on. My throat was dry from panting, but I couldn’t stop. I scooped up a mouthful of snow to eat.
The wind’s voice trembled. Then it dropped, and the pelting ice slowed. Sun broke through and the squall pushed down the pass. The curtain of snow lifted as quickly as it had fallen.
I looked across Acorn’s neck at Ilya. He laughed, shaking his head. “Do we get a moment’s rest?”
“Can you see Kiefan?” Rock blocked my view, and I wasn’t tall enough to lean over the pony.
“Boristan’s lying down,” he said, and took a seat in the snow. “M’lord should take another rest, he’s been breaking trail all day.”
Acorn shook his head, scattering ice crystals. I pulled myself to the pony’s rear and stepped back into the narrow lane of trodden snow. Behind us, Anders was sitting too, Puck’s reins in his hand. My mouth was cold from eating snow, but my throat was drying out again. I picked up another bite from a fresh snowbank.
“Dame Kate! Kate!”
At Kiefan’s call I shuffled around Acorn, nearly stepped on Ilya’s feet, and trotted up the line. Boristan tried waving me off with a mittened hand, but Kiefan tugged his arm down. “I’ll be well. Just a few minutes to rest,” Ther said as I crouched down beside both of them. “All I need is a few minutes.”
Kiefan only tugged Boristan’s hood back so the sunlight hit his face. He was pale, far too pale, and gasping for breath. I put my fingers to his throat and his heartbeat raced in his veins.
“He tried to stand and fell,” Kiefan said.
“Just a moment’s dizziness.” Boristan tried to wave that off too. “I’m tired. We all are. Who can sleep well on cold stone?”
Ulf arrived from somewhere ahead. He’d been helping break the trail, to guess by his snow-plastered cloak. He breathed hard, but his color was much better than Boristan’s. “We must press on,” he said. “We’re near the top of the pass, and well beyond where anyone’s lived to tell of it.”
Boristan clutched Kiefan’s shoulder. “Help me, then,” he rumbled, trying to heave himself up. Kiefan picked him up easily and held on when Boristan tried to stand alone.
“Can you break the trail a while more?” Kiefan looked to Ulf, who nodded. “Ilya! Up!”
I wasn’t so sure it was merely fatigue. It looked like an illness, and we all had it. Cold, dry air and we were a small group in close quarters… I had seen how typhus fever rippled through the army as we marched to Ansehen. On cue, my chest tightened and I coughed as I started walking again. My pulse picked up and throbbed around my Blessing. A frown settled onto my face as my feet slogged on through the snow. I wished I’d found a walking stick while the forest was still with us. I wished —
“M’lord!” Ilya called. “M’lord, stop! Sir Anders!”
Kiefan turned and I did too. There was a thump as Boristan returned to the snowdrift and Kiefan trotted past, flicking a hand at me to follow. My leaden feet quickened and I followed his trail around Acorn, through fresh snow, back onto the path.
Puck stood unmoved, mouthing at his bit, connected to a dark mass in the snow by two reins. “Anders!” Kiefan yanked him up roughly and he startled to life. “He’s bleeding!”
I arrived in time to see the bright smear of blood on Anders’ lip as he wiped it away. His hood had fallen back and he was the same ashy pale as Boristan. Breath rapid and shallow. I checked his pulse and it was high.
“I dozed off, that’s all,” he protested. “Dozed off and another fucking nosebl —” A coughing attack cut him off.
“We spent all day lazing around camp yesterday,” Kiefan said, “and you doze off out here?”
By the crease in his brow, Anders had a headache too. “The snow’s more comfortable,” he managed to retort.
“Kate, do whatever you must,” Kiefan said, stepping back. “Whatever you can.”
I hesitated. “Boristan’s worse off,” I murmured.
A glare. “Ther Boristan can’t hold off three lamia at once. Can you heal this or not?”
I looked at Anders, sitting there pressing his knuckles to his bleeding nose and heaving deep breaths. Kneeling in the snowdrift beside him, I put my hands on his cheeks — scratchy with four days’ flaxen stubble — and called up my kir. Tingling warmth rose to my chest, and even that far off I felt an echo in Anders’ kir. Not surprising he’d be sensitive, given his double Blessing. His eyes fell shut and he leaned into my hands with a weary sigh.
Kir glowed in my hands and my patient’s colorful whorls came to the surface. I focused on their dance, my own eyes closing as well to clearly see the full structure of his chest. Slow and weak, the whorls turned rather than spun. A persistent wobble in one of his meridians caught my mind’s eye. I knew that one from studying the pneumonia patients in the Order’s hospital — it joined the lungs to the heart and the prime meridian along his spine.
My hand slipped under Anders’ cloak, under his layered woolens to press against his breastbone and he startled with a hiss. Then, a weak laugh. “You could warn a man, ice-hands!”
The contact made it easier to focus on his lungs, where the kir should be strong and vital. Stronger than what I saw. Peering close, I saw no competing kir pattern, as in an illness. Nothing attacking, only the sluggishness of heavy congestion. Strange. Nothing in my memory could advise me.
Still, I could help; my master h
ad shown me how to clear the lungs. “Take a deep breath and hold it,” I told him.
I wove my kir into a mesh and drew it through both of his lungs. The phlegm, as it was not a living thing or part of Anders’ pattern, peeled away and I scooped it upward. The body’s urge to be rid of it came on fast and strong, so one must be quick. Anders twisted over, heaving, and got most of it out in a mass. A second hard retch and he spat in the snow.
His kir strengthened and his meridian steadied. When I opened my eyes, his color was better. A bit of his smile was back, after he wiped his mouth. His arm looped around my hips and pulled me to his chest.
“If the rest of you needs warming, m’lady, I’d be glad to repay you for the kindness,” Anders told me with a teasing smile.
“Here?” I cast a glance at the snowbanks, the pony, and more importantly the other five of our party watching. I was quick to extricate my warmed hand from under his cotes. No need to dwell on the muscles under there.
“If m’lady insists.”
He did let me go when I pried at his hand, but I told him, “You’ve been kind enough to me thus far, Sir Anders, though you make it hard to remember that. Couldn’t you simply be the good knight who untangled me from the stirrup that first day?”
His teasing smile dropped. There had been a nerve to hit in there, unexpectedly. More soberly than I had expected, Anders inclined his head. “My apologies, Dame Kate.”
My new name had settled in, but it still didn’t fit. “My name is Kate,” I said, looking to Kiefan to include him in this. And I raised my voice so the rest of my audience would hear. “Majesty was kind to give me a title, but I’m only Kate. I’m not anyone’s m’lady. Certainly not after you’ve all seen me tripping over these damn braies in the bushes.”
Dizziness struck when I stood, and I nearly fell over. Kiefan caught me. “Bring that kir-water,” he called to Ilya. “So was it a fever, D — Kate? Pneumonia?”
“No, I’ve seen pneumonia often enough. It’s not.” I stood on my own and he let me. “I don’t know what it is. Ulf said it was the cold, but it’s something about the cold here in the pass.”
They strung tarps from the rock to make camp. Kiefan had to hammer pitons in, as he had the strength Blessing to make quick work of it. But so late in the day, he had little kir left. He clung to the bare rock when the wind whipped his cloak into a flag, pausing with the hammer in hand as he set his spine against the blast. The next blow he struck had half the strength, but he beat at the stone until the pitons were set. Then he stumbled to the little knot of Boristan and I, letting Ilya tie down the tarps around us.
We took Kiefan in, between us, swaddled him in our wool and fur. I hardly had a chance to think it was the prince who clutched me close for warmth. Boristan had us both in his bear hug until the shivering eased.
The ponies were glad enough to huddle with us in the windbreak even though it rattled and thumped under the air’s fist. Whether it was a storm or merely snow blown up in the gale, it was impossible to tell. And perhaps it didn’t matter.
Bundled together in blankets, in the dim light, I checked feet and hands for frostbite. The kir-water skin was getting light, but a few sips gave me enough to thaw out sluggish kir in a few sets of toes. I was leery of seeing a damaged pattern slip my control when there was little kir handy, but it seemed to help. The hairiest of the feet put in my hands was hardly even cold. I almost laughed. “Whose is this?”
“Me,” Ulf said, his other end off in the shadowy mass of us.
“Did you glue wool to your feet, or is this the usual?”
They all chuckled. “Wife says I’m half wolf,” he answered, doubly a joke as he was named for the beast. “Threatens to put me out in the kennel if I’m not polite enough for human company. That’s how I know it’s time for another hunt.”
Chapter 7
“It’s sleet,” Ulf reported, and that was that.
Despite all the walking and fatigue, our appetite ran low. We dozed in our windbreak — the wind had lowered, thankfully, though the rain splattered loudly on the tarp — without breakfast and ate only a little at noon. Anders hauled himself up to unpack oats for the ponies and returned as exhausted as if he’d walked all day.
“We’ve another two days of oats, at full rations,” he told Kiefan, and dropped back into his slot in the sausage row. “The sooner we get them to grass, the better.”
Kiefan sat at the outside end of the row, pretending to be untouched by fatigue or headache. He nodded. “Soon as it lifts, we’ll go. I don’t want to lose this day any more than you.”
But we did. I unpacked my Arceal book and sat beside Kiefan, closest to the light, reading and asking him to translate some of the more tangled passages. At one part, Anders spoke up, in the language, and explained an especially odd phrase.
“It’s something they say when they think you’re lying, but they don’t want to insult you,” he said. “They have quite a few of those.”
“And how would you know of that, Anders?” Boristan asked, in Arceal, and managed a chuckle before breaking into a cough.
He smiled. “There may have been a few horses involved in a deal.”
“How often have you been to Temitte?” Kiefan asked.
“Only a few times, and as part of the Kaufmanns’ caravan. I wouldn’t say I speak Arceal well, but if there’s swearing to be done I can hold my own.”
Still, I made good progress on my reading. The sleet finally stopped too late in the afternoon to strike camp, and we had to spend a second night in that crowded, cold lean-to, coughing and sore. Boristan wheezed in his sleep as if he had pneumonia, but it still was not. The blanket of clouds finally broke after dark and the Shepherd filled the valley with light. The Grain Moon was three-quarters full and five of the seven Flock were scattered across the sky.
I said, in Arceal, “Shepherd, gather your Flock.”
“Shepherd, though I stray you call me home.” Kiefan continued the nursery song, in translation, looking up at the sky with me. Beyond the moons, the stars lay thick on the sky’s blanket.
“Shepherd, lead your lambs back to hearth,” I finished. We sat quietly and I looked over my shoulder at the sausage-row of men. Still in Arceal, I asked, “Will you tell me about your head pain?”
“Headaches.” He supplied the word. “I have headaches. There’s nothing more to it than that.”
“Often?” A shrug. “But you must have told the Elect about them.” Parselev was the royal family’s own physician.
Kiefan looked out at the narrow, snow-covered valley. We were up on a shoulder, following a trail of rock instead of walking on the snowfield below. The wind cut hard, down the center. He said, “If I can’t shake it, it builds over days. When it’s too much, the Elect sees to it.”
“How do you shake it? Willow bark?”
“A few days’ peace. Sometimes a quiet ride up to Prohzgrad will do it. At worst, a bottle of brandy.”
I considered that. “A quiet ride up to the mountains?”
“I don’t know when I’d gone so long without one, until the blizzards began.”
“Blizzards,” I echoed. That was a new word, in Arceal. Kiefan corrected my pronunciation. “Is the headache bad now?”
“I can hold out.”
We watched the Shepherd and the Flock until I dozed off sitting up. Excusing myself, I crawled back to wrap myself in my bedroll and join my wheezing, snoring companions.
I had taken Acorn from Ilya so that he and Boristan could lean on each other as they walked behind the pony. Ther did most of the leaning, in truth. He was still deathly pale. I kept looking behind to be sure that Anders was still leading Puck, too.
When I turned forward after one such check, Ulf was breaking the path out front and Kiefan followed to widen it. The crust of sleet had frozen solid overnight, and fought even a man’s weight before breaking.
Kiefan simply dropped, limp.
I blinked, and then fear stabbed me. I ran, pulling Acorn up to a t
rot. “Ulf, stop! Stop!”
My master’s training guided my hands. I rolled Kiefan over, put my fingers to his throat to find his heartbeat, then brushed snow from his nose and mouth. His pulse was high, his breath fast and shallow like us all. He shook his head, muttering, and squinted in the light.
“I’m all right,” he tried to claim. “Let me up.”
“No. Don’t argue with me.” I took his head in both hands, thumbs on the initial nubs of his Blessing, and called my kir. His surged back, glad to answer.
Unwinding headaches was one of the first healing charms taught to apprentices. One didn’t need to know the proper pattern for kir in the mind — there was none. All minds were different. A tangle of kir whorls and maybe a meridian caught in the mess was the usual culprit for a headache.
Kiefan’s kir was knotted, hard and tight, around the meridians that sprang from his Blessing. He’d been shrugging this off for days? I’d never seen kir bound so firmly. I squeezed the knots, as one would an object-bound charm, but they didn’t respond. Pressing a knuckle in with a twist, I felt one loosen. I reached for a second knot, did the same, and knew I didn’t have enough kir to force all of them open. They were tough little nuts to crack.
He’d used half his day’s kir, as it was nearly noon, and in my mind’s eye the remainder hovered nearby in a glowing mist. Nearer than it should, in truth, as if it wanted to help. Mentally, I put out a hand and it flowed up eagerly. I picked the knots open one by one and the whorls tumbled out, confused and weak. The last of Kiefan’s kir washing over them helped restart their spinning dance.
When I opened my eyes, fatigue fell on me like another cloak. They’d all clustered around to watch, sitting in the snow.
“Is he well?” Boristan asked. “You took longer, it seemed.”
Disciple, Part I: For Want of a Piglet Page 7