Valor of the Healer (13 page)

“He was hurt, and he was near. So it was with you,
akreshi
. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t help it!”

“You can’t control your magic,” Julian concluded. She didn’t answer him, but the way she huddled in on herself and the anguished mumble that escaped her were answer enough.

“I heal on his command...I heal...”

Her palpable terror pricked a hole in Julian’s psyche, through which awkward discomfort stole. He tamped the sensation down. It had no place in his thoughts, not here, not now. “Kilmerredes will command you no longer if you’re prepared to take your fate into your own hands.” He reached for her shoulder at last, in something he might almost have called comfort. Light as his contact was, it fell on her like a thunderbolt; she started even at his fleeting touch. “You’ve nothing to fear.”

“You said you wished to set me free. You don’t intend to be my new master?”

Rab let out a burst of startled laughter, looking out from beneath his arm. “What a delightful idea. It could be splendid to have someone to do our mending and laundry for once.”

“Why in the world would you ask such a thing?” Julian demanded, appalled.

“You fought other men to take me from the church.” Her voice grew more level, as if she’d found at least a modicum of courage. “You kept them from taking my magic. I have nothing of my own but that, and I don’t want to lose it, and I don’t want to die. If you’ll let me pray at the times holy to Djashtet, I’ll gladly serve you.”

“You hear that? She
wants
to do our mending.”

Julian shot Rab a withering glare. “She’s not going to serve either of us.” Then he glared back at the maiden, and had to force himself not to grab her by the chin and pull her face back up. It would ease neither his pique nor her fear. “But if you’re that damned eager to please, girl, bloody well start by looking me in the eye when we converse.”

“You won’t beat me,
akreshi
?”

She slanted her head sideways, her eyes meeting his as he’d bidden, and as they did Julian realized his mistake. The hope in them, guileless as a child’s and ancient as a crone’s, disarmed him. It left his hand shackled, his eye blinded and all his weapons out of reach, and he didn’t relish the feeling. “No,” he rasped. “I won’t beat you. Nor will I make a slave of you.”

“Then why did you take me from the church?”

“It’s a debt. You helped me. Now I’m helping you.” Pride kept his attention upon her. Defenseless though he felt, he wouldn’t be cowed by a slip of a girl. “And if you must call me something, make it Julian. Not
akreshi
.”

Hope flared brighter in her eyes, and even through her veil he glimpsed a sudden smile. She clasped her hands together at her breast, palm to palm, and inclined her head deeply to him. “You honor me.”

It didn’t help his dismay that she sounded as though she meant it.

In his loftiest, most fulsome tones, Rab began, “You may call me—”

“Rab,” Julian cut in sourly.

“Nine-fingered Rab,” the younger man clarified, sitting back up enough to sketch a courtly bow. “With whom do I have the pleasure of being acquainted?”

Now she faltered, confusion sweeping over what little they could see of her face, tipping whatever scales ordered the workings of her being back toward timidity. Julian was unsurprised, since Rab had flustered many a young woman before. But he’d never made Julian want to throttle him as he did it, and himself at the same time for the urge.

“He’s asking you your name,” he grunted. A proper introduction was hardly needed, for he was fairly sure he remembered her crying out her name back at the church, but Rab never missed an opportunity to be snide. Julian tore his gaze away. Anywhere else would be a safer place to look—the gurgling creek, the trees in the ravine or the white wraith of the moon in a patch of sky, on its way down as the sun rose. Anywhere but at this humble Tantiu maiden with an elf’s eyes and more magic than he’d seen out of any three mages across Adalonia.

“You honor me as well,
akreshi
Rab,” she said, almost brightly, inclining her head to him as she had done to the Rook.

He didn’t want to hear what she would say next; he didn’t want to hear her name again. It would only broaden that hole she’d opened in his psyche, and strengthen whatever power she had to make him feel so raw and exposed. It would only make her real. Julian knew this all at once, without doubt or hesitation. And he knew just as clearly, with an inexorable dread, that there was nothing he could do to block it from his ears.

“My name is Faanshi.”

Chapter Eleven

Djashtet had delivered her, and Faanshi could think of nothing but this as her rescuer’s black horse bore her farther into freedom with every step. Her close, confined world had shattered, from one upheaval after another, and the press of the past hours left her little room for anything beyond dull reaction. But that single realization coalesced in the rhythm of the stallion’s hooves. Once it scouted the way, another bloomed in its wake.

Kestar
. There was only the name, but that was enough. Deep within her, where she remembered the knife plunging into his body, pain throbbed and then eased into gentler warmth. She dug her nails into her palms, but that didn’t erase her magic’s prickling, the memory of his blood slick upon her fingers or the pressure of a hand gripping hers—though it hadn’t, not really. The meadow had been only a dream. But she still saw sunlight glowing on dark hair, and green eyes staring at her with fear and wonder.

Then another hand grasped her shoulder. Faanshi remembered where she was, and knew a moment’s shock that she didn’t flinch against the man who rode behind her on the horse.

“Look sharp,” Julian said, soft beside her ear, and he nudged her with the arm around her waist. “We’re very close to Tolton, but we have to stop to rest our mounts. I’ll tell you this but once. When we stop, I want you to keep quiet, keep between Rab and me, hide when I tell you and run when I tell you. If you do these things, you’ll stay free and alive.”

“If you don’t do them,” Rab said, “I’ll slit your throat. My colleague thinks you worthy of the risk we’ve taken. You haven’t proven it to me.”

His words cut into Faanshi like the weapon that had struck Kestar, and she fought not to tremble. Julian sat too close behind her, and he’d sense such weakness. No sympathy eased the press of his arm; it might as well have been a limb of stone.

“If you become a burden, we’ll have to abandon you,” he said.

What did she know of the natures of men? Yet her magic had touched the
akreshi
Julian too. It whispered that he wouldn’t see her slain, and that if she spoke to him with surety and strength he’d take her at her word. Like her
okinya
, though the thought of Ulima tightened her throat. “I won’t be a burden,” she asserted. “But if I’m to hide, shouldn’t I change my clothing?”

Julian started, and even Rab peered at her askance. “Excuse me?” the younger man said in blank surprise.

“The men who serve the Church and my master will search for us, yes? I’m only half Tantiu, but my clothing is not. I wear what my
okinya
gave me.” Faanshi looked down at herself. “And it’s stained. Shouldn’t I wear something else?”

“You’re right.” Something indefinable altered Julian’s voice, turning it ever so slightly less forbidding. “You should. We’ll deal with that as we pass by Tolton. Rab, find us somewhere to halt.”

Hope flared in Faanshi, though she didn’t voice it. The relief of liberation of speech as well as body was too raw, too new, and she couldn’t bear to risk a change in the minds or moods of her new companions. She’d have to tread wisely to learn how to keep them from casting her aside—or returning her to the cellar in Lomhannor Hall.

Rab at least seemed content enough to ignore her as they rode along a narrow dirt road. Other than what he’d already threatened, his stiff carriage told her nothing of what he might do. Nor could she tell how long she’d have to savor the open air and morning’s warmth on her cheeks. As she closed her eyes and turned her face up to the sun, she heard Kestar’s voice once more.
I
must
come
after
you
.

Faanshi no longer burned with the healing at the cellar window, for the Hawk drowned out all else. Yet as they rested at last at a pond out of sight from the road, she recalled what her power had gleaned from its earlier eruption. It fit with what her eyes could witness. Clad in garments as black as his hair and the shadow of a beard along his jaw, his hand poised on the knife at his belt, Julian wasn’t a reassuring sight. Not when he surveyed their surroundings while Rab unbuckled his horse’s saddle and bags—nor when he turned to her, bringing the patch that hid his left eye back into her view.

“Arms around my neck,” he said.

“I can climb down,” she protested, though she couldn’t in truth say if she were right.

“Don’t argue. This is faster than teaching you to get off Morrigh without breaking your neck.” His tone was no more assuring than his appearance, low and bristling with impatience. “Rab manages the horses, so I’ll manage you.”

Faanshi’s arms quivered as she curled them around Julian’s neck, for an order too slowly obeyed meant punishment. But as he lifted her down from his horse there was nothing angry in his touch, no sign that he meant to do her harm. He’d said he wouldn’t make a slave of her. And though Kestar Eyrian Vaarsen blazed in her like a fragment of the sun, this other man, this moonlight-and-shadow taker of lives, had freed her from the church. The quiet darkness of his presence was a refuge from the sunlight behind her eyes, and for all her confusion, she was oddly reassured.

But her head spun as he set her down beside the pond. Her muscles ached with the feel of countless hours in the saddle of a different horse, with long familiarity with the stallion Tenthim’s strides. She took an uncertain step, and her feet moved without her will past the normal reach of her legs. Her chest ached in phantom pulses that leached away her breath, making her feel strangely fragile, unnaturally short.

Julian caught her by the shoulder as she stumbled. “Girl?”

She was cornered. She had to go for her sword—

Her hand flashed to her side before Faanshi remembered. No warrior with a sword was she, in this land or any other; a slave had no use for a blade. It took what would have been dangerous moments before the duke, moments in which he’d have struck her for faltering in her reply, before she was able to answer.

“Forgive me,
akreshi
, I don’t know what’s wrong with me...” Faanshi’s voice thickened with weariness she hadn’t realized she suffered. All at once she could no longer tell where her feet were supposed to be. Her legs, wobbling, threatened to pitch her to the earth.

Rab slanted a dubious look in her direction, then one toward his partner. “I’d hazard the guess, Rook, that our little dove isn’t accustomed to being on the wing.”

“Are you sick?” Julian shook her, threatening her already precarious balance. But when she might have fallen, his fingers seized her chin just beneath her veil—as the duke had often done—and fright jarred her back to herself, thrusting the Hawk to the farthest corners of her consciousness. As Julian lifted her face to his, she reddened with shame. Her head whirled. Her flesh ached, and her power, denied completion of its task in the bowels of the Camden church, thrummed in her every muscle.

“My magic,” Faanshi whispered, closing her eyes. “I don’t feel right, I still feel him!”

“Magical backlash?” Rab said, and it wasn’t to her. Nor was Julian’s reply.

“We’re not mages, Rab, how can we know? But she needs rest. So do we.”

Both men’s words floated oddly in her hearing, as if out of the heart of a dream. Kestar’s voice wove through those of the assassins, and she swayed, struggling to winnow the voice in her head from the ones in her ears.
I
remember
magic
.
What
did
you
do
to
me
?

“Have you any recommendations on where to get it?”

You
knew
what
I
am
...

“Do you remember the Blind Pig? North of here?”

“A noble establishment, with homey ambiance and a most reassuring avoidance of questions.”

And
you
still
healed
me
...

“I’ll hide the girl there. Get into Tolton and find her something else to wear. Meet us as fast as you can.”

“How choosy am I being?”

What
did
you
do
to
me
?

“Please,” Faanshi interrupted, “if we must keep moving, let’s do so, or else I must fall.”

The men fell ominously silent, and in dread, the maiden opened her eyes. Rab’s were wide, as if in amazement that she could speak. Julian merely studied her for a long moment, then released her chin and gave her a curt nod.

“We move, then. Do you need my aid?”

Faanshi strove to think of air, sunlight and freedom. For those gifts of Almighty Djashtet, delivered to her by Julian’s hand, she could find courage. “I’ll do what I must,” she said, standing a little taller. Her awareness buckled as she did, watery and sheer as glass about to crack.

“Well.” With that, he plucked Faanshi off her feet, hoisting her back into the saddle and then swinging up into place behind her. The horse snorted, sounding as disgruntled as his rider. “I’ll look for you by nightfall. Use the usual signal.”

“Where will you be?” Rab said, and Julian’s reply was the last thing Faanshi remembered clearly hearing. Sunlight around her melded with sunlight within, until she seemed to float in a lake of golden light. Pain pulled at her muscles, but Faanshi no longer discerned what was born from her own frame and what echoed through her from the Hawk.

“In the stable at the tavern. I can keep her out of sight there. Be swift. Be careful.”

* * *

For a time Faanshi knew nothing but raw motion, through half-glimpsed trees and mountain meadows that yielded in turn to dazzling radiance, and at last into velvet darkness. Then there was only the peace of her first true sleep in days. After a while the blackness eased, revealing slivers of the world. A cot beneath her frame, the smell of incense, and an ember of heat in the silver pendant that hung from her neck—

No. Not her neck. Kestar’s.

Other perceptions intruded, jarring against those that came before. The cot became a mass of stalks that poked through her sari. The odor of incense gave way to the scents of hay and earth, oats in a bin and the presence of living beasts. She was in a stable, though not the grand structure that housed the horses of Lomhannor Hall. The air was too close, speaking of a building of humble proportions, big enough for perhaps two beasts, three at most. But the smells were familiar, and so was the feel of hay against her back and palms.

A hayloft, Faanshi decided, waking in truth to the voices of Julian and Rab somewhere below, soft but tight with anger.

“For gods’ sake, when will we be done? She has her freedom now, and we should move on before we no longer have our own!”

“We can’t leave her yet, Rab. Have you looked at that girl? She’s a mouse. The first Hawk who sees her will consume her.”

Faanshi scrubbed her hands across her face and shoulders, and at last slapped them both across her mouth. Without need, for her whimper of distress went unheard.

“Whether I’ve been looking at her isn’t the question. The question is, have you? I can’t fathom why else you seem to have lost your reason!”

Julian’s voice went cold. “If you’d like me to thrash you senseless, keep talking.”

“That’s not a denial! Look me in the eye and tell me you aren’t enamored of the little chit. Great Mother, you can’t possibly be thinking of taking her to your—”

He didn’t finish, cut short by the crack of a fist against flesh and the impact of a body on the stable floor. Faanshi’s jaw flared with pain, and as she writhed in reaction, a second, lesser ache swept over her back. It drove Kestar’s echoes out of her senses long enough for her to wonder in dread if she’d have to heal yet another man so soon.

Then the pain faded, and Julian murmured with dangerous calm, “I don’t want to see or hear you again until the sun rises or a Hawk patrol descends upon us, whichever comes first.”

“Rook,” Rab gasped. For the first time since the two assassins had come for Faanshi, he sounded almost frightened.

“Out. Now.”

She heard nothing more save for a scrabbling of hands and feet along hard-packed earth and the creak of the stable door. Not daring to breathe, Faanshi pulled her knees close and inched backward into the hay. If she hid, if she kept silent, they wouldn’t know she’d heard them. They couldn’t then turn their anger upon her—

Footsteps halted the panicked whirl of her thoughts. Her ears were good, and in the stable’s silent darkness, the tread of feet up nearby stairs seemed as deafening as gunfire. Her eyes, too, were good; she marked the shadow of Julian’s form as he came up into the hayloft, moving with stiff control. She could make out the droop of his head, and as he sank down to sit between her and the stairs, his back against the stable wall, she heard his weary hiss.

Faanshi didn’t know what moved her to speak, nor did she realize she wished to until the words left her mouth.

“
Akresh
—” Then she caught herself. “Julian?”

His head turned. “Ah. I should’ve guessed you’d hear that.”

“Yes,” she admitted, grateful that darkness and gauze veiled her features, for Julian couldn’t possibly see her blush. “Forgive me. I didn’t mean to cause you and the
akreshi
Rab to argue.”

“It wasn’t your fault. Rab excels at vexing questions.”

He hadn’t actually answered Rab’s question—save with the blow she’d heard him,
felt
him deliver, which was both an answer and no answer at all. “So what Rab asked isn’t true? You don’t wish to make me your concubine?” Julian jolted sharply, and she threw up her palms in automatic supplication. Promise or no promise, she couldn’t quell the habit of obeisance. “Please. I only ask because all has changed, the world is made anew around me, and I’m trying to understand.”

Julian’s features, little more than indistinct shadings against the lighter oval of his face, twisted in a grimace. “I like that question even less from you.”

“I don’t mind. I understand what I am.”