Valor of the Healer (15 page)

There was no gracious way to refuse that request, so Celoren leaned forward to fulfill it. He’d shaken most of his dizziness, but as he lifted the teapot, a tremor of his fingers betrayed his weakness and hunger. Before he could pour, Enverly intercepted his hand.

“Forgive me, I should have realized.” No great concern softened the man’s patrician features, yet rueful consideration gleamed in his eyes. “You must be famished. Eat something, I insist. You’ll need your strength, young sir, for the task I must set before you.”

Celoren hesitated. Then, acutely aware of his trembling fingers, he steadied his grip on the teapot and filled Enverly’s cup. Pouring took far more concentration than it should have. But he set down the teapot without spilling a drop, determined he wouldn’t be clumsy before the man who held his fate and Kestar’s in his hands. “I want to see my partner,” he said, sitting up tall. “I must know how he fares.”

Enverly blanched. “No one’s told you? Well then, I suppose I must be the first.” He drew in a long breath, which sent panic jabbing through Celoren’s heart. “He may not live the day. He remains unconscious, and the physician has given strict orders that he’s not to be disturbed.”

“For gods’ sake, Father, if he’s at death’s door you can’t keep me from him!” Celoren cried. “He’s my partner—has it been so long since you rode for the Order that you’ve forgotten what that means?”

“Old and long since settled from my riding days I may be, Valleford,” Enverly said coolly, “but I don’t recall that any of my brothers and sisters of the Hawk would have risked the life and reason of an injured comrade by bursting in upon him against a physician’s orders.”

Prepared to do just that, Celoren began to rise, only to freeze at the priest’s reproving words. “Reason?” he echoed, the needles of panic pricking more strongly now. “Do you mean to imply Kestar isn’t right in the head?”

“I merely relay what Doctor Lannedes had to say about the state of her patient. Her precise words were, I believe, ‘disturbance may agitate his mind.’ If you wish to run that risk, I’ll pass the word to admit you into his cell.” He left it at that, taking up his cup and sipping its fragrant contents without another word.

Aware of a sick, sinking feeling in his belly and of his knees giving way, Celoren dropped hard back down into the chair. When he managed a reply, it came out in a horrified whisper. “Of course I don’t. What do you take me for?”

“An honorable young man whose love for his brother knight may be blinding him to that brother’s folly.” Father Enverly’s voice was almost gentle.

If
I
didn’t
know
you
better
,
I’d
say
you
were
getting
obsessed
with
this
. His own words to Kestar on their way out of Camden echoed in the back of Celoren’s mind. He had the presence of mind to keep that memory unspoken, but he couldn’t keep his consternation from his face, and it didn’t escape the priest.

“I see that very thought’s come to you.” The older man’s gaze took on a regretful understanding as he gestured at the platter of food upon the table. “Please, I entreat you, fortify yourself.” As Celoren still hesitated, Enverly added, “I haven’t poisoned the sandwiches, if that’s your worry. Would you like to choose one at random for me to consume, to demonstrate my goodwill?”

Celoren’s cheeks flooded scarlet. “That won’t be necessary.” Hunger gnawed at him along with guilt, and he reached out at last to take one of the sandwiches. It tasted like sawdust, and when he swallowed, it went down like a knife blade in his throat.

“You do your brother no dishonor by attending to your natural needs.” Enverly set down his tea and took up a morsel of his own. “You must be strong for him in the coming days, and you can’t do that if you neglect yourself.”

“Why do you care?” The question was more plaintive than Celoren intended, laced with his inner misery. “Yesterday you were all but tying us to our horses to get us to leave, and you’ve already said you intend to turn Kestar over to a tribunal.”

“So I did. But I’m a man just as you are, vulnerable to rash choices made in the grip of anger.” With a dip of his head, the priest indicated his bandaged shoulder. “Or of pain. Yet one thing is very clear. An assault upon sacred ground transcends whatever differences I may have with you and your partner.”

Celoren swallowed down the last of his sandwich and stared down at his empty hands. “It does,” he murmured.

A small smile curved Enverly’s mouth. “I hoped you would agree. We are rational men, you and I.” With that he leaned closer. “And as rational men, we may share our doubts with one another. Share yours, my son. They won’t leave this room.”

Anguished, the Hawk confessed, “I’d thought Kestar might be...preoccupied with a search that would find us nothing.”

“But it did find you something. The girl.”

To hear the other man pointing that out was both reassuring and disconcerting. Surely there was some deception in play that made Father Enverly speak so? The man sounded almost pleased that they’d come after the slave called Faanshi—indeed, as he’d expect a priest and a brother Hawk to sound. Half his mind still argued that Kestar didn’t trust this man, but the rest faltered, troubled by the thought that his partner might have lost his grasp upon his wits.

“That’s true.” Cel’s thoughts churned back and forth.
It
can’t
be
Kes’s
fault
,
it
can’t
be
.

“I see you fear for your partner. Don’t let that fear consume you. Share it with me, and soar to the aid of your Church and your brother Hawk.”

Maybe Kestar’s premonitions had unhinged him—one had sent him up the Duke of Shalridan’s mountain in the first place. Celoren had always thought them the Anreulag’s gift, a blessing for Her servant, but one who didn’t know Kes might think of them as magic. What if they were? Dear gods, what if he’d been wrong, what if they’d come from elf blood and Kestar really was a mage just like that healer girl? He couldn’t say the words. The amulets had spoken, but he couldn’t add his voice to their holy light and damn Kestar to a Cleansing’s death.

But Father Enverly’s gaze, knowing and terrible in its compassionate sorrow, was waiting for an answer. “He’s Dorvid Vaarsen’s son,” Celoren rasped, and he found no comfort in uttering a lesser betrayal. “He was given to the Church to be raised. I’ve sometimes feared what it might have done to him, to know that he was cast aside by his own father—and that he must live up to the name of the Deliverer of Riannach.”

“You might well have hit upon the heart of it.” The priest poured more tea into his cup. “Tell me more.”

* * *

His entire being spun.

Kestar knew he lay wounded, but he couldn’t remember why or where. Too many sensations intruded on his consciousness, pelting him in an unending barrage of dreams, to allow him to find which among his immediate memories were real. Rolling motion like the gait of a horse bore him along. Sunlight streamed down on the cloth that swathed his head. Trees slid past, indistinct in his sight. Something red and tacky stained his palms, and he dipped his hands in a stream until the flowing water rinsed the blood away from his fingers—

When had his hands touched blood?

He saw them again, pressing down with all their might upon a chest that spilled its life’s blood with every gasping breath. They were fragile dams, but they kindled with white-golden fire that closed the hole in that faltering chest and stanched the scarlet flow—

No. Not his hands. Hers. Then those palms rose to cup his face, and he looked into eyes as green as summer until he could no longer discern them in the brilliance.
Faanshi
. He couldn’t tell if he called her name aloud, or if he was aghast or relieved that she was disappearing from his sight.

Like dusk following daylight, the light faded. A face returned, lit by a single candle’s glow—an unfamiliar woman, with silver-shot dark braids coiled around her head, and dark eyes set in a square-featured face. Her hands touched his brow. Instead of healing fire they wielded a cool, damp cloth, which she wiped with brisk efficiency across his mouth and jaw. When she pulled it away, he caught a glimpse of red upon its folds.

Her hands, he remembered. Faanshi’s hands had touched his blood.

He tried to move, frantic to see his fingers, to make sure they were the ones he knew. But the woman leaning over him intercepted his hand in a grip he couldn’t find the energy to break. “You must remain still, my lord,” she said. “I’ve tended you as best I can, but I won’t be held responsible for what’ll happen if you move too quickly and reopen your wound.”

The words “my lord” and “wound” were important. He latched on to them, though they tilted and swirled in his hearing. Far beyond a layer of fog across his thoughts was a dull, heavy ache within his chest, right where someone whose face he couldn’t recall had thrust a blade. His body felt strange within the fog, smaller, weaker, its shape wrong. He was—

Kestar Vaarsen. The woman, though, he didn’t know. “Who are you?” He squinted at his own slack hand, held in hers. “Why can’t I think?”

“My name is Elessa Lannedes. I’m your doctor.” She laid his hand across his stomach and dabbed another cloth over his brow. It sent his head sinking again, for he couldn’t hold it up even beneath that featherlight touch. “It’ll be the laudanum muddling your wits. I had to dose you stiffly, as you’ve been sorely hurt. Do you remember?”

“I was...” Memories flashed, brief panicked sparks in the fog. Kestar’s hand groped upward but found only a blanket’s folds and a tight swath of bandages beneath. There was no knife, no blood—but then,
she’d
taken them both away—

It was too much. A spasm of coughing racked him, and when it passed, he lay panting and sweating, unable to focus on his quivering fingers. “I was stabbed,” he croaked, peering at them anyway, trying to figure out why they kept changing. Why they were long and lean one moment, delicate and dusky the next.

“Indeed. You’ve had quite the adventure, sir.”

That was a new voice, not the doctor’s, and with trepidation only somewhat muted by the torpor of his mind Kestar recognized it. With effort, he focused on the room. No decoration but the star sigil carving that hung three feet above him adorned the walls. A lit candle stood upon a trunk beside the cot where he lay, and beside it were a pitcher of water, his uniform coat and a towel. There were no windows, and no door save for the one six scant feet away, a smooth barrier of oak broken only by a barred slit of a window and the sturdy iron of its lock.

Sitting before that door was the priest. Enverly looked pale and haggard, his cassock’s lines marred by the awkward angle of the sling that bore his arm—and for the life of him, Kestar couldn’t remember when or how the man had gotten hurt.

Alarm spiked in him. He had to be alert, he had to think, for fear was growing in the pit of his belly and he had no strength to tamp it down. His body reacted to his tension, each muscle tightening as another wave of deep coughs swept over him. Only when it subsided was he able to speak. “As have you...what happened, Father?”

Enverly gave him a self-deprecating smile. “I’m not yet too old to be wounded in the service of the gods.” He leaned forward, his hand slipping beneath the collar of his cassock. “And it puts me into the curious position of having something in common with you.”

“You weren’t going to Cleanse her,” Kestar accused, his head tossing back and forth along the pillow. “Your master hurt her. Don’t want anything in common with you.”

“Ah, but you don’t have the luxury of ignoring this connection between us. It may be your only salvation.” Enverly drew out his amulet, a silver leaf upon a chain, casting a cold sheen through the candlelight. With an implacable gaze, he added, “Look to your own amulet if you don’t believe mine.”

Kestar fumbled along his bandaged chest and then higher still until he found his amulet twisted around behind his neck. As he pulled it forward, it shone blue against his hand, brighter than Enverly’s, as if direct contact with his fingertips strengthened its sacred light. “This isn’t possible. I—I’m not an elf...”

“Your amulet disagrees. Or do you suggest that the Blessed Anreulag’s sight is somehow wrong?”

Kestar slumped, his fingers clutching the amulet even as his hand dropped onto the pillow beside his head. “It’s never done this before.”

“That may be all that will keep any other priest of the Four Gods from Cleansing you on the spot.”

“You haven’t come to do that now?” Kestar scarcely knew what he uttered; fear leached away the sense of his own words. Her again. It was her fear he felt, the echo of a nightmare where a vaguely female form of towering proportions became a hawk that rent her with talons of fire. Her power soaked through him along with her fright, out through his arm and to his fingers, until the amulet reacted to its presence. It terrified him to his core.

“I haven’t yet decided what to do with you.” Enverly’s voice rolled over Kestar, inescapable, holding him fast. “Tell me why you came back for the girl, and perhaps it will permit me to make up my mind.”

“I came back.” His eyes squeezed shut and his head dipped toward the amulet clutched in his fist. “I had to ask her...” Without his willing it, his voice shifted inflections as he writhed. “Four years,
akreshi
...he said my magic was for him alone. I heal on his command...”

“Eh?” Enverly’s voice changed too, turning startled, but Kestar didn’t look at him.

He couldn’t, for the
akreshi
priest served the duke and he was not to look a man in the eye. “Dear gods, I can’t get her out,” he groaned, flinging up his head, and even that small motion drained him. He sagged hard against the pillow, trembling. “She’s in my head! I can’t...”

Eyes widening, the priest snapped out an order that brought the dark-braided doctor back to sit at Kestar’s side.