Michelle West - Sun Sword 01 - The Broken Crown (3 page)

Taking a deep breath, Askeyia a'Narin reached into her shirt
and pulled out the medallion of the healer-born. It glittered in the
sun as she laid it flat against her breast, a platinum rectangle,
simple and severe, with only the golden glow of two hands, palm up, to
alleviate the starkness. No one in the city could mistake the medallion
itself for anything other than what it was.

The flash of light cut the shadow and drew the woman's
attention, and although she made no move toward Askeyia, her dark eyes
lit with a hunger, a hope, that the healer had seen so often it
shouldn't have been jarring. But it was.

"Healer," the woman said. "Healer, I know—"

Askeyia lifted a hand that was at once gentle and imperious.
She held out her hands but the woman's arms, thin and fragile, seemed
locked in a position that she herself had forgotten how to break.
Shock—or worse. The woman started to speak again, and again Askeyia
lifted a hand. Of all the things that she found difficult, the pleading
was always the worst; it cut her, to hear a voice so devoid of pride.

"I am Askeyia a'Narin," she told the woman gently. "And
I'm—I'm about to start my day at the Mother's temple in the thirteenth
holding." It was absolutely true. "If you'd—if you'd like, you can
accompany me." She held out her arms again.

This time the woman seemed to break; her feet left the cobbled
stones as if she'd yanked them free. "It's my boy—he's hurt my
boy—Healer, my boy—"

This close, she could see the blood that trailed out of either
corner of the child's mouth. He was young; no newborn, but not yet
crawling. And as she touched his face, as she concentrated, calling
upon the talent that was bane and boon both, she knew. Ribs, thin and
flexible, had been crushed with enough speed and force to pierce lungs;
blood filled them, even now. He was dying. Not so close to death as to
threaten her should she attempt the healing, but not so far that his
mother had the time it would take to walk to the Mother's temple and
wait for the healer to arrive.

Not so close to death?

He's only a child
, she thought.
He's
only a child. And children aren't so costly to call back. Everyone
knows that
.

She did not look over her shoulder again. She did not wonder
where Jonas and Mercy were. She held the life in her hands, and the
life was almost everything. It was why a healer couldn't freely touch
the injured or the dying at her level of skill; the call was almost
impossible to ignore. Not that she would have ignored it; she was, as
Levec had said, the softest free towner that he had ever met.

She brushed a stray strand of limp, dark hair from the curve
of her cheek; it was shorn by fire, the candle's kiss—one she'd been
too tired to completely avoid. With care, she took the child from the
arms of his mother.

He's only a babe
, she thought.
It
won't cost much
.

Babies were need defined, but their needs were simple; eating,
sleeping, physical comfort. Askeyia felt the warmth leave her hands in
a rush as the baby's thoughts, inarticulate pictures, smells—the smells
were
strong
— images of a face, smiling, joyful,
tearful, tired, and sometimes angry filled her vision. She could not
recognize this woman in the woman who stood in such desperation,
beneath the trees in the Common;
this
woman was
safety. Had this child known loneliness? Not yet; not yet.

He was 'Lesso; a diminutive, Askeyia told herself, although it
was a struggle to find the word. When he was hungry, he called for his
mother, and she came; she was warm when he was cold, she was sound and
sight and smell.

'Lesso thought that Askeyia was his mother, and when she
called him, when she held out her arms, he came with ease and joy—or
rather, he wailed the louder for the sound of her voice bearing his
name in the shadows of .the foothills that led to Mandaros. She called
him again, and again he wailed, louder; one last time, and she was
there, he was there; she picked him up and held him tight against her,
within
her, bringing him back to himself.

And all about her, too strong to be memory, too visceral to
evoke that naive yearning, the things by which a young babe knows a
mother. By which, in turn, a young mother knows her child. And this was
her child, this 'Lesso, this babe; this was hers, to protect and heal
and comfort. He fell into the cradle of her healer-strong arms and
rested there as if those arms were made to do no more than hold him.

Really, as she'd told Levec a hundred times, a
thousand
times, healing babies was no risk at all.

Really.

But she couldn't explain the tears that coursed down her
cheeks as the world returned to her eyes—to her adult eyes. Couldn't
explain the way her arms tightened around the swaddling cloth, the way
she pressed the babe tight, too tight, to her chest.

She spoke phrases, things meant to separate the healer from
the healed—but words offered no separation.

The screaming, thin and terrible, did.

Turning, sloping groundward with the sudden disorientation of
motion, she saw 'Lesso's mother—his terrified mother, his strong, his
happy, his angry mother—chalk white, white as snow on mountain peaks.

"Healer!" she cried, pointing to a place beyond the vulnerable
healer's back.

Askeyia spun again, lighter on her feet, surer now that the
pounding of heart was without question
her
heart,
not his. And as she gazed at a man who was moving from the center of
the Ring beneath which she stood, she remembered what 'Lesso's mother
had said.

He's
hurt my boy
—

No healer had ever come out of the call with such speed, such
terrible urgency. Was it 'Lesso's fear? Her own vulnerability? The
weakness of a healing? She turned, handing the child to his mother, to
his
other
mother, and then turned again, a single
word having passed between them:
Run
.

He was well-dressed, but not so well-dressed that he needed
guards or a palanquin; she thought him a Southern noble, some minor
clansman, not the valley Voyani whose descendants now crowded many of
the hundred holdings in their attempts to make roots—a place for
themselves that their Southern compatriots neither wanted nor claimed.
His hair was dark, and his skin quite pale; his shoulders were broad
and his hands unblemished. His teeth—rare enough in a man his age—were
perfect, as was his brow; he had the look of power about him.

He carried no obvious weapon, wore no visible armor.

In the light of day, he should have looked like just another
man, another foreigner.

But the light of day shunned him.

She glanced once over her shoulder, just once, to make sure
her child had escaped, and then she, too, ran.

Light, as distinct as a bird call, she heard his chuckle cross
the Common as if nothing at all separated them.

Askeyia a'Narin was good at running. A life of relative luxury
and indolence had not robbed her of the skill—or the instincts that had
honed it. Air crested her open lips and slid down her throat in a rush.
The cobbled stones beneath her feet were hard and solid; they provided
an even ground with no treacherous dips or holes, no unseen roots or
branches.

As a healer, she had a value.

It was beyond money, although money was paid for it.
Untrained, unknown, and unregistered, she was worth half of the naval
fleet's best ships to the right man, if he could catch her and remove
her from view before he could be stopped. It was, of course, completely
illegal; the punishments for kidnapping and forced indenture were
almost as harsh as those for murder. But murder didn't stop, either.

Askeyia knew how to keep her wits about her while she ran. It
was a strength, and time and again, it had proved her salvation. And
the running itself cleared her mind; the depth of the breathing, the
ache of her lungs, kept her firmly in the here and the now. It was
harder to panic if she was
doing
something.

And it was hard to do something with the press of bodies grown
so thick at the height of day. In the summer months, the height of day
was the emptiest time in the Common, but in Henden, what with the cool
breeze and rains, it was the most crowded. She had no time to
apologize, although she heard the curses at her back and to either
side. She hoped that none of the men or. women were foreign, and that
none of them had tempers, because she couldn't afford to be called to
task for the clumsy, horrible run. She had to find—

There. Authority guards. Armor gleaming ostentatiously in a
day that was cool enough for it. Their helms were down; the metal
bridges that followed the line of the nose usually made her think of
sculptured birds.

Not today. Her feet slowed their stride as they responded to
the giddy relief she felt at arriving, untouched, before the men who
kept the Kings' Order in the Common. Safety, here, although in her
youth she'd been raised to distrust Imperial authority. A free
towner's daughter, but not a free towner at heart. Beneath her chin,
the medallion she wore caught the light, bending it, scattering it, and
holding it as she caught her breath.

"Healer?" A guard who Askeyia thought wore the insignia of a
Primus said, eyes widening slightly. Her medallion wasn't a common
sight in the open streets.

"I—I'm being followed," she said, drawing a harsh breath—a
series of harsh, quick breaths. "Foreigner."

The guard—a man she vaguely recognized—frowned as her words
and her medallion made clear what the threat was. He turned at once,
waving his three companions forward. She huddled behind the mass of
their armored bodies, feeling the safety of their height, their obvious
weight, and especially of the arms that they were even now unsheathing
in a rough scrape of metal against metal.

The stranger walked into view.
Walked
.
Yet he followed no more than twenty seconds behind her; less, if she
were a capable judge. He was completely unruffled, as finely turned
out—in a city sort of way—as he had been when she'd first set eyes on
him.

And the shadows that the trees cast still flowed from the edge
of his cloak, bleeding into the stones like a thick, rich liquid. He
smiled, glancing between the guards as if he could see through them.

The safety she felt vanished then, as if she, too, could see
through armor and arms and simple physical strength as the illusions
they were. Had her eyes widened? Had she made a noise—any noise other
than the simple and unavoidable rhythm of drawn breath? She thought she
must have, because he smiled. Winter on the mountain had been just as
cold and just as deadly as that smile for a healer-born girl who didn't
understand what the word storm meant.

And she was a healer-born girl, with all that that implied.
All of it.

"Primus," she said, standing forward, the heart beneath her
rib cage telling the tale of the fear that she forced, with so much
difficulty, from the lines of her face.

"I'm a Sentrus, Healer," he said, as the stranger drew closer.
There was a smile in his voice, a friendly correction offered to a
woman who had seen enough of the effects of a sword, but never seemed
to know enough to recognize the rank of the person who wielded it.

"I—I think I've made a mistake."

He looked back over his shoulder, his eyes narrowing.

She swallowed, pale in the fading day, the weariness replaced
by the giddiness of too much fear.

"Healer—are you certain?" He didn't believe her, of course.
Askeyia a'Narin was a terrible liar. Especially when the lie was forced
out of her by an instinct that she only barely controlled: the desire
to preserve, at any cost, the lives of those around her.

Because she knew, without knowing why, that in seconds, these
men would lie aground, dying just as surely as the babe had been, but
with no one to come and rescue them all. No one to come for even one.

All healers learned to hide from the instinct; to deny it.
There wasn't enough power in the world to stop death from coming to
those who heard the call; not enough power in the world to save every
man, woman, and child who was worth saving. But there was guilt enough
to destroy a healer, and a healer's life.

And if not guilt, there was the call itself. To guide a man
back from death was the most harrowing journey that either the dying
man or the living healer could make. Or so she had been taught.

But she didn't believe it, not now. Because she saw the death
in the stranger, writ across the living shadow in his face, and she
could not imagine that anything could be harder than this: to swallow,
to smile, to force a foolish young expression across her face instead
of huddling behind swords and armor, or better, fleeing and gaining the
moments each guard's death would take.

The stranger had stopped completely; he still looked at her,
through the guards, but his expression lost all smile, all edge of
expensive pleasure.

"Askeyia a'Narin," he said, and she saw that his eyes had no
whites. "I am Isladar."

She wanted to run, but the guards wouldn't—couldn't it
seemed—quite leave her, and she knew that the moment she unleashed her
struggling fear, the moment her feet hit the cobbled stones, they would
fulfill their duty.

And wasn't that what they'd trained all those years for?
Wasn't it what they swore their oath to do? Wasn't it what they—
say
it, Askeyia
—risked daily, with full knowledge? Ah, she
wanted to listen; the words were the strongest they'd ever been. But
she stayed. Because she was healer-born. Because she knew now that
'Lesso's injury had simply been the trap that had closed around her;
this man had injured the babe to catch her out, and a man who could do
that, could do anything.