Valor of the Healer
Read Valor of the Healer Online
Authors: Angela Highland
Valor of the Healer
By Angela Highland
The
Rook
An assassin hired by vengeful elven rebels to kill the calculating Duke of Shalridan, Julian walks into a trap and barely escapes with his life. Healed by a beautiful captive in the dungeons, he’s enthralled and vows to free her from the duke’s clutches.
The
Hawk
A Knight of the Hawk duty-bound to cleanse elven magic from Adalonia, Kestar has a secret—and heretical—ability to sense the use of magic from afar. He knows something suspicious is happening in the duke’s keep, but he has no idea how deep the conspiracy goes.
The
Dove
A half-elven healer with no control over her magic, Faanshi is the goddess’s to command. She’s always been a pawn of the powerful, but after healing two mysterious and very different men, she faces a choice that may decide the fate of the whole kingdom…
Book
one
in
the
Rebels
of
Adalonia
113,000 words
Dear Reader,
April is when the romance conference season really starts to get busy for me. Every spring, I attend the
RT
Book
Reviews
convention, a gathering of about 500 authors, readers and publishing professionals who come together to celebrate their love of both romance and genre fiction Each year, I come away from that conference, and the many others I attend that are focused on the love of books (like the Lori Foster Reader Get Together in Ohio), with a renewed enthusiasm for diving back into my to-be-read pile. As well as a long list of authors and books to add to that to-be-read pile! But because it’s a busy travel time of year for me, that also means more time on the plane and in airports for reading.
Maybe you’re like me—traveling to conferences and in need of some plane reading. Or maybe you just need one more book to add to your to-be-read pile. Possibly you’ve got a newborn baby who keeps you up at night and gets you up early in the morning, and you need something you can read on the ereader in one hand while the baby is in the other. Or perhaps you’re just in search of a good book. You’re in luck; our April books can fill all those needs!
The first book in our newest genre addition, New Adult, releases this month. If you love contemporary romance, sports romance, a (mostly) Jewish, spunky heroine and a hero who will make your heart melt, you’ll want to read
Rush
Me
by debut author Allison Parr.
This month, I’m pleased to introduce the first book in a six-book series written by four authors. Ginny Glass, Christina Thacher, Emily Cale and Maggie Wells kick off a series of contemporary romance short story collections with
Love
Letters
Volume
1
:
Obeying
Desire
. Each volume will center around a different seriously sexy theme. I’ll bet you can’t guess what the theme of the first volume is, with a title like
Obeying
Desire
! Look for the second volume,
Love
Letters
Volume
2
:
Duty
to
Please
, releasing in May 2013.
Fans of contemporary romance will enjoy
Saved
by
the
Bride
, the first book in a new trilogy by RITA® Award-winning author Fiona Lowe. Who knew that being a klutz and combining it with a distrust of wedding bouquets could lead to a black eye?
Joining Fiona and Allison in the contemporary romance category is Kate Davies, with
Cutest
Couple
, book two in Kate’s high-school reunion trilogy, Girls Most Likely to… Look for the conclusion of the trilogy,
Life
of
the
Party
, in May 2013.
Co-authors Anna Leigh Keaton and Madison Layle deliver another scorching Puma Nights story with
Falke’s
Renegade
, while Jodie Griffin joins them in heating up your ereader with her third erotic BDSM Bondage & Breakfast book,
Forbidden
Fires
.
On the paranormal and science fiction front, we have a number of titles for fans. Veteran author Kate Pearce begins a new series with
Soul
Sucker
, in which
Moonlighting
meets
The
X
-
Files
in San Francisco Bay and two worlds collide. Kat Cantrell, winner of Harlequin’s 2011 So You Think You Can Write contest, joins Carina Press with her first science fiction romance,
Mindlink
, while returning author Eleri Stone gives us another jaguar shifter in
Lost
City
Shifters
:
Rebellion
, book three in this compelling series.
Clockwork
Mafia
by Seleste deLaney brings us back to the Western steampunk world of
Badlands
. Inventor Henrietta Mason is retiring from airships and adventuring to return home to Philadelphia. Determined to erase all trails leading to her late father’s duplicity, she dismantles his lab and removes all records of the Badlands gold. And last but certainly not least in the paranormal category,
Night
of
the
Dark
Horse
by Janni Nell continues the adventures of Allegra Fairweather, paranormal investigator.
This month, Bronwyn Stuart follows up her fantastic debut historical romance,
Scandal’s
Mistress
, with her unique regency romance,
Behind
the
Courtesan
, featuring—you guessed it—a courtesan heroine.
On the non-romance side, Jean Harrington brings us the third Murders by Design cozy mystery installment,
Killer
Kitchens
.
And joining Carina Press with an epic fantasy trilogy, Angela Highland tells the story of a half-elven healer with no control over her magic. Faanshi has always been a pawn of the powerful, but after healing two mysterious and very different men, she faces a choice that may decide the fate of a whole kingdom. If you love fantasy, pick up
Valor
of
the
Healer
, book one in the Rebels of Adalonia trilogy.
As you can see, April is full of books to distract you wherever you are, whatever you’re supposed to be doing, and even if you have a baby in your arms. I hope you enjoy these titles as much as we’ve enjoyed working on them.
We love to hear from readers, and you can email us your thoughts, comments and questions to
[email protected]
. You can also interact with Carina Press staff and authors on our blog, Twitter stream and Facebook fan page.
Happy reading!
~Angela James
Executive Editor, Carina Press
www.carinapress.com
www.twitter.com/carinapress
www.facebook.com/carinapress
Dedication
For Lyre, Mehul and Salmalin, who loved Faanshi first
Acknowledgements
Valor
of
the
Healer
is, in a very real sense, a book it’s taken my entire life to create. The world that became Adalonia, Nirrivy and Tantiulo took shape way back when I was in high school, writing novels by hand in spiral-bound notebooks when I should have been taking actual notes in class. That said?
Valor
would not exist as it does today without the help of some extremely awesome people.
Astra Poyser Laughlin was the founder of the online game AetherMUSH, where I played from 1999 to 2002 as four different characters, including the original incarnations of Faanshi and Julian. Aether was a rich, complex role-play environment, and that Faanshi and Julian stayed with me is a testament to Astra’s vision, which brought it to life. Likewise, I must thank Ajit, who I met on Star Wars MUSH, for convincing me to come over to Aether and create Faanshi as my first character.
Props for the third of my main characters coming into existence go to Amanda Hayes. Kestar is named for two of her NPCs, K’star and E’rian, who both romanced my character Mehlani. In his current form, my Hawk has nothing else in common with those boys except names. Nonetheless, they are in a way just as much his parents as Dorvid and Ganniwer.
As with the development of most books, an army of beta readers contributed to this one. Foremost are Mimi Noyes, who contributed early advice on the opening chapters; Kathryn Tewson, who contributed much brainstorming on character development, especially for Shaymis Enverly; fellow session player Ellen Eades, who gave me excellent ideas for how to improve the book on a big picture level as well as catching a whole fleet of typos; housemate Paul Johnson, who pointed out the boot knife trick Kurt Russell pulls off in
Big
Trouble
in
Little
China
, and which I swiped for Julian in Chapter One because it’s
cool
; and last but not least, my own beloved Dara, who gave me a much better strategy for a one-handed assassin to use when he’s about to take out a target, and who also advocated making sure that Julian should get Unexpectedly Pointy at the slightest provocation.
The rest of my beta readers include Michael at Pike Place Market, Roger Crew, Rachel Blackman, Jenny Griffee, MOO-friends Cow and the Mevs, Janne Tørklep, Jenna Moran, Emma Speagell, Geri Fargher, Angelica from Facebook, Glenn Stone, Sherri Meyer, Joely Sue Burkhart, Howlin’ Hobbit, Tina Beck, Lisa Rock, Luisa Prieto, Chong Lee Leian, Jessica Madden, Kenneth Aalberg, RJ, Leannan Sidhe and Ghislaine from Facebook. Many smiles in particular to Heidi Retzer for being Julian’s very first fangirl.
Author Kat Richardson pointed me in the direction of my agent Miriam Kriss—and thanks must also go to Miriam, for being willing to take on a query out of the blue, for believing in this manuscript and for taking me on as a brand new client.
Most of all I’d like to thank Angela James and Deborah Nemeth of Carina Press for giving my Dove, Rook and Hawk a chance to take flight.
I hope you all will enjoy their tale!
Contents
Chapter One
Kilmerry
,
AC
1876
No moon crossed the sky that night, nor did any starlight pierce the clouds to dilute the darkness. A rain-heavy breeze rattled the windowpanes of Lomhannor Hall and breached its walls in a hundred different places, filling its chambers and corridors with drafts. Those within huddled in their beds with warming pans and down comforters, lulled into oblivion by the weather’s assault. No one was awake to catch a stealthy tread on the Hall’s back stairways, the ones where only the slaves and servants walked.
There’d been challenges to getting in, of course, though a wagonload of cobblestones and a laborer’s garb had gotten Julian past the gates. Bundled up in his coat against the wind and rain, the groundskeeper had been far more interested in his warm hearth than in explaining to an oaf of a stonemason why His Grace the Duke of Shalridan owed him three ducats for the delivery, not six. The argument gained him leave to argue his case to the seneschal, and no one challenged him once he was inside the Hall. A servant’s walk and a wheedling tone of voice told those he passed that he had an accepted place in the daily order of life.
And the map of the great house from the footman he’d bribed told him where to hide until darkness fell.
Sequestered in that empty cellar, he shifted from his disguise to his working attire. It took time—he had but one hand with which to change his appearance, one eye with which to see what he was doing. But with systematic care, laborer’s clothing yielded to formfitting black, the gray wig to his true hair. Cotton wadding removed from his cheeks altered the structure of his face, and soot from the hearth closest to his hiding place darkened it, turning him from head to foot into a walking shadow. A black patch, pulled into place, hid his false left eye, and a leather glove swathed the false hand on his right wrist. All throughout he checked and rechecked his weapons, making sure they occupied the places his left hand could reach.
In the night’s smallest hours the Rook emerged to take the servants’ stairs to the third floor, listening for any sound that might be out of place, and keeping a wall to his blind side at all times. With the patience of a snake slithering past a drowsing lion’s paws, he investigated every corner, doorway and alcove, never moving till each one proved safe. He would reach his goal—but only if the lion did not wake.
Behind his mask of soot, Julian’s mouth curled in a tight smile.
Lomhannor
meant
heart
of
the
lion
. But the place’s venerable history and the structure that evoked its name, hinting at the shape of a massive crouching cat, interested him far less than its wealth. On any other night, any of the prizes a thief could spirit out of the place would have tempted him. Tonight, however, he sought a different prize. Tonight he sought a life.
As he stole through the passageways, Julian reviewed his mental map of the Hall. The footman’s parchment erred in the sizes of certain rooms and the number of doorways in certain corridors, but it led him nonetheless to the southeastern wing, where the duke and his family resided. Their wing of the house faced east for the best views of the town in the valley below, and south in honor of the Duchess Khamsin’s distant homeland. In the vital details of that wing—which doors would be locked, which rooms uninhabited—the parchment was accurate enough. So far.
Julian’s pulse quickened in anticipation. No one roused at his passing, and no guardsmen leaped out to intercept him. His way to the door of the duke’s suite lay clear. Everything he’d done so far—getting on to the grounds, slipping into the Hall itself, every second he’d spent on preparation while in hiding—it was all prelude. Now it was time for the symphony.
No bar or lock held the door against him, the first disquieting note in the aria building in his blood. A hallmark of a nobleman who believed himself inviolate within his own walls, this unlocked door? Or the warning sign of a trap? Either was plausible. He frowned. As he slipped into the suite, through sitting room and study and at last into the bedchamber, he scrutinized every last shadow. Night turned the heavy mahogany furniture into indistinct hulking shapes and drained away the colors of walls, ceilings and the arching canopy above the bed. One curtain hung open, admitting just enough light that Julian could make out the shape beneath the sheets and blankets.
His target. Temptingly close, but he couldn’t advance too quickly, not even now. Too many potential hiding places for attackers surrounded him, and chief among those was the shape to his left that could only be a wardrobe, large enough to hide a man within. Julian didn’t bother to test its doors. Instead, he snatched a chair to his right, hefting it up with his one hand so that it wouldn’t scrape upon the floor, and set it down before the wardrobe.
Then at last he approached his quarry.
He bristled with daggers, two on his boots and more up and down his frame, everywhere his left hand could swiftly reach. But those were utilitarian weapons pared down to the essentials of hilt and pommel and blade, and they were for combat. This night’s work required a subtler tool. With one sidewise, slicing motion of his right arm, he released the delicate spike of glass and steel embedded in his false hand. For attack or defense, it was no match for his knives. But for the administering of poison, it had no equal.
On soundless feet he reached the bed, and there he found that the last vital nugget of intelligence from the footman held true. The Duke of Shalridan had a fierce snuff habit, one he was known to indulge upon waking in the morning. As promised, a snuffbox waited on the nightstand in easy reach. Julian flicked the box open and, holding his false hand steady, gave three taps to the first of two small buttons beneath its glove. For each tap, a drop of concoction of his own design slid down through the extended needle and into the snuffbox’s contents.
With the first part of his plan accomplished, he turned to the bed itself to carry out the second. Only a few drops more would be needed—in his target’s ear, or better yet, straight into the open mouth if the man happened to snore. He wasted no motion as he snared the outermost blanket, false hand at the ready. As with his weapons, so too with him: he was pared down to focused, fatal grace, the Rook about to strike.
But as he peeled back the blanket, the woman in the bed rolled over. Her teeth flashed white in her dusky face, distinguishable from the shadows only by that trace of reflected light. “My husband,” she hissed, “will have your eye for looking upon me without my veil!”
Then she screamed, bizarrely grinning, as if it somehow gave her joy. She lunged at him, one hand flying out from beneath the pillows to reveal a blade of her own. In the same instant, from beneath the bed, another hand seized his left ankle and pulled him down hard.
Trap
! Julian had no time for thought beyond that, not with threats above and below. One quick jab to the second button on his false hand retracted the poisoned needle even before he hit the floor, and only then could he deal with the figure under the bed. With his right foot he triggered the catch on the blade strapped to his left boot, releasing it so that he could stab forward—and the crunch of bone and a strangled howl told him he’d found his mark. With his right arm he caught the charging duchess against her stomach and flung her on, forward over his head.
That gave him only seconds to surge to his feet, pull the leather-hilted dagger from the sheath at the small of his back, and pivot to seize the woman. She came at him again with her knife, but neither her speed nor her training matched his. With ease, he dodged the slash she aimed at his face and whipped his right arm around her, his own blade into position at her neck.
“I’d advise you to drop it, my lady,” Julian crooned into her ear, breathing in the scent of cinnamon and oranges from the black braided rope of her hair.
“The women of Clan Sarazen disarm for no one,” she snarled. “I’ll take your eye myself, and give it to my lord. He comes now, accursed snake!
Eshallavan
, my husband! I’m here!”
Running footsteps and the rasp of swords unsheathed heralded an imminent response to the scream, and as the Rook hauled his captive toward the windows, three guardsmen burst into the room. While each wore the duke’s livery of red and gold, only two had the pale complexions of Adalon men. The third was as dusky of skin as Her Grace, though only his eyes showed above the red
korfi
scarf wound round his face, and his blade curved in wicked contrast to the straight swords in his companions’ hands. Yet all three of them skidded to disconcerted halts as they beheld their duchess at knifepoint.
On their heels strode a fourth man with a pistol in his right hand and a candle held high in his left. Around this man the guards fanned out, two of them flanking him, and the third moved between his lord and their prey. Julian flashed a look from face to face, cursing the candle that played havoc with his depth perception as it forced him to adjust to the flickering light now falling across the room. He couldn’t ignore the guards, not when he was so outnumbered, but all depended upon what Holvirr Kilmerredes would do with the gun he brandished—whether he would risk harming his wife by shooting at such close range, or simply order his men to charge.
With tawny eyes, a loose mane of golden hair, and a powerful frame, the duke looked an apt master for a Hall named for a lion’s heart. Moreover, he looked a man who held absolute control over the situation at hand. He studied the dagger pressed against the duchess’s throat, and then Julian himself. “You can’t imagine that threatening my lady wife will get you anything but an extremely painful death?”
“I’ve been told overweening ambition is one of my primary faults,” Julian drawled. His only ambition at that instant was reaching the window behind him before someone shot or stabbed him, but the man he’d been sent to Lomhannor to kill didn’t need to know that. Inch by inch, never easing his grip on the writhing duchess, he edged backward. “I can’t say I’ve observed it, but I’ve never had any pretensions of modesty.”
The duke sneered, taking aim with his pistol. “Nor, apparently, of honor. I’ve never clapped eyes on you, and yet one of my footmen informs me that you entered my Hall tonight to kill me.” Distaste rumbled through his baritone, and his gaze sparked with ire. “So I’ll assume you’ve been paid. You’ve no exits out of this room, and no options. Release the duchess, surrender the name of your employer, and the Bhandreid may grant you a pardon.”
Julian had never heard a more bored-sounding invocation of the queen of the realm in his life—but then, it wasn’t as if that ploy would work on him regardless. His smile flashed broad and cold as he pressed his knife into the duchess’s neck, enough to pierce her skin. “With all due respect to Her Imperial Majesty, I’d just as soon expect sheep to spit dragon fire. But I’ll leave you your lady. Your second, I understand? Wouldn’t want to make you hunt for a third.” He shoved Khamsin forward, letting her stumble away from him—and crumple to the floor as the drug that coated his knife took hold.
It wasn’t as potent as the mixture in the ampoule hidden in his hand. It wouldn’t kill her, and it didn’t need to. Distraction was all he needed now.
The guards cried out, the dark-skinned one in an unintelligible burst of Tantiu, and the duke started. In those few moments Julian sprang to the window and with his false hand he smacked the latch. With his living one, he thrust the dagger into its sheath and plucked another item from a pocket. Blithely he tossed the raven feather into the room and then threw open the window and hurled himself out into the night.
“Bloody hells!”
“Is he mad? It’s three stories down!”
“Get Her Grace to her chambers, idiots! The cur is mine!”
It took only seconds for the duke and his men to shake off their surprise, but by the time Kilmerredes lunged halfway out the window, Julian was rappelling down the side of the building toward the ground below.
A
maimed
Rook
might
not
be
able
to
climb
a
wall
, he thought in satisfaction,
but
he
can
damned
well
fly
down
it
.
Two ropes, one for winding about his right forearm and letting out all the way down, the other for gripping as he descended, did the job. A grappling hook secured those ropes to the wall, just far enough below the window of the duke’s quarters that someone reaching out couldn’t find it unless he knew exactly where to look. Julian had, which meant that Rab had done his job. Unlike the footman, but he’d worry about that later. Right then he had to flee.
Kilmerredes roared an oath. The light of his candle flickered wildly in the still-damp breeze, yet he needed but a moment to aim down with his pistol and fire.
The shot ricocheted off Julian’s shoulder, and the pain of the bullet’s impact drove all else from his consciousness. In panic he clutched at the rope, but his left shoulder had taken the hit, and agony shot up his arm to loosen his hold. When his body slammed against the house’s granite wall, he dropped like a stone for the last fifteen feet before crashing into a gorse bush.
High overhead, voices bellowed. Julian barely heard them. Fog whirled through his senses, swallowing everything except the fire in his arm and the wail in the back of his mind.
Tykhe
,
not
this
one
too
!
“Julian!”
A much closer voice, younger than his. Male. Familiar, though he couldn’t focus enough to see his partner as anything more than a vague form leaning over him in the darkness. Rab’s hands he registered more clearly, the left with the usual complement of five digits, the right missing the ring finger. When they jostled his wounded shoulder he bit back a scream and croaked, “Shot...pistol. Get me out of here, Rab.”