Valor of the Healer (10 page)

His temper spiking, Julian rounded on him and pushed him up hard against the brick wall. Rab’s hands flashed up in self-defense, his blades gleaming palely in the gloom, and only the fact that it was Rab before him kept Julian from doing anything else. Only the need for stealth kept him from bellowing as he pressed his arm against his partner’s chest. “Now isn’t the time for interrogations. Guard my back or go!”

Rab didn’t flinch. “You know me better than that, and I know you better than this. Why are you risking yourself for this girl?”

Yourself
, not
us
. That one word struck home as keenly as any of Rab’s daggers, and a hot flush flooded Julian’s cheeks beneath the ash he’d smeared across them. “Because I owe her, damn your eyes! If you have such problems with the discharging of a debt, would you have preferred I never have come back for you when you stole that horse?”

Horror spread across Rab’s own ash-darkened features. His hands dropped to his sides, and after a moment his gaze lowered as well. “I deserved that. Forgive me.”

Julian instantly released him, unable to suppress a surge of dismay. Had he just given away their location? No shouts sounded in the square or nearby buildings. No running footsteps slapped against the cobblestones, and no watchmen came charging up out of the darkness. No one had heard him. Tykhe, the old Nirrivan goddess of luck—and the only deity Julian cared to follow—was giving them good fortune tonight. But relief couldn’t dispel his chagrin, and he couldn’t meet Rab’s eyes. “I forgot myself,” he muttered. “There’s nothing to forgive.”

“You don’t regret our association?” Rab’s voice held not the slightest tremor, but all at once he looked very, very young.

“Nonsense. You’re my other eye, my good right hand.”

“As well as your witty repartee and healthy sense of self-preservation?”

“Don’t press your advantage.” Allowing himself a crooked little grin, Julian considered what else Rab was to him—his partner, his friend, and the son of the man who’d trained him as a thief and an assassin.
You’d
be
proud
of
him
,
Jacob
. Then he smirked at himself. The healer girl must have affected him more than he’d known. He was dangerously sentimental tonight, and he needed to bring it to heel. “I need you sharp. We have a church to infiltrate.”

Rab gestured graciously with a dagger ahead into the square. “After you.”

From that point, it wasn’t difficult. With one last sweep of their surroundings, they sprinted on noiseless feet through the deepest shadows around the square’s edge. That won them the church’s front entrance, but they couldn’t stay there. The next patrol was due in a few more minutes, and Julian had no intention of staying in sight even for the scant moments required to pass through those weighty wooden doors. Doors that size couldn’t be opened silently, even by him.

But there were other doors into the church.

They circled the building, pausing behind the shelter of a tower on its northwestern corner until the watch patrol went by, out of sight but not out of hearing. Two horses’ hooves clumped along the cobblestones of the square, while a woman’s tired voice called out, “Three o’ clock and all’s well!” Only when the assassins heard nothing around them but the chirp of nocturnal insects did they move once more, completing their dash to the rear of the church.

The forerunner for the meadows and fields on the town’s southern side, a garden stood as a green barrier between the holy building itself and the churchyard that lay beyond a low stone fence. Rosebushes cast delicate scents into the air, announcing their presence even as the darkness leached them of their color. Among them, just beneath the branches of a linden tree, stood a granite statue of a slender figure with outstretched hands: the Mother, keeping gentle vigil over the churchyard’s headstones. She was the only witness to the pair of shadows along the church wall, and Julian saluted her before he tried the door.

“She looks the other way,” Rab murmured at his back.

“May She continue to do so. Tykhe’s the only goddess we need watching over us tonight.”

Malcolm himself had made the hinges on the church’s garden door. As the blacksmith had promised, they made no noise. The door was silent opening, and silent as Julian waved Rab in ahead of him and pulled it closed behind them.

A stained-glass window high on the wall admitted light from outside, tingeing the narrow corridor with faint traces of red, blue and green. In that meager illumination they made out a second nearby door standing slightly ajar, just enough for thin slits of weaker darkness to mark its edges and location—and to let a barely audible voice reach their ears. When Julian inched the door a finger-width wider, a second voice answered the first.

“She’ll tell us nothing, Kes.”

“Not if we give her no chance. Quiet, Cel, let her talk.”

Male voices, young, pitched in the hoarse whispers of men striving to keep from being overheard. Julian frowned. Who else, he wondered, would seek a captured mage in a church in the middle of the night? He fingered two rapid signs to Rab, who gave a single nod and traded out his wielded daggers for a slim blowgun and darts. Julian drew one of his own blades with his living hand and, with the false one, nudged the door open far enough for him to slip through.

Ethereal light from below revealed a stairway leading down beneath the church. Cool air brushed his cheeks as he crept down the steps, Rab keeping close behind him. It made him think of the window at Lomhannor, through which musty chill and a slender hand had touched him. And when a stoic whisper wafted to his ears, he knew who the healer girl’s unexpected callers must be.

“
Akreshi
, I beg you, let me pray in peace. You’ve delivered me to your priest. Isn’t that what Hawks do? Forgive me, but I don’t know what you want me to say.”

Her. The voice that had apologized for saving his life now sounded thin and strained, on the verge of tears. Hearing it, Julian found he didn’t care why two Knights of the Hawk were questioning the mage they’d apprehended at this odd hour. All he needed to know was that they were Hawks.

And that they stood between him and the payment of his debt.

The first Hawk said, “You told me something on my horse—that your master’s always known that you have much sin to Cleanse away. Do you remember?”

“Yes,
akreshi
.”

Julian reached a bend in the stairs and signaled for Rab to freeze. Then he leaned forward to peer around the bend at what awaited below.

The stairway opened into a cellar filled from wall to wall with shelves laden with sacramental wines and the dusty tomes of the church’s archives. But Julian had no interest in what objects the cellar contained. Its occupants commanded all his attention: two young men, one tall and rangy, the other not precisely short, but wiry and compact. Both wore swords at their sides and the uniform of their Order, though their clothing was incidental. The amulets alone, glimmering with cold, clear light, proclaimed them Hawks.

“Then tell me one thing. How long have you had your power?”

His frame taut with unease, the taller Hawk lingered at the foot of the stairs. The other leaned against the door of a cell in the left-hand wall, whispering through the door’s narrow, barred aperture. That one’s brow furrowed at the frightened answer he received.

“Four years,
akreshi
.”

The smaller Hawk cried, “You’ve been a practicing mage all that time, and your master’s said
nothing
?”

“Yes. He said that my magic was for him alone.”

Julian’s mind seized that information and tucked it away while he pulled back around the bend of the stairs—and gave his partner one more swift, signed command.

Murmuring a shocked oath, the Hawk at the door shoved a hand through his straight dark hair. Then his features settled into determined lines. “Maiden, my partner and I need you to tell this to others. We’ll get you out of—”

Nine-fingered Rab jumped adroitly past Julian into position, raised his blowgun to his mouth and fired. With a cry the taller Hawk slapped at his neck and staggered. Before he could reach the dart that had struck him, Rab somersaulted down the stairs and kicked the man’s feet out from under him.

“Cel!” The other Hawk whirled, his sword whipping out of its sheath, and sprang forward even as Rab straddled his now insensible opponent and thrust a dagger at his throat. “Release him, or by all the gods I’ll run you through!”

“Do have at me,” Rab invited, with all the suave, polished politeness of one nobleman inviting another to borrow his carriage. “If you think you can reach me before I spill his life’s blood all over the stone of this humble floor.”

“I’d listen to him.” His knife still drawn, Julian rounded the bend in the stairs. At his movement the Hawk snapped up his head, and Julian took his measure as he came down the steps. He was shorter than he by four or five inches and younger as well, though not as young as Rab. His weight shifted forward onto his booted toes in a fighter’s ready stance. His green eyes flashed back and forth between the assassins, and darkened in perceptible dismay as he took in the sight of Rab’s blade against his companion’s neck.

Observant, then, and honorable enough to hold back from engaging an enemy if another life was at stake—but Julian wasn’t about to gamble on that till he got the Hawk disarmed. “We’ve been denied our last prey,” he drawled, circling in front of the other man, just out of reach. “And my friend’s hungry. I wouldn’t give him an excuse to sate himself now, were I you. I’d give up my weapon.”

“And let you kill Celoren and me?”

“As long as you give us no cause, we’ve no intention of killing you.” Velvet and steel twined together in Julian’s voice. “No one’s paid us to do so. Come now. Your sword.” He nodded once toward the blade clenched in the knight’s hand. “Before I change my mind.”

The Hawk’s stare locked on his fallen partner. Bared by the open collar of his coat and faintly lit by his amulet’s gleam, the muscles of his throat flexed as he swallowed hard. Then, without a word, he dropped his weapon to the floor.

In a liquid blur of motion Rab pounced, snatching up the sword and shooting to his feet. With the bigger blade in one hand and his dagger in the other, he advanced on the Hawk and backed him toward the wall. “A good sword,” he crooned, winking over the weapons. “Nicely balanced.”

“For the proper hand,” the other man replied.

There was nothing more than that, no threats to hunt them down like vermin, no overconfident bluster—just the Hawk’s watchful regard and a tense set to his broadly chiseled mouth that told the Rook this man would leap at him or Rab the instant he saw an opportunity. But the lack of banal remarks made him almost kindly disposed to their captive. “Rab, make the gentleman a little more comfortable. Be gentle. We don’t want him to get the wrong idea.”

Rab’s devilish smile blossomed forth. With a twist of his wrist he spun the sword about and slammed its pommel across its owner’s brow. Alertness drained from the Hawk’s eyes as they rolled back in his head, and he spilled like grain from a torn sack to the floor. As Rab kept him covered, Julian sheathed his dagger and leaped over to search the knight’s slumped form. He found only one other weapon, a knife sheathed at the young man’s back, which he tossed away out of reach. One other find, however, made him grin as mischievously as his partner.

A key.

On the verge of fainting, the Hawk blinked up at him. Julian leaned over him and showed him the key. “A word of advice. Leave the stealing of maidens to the professionals.”

He rapped the man himself, with the stout weight of his false hand, to send him the rest of the way into unconsciousness.

“Well done. Now what, my fearless leader?” Rab shot him an approving look as he straightened up again and pivoted back to the cell door by which the Hawk had stood.

“Tie them up.”

“With what?”

“Find something. Rope...shackles...I don’t care what. Slice up their coats if you must.”

Rab nodded and jumped to the nearest shelf, just discernible in the light of the Hawks’ amulets, glowing even with their bearers lying sprawled and inert. Julian left him to it. Satisfaction hummed through his veins at the skirmish, brief though it had been. Part of him wanted more fighting, and that too was dangerous sentiment, as perilous as memories of the past. With a stern will, he fought it all down.

Then and only then did he thrust the key into the lock and turn it to liberate the girl.

Chapter Eight

When the Hawks came to take Faanshi away, she thought Ulima was mistaken, and the deliverance her
okinya
promised was nothing more than death. She could fathom no other outcome; death was what happened when the Knights of the Hawk claimed those such as her. The servants of the Hall had whispered it, with every tale of the Anreulag hurling fire into the armies of Tantiulo. The duke himself had told her so. His priest, Father Enverly, had threatened it as her fate if she didn’t submit to the prayers he insisted on saying over her each time he came to Lomhannor Hall. He said them again tonight after the Hawks delivered her to the church. With the prayers, harsh and guttural syllables in a language she didn’t know, he took a knife to both her hands and drew her blood into a syringe of glass and iron.

She knew of no rite or
ridah
that called for the spilling of blood. Terror of the Cleansing, of the priest and of her master, made her struggle. To no avail, for Father Enverly clouted her, and she’d had no food since the duke had beaten her. Hunger and the throb of her magic along her palms dropped her to the floor of her new cell. He intoned one last chant, sketched the sign of the star above her and abandoned her to the dark.

But he hadn’t killed her, and she could think of nothing to do but pray to Djashtet that she’d have a chance to see her
okinya
again. Then the Hawks returned—and the one on whose horse she’d ridden, the one who’d treated her with actual kindness, disturbed her with his questions.

Yet she had no chance to learn his intentions, for voices lashed beyond the door that barred her from freedom. The dull sounds of blows and the shadowed figures she could just make out through the slit in the door drove her back against the far wall, shaking, sweating and wondering if death was about to come for her at last.

The bare little room offered no shelter. There was nothing she could hide beneath or behind, no cot or table, shelf or chair. A star symbol on the wall glinted with merciless reflected light as her hands began to glow, far more strongly than when the hurts the priest had dealt her disappeared. The magic drenched her in phantom sensations—a jab in the back of her neck, two red blooms of pain along her brow and the top of her head, weakness in her limbs. They pulled her close to unconsciousness and yet blocked her from it, chaining her awareness instead to the heat building in her palms. She didn’t know who was fighting with the Hawks or how many were hurt beyond the door, though it felt like more than one.

What she could do about it, Faanshi couldn’t tell. Her senses blurred, reeling away from the echoes of pain. Her knees trembled. All that kept her upright was the recollection of her struggle to defy the duke as he’d beaten her. He hadn’t killed her—a little victory—but he’d given her to the priest and the Hawks, and ultimately that was no different. She was no warrior. She had no weapons to drive away the men outside if they came for her. Nor could she see how she could make the magic—the treacherous, volatile magic—defend her. The idea of trying made her every nerve shriek, and so she prayed, with raw and desperate strength.

Lady
of
Time
,
let
me
do
it
.
I
do
not
want
to
die
.

She found no reassurance when the sounds of the scuffle ebbed, for none of the agonies flooding through her subsided with them. When she heard the rattle of a key in the lock, when the door swung open on a tall figure dressed in black, she nearly swallowed her tongue in the effort to keep from screaming.

“Tykhe,” a voice swore. Left hand extending, the figure edged closer and added more softly, “Easy. Easy, girl, I won’t hurt you.”

It was the man she’d healed—the man who’d tried to kill the duke. His face was harsh in the light from her hands, much the same as the first time she’d seen it, up to the single eye that stood out a vivid, dusky blue against the ash that darkened his features.

“Djashtet be praised,” she blurted. The pain and weakness igniting her power dimmed for an instant as something else shot through her, so fierce and strange that she scarcely recognized it as joy. “They didn’t kill you. They didn’t catch you,
akreshi
!”

The stranger’s lone eye blinked, with as much amazement as he’d shown when she’d mended his wounds. His hand darted forward to take one of hers, lifting it up to shine like a lamp between his face and her own. “You’re here because of this. Do you want to be elsewhere?”

The question stopped all Faanshi’s breath, blocking out all trace of the reflex that should have driven her gaze down and away from a man’s. Her head spun. Her heart pounded. But none of it obscured her abrupt elation. Her prayers had been answered. Ulima hadn’t been lying or mistaken. The promised deliverance had come.

“Yes! Great Lady, yes!”

She might have whispered it, or shouted. Faanshi couldn’t tell which. Her hands were growing hotter, the magic snarling to be set free, and the prospect of her own imminent freedom vanished in the rising wash of heat and light. Before she realized what she was doing she was stumbling for the doorway and the two prone figures beyond it. After only three steps out of the cell she toppled to the floor, but it didn’t matter, for she was nearer to where she needed to be to release the fire—

Her liberator caught her, fingers closing around her shoulder in an iron grip. “What the hells are you doing, girl? Out’s the other way!”

She wasn’t as strong as he, and conditioned to submit to a male hand besides. For a blind moment Faanshi struggled, conscious only that something kept her from reaching her goal. Then the stranger hauled her close against him, immobilizing one of her arms while his hand clamped around her other wrist. The magic had latched on the pair of bodies on the floor, blotting out the echoes of the last healing she’d wrought. She remembered it nonetheless, her power pouring through this man, rejoining shattered bone and smoothing away rents in his flesh. Though she’d never heard it in truth, she remembered his voice, younger, crying out in terror.

I
didn’t
do
it
,
Cleon
,
I
swear
I
didn’t
do
it
!

“He shouldn’t have hurt you,” Faanshi murmured as the roaring in her head parted, just long enough for her to stare in horror and sorrow up at him. Her control was gone, and she had nothing left to hold back the words that tumbled forth. “Cleon shouldn’t have harmed you if you didn’t—”

As though her body had burst into flame, the man jolted violently, jolting her with him, for his hand clenched her wrist with force enough to snap her bone. “Stop it,” he ordered. His eye was wide in his darkened face. No sign of it showed in his voice, but his expression, already urgent, took on a cast of fear. “Whatever this is, douse it, or the moment we step outside every man, woman and child in Camden is going to know you’re free.”

Free
. The word hammered at her awareness, urging her to run, to do whatever she must to reach the open air. Her limbs, though, were still in the sway of her power. Straining against the stranger’s hold, she writhed again, flailing toward the nearer of the two fallen Hawks. The one she’d ridden with. The one called Lord Vaarsen, the one who’d questioned her. She couldn’t take her eyes away from the blaze of the pendant around his neck, and she couldn’t rid herself of the growing mad need to reach him. Her head ached where his had been struck. Beyond him, his companion lay flattened by a poison in his blood, a weakness she could almost see straddling his chest and pressing him down into darkness.

Next to that Hawk a third young man crouched. He was tying the Hawk’s hands with long strips of torn linen, but he snapped up his blond head as Faanshi’s stranger called, “A hand here if you please, Rab!”

“What in Tykhe’s name—”

“
Now
, Rab!”

Panic surged through Faanshi, yet she knew what she had to do. “Strike me,
akreshis
!” she shrilled. “Silence my magic and take me from this place!”

The maimed man’s grasp loosened in surprise. The young one gaped at her as he shot to his feet, but paused for only an instant before springing forward, a hand upraised. “Far be it from us to deny a lady’s wishes. Hold her still, Rook.”

“I’m trying. Gods damn it, girl, don’t make us hurt you!”

Faanshi tried to brace herself for the blow she knew was to come, but the magic’s grip on her was stronger than her rescuer’s hand. It kept her thrashing, and as she struggled, bright golden wisps of light hurtled out to bridge the distance between her and the men crumpled nearby.

Since her eyes were already on the Hawk called Vaarsen, she was looking his way when he leaped unsteadily up off the floor. In the mingled light of her magic and his amulet she glimpsed his dazed, angry eyes—all she had time to see before he tackled the younger of her rescuers.

Afterward she was never certain what happened next, for the light nearly blinded her now, gold blending with silver-white to limn the men around her in brilliance. She marked them only by their motions, by one body slamming into another and driving it into the wall, and two pairs of hands grabbing for the same blade. Voices shouted, before her and behind. The man who’d tried to kill the duke shoved her away, and she thought she saw him lunging to the aid of his friend.

Then white-hot agony burned everything away from her sight.

Her chest seemed to collapse in on itself. Hard, bright fire deep within it stole away every scrap of air she breathed. Someone shouted, someone screamed, and she couldn’t tell which sound came from her. There was only her magic, lashing her like her master’s riding crop. Surely the duke would find her, beat her, perhaps even kill her for healing without his bidding—surely the Anreulag Herself would come at any moment and strike her down. But even in the rush of these twin terrors, she could no longer withstand the golden fire’s fury.

It threw her at the source of that maelstrom of pain, and when her fingers found a knife’s hilt, she noted it only as a barrier to what she had to do. Sobbing, gasping, she pulled with all her might at the weapon. Its edge sliced at her palms and fingertips, just as the priest had done with his own knife earlier that night. She didn’t care. She tossed the blade away and pressed her hands where it had been, upon cloth and flesh and the slick, damp warmth of blood bubbling up around her fingers. The smell of it, thick and hot and metallic, choked off her breath—but not her magic. For the second time in two days a stranger’s thoughts obliterated hers.

Cel!
Blessed
gods
,
no
,
got
to
fight
,
got
to
free
the
girl
.
Anreulag
,
help
me
,
I
can’t
breathe
,
I
can’t
see
—
the
light
,
dear
gods
,
the
light!

Something, the same inexorable force that had tugged her hands to the wound in his chest, riveted Faanshi’s gaze on the Hawk’s face. Though the incandescence blinded her to all else, his taut features stood out with piercing clarity. Thick dark brows shot up over pain-darkened eyes; his mouth quivered, their corners reddening with yet more blood, though no sound escaped him that she could hear. As his stare locked into hers, all her senses swam—and suddenly became his.

She felt his head pounding, his lungs heaving for air, and how he struggled to rise or move his hands to the pressure against his chest. As his flesh rejoined to staunch the blood welling out from within him, he fought frantically to hold back his own howl. Faanshi cringed when it erupted, for she’d never before heard a man scream. The hoarse, ragged cry and the fire of his agony threatened to split her mind apart.

Even as her radiance drowned his pain, bringing back his breath while it knitted cracked bone and sealed the place where the knife had jabbed through, she sensed something in him latching on to the magic in a surge of bone-deep comprehension. When that happened, her awareness flared with answering light from him. His entire world narrowed down to
the
girl
who
was
the
sunlight
from
the
mountain
; hers became
Kestar
Eyrian
Vaarsen
, above and beyond all else, until one panicked corner of her brain rebelled.

“
Nei
!
Ilh
anna
Faanshi!
Ilh
anna
Faanshi!”

Through the Hawk’s eyes she saw her own frame spasm, her head thrashing back and her face contorting in panic beneath her veil. She heard her own voice through his ears, screaming in the Tantiu tongue.

Someone grabbed her then, breaking the connection about to devour her very being. A strong, lean hand yanked her back and up from the floor, and through two sets of senses at once she glimpsed him.
The
murderer
who’d
tried
to
assassinate
the
duke
loomed
over
him
,
and
his
entire
body
writhed
in
protest
.
He
fought
once
more
to
leap
to
his
feet
,
but
he
couldn’t
shake
the
weakness
that
crushed
him
to
the
floor
—no, no, he was the man who’d come to save her, and she tried to cling to him even as she struggled in his insistent arms.