Valor of the Healer (31 page)

Faanshi saw the other Hawk now, one of the two figures that wore the amulets crying out against them with their light. He threw himself forward ahead of the duke, only to stumble into the range of Kirinil’s working. His features contorted, and the sword he’d drawn clattered from his fingers to the floor. “Kes?” he blurted, strength draining from his voice.

Before Faanshi or any of the others could react, the duke sprang after him. In a hiss of steel he drew his sword. A breath later he had it at the Hawk’s throat. “Surrender at once, Vaarsen,” he commanded, “or by gods, I’ll ruin you and your partner both.”

Why Julian and Alarrah didn’t strike with blade and bow Faanshi couldn’t tell, but the faltering of the gun in Kestar’s grasp, without his firing a shot, was all too plain. Guilt stabbed across his face as he watched Celoren stumble, and when a new voice called out, his eyes went hot with shame and sorrow.

“I don’t care what fugitives you’ve cornered. In the name of all that’s holy, do not shed blood upon this sacred ground!”

The man who shouted charged into the chapel, only to be shoved into the nearest doorjamb by the one wearing the other glowing amulet. Father Enverly. Faanshi’s blood ran cold once more in that instant of recognition. “I’m afraid you’re outranked here, Abbot Grenham,” he said, and he didn’t sound afraid at all. “Pray do not interfere.”

“You cannot allow an armed brawl in our chapel!”

“Human, we have even less interest than you in our blood spilling upon this ground.” Kirinil’s voice bit like winter into the bone. His magic pulsed out from where he stood, and two of the duke’s guards blanched and dropped their weapons as Celoren had dropped his. The youngest of the guardsmen bolted, starring himself as he scrambled back outside, his face blank with fear.

“Damn you for white-bellied cowards!
Hold
!” roared the duke, to no avail. Celoren thrashed against him, driving an elbow into the older man’s body and setting off a jab of pain that provoked Faanshi’s power once more. Alarrah seized her by the shoulders before she could move, and she didn’t resist. No matter how loudly it shrieked, she didn’t want to loose her magic upon the man who had been her master.

Kestar lunged forward, turning his gun in his hand to swing it as a club and crying out his partner’s name.

Grappling with one Hawk, seeing another charging his way, the duke howled, “Enverly! Do it! Now!”

Without warning, the priest seized and stabbed one of the duke’s own guards. Then, his bloodied knife held high in one hand, his amulet in the other, he strode several paces into the chapel. He began to chant harsh, low words in a tongue that Faanshi didn’t know. His amulet’s blaze lashed forward in a flood of molten light. Celoren’s amulet flared in reply, catching the fire and flinging it ahead through the chapel, and Kestar stumbled as the light washed over him. He pawed at his chest, where something burned white-hot through the muffling layers of his clothing. Alarrah wailed beside her and fired several arrows in rapid, desperate succession. Someone shrieked, and two bolts of pain, dark and jagged against the whiteness, drove Faanshi to her knees. She could scarcely see. But she could still hear Father Enverly’s chanting, sonorous and cold.

In terror she realized what he was doing, for she and Kestar both had heard these words. But there was no time to scream a warning or even a prayer. Kirinil’s power pulsed anew, roiling over and past her body, trying to push back the light.

Then the light pushed back, and the entire chapel shook. Faanshi caught only glimpses of figures collapsing to their knees, and of Kestar being thrown to the floor. All else was lost in the brilliance. In its heart a figure coalesced, and Faanshi was all at once grateful that she’d fallen, for she could not possibly have kept her feet before the manifestation of the Voice of the Gods. All the light in the chapel rushed together to give Her form, to make Her tall and terrible, towering above the lesser beings surrounding Her. Silver and white and blue She glowed, crowned and clad in radiance, and as She took shape, Enverly’s chanting crescendoed into a final discernible call.

“Blessed Anreulag, accept this sacrifice offered up in Thy name! Consume and Cleanse the taint of unholy power from the blood of these unbelievers, so that they may face the justice of the gods!
Ani
a
bhota
Anreulag
,
arach
shae
!”

Her head snapped round to those at the altar, and Her gaze was as blank and as searing as living lightning. All thought in Faanshi’s mind charred into ash beneath that stare. She couldn’t think where to flee or hide herself. Voices shouted—the guardsmen crying out prayers, the duke thundering hoarse commands, Kirinil breathing a fervent string of Elvish syllables that sounded like a prayer of his own as his magic buckled. Alarrah kept firing, aiming for the apparition that floated now in the chapel’s very center. In brief bright wisps of flame, her arrows vanished without reaching their target.

A weight slammed into her and a voice barked in her ear, “Stay down!”

Julian was a shadow, a shield against the glare, and Faanshi ducked back down without hesitation. Her every nerve screamed in echoed pain, and she twisted beneath the Rook while the altar and the candles on it shattered behind them. She didn’t want to look, oh Great Lady of Time, she did not want to see. But her power was roused, roaring right back out of her hard-built mental hearth, and it pinned her attention on the form of the Hawk sprawled in a boneless heap in the aisle between the pews.

I
just
healed
him
. The thought felt tiny and petulant in the face of the being before them all.

And then she moved, writhing out from under the assassin with agility she hadn’t known she possessed. Whether it was truly hers or something from Kestar Faanshi didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered save reaching his fallen form. He was stunned, she could tell, winded enough that he couldn’t move. The gun had dropped from his hand, leaving him defenseless. As she sprang for him, Julian caught her and shoved her back to the floor with all his strength. “Gods damn it, girl, I told you to—”

Before he could finish, the Anreulag struck.

Blue-white fire from Her upraised hands speared the Rook full in the chest. An agonized howl unlike any Faanshi had ever heard before ripped from him. A stench of scorched flesh assaulted the air. Julian fell heavily down beside her, and for one horrifying instant she glimpsed what the unearthly fire had done to him. There was no blood, but his flesh was distorted now, dark and seared.

Her mind went blank under a second fiery assault, shock and grief and Julian’s overwhelming pain. Then her magic erupted.

A deep concussive boom centered on her rattled her hearing. Golden light hurtling up from her on all sides flooded her sight, washing over the forms of the two men beside her and the pews that surrounded them. Only through touch could she find Kestar and Julian, and she could barely reach them, even kneeling between them. She could see nothing save the Anreulag, looming like dawn incarnate.

Somewhere outside the light Enverly shrieked, “Cleanse their taint away from Thy sight, Blessed One!”

Flame blazed forth from the Anreulag’s outstretched hand, leaving Faanshi no time for any thought save keeping the holy fire from reaching Julian and Kestar. Her hands refused to break contact with either man, and so she tugged them closer, ignoring the strain that tore through the muscles of her arms. Julian thrashed in her grasp, a throaty, gurgling scream clawing out of his ravaged throat. Her magic arced over them just as a massive, crushing force slammed into its shielding brilliance.

The impact jolted her through blood and flesh and bone, straight down into the floor on which she huddled, and Faanshi’s own scream drowned within the reverberating crash of heavy wooden pews hurled toward the chapel walls. She could only pray that Alarrah and Kirinil would be able to flee, for she could do nothing for them. She could do nothing but cradle Julian to her with one arm and pour her power unstinting into his body, and cling with her other arm to Kestar. The Hawk stirred and, with desperate strength, embraced them both.

Other voices shouted. She couldn’t tell whose. Only Father Enverly’s ongoing chanting, lifted now to a strident pitch, was clear in her ears. Even that vanished in the thunderclap of a voice that echoed through the chapel.

Her
voice, Faanshi realized, as the Anreulag screamed.

“
Ràe
elari
enno
sul
ve
carya
!
Enno
Amathilàen
korthiali
ràe
!”

The words shook the chamber to the rafters, and though they were as far beyond speech as a thunderstorm was beyond a spring rain, something in them caught at Faanshi’s hearing.
Elvish
? A squeak of a thought, no more, yet it—and the brief glimpses of Kirinil and Alarrah lifting their heads in shock—hauled her own sight upward. Through a veil of fire she beheld the Voice of the Gods, and all at once met Her eyes. They were locked on her, a yawning void far greater than the maw in the mind of the duke. Within it she glimpsed pain, and her magic keened. Already it enfolded Julian and Kestar, but it couldn’t bear another agony so near. It flared out, and Faanshi couldn’t find the will to pull it back.

The void wavered beneath her power’s onslaught, splintering into knife-edged shards. For an instant the Anreulag’s fire swept back into that shadowed vortex, and Faanshi saw Her with no veil of flame across her sight. Silver and blue dissolved, leaving only white—wild hair and gaunt features the color of bone, a billowing gown the hue of ancient snow. No longer was She a goddess, but rather a wraith, a wilted remnant of a deity’s might, Her voice diminished to a memory of thunder.

Then the Anreulag smiled, without joy. The void of Her eyes pulled at Faanshi, boundless, inexorable, eclipsing the inferno of Julian’s agony even as the healing refused to release him. Between the man she held and the ghostly shape hovering before them, her magic pulled thin and tight and threatened to rip the very core of her apart.

Kestar whispered in her ear, “Please, gods, no!”

His voice wasn’t much, a meager glimmer of resolve, but it gave Faanshi an anchor. Frantically, she latched on to it.

The Anreulag went still, pausing for a single eternal moment in the air. Then She vanished in a burst of flame and force that shattered every window of the chapel and flung Faanshi’s power back the way it had come. The magic struck her like a mountain, slamming her awareness back toward Julian and what had been done to him.

It was almost a relief to plunge into the healing, and lose herself in the light.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Silence tumbled down upon the chapel, so abrupt that the hammering of Kestar’s pulse in his ears deafened him, till other sounds edged into his awareness. One of the guardsmen openly sobbed, and another chastised him with angry vehemence. Urgent voices grew slowly louder around him. Abbey residents, come to see what devastation the Anreulag had wrought. He couldn’t make himself care about their presence; he could barely open his eyes.

But the slender form against his and the dim radiance that bathed her commanded his attention nonetheless. His breath catching, Kestar looked at the girl crumpled in his arms—only to find that he clasped not one body, but two. Faanshi, slack and unmoving, held the one-eyed assassin who’d stolen her out of the Camden church. His shoulders protested the effort of bracing their weight, but he couldn’t move. He could only stare at Faanshi’s face and wonder why he couldn’t seem to let her go.

“Human.” Only after Kestar blinked up at her several times did his sluggish wits identify the fair-haired she-elf. She still held bow in one hand, arrow in the other, as if ready to fire again at the slightest provocation. “You should release her now,” she said. Though it was quietly pitched, it had the timbre of a command.

I
should
arrest
her
. There were words to do just that, words any Hawk was sworn to utter when taking an elf prisoner. He opened his mouth to say them, and could muster no surprise at what came out instead. “I don’t want to drop her.”

The elf woman’s eyes, gold-tinged gray in the light of Faanshi’s power, didn’t soften. But she kneeled beside him, and her voice eased a fraction as she said, “I’ll see to her,
valann
.” Then, shifting Faanshi and the assassin out of his embrace, she slid a thoughtful glance past him. “You may wish to see to one of yours.”

It took him nothing at all to fathom who she meant.

“Cel.” He scrambled to his feet and whirled toward the back of the chapel in search of his partner. Pews lay strewn like storm-tossed twigs to his either side, and shards of glass dusted everything in sight. The chapel doors were flung wide, allowing lamplight and anxious voices to spill in from the courtyard. Abbot Grenham roared orders for those outside to keep back—and had seized Father Enverly by the front of his robes, pressing him back against one of the doors.

Kestar froze, and only then did he spy another slack form near the feet of the priests, one of the duke’s guards. No warm glow covered that body, and for one wild moment, he wondered if such magic would help.
No
, he thought then, appalled. Even from a distance, he could see blood pooling on the chapel floor, and damning red on the hands of Shaymis Enverly. Two more of the guardsmen had weapons drawn on the priest of Camden. Yet the rough handling didn’t daunt the older priest, who bellowed the instant he saw Kestar move.

“Vaarsen! I command you in the Anreulag’s name, surrender yourself this instant.”

Kestar ignored him, all his attention upon the wood and slate littering the floor. It was a miracle that the ceiling hadn’t collapsed, for pieces of rafters had ripped free of it, leaving holes through which the night wind stirred the clouds of dust that hung in the air. One fractured beam of heavy Kilmerry fir pinned the Duke of Shalridan and Celoren, who sprawled in what had previously been the aisle between the pews. Kilmerredes had taken the brunt of its weight and was facedown beneath it, golden hair disheveled and streaked with blood. Only the end of it had caught Celoren, and as Kestar hurried to crouch beside him, he moved.

“Cel, are you hurt?” Kestar’s throat tightened with guilt and panic. He hadn’t even seen the rafter fall.

“Kes.” His partner coughed. Dismay filled his face, but he took Kestar’s hand, and with his help sat up. His amulet was still out and shining, too bright to Kestar’s dazzled eyes. Celoren’s gaze dropped to it and then lifted once more, dark with doubt. “What have you done? Tell me you’re not—”

“Celoren Valleford, you will by gods take the prisoners into custody!” Enverly commanded.

“You, sir, have no authority here.” Abbot Grenham’s outburst overrode every other voice in the ruined chapel, striking the onlookers peering in from the courtyard mute with shock. Celoren’s head snapped toward the two clergymen in abject confusion. Though they were no longer in his line of sight, Kestar had the uncanny certainty that Faanshi’s elven companions had gone watchful and still.

“Don’t play rebel against me in this,” Enverly sneered. “You know the holy laws. You know what must be done with these unclean ones who taint this blessed sanctuary.”

Kestar might have believed his fervor—save for Faanshi’s memories threaded through his own. “It’s intriguing how one who champions holy law so ardently could turn a blind eye as his master hides a mage to keep her power to himself.”

Enverly sputtered in outrage, but buzzing voices just beyond the doors and another hard shove from Abbot Grenham cut the older priest off.

“Intriguing indeed,” Grenham said. “Interesting too how a mere parish priest has learned to profane the highest of rituals, to call down the Blessed One Herself—”

“Unhand me at once, sir, or I’ll call upon Her again to smash this place into rubble.”

“No, Father, I don’t think you will.” Grenham’s face was hard with steel-sure resolve. “You’re a murderer. I saw you take the life of His Grace’s man—and you couldn’t keep the Anreulag from nearly killing us all. Brother Gannon, Brother Iain, take him away and cut out his accursed tongue. So I command it be done, in the name of all the gods, to punish this spiller of blood. I won’t have the rest of my abbey destroyed or anyone else killed tonight.”

Two men stepped forth at Grenham’s order. Their faces as grim as their abbot’s, they seized the aging priest and ushered him out of the chapel as swiftly as they could propel him. His frenzied curses lingered in the air even after he was out of sight, but only until Grenham lifted his voice again.

“Let’s clear this debris away. Help me with His Grace and whatever other unfortunates may remain trapped herein.”

That drove two of the duke’s men and three of the young priests to the fallen rafter. Two more picked their way through the fractured pews to the far side of the altar, where Kilmerredes’s rear guard had come in no farther than the boundary of Kirinil’s magic. One of those lay silent beneath a pew that leaned askew against a wall, but his comrade was stirring, coughing weakly. Celoren hoisted himself to his feet, stumbling as he strove to keep everyone in sight, but Kestar felt strangely disinclined to move. Only as he saw the captain of the guardsmen pausing nearby did he too rise, and then only because the man was eying him askance, along with the elves and the two glowing figures in the middle of the floor.

“Father,” Captain Follingsen said, his hand upon the hilt of his sword, “there still remains the matter of the prisoners.”

Frowning, Grenham approached the Hawks. His gaze slid past them to the elves, then down to Faanshi and the assassin, with palpable uneasiness. At last he looked back to Kestar, and though the consternation didn’t leave his face, his voice remained resolute. “Lord Vaarsen, do you and Sir Valleford have these individuals in hand?”

Kestar glanced at Celoren; Cel looked as startled as he felt. Gods above, he didn’t want to face the elves, nor to think of Faanshi’s awareness subsumed in the mending of the assassin’s burned and broken form. He even felt the other man’s pain on the edges of his senses, because Faanshi felt it first. “Yes, Father,” he said, as firm as he could manage, though more hoarse than he liked.

Grenham nodded once. “Then I’ll leave Hawk business to the Hawks.” With a sidelong glance, he added to the guard captain, “And I trust that you’ll now attend to your master.”

The captain grimaced but without argument followed the abbot to the injured duke. Grenham shouted orders to clear the way for the abbey physician, and Kestar finally turned to those just behind him.

On her knees at Faanshi’s side, frowning, the elf woman had her hand on the girl’s brow. Her male companion stood behind her, his stance protective, and as Kestar met his eyes, he said, “Well, human? Will you give us all now to your gods?”

“Kes,” Celoren moaned.

Not daring to spare Cel a single look, Kestar focused instead on the heat of his amulet against his chest. He couldn’t discern it in the midst of Faanshi’s power, yet some nuance in the blessed silver’s warmth told him the elf woman was working magic as well—lesser magic than the girl’s, but magic nonetheless. As if she sensed his scrutiny, she lifted her head and looked at him, saying nothing. He was grateful for that. His head ached with the weight of the choice before him, and any words would have pierced him like knives.

Not one, not two, but three elf-blooded mages, and a human collaborator as well. The Anreulag hadn’t destroyed them, or
him
. Kestar couldn’t fathom why, when elven blood in his veins made him as culpable as the girl he was supposed to apprehend. Did it change anything at all?

Did it change his avowed duty?

“You,” he said at last to the woman, nodding toward Faanshi, “you’re a healer? Like her?”

“A healer,” she affirmed. “But not like her.” Pride briefly lit her eyes. Or perhaps it was challenge, for her gaze flickered to Kestar’s chest, to the place where his wound had been.

“Not like her,” he murmured. The absence of pain was an ache in and of itself, searing him from within, tangible enough to brush against his skin and change the taste of the air. It didn’t banish the oppressive sense that a great doom had only just missed him and would soon descend upon him in earnest. But it did illumine a course for him to take.

“When they can leave this place under their own power,” he said to the elves, nodding down to Faanshi and Julian, “you’ll have that head start.”

* * *

In the end they moved Faanshi and the assassin to one of the storerooms—the very one, it turned out, through which she and her companions had infiltrated the abbey in the first place. No one seemed brave enough to approach them after Abbot Grenham’s order, and the two elves at any rate would allow none but Kestar himself to assist them with their charges. He sent Celoren to make certain that a pallet was prepared for them, while he lingered in the ruined chapel and helped the she-elf move the two limp forms onto a makeshift litter. It took care, for the grip of the maiden’s arms around the man could not be broken. Nor was Kestar at ease touching them, for fear that he might somehow disrupt the magic.

But the thing was done at last. At the storeroom door Kestar watched as the elf woman kneeled beside the still figures and reached with a strangely deferential touch for the assassin’s head. Her fingers drew forth from his skull something that gleamed in the healing light—a glass eye. Then, drawing a knife, she sliced through the black cloth of his sleeve and the leather straps beneath. When the shape of a gloved hand fell away from his empty wrist, she caught it. Kestar wasn’t surprised. He’d seen the man fight only with his left hand, and he’d felt the weight of the false one on his own skull.

A footstep beside him proclaimed that he was no longer alone, but he didn’t turn his head. “I know his name, Cel,” Kestar whispered.
Julian
. Whatever he was, assassin or thief, Faanshi’s abductor or her liberator, his name had meaning to her, though he grasped only its echo. “Because she does.”

“Are they going to be all right?” Celoren asked.

With a pang, mindful of what that question must have cost, Kestar turned to meet his eyes. “Her magic’s keeping him from death.” He paused. The elves’ names hadn’t come to him through Faanshi as the assassin’s had, and he didn’t know what to call them.
Prisoners
didn’t suit. Nor did
guests
, and the thought of simply asking their names seemed awkward beyond measure. Finally he settled for nodding toward the pair keeping vigil over the entwined forms upon the pallet. “Or so they tell me. His flesh has been burned from within...”

With that Kestar’s voice died in his throat, for he still couldn’t credit why the Anreulag had left any of them alive.

“Abbot Grenham’s given orders that they...
we
...aren’t to be disturbed.” Celoren’s brow furrowed. “And he’s confiscated Father Enverly’s amulet...on top of what the priests have done to him.”

“Which reminds me.” Kestar reached beneath his shirt for his hidden pouch. Then he shook his knotwork pendant out and held it up, aglow in his grasp. “Are you going to ask me for mine?”

His partner straightened to his full height, comprehension dark and heavy in his eyes, aging him past his years. “The Order would call it my duty.”

“And what do you say your duty is?”

“You asked me in Camden if I trusted you.” Celoren blew out a slow breath. “Kes, my answer hasn’t changed.”

“Hasn’t it? I drugged you. I took Pasga.”

“And I let Father Enverly make me think you’d lost your mind even when I knew better—when I should have kept on trusting you. I think that makes us even.”

Relief he could barely acknowledge, much less express, stole through him. He stared at his partner, and his partner stared back, apologies unspoken yet accepted palpable between them. It wasn’t the uncanny attunement he’d achieved with Faanshi, but it was strong and it was honest, and Kestar welcomed it with all his heart.

Tentatively, Celoren asked then, “What will you do?”

Kestar dropped his gaze to his amulet, still hanging from his hand. “Once...” His voice hitched, for he’d not yet accustomed himself to uttering the names that had so thoroughly upended his existence. “Once Faanshi and Julian are able to move, the elves will take them away from this place. I promised them they’d have until the next morning before anyone launches a search.”

“Will you go with them?”

“You and I both know I can’t be in the Order anymore.” That was no answer, though Kestar could think of none other to offer. He couldn’t fathom any chance that the elves or Julian would welcome his presence, even if they’d risked their lives along with Faanshi’s so that she could heal him. “More than that I don’t know.”