The merchant grunted and took a bit longer than he could have to reply. “At this point, I’ll take whatever you think she’s worth. Yuhltse.” It was a strange name, to be sure, and even stranger to hear coming from the man’s lips—almost as if he cursed both her and her name for invoking his first.
The High Priestess blinked slowly. “This would be the first time you’ve come to me without a price in mind.”
“Well, it’s the first time I’ve had to damage something I meant to sell you.”
Yuhltse’s eyes widened a little in her pale face. She glanced at Rahlizje in the cart, who, even in the returning haze of her fever, was surprised by the merchant’s guarded referral to her as merely something he meant to sell. It shouldn’t have surprised her, after all, but how many men discussed poor philosophy and took extreme measures and searched for healers to alleviate a sickness in a belonging with little more worth than the number of coins it might fetch?
The High Priestess tilted her head and slowly returned her attention to the merchant. “You leave me to judge her worth. Very well. It’s a welcome surprise, merchant, but when you return, I expect you to bring me what I asked of you. No more surprises.”
“Aye.”
She looked Taltaz up and down, just like the priest had minutes before, then turned on her heels and disappeared again from Rahlizje’s view and then the stone courtyard around them.
For a few more excruciatingly long seconds, Taltaz stood beside the cart, his back turned toward Rahlizje, and the only sound came from the wind whistling through the passage leading down from this interminably strange place. The thief cleared her throat, and an unintended moan quickly followed. “The temple witch,” she croaked.
Taltaz turned slowly to look at her, reflecting a surprising amount of remorse within one narrowed, glistening eye. “In a manner of speaking.”
“This is it, then.” Rahlizje tried to push herself up straighter against the side of the cart, but her arms were far weaker than she’d expected, and her head lolled toward her shoulder without obeying her commands to hold steady. “You’ll recover your costs and be on your way.”
“Aye.” He grabbed the waterskin and approached her with it again for a final drink from the man who’d hunted her, captured her, strung her up in the back of the cart, and shot her through the leg with his crossbow. “I won’t lie to you, thief,” he said as Rahlizje guzzled as much of the water as she could bear; most of it dribbled down her chin and disappeared into the pile of woolen blankets tucked around her neck and shoulders. “I shot you down for pushing your luck that night, but I don’t expect you’ll find the same kindnesses here as you found with me.”
Rahlizje chuckled wryly and swung her head toward him to meet his gaze. Her eyes wouldn’t stay in one place no matter how hard she wished to focus, and she blinked heavily. “More talk of your kindness.”
“Piss-poor philosopher, aye.” The merchant rested his forearm on the cart’s siderail and leaned toward her. “Keep your head down. Do what they ask of you. Trying to run from this place…” He sucked in a sharp breath through his teeth and gazed quickly about the stone courtyard. “Might be I did you a favor with that leg.”
“Sounds like—” She wheezed out a groan at the flash of searing heat throbbing up her calf and all the way into her knee. “Only if it kills me.”
“It won’t.” He sniffed. “Not now that you’re here. These people—”
“Merchant.”
Taltaz turned away from her and straightened.
The priest who’d greeted them first headed toward them across the courtyard once more, accompanied by two others. Both of these news strangers also boasted the beads and silver rings plaited through their hair, thick black cloaks flapping about their ankles as their own bare feet whispered across the cold stone beneath them. These other two stopped just behind the first priest, eyeing Taltaz with the same level of emotionless appraisal. “Fifty for the shipment, as usual.” From within the dark folds of his cloak, the priest produced a massive purse that could not have held only fifty coins, no matter their color. “You’ve been offered three times as much for the… unexpected gift. Do you accept?”
Rahlizje would very much have liked to see the merchant’s face in that moment. The only thing she did see was Taltaz’s shoulders stiffen. He lifted his hand, paused, then offered his reply by snatching the massive purse from the priest’s outstretched hand. The purse clinked heavily, and he glanced down at his belt and the smaller purse tied to it there. Rahlizje noticed the small purse, how inconsequential it was in comparison, and caught the glint of her own dagger still strung through the merchant’s belt. She’d had that weapon for years, and for the first time since, she knew she would never hold it again.
The priest cocked his head in mocking formality, as if he very much despised the act of trading with a man from the outside world. “Until your return.”
Taltaz hefted the massive purse, nodded curtly, and turned toward the front of the wagon to climb upon the driver’s bench.
Not a word was spoken as the three black-cloaked figures approached the back of the cart to relieve it of their new prize. The back gate creaked open as it lowered, and Rahlizje did not see which one of them whipped the pile of blankets off her sickness-ravaged body. The bitingly cold air did not chill her but only made her feel pricked with wetness, which made sense when she realized her relatively new clothing from the old woman at Gileath Junction was soaked with sweat. She tried to stare down the two unspeaking priests as they reached for her, but the fever haze washed over again with such a vengeance that all she registered was one of the dark forms jumping up into the wagon with her.
A hiss of disgust escaped the man. Rahlizje’s heavy head swung down toward her chest, and she caught a brief glance of her exposed leg—swollen grotesquely now, her red-streaked flesh bulging in darker shades above and below where Taltaz had wrapped the wound in what makeshift bandages he possessed. Blackened stains had dried upon those bandages, rendered nearly invisible by the greenish hue of something quite clearly not blood. Even in her daze, she knew that nothing of what she saw heralded a swift and painless recovery.
Rough hands gripped her under the arms, and the nameless priest dragged Rahlizje from her propped resting place toward the wagon’s lowered gate. She gritted her teeth against the agony of her festering leg as it scraped across the wooden slats. Perhaps she heard her own voice in the low moan following her; perhaps it was merely the wind in the pass again.
When the priest lifted her from the cart and tried to offer her the chance to stand, she could not. The black-stone courtyard whirled around her, and she felt herself drop to meet it. The priest, however, caught her swiftly under the arms again with a grunt, and the second voiceless man moved more quickly than she thought possible. She thought she cried out when her legs were lifted from the stone floor, but everything blurred in her vision now, and a thick, quickening rush filled her ears to drown out everything else.
The man who’d paid handsomely for the fevered thief turned slowly toward the wall of rock again, and his acolytes followed, carrying their burden between them as if she weighed nothing. Rahlizje heard and saw nothing more of the merchant of Gethlem beyond the click of his tongue and the clopping of his horse’s hooves echoing through the courtyard. Then the darkness took her.
Chapter 12
Rahlizje awoke in a dark room, surrounded by flickering candles and shivering violently. A shuddering breath hissed through her teeth, and the sound of it echoed around her. From amid the dancing shadows on the dark stone walls of whatever chamber in which she’d been deposited, another black-cloaked figure appeared. The woman couldn’t have been much older than Rahlizje by more than a few years; while the thief could not say for certain how many years she’d lived herself, her best estimate was somewhere between twenty-five and thirty.
It was difficult to pinpoint anything more about this new woman in the black cloak, mostly due to the short cut of her hair. Obviously
, it had had some time to grow back into a semblance of hair again, but it was uneven and patchy in different lengths all over her head, as if some young boy had tried his hand at shearing her instead of one of his father’s sheep.
The woman slipped quietly across the floor toward Rahlizje on narrow, bare feet. Her gaze started at the thief’s boots and traveled slowly across the low pallet until she settled on Rahlizje’s eyes. “It’s good that you woke on your own. We didn’t know if you would.”
“Now you know,” Rahlizje muttered through chattering teeth. “But if I don’t wake again, might be the cold that kills me.”
The short-haired woman offered a brief smile of only slight amusement before kneeling beside the pallet. “Quite the opposite. The cold is the breath of Arahaz. You’ll learn that soon enough.”
“And you’re here to teach me. Is that it?”
“No.” The woman dipped her head and studied Rahlizje’s face. “The fever makes you useless. You won’t be learning anything until it’s gone. That is why I’m here.” She pressed the back of her hand to the thief’s forehead for a few seconds, then each cheek, then the hollow of Rahlizje’s throat. Only then did the wounded prisoner realize she’d been relieved of her cloak before being laid out here to sweat in the candlelight. “Tell me what happened.”
“You can heal this?” A round of coughing left Rahlizje’s throat sore and raw. She had little enough strength to turn her head toward the women kneeling beside her.
“Yes. But only if you start from the beginning.”
Rahlizje had no idea just which beginning this woman wanted to hear, but as far as she was concerned, the only one that mattered was the beginning that had left her lying prone and shivering on the floor of a stone chamber. “The merchant shot a bolt through my leg with his crossbow.” The woman’s eyes widened just a little, and Rahlizje swallowed heavily. “A day later, I was fever-mad.”
“How many days since?”
The thief dredged up what she could of her memories between that night and now, but none of it made sense even to her. “A fortnight at least. I don’t know.”
The woman nodded. “We’ll see how true your memory is.” She shifted beside the pallet until she knelt in front of Rahlizje’s legs—one healthy and strong and covered by her dark breeches, the other grotesquely swollen above and below the putrid bandages and exposed to the cold air of the chamber. The woman paused and frowned at the infected wound. “Did any woman lay eyes on you after this began?”
Rahlizje swallowed and shook her head. She wanted to sit up and cast the woman a skeptical glance; it was a truly odd question to be asked. But while her wits had returned to her some, at least for now, her strength had not. “Not that I’m aware.”
“I thought not.” The woman snorted and set to untying the laces of Rahlizje’s boot beneath her swollen calf and ankle. “Men are idiots. It never occurs to them how many things restrict a body. Unless they’re removing their breeches.”
The thief blinked and thought she felt a smirk on her own lips. “I may be an idiot as well, then.”
Large, gray eyes turned to study Rahlizje in disbelief. “You’ve never worn a corset?” Rahlizje merely shook her head; even that small movement against the straw pallet beneath her made her dizzy. The woman shrugged and returned her attention to the thief’s boot. “Well, at the very least, you’re in the right place to continue that practice. Try not to move, if you can help it. This won’t be the worst of it.” With no more warning than that, the woman tugged at the heel of Rahlizje’s boot.
A mixed agony of searing heat, the ghost of that crossbow bolt stabbing through her flesh, and a constant, dull ache flared in Rahlizje’s leg. It moved from her toes all the way to her thigh now, and she gritted her teeth against it with a sharp breath. The woman’s hands were gentle enough as she cradled the thief’s swollen ankle, dropped the boot, and lowered the fevered leg to the pallet once more. Then she pulled a small sickle knife from the belt at her black robes and set to cutting away the strips of cloth Taltaz had used as bandaging. Rahlizje could not have said whether the merchant had changed these makeshift dressings once, twice, or not at all since the night they’d become a necessity. She highly doubted it would have mattered after the fever had overtaken her mind.
The bandages clung to her flesh with surprising resistance before they were peeled away. The woman worked slowly and methodically, and the loosening bandages left Rahlizje’s ankle, calf, and knee alternating in waves of blazing heat and tingling cold. The thief could smell the sickness in her own limb now, which rivaled by far the stench she’d carried into Gileath Junction after having soiled herself in Taltaz’s cart as a mere attempt to shatter the man’s stoicism. Everything she’d tested, prodded, and tried to provoke within the merchant of Gethlem seemed like a childishly foolish game, now. Not once had he crumbled beneath her aggravating rebellion, and Rahlizje realized now that she should have recognized his fortitude the first time he’d pulled her to the ground and pressed her dagger against her throat with a very clear warning to cry off her pursuits. The fact that no one until then had resisted the thief’s pressure made it that much easier for her to doubt his conviction. That was, of course, what had led her to this moment now—lying on straw in a candlelit chamber, just short of writhing in agony as her prisoner’s wound was freed from its own bonds, inspected, and summarily prodded in kind.
‘You did this to yourself,’ Taltaz had said. Only now did she begin to see the truth of it, perhaps because there truly was no foreseeable way to undo what had happened. Not yet, at any rate.
To focus herself on anything but the pain, Rahlizje studied the short-haired woman’s profile. No doubt the malodor of infection was far worse for the robed woman than for the thief herself, but Rahlizje found no sign of disgust, resentment, or horror on her caretaker’s features. There was only a focused determination to see the whole of the thief’s wounds and—if the woman could truly relieve the sickness, as she’d said—to perform the necessary actions to root it out.
With a lingering glance at Rahlizje’s leg, the woman stood and moved quietly on bare feet toward the far wall of the chamber. She lifted a stone bowl from a table rising no more than a foot from the floor and returned with it to the pallet. Water trickled from the soaked rag the woman rung out over the bowl, and Rahlizje thought she smelled a faintly floral smoke wafting toward her. That, of course, could have also been the fever.
The rag, though, most definitely had not been soaked in merely water. Water did not burn like this in any wound, no matter how advanced the sickness spreading from it. Rahlizje shouted in surprise and pain and tried to jerk her leg out from under the woman’s administering hands. She did not expect those hands to deliver such a powerful grip. The woman kept Rahlizje’s leg exactly where it was, pressing her own weight onto it just enough to catch the thief’s attention with a subtle warning. She did not look up from the exposed flesh of her patient’s calf, which was dangerously inflamed with streaks of bright, angry red crawling across every visible inch of it.
Rahlizje cleared her throat. “That’s quite enough.”
The woman slowly turned her head and blinked. “I think not. I’ve been told to heal you, and that’s exactly what I intend to do.”
A dry croak of a laugh burst from Rahlizje’s lips. “And I suppose you’ve always done what you’re told.” She tried to nod at her leg, but lying on her back made it especially difficult. “I’m telling you now to stop. There must be some other way to heal this leg without it feeling like I’ve been shot a second time.”
With raised eyebrows, the woman dropped the cloth into the bowl, set both her hands on the stone floor beside the pallet, and leaned toward Rahlizje’s face. “Wherever you’ve come from, whatever you’ve done, know this. There are rules here, and each of us does as we are told. You no longer hold the reins of your own fate, and you’d do well to remember that.”
“I hold enough of it still.” Rahlizje grunted. “At this point, I’d wag
er I’m just far gone enough to choose my own death over whatever waits for me here.”
“Perhaps.” The woman nodded slowly. “Not for much longer. Once I’ve finished with you, your body will be whole. But it will no longer belong to you.”
For a few seconds, Rahlizje could only stare at the stranger with shorn hair who might or might not have been a legitimate healer. Her eyes narrowed. “If you expect me to answer your riddles, you will be sorely disappointed.”
“The only answers I need will come from this leg of yours and the time it takes to mend under my care. Everything else is for your mistress.”
A smirk spread across Rahlizje’s lips despite her overwhelming discomfort. She felt the first sheen of sweat rising again at her temples and beneath her chin. “I don’t suppose that would be you, then.”
The woman cast her a condescending glance before returning to her ministrations on the thief’s infection. Her sickle knife dipped quickly into the stone bowl of smoke-scented water, then she pressed the very tip of it against the crust that had dried on her charge’s wound. Rahlizje forgot to breathe under the swift, sharp pain of her flesh being opened again, just a bit at a time. The woman’s grip just below her knee tightened with unbelievable strength before the tip of that tiny blade pressed flat against the red-streaked flesh of Rahlizje’s calf.
The thief had just enough presence of mind left in her to feel some part of her skin burst open to release the sickness building there. Then the agony of what this short-haired woman called healing joined with the rising tide of fever, and Rahlizje lost consciousness again.
Playing With Fire Page 108
