Healer's Touch

by Kirsten Saell

  “Only because he chose to make it so,” Karal growled. “He could have taken her will, forced her to do all manner of terrible things. He could have made her cut her own throat if he wanted, and neither of you could have stopped him.”

  She started to get angry again, but then remembered Aru’s own words. It has gone too far. I cannot trust myself.

  “He would never do such a thing…” she said, needing to believe it.

  “He’s not Darjhian, Viera,” Karal snapped. “He’s Omahru-azhi. He would have you believe his Power was taken away when he fell, but that simply isn’t true. It changed as he did. It…fell. That’s why he can’t heal without aid. He can no longer use his Power to give life—only to take it.”

  She swallowed past the knot of unease in her throat. The aftereffects of too much drink and the wildness of the last few hours combined with her dread had set her stomach churning. “How do you know this?”

  “I saw things during the war.” His hand came up to stroke her hair. “I was at the siege of Barrago’s Hold. There were six thousand of us, fifty thousand Bal-shar. The Hold was built for war, surrounded on three sides by unscalable cliffs. Its curtain wall is ten feet thick and fifty high, easily defended by the fifteen hundred Andun who sheltered behind it. Lord Martin had turned its approach into a maze of kill-zones. Any enemy foolish enough to attack the fortress would take hundreds, thousands of losses before they even made it to the walls. But we didn’t need to attack. The week before, Lord Martin had sent all of his small-folk north, and nearly all the rations with them. The men in the keep were soldiers out of Stonehall, and they’d brought with them only as much as they could readily carry. Food for a week—two if they stretched it. Once we poisoned the water source, they knew there was nothing for it. All we had to do was wait.”

  “I didn’t know you were a soldier.”

  “The Oath made soldiers of us all, every man, woman and child.” His hand crept to her nape, idly massaging the muscles there. “I took up my first sword before I learned how to hold a quill, but I’d never seen real combat before. Mordraghil had emptied the whole of the Dragon’s Head for the offensive, all of us, from spot-faced adolescents to graybeards to women round with child. We’d already taken heavy losses. The Anduni garrison had booby-trapped Stonehall’s keep with our own munitions. The explosion took out over four hundred of our men and thousands of Bal-shar. Up to that point, it was all going our way, but Stonehall shattered our confidence. When we pinned the bastards in Barrago’s Hold, we all figured luck was back on our side. There was no easy way to get in the keep, but no way for them to get out, either. All we had to do was set up a barricade and patrol the surrounding country to repel siege-breakers. We had more than enough men left for that.

  “The third night everything went to shite” he said, his voice lowering until she had to strain to hear him. “They came on us without warning. From the west, where we had not thought to post a watch. We never expected the Protected Lands to be a threat. Why would we? No man with an ounce of Anduni blood could pass their Net of Warding, and the Darjhi were harmless…or so we believed. These warriors, though, they were Darjhian, but…not. We didn’t know what to call them then. It wasn’t until much later that we learned the name Omahru-azhi. Learned to fear it.”

  “Cael’s Four Thousand,” Viera said, thinking of the songs. “They say he lost not one man.”

  “No one really believes that,” he said softly. “But I saw it with my own eyes. Saw what fell arts they employed to survive that battle. For the first while, we thought we had them. They were faster and stronger than us, but our Kurgan troops alone had them outnumbered by half, and we’d been starving the Bal-shar for days, whetting their appetite for blood. But it wasn’t long before they’d cut a swath through the Bal-shar, hacking them down like saplings. Then they were on us. I took one of the fiends with my sword, sliced his belly wide open. And he just…shrugged it off. One moment his guts were spilling out, the next he was swinging his blade once more, as fierce as ever. But…he’d changed. Withered. When I looked at his shrunken face I thought him a cadaver.”

  “The walking dead,” Viera whispered, not wanting to hear the rest, not wanting to know what Aru was.

  “The walking dead,” Karal agreed. “Each wound he took aged him more until he was nothing but a skeleton with ragged leather for skin. And yet he was as strong as ever. He slashed my thigh to the bone—I almost bled to death on that field. I lay there, waiting for him to finish me, but he only kept hewing and hewing at the men around me until finally he cut one across the throat. Poor bastard fell right beside me, blood bubbling from his wound. And the fiend dropped down on him like a carrion bird on a carcass and I saw what he did then.”

  He fell silent and Viera pushed away from him, leaned back to look at his face. His eyes were closed, his brows drawn together over them. He had gone pale, sweat beading on his forehead and upper lip. Viera swallowed hard, looking him up and down from his rough-hewn face to his muscled arms and chest. She could not imagine a tougher-looking man, yet at the moment he was like a young boy revisiting a nightmare.

  Reaching up, she laid her hand on his cheek, felt the muscles working under her palm. He opened his eyes and looked at her. His face softened, his gaze turning incongruously tender, an emotion she had never seen in him. “I was told later that they take the spark, not the soul, but at the time all I could think was that these walking dead, not the Bal-shar, were the true children of Gorgorn. Eaters of Souls. I saw him conjure up the dying man’s spirit and devour it. The light passed into him and he grew young before my eyes, and then he breathed out a thin, trailing mist and it was done. He stood and began to fight once more. By then our men had begun to realize we could not win, that these ghouls possessed some devilry and could not be killed. Someone grabbed me under my arms and dragged me away. They threw me across a saddle and we rode. Barely a thousand of us left that battle alive, and not a single Bal-shar. And Cael of the Omahru-azhi lost not one single man.”

  Viera rose and went to her small pantry, wobbling a little from all the wine she’d drunk. She found her bottle of absinthe and poured two generous measures. Karal took his and nodded his thanks before tossing it back. Viera didn’t have the stomach to sip hers just yet. Sinking slowly down, she perched on the edge of the cushions beside him. She felt numb inside, as if all her nerve endings had frozen and broken off.

  They take the spark, not the soul. She repeated this to herself, tried to let it comfort her. “I always thought Aru held himself apart because of his wife. Because he would not break his vow to her. I never thought it was something like this. Has he ever…?”

  “Not to my knowledge. But how would anyone know? The Omahru-azhi have laws governing this conduct. They act in secret and take only Andun or Kurgae’in already on the bitter edge of death. That was why the one I fought did not take me. He could not do so until my death was a certainty.”

  Viera frowned at him. “But you were the enemy. It was war. Why wouldn’t he have killed you? Who would have held him in blame for that?”

  He shook his head. “They were there to aid the Andun against Mordraghil. They did only what they must to drive us off. They could have annihilated us, had they wished. Our retreat might as well have been a rout, but they didn’t even follow.”

  “So they have no blood-thirst.” She held to that until he pulled it ruthlessly from her grasp.

  “I didn’t say that.” He scowled at his empty cup. “Twelve years ago, when I lived in Sylphae, one of them went rogue. Defied their law and took a healthy child. When his crime was discovered, he fled south from Harweald to Sylphae, killing as he went. Cael’s own son was sent to stop him. By the time it was over, he had left more than a hundred Anduni dead in his wake, most of them children, and was so powerful for it, it was all Oren sur-Cael could do to put him down. All that youth, all that life…wasted to feed a monster. That is the fear of every Omahru-azhi. That is Aru’s fear. That his hunger for more life will be t
oo powerful to control. That one day he will become a monster, a ravening beast that must be put down.”

  She stared at the cup she still held in her shaking hand, feeling her insides go hollow. All of a sudden she realized how she must look—her hair a mess, her clothes stained and face-paint streaked with sweat and tears. She thought of the things she had done in that tavern—the things she had been prepared to do if Karal had not come when he did—and her mind flinched away from the memory. She didn’t want to imagine what Karal must think of her. Her throat felt thick with vomit and she tossed back her absinthe, letting its burning sweetness cleanse her.

  “I want to thank you for telling me this,” she whispered. “And for…finding me tonight. For being there.”

  He gave her his customary wordless grunt, rubbing his hands up and down his face. “What will you do?”

  “I’m going to talk to him.”

  “Viera, I don’t know…”

  She shook her head. “I can’t leave it like this. I need to talk to him. Even if we can’t be together. Even if…”

  “All right.” He sighed tiredly, nodding. “All right.” Pushing to his feet, he dabbed his bleeding chin with a finger.

  She gave him a wobbly smile. “Sorry.”

  “Never mind. Half the blood’s in your hair. It adds a pretty sheen.”

  She laughed in spite of herself.

  “I should go. We reopen the shop tomorrow afternoon. Inella will want an early start.”

  Viera rose to walk him to the door. “How’s she getting on?”

  “Strong as a soldier, when she isn’t sniveling.”

  Viera smiled. That was the most effusive praise she thought she’d ever heard out of his mouth. When he wasn’t in the middle of an orgasm, that is.

  She stood on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek. “Thank you for giving her this chance, Karal. You’re a good friend.”

  “You going to be all right?”

  “I am now. I’ll come by the shop tomorrow to say hullo.”

  “Tomorrow, then. Sleep well.”

  Aru let himself into the house. Nothing greeted him but the quiet creaks and sighs of an old building settling on its joints in the chill night. No sound of her, no flash and glow of her aura as she dreamed in her bed above. The burned-down candles still marked the path upstairs, the wilted petals drained of their scent after a single day. He ought to clear them away, but that was a task he could not face tonight.

  The infirmary was empty. There had been patients today, but nothing serious. Without Viera, he had no heart for the work and had sent them on to the Kurgan hospital.

  He thought about going upstairs, but he could not bring himself to sleep in either bed. Could not bring himself to lie where she had lain, to breathe the scent of her that still clung to the linens, to remember the sight of her body or the sounds of her passion. Even the infirmary was filled with her presence, with its narrow bed where she pleasured herself, feeding him her Power so that he could be strong once more in his own.

  There was mead in the kitchen. He went there, poured himself enough to intoxicate a water buffalo, drank it down. At the table where they had shared their meals, he laid his head on his hands and tried to forget what he had seen tonight.

  His forearms stung where they had scraped the brick wall of the tavern, but he did nothing to close the wounds. He wanted to hurt. In truth, part of him wanted to die after what he had seen tonight. In the alley outside the Bull’s Bollocks, surrounded by offal and vermin, he had stood pressed against that tavern wall, his eyes closed and his mind outside of himself, and watched what she did. What he had driven her to.

  All those men, vermin of a different sort. Those who had touched her and those who watched, waiting their turn. He would gladly hunt them down, every one, and spill their blood until the ground and his soul were soaked with it. Not just because they had dared lay hands on her, but because their touch had brought her no joy. Her aura, always so brilliant and many-colored when she took her pleasure, had been a sickly yellow, the dull hue of jaundice or pus. And the more she hurt, the more eager those men seemed to become.

  Aru had stood weeping in the alley, watching as his angel was pawed and debased, and he had done nothing, knowing if he went into that tavern, when he left not one of those men would be alive.

  Then Karal had come and carried her away. Aru had followed them, had stood in the street and watched the two of them in Viera’s apartment, had stayed there until Karal finally left. He had stayed while she made her preparations for bed. Her movements, even after the trauma and wildness of the evening, held a normalcy that soothed his raw emotions. He didn’t know what Karal had told her—the half-world of specters and spirits was a place of utter silence, and they had been too distant for his physical ears to detect their words. He did know that, despite his obvious arousal, Karal had not touched her beyond the giving of comfort.

  The kinder side of the double-edged sword that was Kurgan honor.

  Aru had stayed in the street outside her apartment until she found her bed and fell into an exhausted slumber. Then he’d gone home to his empty house. His empty life. And he promised himself he would never seek her out again. He could spare them both further pain. He could do that much.

  He drank and drank until the mead finally eroded the sharp, jagged edges of his guilt, and then he laid his head on the table and slept.

  Chapter Ten

  “Did you talk to her?” Inella asked without preamble the next morning.

  Just like a woman. The door hadn’t even shut behind her and already she was interrogating him.

  Karal kept his eyes fixed on his task, tipping powdered willow bark from a vellum funnel into two-dozen small phials. Even so, he felt his face go red to the roots of his hair. “I did.”

  “And?” She shrugged her cloak from her shoulders and hung it up, then crossed to him. Her hand settled on his forearm and he fought the urge to flinch at the sudden heat. Ever since that witch Viera had told him what she and Inella had done, he hadn’t been able to think straight. The two of them performing for Aru? Viera, he could imagine, but Inella? All he could think about all night was her blonde head moving between Viera’s thighs as she took the other woman with hands and lips and tongue.

  Except when he was imagining her doing the same to him.

  He flicked a glance at her concerned face, then scowled pointedly at her hand until she took the hint and removed it. Damn, he couldn’t even look her in the eye! How was he supposed to work with her now?

  “I found her in a tavern, making a spectacle of herself,” he said quellingly. “It wasn’t pretty.” Of course, now he was thinking about Viera dancing on that table, which wasn’t doing anything to soften his cock.

  “Is she all right?”

  He tapped the last of the powder into the phials and began to cork them. “She’s better. You were right. She deserved to know the truth.”

  Her hand was back on his forearm, squeezing gently. “Thank you, Karal.”

  Biting back a curse, he jerked his arm from her grasp, needing to get her away from him before his cock leapt out of his pants and started chasing her around the room. “Still plenty of work to do out front before we open.”

  She was silent for a moment, sniveling, no doubt. Ruthlessly crushing an inexplicable impulse to apologize, he risked a glance at her. She was glaring at him, but her eyes were dry. A spot of color brightened each cheek and her lips were pressed together in a thin, white line. “You’re quite the unmannerly sort, aren’t you?” was all she said before she brushed past him and through the door to the front of the shop.

  Alone in the back room, Karal let out a long breath and glowered down at his cock where it strained the seam of his trousers. “You’re going to get me into trouble,” he muttered.

  The pop of a shattering bottle sounded from the front room, followed by a mild oath. Cursing under his breath, Karal started to go check on her.

  “Karal?” she called, her voice beginning to trem
ble with concern. A familiar odor hit his nostrils, stinging the tender tissues inside. Paraxinal.

  “Shite,” he hissed, hurrying into the other room.

  “Karal?” she rasped, her frightened eyes flying to his face. At her feet, shards of green glass lay in a hissing, smoking puddle on the floorboards. Her hands gingerly held her skirts away from the fronts of her legs. Wet flecks spattered the hem, beginning to give off fumes.

  Hell and blood. “Get out of the puddle, Inella, it will burn through your boots. Did you get any on your skin?”

  She nodded, picking her way past the broken glass to a relatively clear spot in the center of the room. “Get me some soap and water, please,” she said with amazing calm.

  He reached for a jug of vinegar. “Soap will only make it worse.” Keeling in front of her, he pulled his knife from his belt and grabbed a handful of her skirt, cutting the fabric down the front from waist to hem. Her legs were bare above the tops of her boots and stockings, flecks of the corrosive liquid already reddening the skin on her shins. Uncorking the jug, he splashed a good amount on the burns, then pushed to his feet.

  She made no protest as he took her by the waist and lifted her up to sit on a barrel. Her skirts fell to either side of her lap, only her knee-length shift preserving her modesty. One at a time, he cut the laces of her boots and pulled them off, then soaked her stocking-clad feet with vinegar. Her hiss of indrawn breath drew his gaze to her face. Her eyes were closed, brows pulled down low in pain, but she didn’t even whimper. The vinegar would have neutralized the alkalinity of the paraxinal, but now it would be stinging fiercely on her burned skin. Salgrim’s prick, if he ever got his hands on that unorganized disaster that was Festil sur-Maracon, he’d dump a whole bottle of the caustic stuff right on his fucking head.

  “It’s all right,” he said, smoothing her hair back from her face. Her eyes opened and met his and she nodded. “I’ll get some salve.”

  She smiled tightly. “Third shelf from the bottom, on the far left.”