“Oh?” Milo replied, amusement in his voice. “Have you met all the mages in Aredia?”
Kali missed the boy's response. All of her concentration centered on the woman beneath her hands, to the flushed skin and labored breathing, to the agitated particles that swarmed around the Parsan villager's wounds like a hive of furious, crimson bees. Quickly, Kali layered her will across the minute particles in an effort to soothe them—and ease the woman's pain—before she turned her attention to the business of healing.
As Kali had done so many times today, she poured herself into the task. Not too much, for she was already lightheaded and weak from her efforts, but enough to speed along the woman's natural healing. Deep breaths. Focus. Kali’s concentration spiraled deeper, inward, to the place where names and identities fell away and everything was purely particles: the place where magic lived.
She nearly lost her focus when she stumbled upon something unexpected. At first, she had no way to quantify the strange essence within the Parsan's body as anything other than foreign. It was not like a sickness or a disease, but almost another living presence, like the sudden awareness of a spider crawling up the back of Kali’s leg. Casting her memory back, she recalled sensing something similar within Ytel, a Sufani nomad she'd healed during her journey to Whitewater City. Were thralls the connection between Ytel and this woman? Curious, Kali pushed her own focus closer to examine the oddity; it was like stepping into a dark room and fumbling for a way through.
“Mage Halcyon?”
It was not the sound of her name so much as the gentle touch against her shoulder that broke her concentration and left her gasping in surprise. Kali whirled to see Milo crouched beside her, blue eyes darting from her to the woman who lay quietly beneath her hands.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “You don't look so good.”
“It's to be expected, I'm afraid,” she replied. “Healing's a messy business.”
He paled a little, but shook his head. “No, I mean you look… ill, yourself.”
Kali held up her bloodstained hands and realized they were trembling. She felt weak and drained as well, but that was normal for any mage who’d been healing for several hours straight.
“Should I get Beacon?” he asked.
She nearly laughed. What could a sentinel mender do for any mage? Instead, she shook her head—slowly, for she was dizzy—and tried to give the younger man a comforting smile. “I'm fine, Milo. Just a little tired.”
The Parsan woman stirred, groaning, but did not open her eyes. Her son still hovered nearby, though he was in conversation with several of the elder villagers, occasionally gesturing to Kali and his mother. Another villager joined them: the tall, muscular woman who'd been guarding the door. She broke into the conversation and said something to the elders in a low tone while the boy frowned up between them all.
“Are you certain?” Milo asked Kali, still kneeling beside her.
There was nothing in his voice but concern and his face was open with worry. He looked too young to have pledged his life to an entity that would claim it in the worst possible way.
Sympathy swelled within her and Kali nodded. “Aye.”
“If you say so,” he replied dubiously. Then he added, “I hope you're right. The sergeant will have my right hand if anything happens to you.”
Her mouth opened but speech froze within her throat. No doubt Milo said the words in jest, as only a reference to his duty as a sentinel, but they cut her to the quick. She refused to look around the room for him and instead turned her gaze back to her patient. Focus on your task.
“I'm fine,” she heard herself say again. “Let me just make sure she will be.”
Milo looked as if he were about to reply, but the tread of heavy boots made both him and Kali glance up to the blacksmith who now stood above them. “I need your help, Serla Sentinel,” she said to Milo. “Doors are busted off their hinges; I need a strong back to support their weight while I mend ‘em.”
“I'm afraid I'm needed here, ser,” Milo said.
“Everyone else is either dead, injured, or busy with those that are,” the blacksmith said. She lifted a brow. “I'll make it worth your while,” she added slowly, meaningfully.
Any other time, Kali would have chuckled at the implication; now, she was too drained to find the blacksmith's gambit amusing.
Milo didn’t bat an eyelash. “I'm sorry,” he said again. “But I have orders not to leave Mage Halcyon's side. Perhaps I can help you when we're finished.”
The blacksmith pursed her lips in consideration, eyes flickering to Kali, then back to the sentinel before she sighed deeply. “That’s a real shame, serla. There's just so much to do, and not nearly enough time. But I must help in any way I can, and if these poor folks are to have any peace of mind tonight, I need to get those doors in place.”
The doors hadn't done too much good before, but Kali refrained from pointing out that fact. But this request struck true, for Milo frowned and looked around the room again. Kali followed his gaze as it landed on each of the other sentinels. Beacon and Sadira were still preoccupied with their own patients, while Flint and Rook were helping an elderly woman up from a bed. Milo exhaled and looked back up at the blacksmith, clearly at a loss.
He seemed like a nice enough fellow, so Kali decided to make his dilemma easier. Besides, she felt like being alone. “I need to stay with this patient a while longer, so I'm not going anywhere.”
“I shouldn’t leave…”
She gave him the warmest smile she could manage. “Please go help with the doors, Milo. I’ll be fine. I promise.”
He seemed to think very hard, then nodded once and got to his feet. “Aye. Very well,” he told the blacksmith, who brightened. “I'll be right over there,” Milo added to Kali, pointing to the doors across the temple. “Yell if you need anything.”
She watched him slip between the villagers, making for the temple doors. Sadira and Beacon were several pallets away from Kali, both bent over someone Kali could not see. The female sentinels and their charge had disappeared behind a curtained-off area that housed the makeshift latrine.
Stonewall was nowhere to be seen.
“This is the right thing to do.”
“No, it wasn't,” she whispered to no one.
Her eyes stung. She tried to tell herself it was because of the stuffy air within the hall, but knew it to be a lie. Carefully, she swiped the tears off of her cheeks with her relatively clean forearms and took several deep breaths to regain control of her emotions. It was foolish indeed to cry over a man she barely knew, a man with whom she'd only shared a few weeks of intimacy. A warm body – nothing more. That was clearly all she had been to him; that was all he should be to her.
But his voice echoed in her thoughts. “Put me out of your mind. I'll do the same for you, and we'll go on with our lives.”
Could he really do that? Apparently so. He'd done a fine job of it so far. Perhaps it was easy for him to share his body with another and then dismiss that person so easily.
Honor. Service. Sacrifice.
In other words, duty before all other things. Yes, she should have known better than to believe a sentinel would act otherwise. If her own father was willing to abandon her for his duty, then it should be no surprise that Stonewall—practically a stranger—would do the same thing. And even if Foley had spoken truly about the commander knowing about her and Stonewall’s relationship, that didn’t excuse the fact that Stonewall had not trusted her enough to simply tell her what was going on, as she’d urged him to. No, he’d made up some foolish story, and then tried to explain his reasons away with a sodding letter – or so she assumed, since she’d tossed it back to him without even opening it.
Even if he did… care for her, deeply, those were not the actions of a man she could trust.
“They treat us no differently than they treat their weapons.”
Maybe Eris was right. But it was too late now, wa
sn't it? Even if Kali could somehow steal a horse and ride at breakneck speed back to Whitewater City, she would not reach the gates until late into the evening. Eris would be gone, along with however many other mages were planning to leave, and Kali had no way of knowing where they’d gone or how to find them. No telling exactly what the sentinels' reaction would be once they learned of the breach in their defenses, but Kali figured life would not be pleasant for the mages that remained for some time. Not that it was exactly paradise now.
What would it be like to live outside of bastion walls? Could she really have gone with Eris? The urge to be on the move was strong indeed, and the idea of true freedom was so foreign, so sweet, she could hardly picture what such a life would be like. At the very least, it would be good to get away from Whitewater and from Stonewall, not to mention the sodding hematite that bound her in more ways than one.
Well, there was nothing Kali could do about any of that right now. Now, she had a duty of her own. There was no sign of thralls here, but she would not sit idly by and allow others to suffer when she could help, nor would she give anyone a reason to say that mages were “evil.” So Kali focused back on her patient and rested her hands over the woman's now-healing wound. The particles had settled and a scab was already forming; with any luck, Kali’s patient would bear nothing worse than a severe scar on her abdomen. The cuts on her arms needed thalo, but should heal cleanly.
All this, Kali assessed within seconds before turning her attention back to the strange, foreign presence she'd sensed before Milo had interrupted. What in the stars was that? Was this woman pregnant? But no… It didn't feel like any of the unborn children Kali had ever sensed before. It felt… slippery, like trying to grasp a wet chunk of soap actively avoiding her.
But such a thing was impossible, wasn't it? What is happening?
Kali gritted her teeth. Focus.
Perhaps if she could not find the strange presence, she could get it to find her. Though she'd never hunted game, she'd read accounts of others who had, and many of them mentioned that the best way to find what you sought was to be patient and still, and allow your prey to come to you. So she kept her awareness on the particles of the woman's body, but did not search again. She made no effort to seek out the otherness, but acted as if she were still only interested in the wound. She waited.
And waited.
Then…
There. The foreign presence was little more than a gleam in her mind's eye; a final flash of sunset on a dark horizon. But the prickling presence of something else was real, not a weary hallucination or product of her imagination. As the understanding solidified in her mind, the foreign presence sharpened and Kali got the sense that she was being examined in turn. It was akin to a dog circling her, snuffing, though it happened almost too quickly to notice. If Kali had not been investigating, she might have missed the sensation altogether, as well as the following sense of recognition that radiated from the otherness within the Parsan woman.
A recognition that swiftly merged into sharp, snarling hunger, a wolf lunging for Kali's throat, and a thought that was not her own echoing in her head: Sweet magic.
Someone grabbed her wrists. Jolted from her concentration, Kali snapped her eyes open to see the Parsan woman, sitting upright, holding her with an iron grip while her eyes burned like twin stars. “Magic,” she croaked, pulling Kali closer. “Sweet magic. Give it to us.”
Kali tried to wrench her wrists free, but the Parsan woman’s fingers were like iron, pulling Kali closer with a grip tight enough to puncture her skin.
“Magic. Sweet magic.” The thrall's voice was somewhere between a hiss and a screech. It was no human voice. As it spoke, something shifted within its particles. Something, that foreign presence Kali could not quite quantify, slipped from the thrall’s body to hers; only because she'd been so deep in concentration before did she notice the invasive feeling now. Compared to the thrall's grip on her forearms, this was a feather-touch, but it made her want to retch. She had no way to identify it besides thinking it was a parasite she could not shake, a spider crawling inside her body up toward her brain…
“No,” Kali gasped, struggling for all she was worth. “Stop! Let me go!” She tried to shout, to alert the sentinels, but she was still exhausted, and the words came out as only a strangled whisper.
“Surrender, sweet blood,” the thrall said aloud. Then, in Kali's mind, You are ours.
The words were not spoken in this thrall's voice, but they had a similar resonance. A chill skated up Kali's spine and she was momentarily stunned into stillness before she twisted again, trying to free herself, but the thrall was too strong. Kali’s heart raced, her blood beat in her ears like thudding boots, yet she forced herself to focus. Seren's light...she would not go down without a fight. The Parsan woman—the thrall—still tried to pull her closer in a mockery of an embrace, so Kali seized that closeness with her own kind of ferocity. Rather than draw out her own strength and vitality to heal, as she'd done for hours, she wrenched the thrall's strength away from the creature, siphoned it into herself, like turning the path of a flowing river.
Everything seemed to happen very slowly after that, though only a few seconds must have passed since the thrall grabbed her. The creature gaped, screamed, and released Kali's arms to claw at her own face, where the skin was shrinking against bone as the woman’s life drained away. Meanwhile, strength and energy flowed into Kali, disorienting her with dizzying force. Everything was so vivid, it was painful, and her thoughts spun incoherently as if she were blind drunk.
At last, the thrall moaned, drawing her attention. “Please help me,” a human voice whispered.
Before Kali could reply, the woman's eyes dimmed to a mortal, watery brown, and she crumpled to the floor, unmoving.
Someone seized Kali’s left arm, then her right. Yet another grabbed her chin and tilted her head back. When Kali tried to look up into the faces of her captors, all she saw were Parsan villagers with the star-bright eyes of thralls. Between their bodies, she caught a glimpse of Milo and Flint surging her way, swords drawn and shouting. But she couldn’t spare another second to look at them, for in the corner of her eye was a flash of steel or metal that threw her back to her journey to Whitewater, when a group of Sufani had held her captive and threatened to steal her blood.
Kali screamed and struggled, but even her new-found strength could not withstand so many, and she could not focus enough to do more than cry out when the flash of steel sharpened into a butcher's knife aimed for her throat. She did not feel its bite, only the warm wetness that flooded down the side of her neck and across her chest, and stole her breath.
Then, darkness.
Twenty-Seven
Milo had to use his entire body for leverage against the temple door, because the sodding thing was much heavier than it looked. The heavy wooden door settled into its hinges with a clatter. The Parsan blacksmith began tapping the pins in place to secure it while Milo pressed his hands against the wood to support its weight.
“How about now?” he asked.
“What? Oh, aye. Stand down, soldier.” The blacksmith winked at him before returning her attention to her task. She was a tall, solidly built woman with arms like branches, and she wielded her iron mallet with ease.
Carefully, for he was half-convinced the thing would topple over without him, Milo stepped away from the door. But it remained upright and he exhaled in relief. He glanced around the room again, first looking for Mage Halcyon. As she'd been every other time he'd looked her way, she sat quietly before the Parsan woman, a look of concentration on her face. It was a little odd that she'd spent so much time with that particular villager, but perhaps the woman's injuries were worse than he could tell. Or perhaps Mage Halcyon was not as strong as Sadira, who, by Milo’s rough estimation, had brought half a dozen Parsans back from the brink of death since the squad's arrival.
Satisfied that his charge was unharmed, he searched for his sister. Flint had bee
n patrolling outside of the temple, though at some point she'd slipped back inside the great room to offer what assistance she could. She and Rook were easing an older woman back down onto a pallet, having just helped her to the latrine. Milo caught Flint’s eye and smiled; he expected her to at least roll her eyes, but she surprised him by leaving her self-appointed post to make her way toward him.
“That’s about got ‘em,” the blacksmith said, pulling away his attention. “Thank you, Serla Sentinel.”
Milo stepped back further and studied the double doors. Their iron hinges were secure, but the wood was still splintered in places. “Don't you need new ones? Doors, I mean.”
She gave a tired laugh. “Aye, but these are in place for now. I'll sort out the rest of the repairs later. Thank you for your help.”
“I wish I could do more.”
The blacksmith swiped a hand over her forehead, leaving a trail of tanned skin through the sweat and grime. “There's too much to do,” she admitted. “I think you'd be here the rest of your life.”
For however long that would be. He did not know where the thought had come from, but knew enough not to say it aloud. Instead, he gave the blacksmith a warrior's salute. “Well, I'm glad to have done what I could.”
She eyed him up and down, then smiled again. Her teeth looked very white amidst the grime that covered her face. “I suppose I should make good on my promise to you.”
Milo frowned at her. “You don't owe me… Wait, what promise?”
Flint appeared at his side and slapped the back of his cuirass hard enough to make him stumble forward. “Maybe another time,” she said to the blacksmith. “We've all got work to do, ser. But I'll encourage my brother to visit you once he's got a day to himself.”
Her voice was wry, her manner easy. The blacksmith chuckled and nodded, then turned back to her work. “I suppose that will have to do. The One keep you both.”
“And you,” Milo replied, only belatedly realizing he'd not learned her name.
Catalyst Moon: Breach (Catalyst Moon Saga Book 2) Page 32
