Valor of the Healer

by Angela Highland

  “Evidently this no longer signifies. Jannyn and Tembriel had little to say on the topic, at least in Adalonic.” Rab grinned, thin and wicked. “I didn’t enlighten them that my grasp of Elvish is more comprehensive than they supposed. As for Alarrah, she informed me that our services were no longer necessary, that our failure to fulfill the contract wouldn’t be held against us, and that we could keep the half payment already given.”

  Annoyed, Julian slapped the ground for lack of anything or anyone nearby to strike or throttle, his mind racing over the ramifications—whether they’d have to hide, how long it would take Holvirr Kilmerredes’s wrath to burn away, how well their reputations would bear a failure’s blow. “How generous. Did your undisclosed grasp of Elvish get you anything else I should know?”

  “They’re rejoining their people. How, I couldn’t say. I saw no horses but ours near this cozy little hideaway, and they didn’t discuss how they were about to depart. With, I might add, enough haste to eschew quibbling over matters of payment with dishonorable human assassins such as we.”

  “Now, now, we mustn’t be bitter. We are dishonorable human assassins.”

  “I concede that point.”

  “But this doesn’t mean I won’t overlook our elven friends’ condescension in upholding their side of the contract. Because I’m a better man than that.” As Rab snickered, Julian ducked his head under the overhang to one-handedly roll up his bedding. Rab leaned over to tie off the bedroll in a tight bundle, and as they worked Julian went on, “I don’t like that they’ve left so suddenly. We’d best find another bolt-hole while we consider our next move.”

  Levity vanished from his partner’s face with a speed that told him that thought had already crossed Rab’s mind. “Do you think the elves will attempt something against us?”

  Julian sat back on his heels. “Jannyn would cut our throats if given the opportunity. Alarrah seems more peaceably disposed, but I couldn’t say the same of Tembriel or the rest of their people. Make no mistake, they’re relaying word—”

  “Of us?”

  His wrist hurt. Julian rubbed at it and frowned. Its flesh seemed more tender than normal, with an itch that came to him only in winter or violent storms, when cold and damp sank into his bones and made his arm recall how it felt to end in a hand and five fingers. Fire and lightning, not winter cold, had overwhelmed him at the duke’s mansion, but the specter of a remembered hand was the same. So was the pain at his wrist.

  “Of her,” he murmured. “The girl in Lomhannor Hall.”

  Rab stared at him, first at his hand’s movements, then at his face. “You take issue with this.” It wasn’t a question. “If she’s mage enough to do...what she did, wishing to spread news of one of their own in Kilmerredes’s hands is hardly surprising.”

  “No, but that His Grace possesses her in the first place is. Something’s there. I want to know what it is.”

  “We’ve been called off the contract,” Rab protested.

  “Precisely why we’d better find a way to recoup our losses. If we won’t be paid to kill the duke, we can bloody well blackmail him if he’s got a mage stuffed in his cellar. The Hawks should have taken such a fascinating little houseguest off his hands some time ago. They haven’t—”

  “How do we know that? The duke might be holding her for them. Mother’s Mercy, Julian, a major act of magic just took place on the man’s estate. If the Hawks aren’t crawling over it by now, every last one of them is blind!”

  Rab was right, and yet annoyance burned across Julian’s mind, unfathomable even as he felt it. He seized his false hand and twisted it into place on his wrist, too restless to sit still and too vexed to hold his partner’s gaze. “Then I want to know if the Church is on to him, and if not, why.”

  “Did you hit your head along with everything else?” Rab demanded. “What use is it to hide from the elves only to spy upon the very man who’s doubtless now summoning every Hawk and watchman within two hundred miles to capture us?”

  Julian was on his feet and snapping his false hand’s leather straps about his wrist before the question stopped him. He didn’t want to look back at Rab. But neither did he want to consider what had come over him, and what prompted the words that escaped him next.

  “Lay low if you wish, Rab. I’m going after the girl.”

  Chapter Five

  No one with vegetables to peel or clothing to mend roused Faanshi the next morning; no servants bearing orders or insults arrived at the cellar door. For once she slept past dawn, waking only when the morning was well underway, then scrambling to kneel in the small pool of light near her window.

  Shame flooded her as she focused her sleep-dazed thoughts for prayer. The sunrise should have awakened her. Sunlight was a tenuous treasure, but Faanshi had claimed it nonetheless, hoping that if she revered it enough, the Lady of Time would deliver her from confinement—and from her master. It was a hard dream to maintain in the face of the duke’s ongoing blithe assertion of her madness, and against the rejection of Djashtet by almost all the Tantiu in Lomhannor Hall. She resented that she had to.

  “I’m not mad,” she whispered in the Tantiu tongue, for that too was something to claim as hers. “Dawnmaiden, Noonmother, may Your ridahs keep me that way! Strength and courage and grace...”

  Closing her eyes, Faanshi prayed, rhymed stanzas to extol the goddess’s sacred virtues. There were twelve in all, four each for body, mind and heart, each in turn the province of one of the aspects of the Lady of Time. But it was a trial. The lines of the prayer and the virtues they praised jumbled in her thoughts. Wisdom and fortitude and cleverness and compassion...

  Between them all, her mind kept jolting back to the man who’d tried to kill the duke. His soot-masked face was seared across her memory, along with the emotions and recollections that had invaded her when she touched him. He’d spoken to her as none ever had before, neither with her master’s false pity nor her okinya’s reserve, but rather with approval. The memory filled her with triumph.

  “Guide him, Djashtet, and make him safe. Noonmother, Crone of Night, don’t let him be captured.”

  Conviction caught and burned in the hearth of Faanshi’s heart. The ridah rhyme, each line in its proper place, followed her pleas for the stranger. When she’d finished, Faanshi murmured every other prayer Ulima had taught her along with the ones she’d made up herself in her cellar’s quiet darkness.

  She was still praying when the men came to the window.

  The rhythm of their voices and the creaking of their cart hauled her out of her litanies. Their figures beyond the window’s bars, blocking the light, sent disquiet winging through her. When she saw them laying brick and mortar in an ordered row along the bottom of her confining bars, all her triumph vanished. Heedless of the beating she’d earn by lifting her eyes, she flung herself toward the window.

  “What are you doing? Please, I beg you, no!”

  Two men kneeled at the bars, one old, one young, gardeners or perhaps groundskeepers. Faanshi didn’t know them. “His Grace’s orders, chit,” the older one barked, spitting sideways into the bushes, as though addressing her left a foul taste in his mouth.

  The younger one’s face should have been friendly, with its innumerable freckles and crown of fiery orange hair, but he gave Faanshi a hard glare as he worked. “The master believes you’ve been having too many gentleman callers. We’ll be putting a stop to that, we will.”

  He knows!

  “No!” With her scream, her feet propelled her onto the crate beneath the window. Her hands shot up, one clawing through the bars in desperation, as high as she could stretch above the bricks that now blocked part of her way. “I won’t let you! Don’t take away my light!”

  The older man’s weathered cheekbones flushed dark red as he scowled. “Don’t make this harder than it has to be, girl.”

  “Bloody mad elf-blooded—down, if you know what’s good for you!” The younger man struck Faanshi’s hand with his trowel, slicing across
her palm. “Wailing about it won’t change what the duke says you’ve got coming.”

  The slash across her hand splintered Faanshi’s awareness. She couldn’t tell which came first—her pained yelp, the crate upending as her foot slipped off the side, or her body crashing to the floor. Then the heat rose up in her palm where the trowel had struck, obliterating the rent in her flesh before it had even begun to ache.

  Dizziness curled her in on herself, while blind instinct pulled her glowing hand to her chest before the men by the window could see. Can’t let them see—deliver me, Lady of Time—he knows!

  Weak though it was, the light stood out in the cellar’s gloom, and the men at the window flinched at the sight. The young one swore, and his old companion starred himself.

  “Great Father! What’s she doing? The Hawks came at dawn, they’re for her, aye? They’ve come for her?”

  “Never you mind. His Grace’s business, not ours. Ours is to finish sealing this window before tonight. Keep at it, boy.”

  Faanshi remained where she’d fallen, her hand cradled against her. Her magic’s gleam died almost the moment it ignited, a mere accent to the shrinking semicircle of daylight on the floor. She scarcely noticed, for she couldn’t take her gaze off the vanishing figures outside. All thought narrowed to a final mumbled prayer to keep her light, but the men didn’t hear her, and as the bricks piled higher and higher along the window, she despaired that Djashtet wouldn’t hear her either.

  * * *

  Her promised hour of freedom never came. No one brought sunlight or fresh air or the cake from the kitchen. No one brought any food at all, not even the gruel that was her usual fare when she was in ill favor, or any water to drink. With her window bricked, she couldn’t see the sun, and so she didn’t know the hour when the akreshi duke came at last.

  Weak with hunger, thirst and terror, hunched into a ball on her cot, she snapped up her head as the cellar door swung open—and cringed at the lantern light that jabbed into her eyes. Even then the shape of his frame was unmistakable.

  “I’m very angry with you, Faanshi.”

  She knew each nuance of his voice. His shouts could hammer her like blows, their force all the greater for heralding the blows of his hands. But he didn’t shout now, and that was worst of all. When he whispered, when his words grew calm, she could never tell when he’d hit her next. Standing there in the cellar door, cast into shadow by the lantern light, he looked to have captured the sun itself. She’d never behold it again, her frightened mind gibbered, as he shut her away in a prison of night.

  “Concealing the truth from me is as great a sin as lying.”

  “Mercy, akreshi!” Faanshi scuttled up, trembling, to prostrate herself at his feet.

  It didn’t help. With her face to the floor she couldn’t see what he was doing, and not until he yanked her with brutal strength to her feet did she find the lantern hung from the wooden beam that ran along the center of the ceiling. From another dangled a rope. With this he bound her, lashing her wrists together above her head.

  When he pulled the riding crop out of his belt, she knew what was coming. Fear blotted out almost everything else, but didn’t hide her master’s face as he caught her chin in his hand and jerked it up. His gaze burned into her, molten gold.

  “You healed the man who tried to kill me.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  Faanshi caught herself, nearly choking in her effort to hold back the unthinking words, and the duke snarled, “You didn’t mean what?”

  He was going to beat her. There was no escaping it, even if she said what he wished to hear. She hadn’t meant to do the healing—she never did. The magic never gave her that choice. Yet the stranger had urged her not to apologize, and by Djashtet she would not. But her master would kill her if she said as much. So she retreated into the ridah prayers, gasping them out with as much strength and defiance as she could summon.

  The duke started, surprise and fury flooding his face. As he stepped back, the riding crop lashed forward.

  Fire cut across Faanshi’s side. In angry reply her magic welled to smother the pain, setting off fire within to match that without. Light spilled down her frame like water, pale and otherworldly against the lantern’s homier glow, and its presence only seemed to further fuel the wrath in the akreshi’s eyes.

  “You’ve forgotten a basic tenet of your existence, my girl. Your father was an elf. Your very existence is a sin. Do you want me to give you to the Hawks?”

  This time she couldn’t hold back the commanded reply. “No, akreshi.”

  “Do you want me to let Father Enverly Cleanse your taint from the world and put you to death?”

  The name of her master’s priest made her thrash where she hung, for she feared him almost as much as she feared her master. Something in her cried out that anything would be better than being locked away, caught between the priest’s implacable prayers and the sick chill they sent through her blood—or letting the hungry shadow in the duke’s mind blot out her own and make his lie of her so-called madness all too bitter a truth. But Faanshi couldn’t shriek those words aloud either. Pain and fear drowned her frail gleam of defiance even as she fought to keep it alight.

  “No, akreshi.”

  “I have seen the Anreulag Herself destroy Her enemies on the field of war. Do you want to burn in Her holy fire?”

  Her terror spiked even higher. To the duke’s people, the Anreulag was the Voice of the Gods. To Faanshi, She was the name and shape of her nightmares.

  “N-no, akreshi...”

  “Then you must be reminded of your function.” The crop lashed her arm, provoking another flare of eldritch light. “You live because I will it. Do you understand me? You heal on my command!”

  All her senses churned in revolt, overwhelmed by the blows and her power’s struggle to mend the places they struck. Tears streamed down to soak her veil, while droplets of blood, escaping before her magic closed her wounds, trickled along her skin. Bile filled her throat, almost strangling the acknowledgement her master’s rage demanded.

  “I—I understand...”

  “Say it!”

  “I heal on your command...I heal on your command...”

  With each repetition the riding crop struck home.

  * * *

  This time, Ulima thought as she stole into the cellar, the jackal has almost killed her.

  Limp as the herbs and roots once stored in the little chamber, Faanshi dangled from the hook where she was tied. Bloodied rents marred her sari and the choli and silwar beneath, but through each slash in her garments, her skin glimmered without flaw. Tears, blood and bile fouled the veil meant to shield her face from infidel eyes, and it did nothing now to hide the shimmer of the slack features behind it. The girl didn’t rouse as Ulima cut her down and laid her gently upon her pallet. She scarcely breathed. Only the faintest pulse within her throat told Ulima that Faanshi lived at all.

  “Forgive me, child.” She stripped the damaged raiment away, voicing the words only because the girl couldn’t hear her. Ulima never had disputed the law that proclaimed the product of an unhallowed union out-of-caste, even if she carried noble blood, even if she were the daughter of one’s own clan. But no one, not even a casteless orphan born of sin, deserved to be beaten worse than any beast.

  Beneath the girl’s garments Ulima found the direr wounds, the ones Faanshi’s magic still fought to erase. They’d stopped bleeding, but livid bruises still darkened her flesh. At the touch of the clean, damp cloth Ulima drew to those bruised places, the young slave’s body shook.

  Then, barely audibly, she sobbed.

  “I can’t bear it anymore, okinya...how did I sin? Why does Djashtet hate me?”

  There was little Ulima could say to that. Thus in silence she cradled Faanshi to her breast, until the convulsions subsided and the fitful sparks of light along her limbs died away, taking the bruises with them. In silence she washed her, clothing her once more in garments cast aside by the akresha
Duchess Khamsin’s Tantiu-born handmaiden. There were no castes in the cellar’s gloom. There was only a girl thrashed to within a hair’s breadth of her next life. The sacred ridahs bid Ulima to succor her, and in silence she prayed to the Lady of Time that she could keep the girl alive long enough for Her holy will to be fulfilled.

  To her surprise, the goddess bestowed upon her an answer.

  Ulima had visions sometimes, a gift of Djashtet. One had guided her northward with the household of Yamineh, newly made an Adalon duke’s wife. Another had prompted her to save Yamineh’s life when Kilmerredes would have killed her, with her claim that if he let her carry her child to term, then it would grow up to save his life in turn. More than once, in her heart of hearts, she’d regretted that vision’s coming true a scant handful of months after Faanshi’s power had blossomed—but no, the virulent fever that had overrun the province that year had not stood against the girl’s magic.

  This newest vision flared up now without warning, fragmented images and happenings uniting in a clarion whole, so swiftly that they overwhelmed her sight both without and within.

  A battered dove feathered in fire and earth, pinned beneath a lion’s paws—

  A one-eyed raven harrying the lion, darting up and away from mighty claws before the lion can strike—

  Hawks circling high overhead, their shadows falling upon the dove but unable to dampen the starlight gleaming along her form. One hawk breaking ranks to plunge lower, with a hunting call that melds in unexpected harmony with the dove’s cries—

  And an ancient snow-white owl diving into the lion’s eyes, making him lift his paws from the dove—even though the dove’s only path of flight is straight up to the host of hawks.

  It might have taken a moment or an hour for the vision to coalesce. Once it was gone, Ulima stared down at Yamineh’s daughter.

  “Great Lady of Time, you can’t mean this?”

  Sweat beaded the old woman’s brow, and she pressed a gnarled hand to her chest, fighting to steady her breathing and her thoughts. It was the simplest of meditation exercises, practiced over decades, yet it brought her no peace now. Nor did it bring any answer to the question she whispered, save the one she already knew. That was no answer at all, for it meant taking Faanshi from the lord who would destroy her—and yielding her to the Church who would do no less.