Darian knew an incipient explosion when he saw one, and he was quite glad that he wasn’t standing in the footprints of either the pretty young woman or her Companion.
There was something about the girl that was naggingly familiar to Darian, even though he was certain that he had never seen her in his life.
“I also brought my sister,” the girl continued, undaunted. “And since you just now mentioned Healers, I can’t help thinking that my premonition was accurate.”
She beckoned, and around the same edge of the cave, looking nervous and determined at the same time, stepped Keisha Alder.
Keisha hadn’t had a moment to think from the time that Shandi scooped her up until the moment they both intruded on the war council. Much to Keisha’s relief, Darian rose and worked his way over to her, and both of them escaped from the council as quickly as they could. The fierce interrogation that Kero was putting Shandi Alder through was also an extremely uncomfortable and public grilling. No less ublic—though silent—was the similar set of coals that Shandi’s Companion was being hauled over by Sayvil.
“Your sister must be crazy. I can’t believe she ran away from the Collegium,” Darian said, shaking his head.
Keisha just sighed. “I can’t either—though to give her credit, she didn’t exactly run away.”
Darian gave her a quizzical look. “So what did she do?”
He found a place for them both to sit. Keisha was only too glad to sink down onto a cool stone and stretch her aching legs out. Riding pillion, even on a Companion, was about as uncomfortable as riding a dyheli.
“She bullied them into letting her come back, if you can believe that! She said she had some sort of premonition, and since she obviously wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer, they gave in!” Keisha thought incredulously about the Shandi who had left Errold’s Grove, Shandi the peacemaker, Shandi the gentle, and shook her head with disbelief. “I hardly recognized her—”
“Start from the beginning,” Darian interrupted. “I want to hear this in sequence.”
Keisha took a deep breath, and began at the beginning—just after dawn this morning. “I was in Errold’s Grove. Nightwind told me to spend half my time there since I’m supposed to be the on-station Healer now, and I’m supposed to take care of anything that happens to the volunteers, now that most of the other Healers are here with Kerowyn. I’d just checked the camp at morning call for anyone sick—no one was, but I always check—it was just about dawn. Then one of the sentries reported a Herald coming. We expected Eldan, of course, so stayed to see what had brought him there. Obviously, we thought something might have happened out here. And out of absolutely nowhere, up comes Shandi, acting as if she had every right to be there and not at the Collegium where she belongs!” She couldn’t keep her indignation to herself; it crept out and colored her last sentence.
Darian cocked his head to one side. “Are you aware of how much you sound like your mother?” he asked dryly.
She flushed. “I suppose I do; well, being someone’s big sister tends to make you feel that way. Anyway, she somehow managed to bluff the lieutenant into thinking she had orders to find Herald-Captain Kerowyn. She found out where you all were, and before anyone could question her about anything, she just scooped me up and kidnapped me! She says she had a premonition that she and I had to be here for some reason, and that was why the Collegium let her go.”
“Do you believe her?” Darian asked.
She hugged her knees to her chest, and rested her chin on them. “I don’t know,” she confessed. “If it was anyone else—but it’s hard to think of Shandi as—as having premonitions I’m supposed to believe in.” She rubbed the side of her head, easing the ache in her temple. “I mean—Shandi, of all people! She never showed any signs of anything like that before!”
“People often don’t, not until they’re Chosen anyway,” Darian reminded her.
“She says her Gift is ForeSight, but that it isn’t properly trained yet, so all she gets is bits and pieces. I just don’t know.” Keisha rubbed her tired eyes, and wished that this had happened to anyone but her.
“Can you think of any other reason why she should come pounding up here?’ Darian asked, reasonably. ”And can’t you think of a lot of reasons why she would avoid doing so if she could?”
Keisha had to smile at that. “Well,” she admitted, “now that you mention it. If Mum and Da got word she was here, they’d have a worse fit than they did over my staying. She’d never hear the end of it. And as for the Captain—” she shuddered.“—I’d rather die than have to explain something like this to Captain Kero.”
Darian spread his hands. “There you have it. I’d trust that premonition, personally. Everything she told you sounds perfectly logical to me. I don’t think her Companion would have gone along with this if she had been making it up, do you?”
Keisha nodded, slowly, and felt a little better. “You’re right. You’re absolutely right.”
The only thing is, she said her premonition involved me. I don’t like the sound of that....
Darian interrupted her worrisome thoughts. “Now, would you like to hear what we’ve been finding out, since it seems that you’re going to be involved?”
Keisha nodded, and when Darian was done, she remained silent, thinking everything he’d told her over carefully. “This Summer Fever,” she ventured. “I don’t like the sound of it. It sounds more dangerous than the barbarians.”
“Why?” he asked, puzzled.
“They’ve had a few years to get used to it—I’ve never heard of anything like it down here,” she told him, feeling a little chill in her heart. “If it got loose here, it could go through us like a wildfire.”
“We have Healers,” he objected. “Surely they can do something first.”
“You have to know what you’re up against, how it works, before you can fight it,” she pointed out. “Otherwise it’s like fighting an enemy blindfolded. Sure, you can flail around with a sword and hope you hit something, but you’re more likely to get hit yourself first.”
He winced. “I see your point.”
“That’s not all that bothers me, but it’s the main thing,” she continued, wondering if he would understand how she felt. “I think you aren’t going to like this, but I think we have to help them.”
As he’d described the children with their withered limbs, she’d felt that old familiar tug, that insistent call to do something. The only difference was, now she had the tools to act on that call.
“What do you mean by that?” Darian asked sharply.
“I mean, I’m a Healer now, in everything but the robes. It’s part of the vow. I have to help where there’s need, and you can’t deny that these people need help!” She watched him closely, begging with her eyes for his understanding. “Don’t you see? That’s why Healers are what we are. We don’t take sides, we just help, no matter what!”
She watched strong emotions flit over his expression, watched him fight down an immediate retort and give his anger a little time to cool. “I know it sounds crazy, even disloyal, but you can ask any of the others, and they’ll tell you the same,” she said softly.
“I don’t doubt you,” he said brusquely, “But I think it’s madness.” He smiled crookedly. “Maybe that’s why I’ m not a Healer. Still ... you did say that in order to deal with this sickness, you have to know what it is you’re fighting and how to combat it, right?”
She nodded.
“And I’ve never heard of a fever or a plague that would stay politely in one place or attack only certain people—no matter what some priests would claim. So if you’re going to be able to battle it when it finally decides to jump to our side, I’d rather you did your flailing around on patients that aren’t Tayledras or Valdemaran.” He turned his hands palm-upward and shrugged. “Chauvinistic of me, but there it is.”
“It’s a point,” she agreed, relieved that he had conceded the potential conflict. She already had the germ of an idea in her head,
but for it to succeed, she would need him. She stood up. “First things first, though. Let’s go see if Captain Kero left anything of Shandi. I want to know more about this premonition of hers than she told me on the ride.”
Firesong
Fourteen
They spotted Shandi, sans Companion, walking toward them through the camp as they returned to the cave. Keisha was glad that the Herald-Captain hadn’t significantly damaged her sister; in fact, Shandi was remarkably composed for someone who had just faced the redoubtable Kerowyn on the wrong side of a situation.
Nevertheless, she was clearly glad to see Keisha and Darian, and equally glad to be taken off to Darian’s campsite. “Whew!” she said, collapsing on Darian’s bedroll and stretching out flat, both eyes closed. “I’ve faced off against Cap’n Kerowyn with a weapon, and I never wanted to do that again, but getting a dressing-down from her is a hundred times worse!” She opened one eye and looked up at both of them. “Whose bed am I taking up anyway? Yours? You’re Darian, the half-Hawkbrother, I presume?”
“Right on both counts,” Darian said, his mind still clearly elsewhere, but his tone quite cool and unimpressed with Shandi’s casual attitude. “And I presume that the Herald-Captain has informed you just how dangerous this situation is that you’ve casually barged into without so much as a ‘by your leave’?”
Keisha was astonished; she had never heard a young man take that tone with her sister! They usually couldn’t keep themselves from near-servility, but Darian had just done a little dressing-down himself, had come within a hair of sounding angry with her, quite as if she were his little sister and not Keisha’s! There was no doubt that the comment was intended as a rebuke, and Keisha hadn’t ever heard a young man rebuke her sister since Shandi had turned ten!
Shandi sat straight up, also taken aback by Darian’s tone. “She did,” she replied, nettled. “She also gave me leave to remain, on the basis of my premonition and the Collegium’s acceptance of it, as long as I understood I was under her orders, absolutely and without exception or excuses.”
Darian leveled a look at the Trainee that was just as severe as Kerowyn would have wanted. “She means it, and we’ll back it,” he told her flatly. “If you’re ordered out of here, you will go, even if I have to knock you out and tie you onto that Companion of yours. And don’t think you can hide somewhere if you’re ordered out either; you can’t hide from the eyes of our birds or the noses of our kyree, no matter where you go or how cleverly you think you can conceal yourself.”
“I’ve no intention of disobeying orders!” Shandi snapped back, eyes flashing and her temper beginning to show. Keisha stepped in before it turned into a quarrel.
“I’ve got to know more about this premonition,” she said earnestly. “You didn’t give me anything to make any kind of judgment on.”
“I don’t have that much myself,” Shandi replied in irritation, still annoyed with Darian and giving him a dagger-laden glare. “All I got was a few flashes and a feeling—a flash of me, one of you, one of him, though I didn’t know who he was at the time, and a.very, very strong feeling that I had to be where the Captain was, so strong that I was halfway to Companion’s Field to get Karles before I came to my senses. That’s it.”
“That’s all?” Darian asked incredulously. “And on that basis the Collegium gave you leave to come to a battle zone? Are they crazed?”
“So far I’ve had a grand total of four days of training in my Gift,” Shandi said tartly. “It’s not exactly under my control, all right? I have to make do with what I get. It was good enough for the Senior Herald at the Collegium.”
“Now why am I so certain that the Senior Herald at the Collegium didn’t even know that we’d contacted the barbarians yet?” Darian shook his head in disbelief, but didn’t challenge her any further, which made Keisha grateful. Shandi didn’t lose her temper often—at least, the Shandi she knew didn’t—but when she did, the results were often spectacular. At the moment, that was one spectacle she’d prefer not to witness.
Darian took a deep breath, closed his eyes a moment (probably counting to ten, or invoking patience), and then opened them again. “You’re probably tired,” he said. “You must have ridden like a madwoman to get here as quickly as you did. Why don’t you get some sleep while I make sure someone gets a billet set up somewhere else for me? A bed’s a bed, and I don’t care where I sleep.”
Shandi heaved a great sigh and lay down again. “Thanks. Sorry to be so sharp—I am pretty dred—”
She closed her eyes, and didn’t so much fall asleep as pass out; she did it so quickly that Keisha realized she must have gone without sleeping—except in the saddle—for her entire journey. Darian obviously realized it, too; he managed a little smile, and took Keisha by the elbow, leading her silently away through the rows of tents.
“You’re the only one of us that looks like she got any sleep last night,” he observed, when they were out of earshot.
“I probably am,” she replied, noting with concern the deep shadows under his eyes. “That was awfully good of you, to give up your bedroll to her.”
He waved the compliment aside. “It’s just a bedroll, the hertasi can move my things elsewhere, and they will as soon as I—Heyla!” He interrupted himself, as a hertasi poked its snout out of a larger tent. It waited expectantly while he hissed something at it, bobbed its head, and ran off.
“There,” he said with satisfaction. “I’ve got myself a new bunk with Wintersky, and you one with the Healers—which I’d better take you to, so you can all get your heads together over this Summer Fever thing.”
“Thank you,” she replied, feeling more confident than she had since . Shandi carried her off this morning. “Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems more important to me than the barbarians fighting with us.”
“And maybe you’re right,” was Darian’s thoughtful reply. “After all, there’s always the tactic of bottling them up in their camp and starving them into submission, but a line of fighters isn’t going to keep a plague inside their pickets. Listen, I hope you weren’t offended by the way I treated your sister, but—well—” He scratched his head, then shrugged. “I’m not impressed. She strikes me as used to getting her own way a lot, pretty immature, actually. Honestly, she hasn’t half the brains and good sense you have.”
“She’s probably so tired that half her brains aren’t working,” Keisha pointed out. “Besides, she’s not used to boys who treat her like—like—”
“Like a brat who’s getting away with something she shouldn’t?” Darian offered, with a half smile. “Like a spoiled village princess who expects fellows to melt just because she looks at them with those sweet, brown doe-eyes? Oh, please!”
Keisha was so surprised by his answer that she simply stared at him for a moment. “Well—she is so very pretty—”
“Not prettier than you,” Darian said bluntly. “And you have a great deal more than being pretty, if you’ll pardon my saying so. A Hawkbrother could turn a mud-doll into a beauty; we aren’t that impressed by prettiness alone.” For all his bluntness, he started to blush as he said that, and looked quickly away as she continued to stare at him in further astonishment.
“Right, here’s the Healers’ tent,” he said quickly, waving at the large tent pitched at the end of the path they were on. “You go right on up. The hertasi will have told them you’re coming. I’ll find Wintersky’s billet and get a nap myself, before something else happens.”
Still blushing, he left her and made a sharp turn to the right, as she watched him hurry away with bemusement.
Then she shook herself into sense, and made straight for the Healers’ tent and business. Granted, it was entirely a new and rather delightful feeling to have a young man tell her she was pretty, and blush over her, but this was neither the time nor the place to get moonstruck.
When she got within earshot of the tent, she heard the debate already going on inside; she pushed open the flap, and was greeted immediately.
; “Keisha!” Nala called with relief. “Good, we need all the minds on this that we can get! What do you know about this wasting disease?”
The Healers had arranged themselves in a rough circle in the middle of the large infirmary tent—which at the moment had no patients in it. Nala and her apprentices squeezed over on the bench they were using, and Keisha took her place beside them. She detailed everything that Darian had told her, and then added, “Tyrsell the kingstag is the one who had direct contact with the chieftain’s mind; would you like him to come give us everything he got?”
“That would be extremely helpful,” Gentian said thoughtfully, not at all disturbed by the notion of having the dyheli dump a basketload of mental images directly into his mind.
Keisha turned in time to see a hertasi coming into the tent with what must be her bedroll. In Tayledras, she asked it if Tyrsell could be invited to the tent, and why.
“Easily done, Healer,” it answered, with a bow of profoundest respect, and left the bedroll on the tent floor to answer her request personally.
“I believe that we must assume that this illness is both contagious and a grave danger to us,” Nala said, as Keisha turned her attention back to the group. “Remember the description, that it first went through the barbarians like a wildfire? Now we can expect them to have built up some immunity, but we have no such protection at this point.”
Grenthan mopped his brow and the back of his neck with a kerchief. “You surely know what the villagers and even Lord Breon would insist on, if we let it be known that we consider it very dangerous,” Grenthan said reluctantly. “They’d want us to surround the camp and burn them and it down to the ground.”
“That’s unacceptable!” Gentian snapped, rounding on his fellow Healer as if Grenthan were an enemy. “We cannot condone anything of the kind!”
Valdemar 11 - [Owl Mage 02] - Owlsight Page 37
