by Lou Hoffmann
L’Aria almost choked on half-chewed fruit when she gasped at the sight of the man she most liked to sass. She coughed between words, “Oh… gods…. Han… what…?” Despite her trouble speaking, her concern—perhaps even fear—for Han came through clearly.
“I’m all right, Spitfire,” Han managed, trying to reassure her, though he knew it was true only if one used a very broad definition of “all right.”
“His wound has bled through the wrap and the blanket,” Tahlina pointed out, then took a deep breath that might have indicated an intention to launch strident instructions.
She quieted when Tiro raised a hand, palm out, a gestured command to silence.
“Be still a moment, Healer,” he said, having recovered his calm, formal manner.
No one in Ethra—except maybe Thurlock on a grouchy day—would argue with Tiro L’Rieve. Not if they knew who he was, and of course Tahlina did. She nodded and stood to wait.
Han wished he could command that kind of respect, but he was pretty sure in his present condition he didn’t even come close. He looked down at his leg—he didn’t need to, honestly. He knew beforehand he’d see blood trickling into a small puddle by his foot. But he looked anyway and got a shock at just how much blood—lined with a narrow edge of greasy yellow matter that meant his wound was still infected—had already collected on the floor.
He shook his head to clear it—with no success—and tried to focus on what he knew was most important. “Luccan… he was attacked today on the green.” Han wanted to stand up straight on his own and move, to get to his nephew and help him, but he was fading fast. He’d gone dizzy, but he wasn’t sure if that was because of blood loss and fever, or maybe he’d been drugged again, or maybe he was having some kind of delayed shock reaction to the news about his nephew, which was not only frightening but almost unbelievable.
Tennehk touched Han’s shoulder and took over explaining the events at the celebration to Tiro. When he concluded, “So I took the boy to his room, put out a call for the healers, and made the mistake of telling Han.”
Tiro nodded sagely, a compassionate frown on his face. “Ah, Han Shieth, I see your mind. Frightening, is it not? For the Suth Chiell to be attacked—merely to think we’ve come to this.” Tiro looked away momentarily, breathed deep and let it go in a long sigh. Then he turned his gaze to L’Aria, who’d just stepped away toward the hall where Luccan’s room was. “You’ll wait, daughter,” he said, more stern than usual with his only child.
Briefly, Han’s mind wandered to trying to decide whether she rolled her eyes, but he couldn’t focus well enough to see and anyway it didn’t matter, so he reined in his squirrely thoughts. He had little energy and more pressing problems to spend it on. “I have to see Luccan,” he insisted, and tried his damnedest to step away from the wall Tiro had propped him against.
Tiro held him in place with a single hand on his chest. “No. I’ll see to the Suth Chiell, Han Shieth. And I’ll keep watch on him tonight—”
“I’ll help,” Zhevi interrupted.
“Let’s go,” L’Aria said, but she didn’t move without her father’s permission.
Possibly the most obedient moment of her life, Han thought, his mind getting mushy again.
“You, L’Aria, will wait. You, Han, will go back to the task of becoming whole and well. I will come to see you once I’ve seen to the boy.”
A note of irritation had crept into Tiro’s voice, Han noticed, but he decided it was due to what must seem like impertinent and impatient youth. After all, the years Tiro had been alive were, literally, countless. Reluctantly, sadly, Han admitted to himself that he could do little to help Luccan in the shape he was in anyway, and he nodded his acquiescence.
Tennehk stepped up to take a share of Han’s weight and help him back to the infirmary, and Tahlina roughly took Han’s other arm. Han’s emotions were a crazy mix, but next to worry for Luccan, frustration was top of the list.
How can I be so damned useless—helpless, even? I’m never useless….
It was then that he realized something even more alarming. On the mountainside, when his ability to communicate mentally with Luccan had returned, he’d assumed it meant his lifelong telepathic talent had returned.
I haven’t heard a single thought from anyone else. Not even L’Aria.
A voice in his head belonging to the wiser part of him, which seemed to enjoy saying I told you so and suchlike, said, But you like the quiet, don’t you, Han Rha-Behl Ah’Shieth?
No. Yes…. The admission came unwillingly but rang true. Is that why? He considered. Perhaps. But… if it is… what about Thurlock? Has he been calling for help all this time and I’ve been deaf to it?
L’ARIA’S FATHER never scolded her, but she didn’t know what to expect if she defied him. She’d never done it. Tiro just wasn’t the sort of person a smart girl would sass. It wasn’t that she feared him. He would never hurt her, would always protect her, and she enjoyed all the time she spent with him. He might seem formal and old-fashioned, but away from the Sisterhold, he let his sense of humor and love of fun have free rein. He could even be a little wild. All of that was as might be expected from a man who spent at least half his time as a giant otter. Above all, regardless of what form he’d taken or the social situation, he remained honorable. L’Aria, like everyone she knew, respected Tiro completely.
But this time, his order for her to wait chafed. She didn’t want to delay going to see Luccan. Not only was he her friend, but in some way nobody really understood, their fates were tied. And something was wrong, terribly wrong, with Luccan—she knew that, felt it in the way her own blood seemed to have lost the rhythm of its song in her veins. The first time her father told her to wait, she clenched her teeth against her fears for Luccan and did as he asked. She tried to obey the second time he gave the order too, biting her lip and tapping her foot. But after a moment, she gave in to the confusing urgency of the song boiling up inside her. She’d never felt, sung, or heard a song like this one, and it frightened her but at the same time drove her to ferret out its source, face it down, do something about it.
She knew Luccan wasn’t the source of the song; he was its primary target. L’Aria feared that what she felt was only the extra poison of it spilling over. If that was true, how much worse might it be for him? Fearing he might not survive, determined to help if she could but with no clear idea how she might do that, L’Aria stepped away from where her father stood talking to Han and Tennehk and broke into a run, heading for Luccan’s door.
She made it three steps into his large room, but no farther. The boy in the bed didn’t look at all like the Luccan she knew, liked, and cared about—not in her eyes. He looked dead, or almost, and wrapped up in some kind of shadow. The stench of it hit her like a fist to the gut, and—somehow—she could see the awful song of it pulsing, worming in and out of his flesh. She had a flash of insight and forced herself to act on it. She put her hand around the jewel at her throat—the pure aquamarine known as Tiro’s Stone. She drew what strength she could from it and then stumbled across the room. The Key of Behliseth lay on a bedside table, its chain broken. Though the idea of touching what appeared to her to be Luccan’s rotting hand revolted her, she placed the Key in his palm and closed his fingers over it. He didn’t wake, but he tightened his fist and held fast to the talisman.
Perhaps she sensed a lessening of the power that had hold of Luccan, but she’d been too close to it for too long. Just as Tiro and Zhevi came into the room behind her, the unnatural song haunting Luccan grew to a deafening pitch in her head, and whatever darkness was holding him, it engulfed her. She hung on to a thread of awareness for a moment, just enough to see her father flinch when he turned her face to look into her eyes. She saw Tiro sway, and she sensed that the magic affected him too, maybe more than it did her. He was able to catch himself before he fell, most likely because, of course, he was stronger. When she fell, he caught her.
L’Aria came awake as her father set her dow
n on a couch in the sitting room across the hall from Luccan’s chamber. He laid her back and went down on one knee to meet her gaze. Staring intently into her eyes, he picked up both her hands and chafed them in his, warming her. After a few seconds, he breathed deeply and nodded in answer to some question he’d asked himself, and laid her hands down gently at her sides. He stroked her hair back away from her face, comforting her before he rose.
“Wait here for me,” he said.
L’Aria was glad Tiro didn’t seem angry about her earlier disobedience, but this time his voice held a note of warning, and even if she’d felt strong enough, she wouldn’t have defied him again. Besides, the horrible song that had flooded her psyche had fallen to a low hum once she was outside Luccan’s room, and she had no desire to aggravate it. But the door to the room she was in aligned with Luccan’s door, and she watched through the doorways, feeling floaty and detached, as her father and Zhevi stood beside Luccan’s bed.
Tiro laid a hand on Luccan’s forehead and then jerked back, as if burned by Luccan’s fever. He pulled the blanket down from Luccan’s shoulders and revealed already bloody fingers clutching the Key, with its sharp angles, close to his chest. After prying Luccan’s hand loose, he placed the Key in the other hand while he bathed the one that had been holding it with a cloth dipped in cool water from the washbasin on the bedside table. When that hand was done, he switched hands, and when they were both done, he gently cleaned the blood, mud, and grass from Luccan’s face and arms. Luccan seemed a little brighter, in L’Aria’s senses, while he held the Key. He responded some to Tiro’s ministrations—stirred and kicked—but he didn’t wake.
By the time Tiro finished his self-appointed task and turned away, his own face had become a mask of dull pain. “Zhevi,” he said, “stay with Luccan, please. L’Aria and I cannot be here, of that I’m certain. I’ll go talk to Han now, and I or someone will let you know what plans we make. Call for help immediately if there is any change in Luccan’s condition.”
Zhevi nodded, a somber expression on his face, and stepped away to take a seat in the chair nearest Luccan’s bed.
When Tiro left Luccan’s room, he pulled the door closed behind him. He came back into the room where L’Aria waited and knelt to embrace her, then help her up from the sofa. To her surprise and alarm, he breathed hard as if exhausted as he led her out to the front of the manor house, and when they reached the informal breakfast room outside the kitchen, he sat down hard on a couch, laid his head on his arms on the table, and closed his eyes. His breath came fast and shallow, and he’d gone gray beneath his perpetually suntanned skin.
“Papa!” L’Aria whispered. “What is it?”
He said, “I feel… I’m not sure, but I think I feel… sick!”
L’Aria sat beside him, speechless. It made sense—he wouldn’t know for sure—because he never got sick. Suddenly, fear for him overtook all her other cares. With her mind and heart freed of the pain she’d felt when near Luccan, she thought she could sing and decided to try. She hoped her magic—her brand of the River Song magic only he and she of all the people in Ethra shared—would help.
But Tiro abruptly stood before she got a single syllable out.
“Oh… oh!” he ground out, running for the door. Once outside, he leaned over the banister of the wrap-around veranda and vomited into the shrubs.
L’Aria contained her shock enough to go to him and proffer her scarf for him to wipe his mouth. “Papa, you never get sick!”
Sounding shaky, he said, “I have, daughter. In my natural form, when I’ve eaten bad meat.”
It made no difference at all to L’Aria to hear that, because this was obviously not the same. “Not like this,” she said. “What’s happening, Papa? What…. Luccan…?”
“I don’t know. Something touches him, holds him, something dark and evil. But you already knew that. It reached into me—as it did you. But you have recovered?”
“Yes, Papa. I feel… mostly fine, now.”
“Good. But I ask you to stay away from him for now, girl. Your recent journey has been long, and your defenses are low. Find food and rest for yourself, and perhaps ask Shehrice to send someone to Zhevi with nourishment. I go now to talk with Han Shieth.”
He took her hand and patted it, then stood patient while she stood on tiptoes to kiss his rough, bearded cheek.
“Do you need help, Papa? Do you want me to go with you?”
“No, child. I’m sick, but I’m getting better, I think. Go now,” Tiro said, and then he turned and left without another word.
L’Aria obediently turned back toward the house to find Shehrice, but she moved slowly, still dazed. How can I rest? she wondered. Something is so wrong in the world, if it can make Tiro L’Rieve sick!
BLACK SILENCE gave way to the sounds of battle coming faintly to Lucky’s ears from a distance. He looked around to find himself crouched in some thorny brush, all gray in the wintry dusk, chill wind cutting right through the sparse leaves of his cover. Desperately, he racked his brain trying to remember where he was and, especially, how he got there. The last thing he could remember for certain was being hit on the head. Was this where he had been when that happened?
He stood suddenly, without any plan to do so and without assistance from his arms, which were useless, pinned to his sides as if stuck with Gorilla Glue. An instant later he was walking, and he soon realized he’d been walking for a long time. His thighs, knees, calves burned with weary effort because, he decided, his long trek was all uphill. The sounds of battle grew closer—swords and clubs slammed against shields, cries of triumph and fear and screams cut abruptly short, and… was that…? Yes, guns. Guns too.
He came to the edge of a ridge and in an instant his perspective righted itself. He hadn’t been climbing, he realized. He’d been descending, and the burn in his muscles came from his struggle against the forces pushing and pulling him down. The miasma of death rode in on the wind, and there was the battle spread out in the valley below him. All color had gone to gray in the misted twilight except the cold blue of wandering lights, the black of shadow liquid-thick, and red—the red of blood in great spills and pools and fountaining wounds.
Lucky closed his eyes and dug in his heels, refusing to see it anymore, refusing to move any closer. The cold around him and in his bones deepened, and then suddenly the forces keeping him upright and moving ceased, and he fell back into the foul mud at his feet.
With the intruding sense that sometimes breaks into dreams, Lucky held his eyelids tightly shut, determined to refute the truth of what he saw, where he was. Despite that, a shadow darker than all the rest loomed against the backs of his eyelids, and they sprang open. There before him, once again, was his mother, Liliana—or perhaps the shade of the woman she had once been. She sat astride her horse with her quiver and arrows and sword, just as she had in life. Her hair gleamed white like ice-crusted snow, her horse the same, though his eye sockets appeared as dark hollows, and his breath frosted in blue light.
She reached down her shadow-wrapped hand. “Come, Luccan. Time grows short. I want to save you while I can.”
In contrast to everything else, he heard something that might be some remnant of love in her voice. “Save me?” he asked, wondering suddenly if he’d been thinking backward, if she knew something he didn’t.
But then he felt something blessedly warm against his palm, and he closed his fingers around it, not caring that sharp edges sliced his living flesh. He looked down and saw golden light seeping through his closed fingers, and when he looked up again with that light between him and his mother’s form, the spell of her voice was broken, and he saw her in all her horrific darkness and decay.
He breathed.
A TOUCH on Han’s shoulder woke him. That didn’t happen often—Han had long ago trained himself to “sleep with one eye open,” in a figurative sense. He always woke before someone got close enough to touch him. Not this time, though, and the shock of the contact sent him flying into somethin
g like panic, though for a man like Han that meant he rose up ready to fight.
“Hold, Han Shieth!”
The particular bass note of that commanding voice could only belong to one person, and Han recognized it immediately. Not all of his brain caught up to the facts at the same time, but coupled with the strong hands holding Han’s arms down at his sides, it was enough to keep Han from attempting to hurt one of the few people in the world who could hurt him back with little trouble.
“Tiro,” Han said, catching his breath, blinking away both sleep and fright, and struggling to adjust to waking reality. “I… I….” Gods alive! What did they put in my tea this time!
Tiro helped Han sit up and situate himself on his cushions. “Don’t fret. Don’t speak. Just listen. I’ve much to tell you.”
After Tiro told him about Luccan’s condition, Han stared at him, trying to clear the dust from his thoughts, at a loss as to how to respond. He was mortified by Tiro’s report, but his words were underscored by the strange fact that Tiro L’Rieve was sick from contact with whatever had infected Luccan.
This just doesn’t happen.
In any circumstance, there was nothing Han hated more than finding himself helpless to help someone in need. It wasn’t a feeling he’d ever had to grow familiar with. By the time he’d had enough birthdays and stern lessons from the wizard to get over feeling sorry for himself so he could get back to caring about other people, he’d already become strong and capable. And then some. Helping people was what he did. As the wizard’s shield, as part of the Sunlands’ government, as a friend to many; in all his roles, he took care of people. Even as a military leader. His main job there, as he saw it, was helping people to stay alive and keep despair at bay. That was how he led, always and unapologetically—with his heart as much as his head.
At the moment, his heart weighed like a boulder in his chest. When it came to Luccan… I’m his uncle, for Behl’s sake! For all intents and purposes his only family. If ever there was a time for me to step up, this is it.
