A Flame in Hali (29 page)

As Saravio shifted energy currents within the merchant’s brain, Eduin used his
laran
to reach behind the man’s emotional barriers. The merchant had a touch of
laran,
but not enough to withstand a trained telepathic probe. Eduin found a tangle of regret, of petty unkindnesses, of hopes disappointed, of all the ordinary irritations of a long marriage. Interwoven with them were moments of tenderness, of trust, of wordless comfort. Caught between the good and the bad, the poor man could release neither.

Saravio’s song evoked a rising sense of well-being in the merchant. It was just what Eduin needed to break through the despondency. Emotions surged forward—loss and love and even relief. Tears streamed down the merchant’s cheeks. His body shook as he sobbed out his grief.

Now you are both at peace,
Eduin spoke mentally while Saravio cast a euphoric veil over the pain.
Peace . . .

Yes . . .
the merchant repeated silently.
Peace . . .

Eduin fed words into thoughts.
Let there be an end to mourning, to pain itself . . . embrace hope . . . return to health . . . joy . . . must tell the story . . . must . . . reach the ears of Lord Brynon . . . his daughter . . .

They left the house some hours later with a filled purse. The merchant sang as he went to his bed, his head swimming with pastel visions and the promise to write the next morning to the castle steward who purchased his goods.

“The brothers Eduardo and Sandoval Hernandez,” the herald called out the names that Eduin had presented, having devised them during their stay at Carskadon. The herald’s voice filled the presence chamber of Lord Brynon Aillard. The room was long and low-ceilinged, its stone walls bare of tapestry, the floor rushes worn with many cleanings, yet some trick of construction rendered the acoustics superb. If the Lord whispered, everyone in the chamber could hear.

Lord Brynon slouched upon his heavy chair set upon a raised dais. The chair was draped with the gray-and-red feather pattern of Aillard. He braced one elbow upon the chair’s arm, his chin resting upon his fist. Flanking him were a handful of somber, solid-looking men.

A lone woman, her chestnut hair coiled low on her neck in a style Eduin had never seen outside a Tower, stood a little apart from the others. From the simplicity of her dress and the telltale signature of
laran,
Eduin guessed she was the household
leronis.
He did not think she could penetrate his barriers, but he would have to be careful with any use of his powers lest she detect his trained
laran
at work.

The rest of the courtiers wore such dark colors that Eduin wondered if someone of importance had just died. They watched him with wary, almost haggard expressions.

Eduin stepped forward from the line of supplicants and bowed. At a murmur from the courtiers, he glanced back. Saravio did not bow but stood swaying. His black robe swirled around his angular frame as if caught in an invisible wind. Above it, his features shone with an unearthly pallor, his eyes burning in hollowed sockets.

“Uncover before His Lordship,” a courtier hissed.

Eduin realized that although he had taken off his hat as he bowed, Saravio still wore the skull-clinging knitted cap of their journey. Before he could act, a guard stepped forward, hand outstretched to sweep it from Saravio’s head. Eduin held his breath, for he had not shaved Saravio since their arrival in Kirella.

Saravio did not flinch as the strings that anchored the cap upon his head snapped. The guard stepped back with the offending garment in his hand. A murmur rippled through the assembly. Instead of treacherous red, a pure shimmering white covered Saravio’s head. It was little more than a fuzz, but it gleamed in the light of a hundred torches.

Eduin caught the sudden flare of interest from the household
leronis,
as if she had sensed Saravio’s mental powers. Eduin tensed. She was clearly the only one at court with any formal training, but his impression of her was one of a minor degree of talent, enough to teach children the rudiments of control, diagnose threshold sickness, ease a fever, or cast truthspell. And that, he thought with a trace of exultation, he need not fear.

Lord Brynon drew himself upright and for the first time, Eduin noticed the six fingers upon his hands. Many Aillards had that trait, said to be a product of their
chieri
blood. Certainly, this man did not resemble the half-mythical nonhumans in any other way. His hair, where it was not age-grizzled, was so darkly red as to appear almost black, and the shoulders beneath the rich mantle were broad and masculine. Even his face looked as if it had weathered years on the fields of war.

“So you are the healer half the city has been talking about,” he rumbled. “A few hysterics claim to be cured, and everyone is amazed. I am not so easily fooled.”

Eduin bowed again. “
Vai dom,
if you were, then you would be standing here and I in your place. Since it is otherwise, clearly you are no fool and I am but your poor servant.”

The court fell silent, stunned. Faces turned from Eduin to the dais. Lord Brynon threw back his head and roared with laughter. “A man of wit as well as impudence! I like you already. But your companion there, the one they claim worked these miracles, can he not speak for himself?”

“He speaks but rarely, and then only to Naotalba or to me.”

“Naotalba? The Bride of Zandru? I have never heard of such a thing. He must be mad.”

“Some have said so,” Eduin replied, “but it is that very madness that so often comes with the healing gift. Perhaps the rest of us, who do not speak with the gods, are not as often answered by them.”

“Indeed. And is your friend one of those?”

“I am a simple man,
vai dom.
The gods do not concern themselves with the likes of me. Yet since Naotalba spoke to my brother, Sandoval the Blessed, I have seen men who were broken in body and mind returned to health when all else failed. If that is not a miracle, I do not know what is. You must judge whether he can do the same for anyone in this house.”

“That remains to be seen,” said the Aillard Lord, “Come, you will dine with us tonight, both of you.”

The
coridom
who arranged the seating at dinner placed Eduin and Saravio at the end of one of the long tables, well away from the Aillard Lord. The men who sat at the head table were important courtiers, signified by their rich robes and emblems of office. A few of them glanced curiously at the strangers, but most ignored the lower tables. They bent over their food, barely conversing with their neighbors.

Eduin accepted the situation without complaint, for he had accomplished his first goal. He was not so long from the gutters of Thendara to scorn a decent meal, but memories of his life before that came back to him. He remembered dining at Hali with Carolin, then yet a Prince, at the table of King Felix.

He had never seen such elegance as at the Hastur court, as if he had wandered into a dream. Memory burnished candlelight, the jewel-toned tapestries, the curve of a lady’s arm, the brilliance of her glance.

Now, sitting in a smoky, crowded hall, crammed in among men he would have once scorned, Eduin remembered the smoothness of his borrowed silk shirt against his skin, smelled the fragrance of the green boughs and spicebread, heard the lilt of a superb singer, clasped the light, supple body of his dancing partner.

He must, he knew, take care not to idealize her. She was human, as capable of folly as any other, and more than that, she was the sister of the man he must destroy. For all his wishing, Eduin could not tear away that luminous shimmer from her image. She had been the sweetest of young maidens, afire with life and joy, and immensely, unself-consciously generous in spreading it to everyone she touched, at a time when his own heart was starved.

She existed only in the past, that radiant girl. The boy he had been no longer existed, except as nostalgic reminder, and the same must be true for her. He could not afford such sentimentality, especially here in the court of uncertain allies.

The next moment, he jerked awake from his reverie. Two of the Lord’s dogs, huge rangy hounds, had lunged at the same time for a bone tossed from the table. The larger, a young male, caught the end of the joint between his jaws. The other was older, unused to challenge. Hackles raised, lips drawn back from yellowed teeth, he advanced growling upon the other. Eduin saw this much from his seat, halfway down the table.

The next instant, the two dogs erupted into a snarling, rolling mass. Someone shouted to stay back, another called for a bucket of water to throw over them. Several men rose to pull them apart. A lady shrieked. One of the young pages, a boy of six or seven, stood motionless, his mouth open and eyes frozen, as one dog drove the other, snapping and yelping, in his direction. Before any of them could react, the animals had knocked the boy down. His scream pierced the air.

Lord Brynon strode across the room, sweeping a table out of the way with one blow. He grabbed the nearer dog by the back of the neck and tore it away, in one movement hurling it against the next table. The other dog retreated, yipping in terror.

Eduin pushed through the onlookers. Lord Brynon knelt, his broad back cutting off sight of the fallen page. Blood soaked the floor rushes. Eduin could smell it. Adrenaline and shock rose like smoke from a wildfire. Around him, men drew back in silence. One of the women began sobbing, quickly hushed.

Yet the boy lived. Of all the swirling energies Eduin sensed, death was not among them. Not yet. Blood spurted from a deep, ragged gash along the side of his neck to soak the fabric of his tunic.

Eduin knew he’d be taking a desperate chance, using his powers in the presence of a
leronis
who, however minor her own talent, might well recognize his. She would ask why a Tower-trained
laranzu
was masquerading as the servant of an itinerant healer. But he might never have a better opportunity to gain Lord Brynon’s confidence.

If he used Saravio’s
laran
as a shield, he might yet escape detection. The
leronis
would see Saravio as a wild talent, trained but flawed and erratic. She might not think to look deeper. And if she did, then he would have to deal with her.

“Vai dom,”
Eduin cried. “Is this not the reason you have kept us here, to help in such a case?”

Lord Brynon spun around, rising to his feet with the deadly speed of a swordsman. His face contorted for an instant, and Eduin realized that the page was not some youngest son of an insignificant distant cousin, but his own.
Nedestro
and unable to inherit, but deeply loved all the same. Even if Eduin had not possessed a scrap of
laran,
he would have been able to read the older man’s thoughts, that for such a wound, there was no chance.

“Do—whatever you can—”

Eduin had no need to summon Saravio, for the other man had followed him like a shadow. He pushed Saravio toward the dying boy, aware that they had only moments in which to act. It was vital that Saravio be seen as the one who saved the child, and not Eduin.

Saravio responded instantly to the torrent of pain issuing from the boy. He threw himself to his knees, oblivious to the pooling blood, took the boy’s hand, and began chanting loudly.

“Naotalba, we call upon you, save this boy—”

Eduin retreated to the shadows, confident that all eyes would be upon Saravio and the wounded boy. Slipping one hand between the folds of his belt, he grasped his starstone.

“Hear my plea, O great Naotalba, come to us now, heal him speedily—”

The court’s attention now fixed firmly upon Saravio, whose voice rose in pitch and loudness. Reaching out with his peculiar
laran,
he propelled the boy into a state of pleasurable somnolence, damping all sensation of pain. The effect rippled through the audience.

Eduin plunged into the mass of energy currents, the outpouring of life force. He worked quickly, with all the skill of a
laranzu
trained at Darkover’s finest Tower. The cut looked messy, the edges mangled by the dog’s twisting bite. The artery, for all the profuse bleeding, had been only nicked, not severed.

With his mind, Eduin spanned the gap, creating a cuff of psychic force over the vessel. Nothing, not the droplets of liquid or the forces that bound them together, penetrated the barrier. The physical mending would take longer, but the boy’s life was no longer measured in heartbeats.

Behind the temporary bandage, Eduin began weaving together the tiny fibrous threads that made up the wall of the blood vessel. Bits of clotted blood caught in the strands, matting them together. Eventually, the seal would resolve into a scar as the body itself completed the healing.

“I am here! All is well!” An elderly man in the robes of a physician rushed forward. His face paled visibly as he took in the extent of the bleeding. “My—my lord, you must prepare yourself, I—” He pointed at Saravio. “What is this man doing here? Clear the area! I must attend to my patient!”