Bloodraven (30 page)

“I suppose, at the moment, I am,” he said carefully. “Allies in the same prison cell at the very least. I wish you no ill....”

He faltered on this last, detecting some unerring truth within words designed to placate. He didn’t wish Bloodraven ill, though he should have. He had every right to, yet he found he rather wished worse things upon the hawk-faced lord Dunval than the half-man who had placed a brand upon his back. For the moment. Perhaps it was simply that Bloodraven was wounded and he’d always had a sympathy for wounded things.

Bloodraven sat him back, and Yhalen dropped back onto his rump on the floor beside the pallet, faintly lightheaded from relief. Bloodraven had a disconcerted expression on his face, a slight frown, but it wasn’t ominous—simply quizzical, as if Yhalen had baffled him utterly.

“Water. Then food. Then sleep,” Yhalen said, reaching for the ladle and dipping it again into the bucket.

“Are you in the habit of telling others what they ought to do?” Bloodraven asked with less fervor than he’d had when responding to Yhalen’s first request. He took the ladle nonetheless.

Yhalen thought a moment and shrugged. His bloodline was the most honored and respected of all Ydregi, after all, and Yhalen had not been averse to making others aware of that fact for his own benefit. “I suppose I am...before this at any rate.”

Bloodraven grunted, dipping the ladle again himself, water trailing down his chin and onto his broad chest. When he'd drunk his fill, he picked at the cooling food, but as expected, his appetite was less than hearty. After he’d finished and pushed the tray away, he eased himself fully onto the pallet, arranging the down-stuffed pillows in a corner and lying back with a grunt, one hand reflexively hovering over his side as the wound strained from his movement. Already a spot of seepage had stained the clean bandages. It would need to be re-cleaned and drained again before the day was through. Yhalen would ask for more bandages and perhaps see if there were any fresh cairrib root to be had, for it had not been included among the supplies they’d given him and he recalled his mother speaking highly of its properties.

He smiled a little at his own thoughts. He’d never once wanted to follow in his mother’s footsteps and become a healer, instead following a young man’s desires for more arduous pursuits. Hunter or warrior, perhaps chieftain someday...but magic and healing had not hovered within the scope of his wants. Ironic that he found himself now in the practice of both, though the former came to him sporadically.

“What do you hope to gain, by treating with human lords?” Yhalen finally asked. “You can’t hope they’ll deal fairly with you after the bloodshed you’ve caused.”

Bloodraven said nothing, holding his motives close to home. Yhalen sighed, folding arms around knees as a faint shiver passed through him. This far underground it was still chilly. He wished there was a hearth to warm himself by, even if there was no window with a view to the sky.

“I don’t understand you,” he murmured.

“In that, then, we have a common dilemma,” Bloodraven sighed and refused to say more as his breathing evened and sleep overtook him.

Bloodraven slept like the dead. So long and still, in fact, that if not for the rise and fall of his chest, Yhalen might have thought he’d succumbed to his wounds and finally journeyed to whatever afterlife his people believed in. Hours passed and the halfling didn’t as much as shift in his sleep, and all the while Yhalen roamed the limited confines of the room like an animal caged. He knew the exact count of steps it took to cross from one wall to the other. He knew how many spidery cracks pieced the surface of the floor and ceiling, and how many hewn stones had gone into the forming of four walls.

He couldn’t rest for the annoyance of being trapped here. He couldn’t stop the growing resentment for the human men that had bartered him away for the promise of information that might or might not be of value to them. He wanted nothing more than to go home. To properly mourn the loss of the friend Bloodraven’s men had taken from him.

Yherji. Yhalen had not thought of him in a long while, too wrapped up in the web of his own misery.

Yherji had died and Yhalen had run like a deer startled by a forest cat, too caught up in its own fright to give thought to its fellows. If he’d stayed, the reasonable part of him insisted, he’d most likely have shared Yherji’s fate. It’d have been an honorable death, if such a thing existed. Death was death, after all, no matter what the elders said the Goddess promised afterwards. And she was most likely put out with him at the moment, so he had no wish to rush to her embrace.

Foolish and selfish, Grandfather would say. But, though Grandfather was wise beyond measure, he was also pious in the way of the Ydregi and Yhalen had not lived enough years to share in that all-consuming faith. Nor had he lived long enough to have the wisdom of the old. He had ample fear though, and anger at his predicament, as well as the fickle fate that had led him to it. Anger too at Bloodraven and his ilk, at the human lords who sat in their keep above, drinking their wine and eating their feasts as they idly decided the fate of others as though they had the right.

He sat down finally, on the thin rug in the center of the floor, and stared morosely at Bloodraven on the pallet across the room. Bloodraven was crafty and hid the extent of his patience behind the barbaric trappings of his people. Bloodraven spoke very little and thought a great deal, and Yhalen ought to warn Lord Tangery that he wasn’t to be trusted as far as a man could throw him, which wasn’t at all. But then, Tangery had proved no great ally to Yhalen himself, though he supposed, grudgingly, that the man was honorable in his way. Forthright enough, as long as the welfare of his people wasn’t at stake.

The rattle of the locks on the door roused him out of his sulk. Yhalen rose hastily as the door was opened. Cautious guards surveyed the safety of the room, crossbows ready in hand, before allowing a serving man to enter as far as the threshold. The man’s arms were burdened with thick blankets, fresh linens, what looked to be clean clothing and a wooden bucket filled with various personal necessities.

The lady Duvera had been true to her word at least, in providing a few more niceties to make this makeshift cell more accommodating. Yhalen took the armful from the nervous servant, catching awkwardly at the man’s sleeve before he could back out and make his escape.

“There are a few healing herbs that would help, if you have them. Hallow leaf and cairrib and fresh water when you return.” He indicated the bucket of fouled water that he’d used to cleanse Bloodraven’s wound.

The man snatched it up and left, the guards giving Yhalen a dark look before shutting the door and latching it from the other side. Yhalen frowned darkly himself, overburdened with Duvera’s offerings.

He deposited them upon the table and sorted through the things in the bucket. Soap and a bone handled brush and comb were chief among them. There was a clean tunic for him, and a much larger one that had to have been hastily sewn. It looked to be about Bloodraven’s size. There were trousers of an equal size to the tunics, made of good serviceable cloth. The lady was thoughtful in her offerings, and Yhalen idly wondered if she’d send down an oversized barrel for Bloodraven to bathe in, since she seemed to have a care for his comfort.

He glanced over his shoulder at the halfling, but Bloodraven had not moved. Yhalen frowned, surprised that he’d not stirred, for little effort had been made to be quiet in the exchange at the door.

Perhaps Bloodraven really had fallen into the deep sleep of the deathly ill. It was more than possible, considering his wounds.

Yhalen knelt carefully on the edge of the pallet, reaching out a hand and tentatively touching the skin of one bare shoulder. He drew his hand back in surprise, shocked by the heat. Bloodraven had not been so fevered when he’d treated or fed him. He was burning now with it. Yhalen sat back, a helpless panic overcoming him. He wasn’t a healer. He wasn’t his mother. The most he could do was clean a basic wound, not deal with the onslaught of deadly fever. And it was deadly. A fever this hot could fell the largest of men and animals.

He curled his fingers in the blankets, cursing Bloodraven for his stubbornness in not drinking more water. Cursing him for asking for Yhalen to begin with. Cursing him for being caught and injured and putting them both in this situation. Why hadn’t the fool simply returned to the north with the remnants of his party and accepted his loss?

He pushed himself off the pallet and fetched the bucket of clean water and a strip of linen. Settling next to the halfling, he dipped the cloth in cool water and pressed it against Bloodraven’s dry forehead. Not a twitch. No flutter of lashes. Again he damped the cloth and wet Bloodraven’s face, his throat, his slowly rising chest. The infection around the wound in his side had spread beyond the bandages covering it. That was what was killing him. That was what, Yhalen discovered when he gently laid fingers against it, was sucking the vitality out of Bloodraven. The taint of it seeped like a silent poison into his awareness through the touch of his hand, coming upon him unawares, like a voice out of the shadows.

He pulled his hand back in surprise, breathing gone shallow and harsh. He’d always heard his mother speak of the connection she as a healer had with the bodies of her patients. Was this what it felt like when an illness talked to her? Did she feel the very blackness that threatened to engulf an ailing body?

He drew a breath and pressed his palm to the bandage, feeling heat through the cloth and wishing the source of it gone. Wished he had the skill of his mother this once to borrow life from the world at large and channel it into a source of healing. But even if he’d had that skill and that knowledge, there was nothing here to borrow from. Nothing but stone walls.

“Damn you,” he whispered, hands shaking and stomach churning.

Why should it matter if Bloodraven died? Why should he feel nauseous at the prospect, save that the Ydregi despised useless death. You killed only what you needed to survive. You didn’t kill fellow men...even half-men that had treated you badly. Yhalen shuddered in a bout of half hysterical laughter.

As if that should matter to him. As if the killing of ogres would make him break a stride or blink an eye.

As if he’d not already taken a path that his mother would be devastated at, that his grandfather would condemn him for. Why should Bloodraven’s death bother him at all, when it was so richly deserved?

But it did and it baffled him and filled him with desperation. He shut his eyes and thought that perhaps there was something to draw upon after all. There was himself. He’d seen his mother give of herself in small matters many a time and come out of it no worse for wear after a nap and a decent meal. He knew he had the talent, a fact made abundantly clear by the healing of his own injuries, it was simply a matter of using it willingly instead of simply out of survival instinct.

It wasn’t so easy as he’d supposed, the giving of one’s strength. Willing it didn’t make it so. Finding the core of it was something that took many, many years of training and dedication. Controlling it was a matter of practice and only with much practice and guidance could a healer exercise her art in safety.

So Mother always said.

Practice wasn’t an option and there was no one here to guide him, no one to share decades old wisdom. There was nothing to do but force the issue and overcome the blockage that prevented the sharing of strength. When it came it was like nothing so much as the release of a bladder, held full too long and unstoppable once the flow started.

Almost it was a relief at first, the satisfaction of success. He could feel, so very clearly now, the core of Bloodraven’s physicality. The essence of his strength, so tried and tested by the invading infection.

And that infection was a raging thing, grown so out of hand by mistreatment and the filth of the dungeon cell that it threatened to overcome even an ogr’ron’s great endurance.

But Bloodraven’s will to live was tremendous, and perhaps it was that very will that grasped at the tendrils of Yhalen’s vitality and suckled at it like a desperately starved pup feeding at its mother’s

teat. Yhalen gasped, pulled in further than he’d intended, weakness invading him even as strength poured into Bloodraven, unable to break the connection once he’d initiated it, unable to jerk backwards and sever physical contact. He felt with an intensity that took his breath, the pain of a mortal wound in his side, slowly sucking his life away, despite all his body's stubborn insistence to fight it. He felt the lesser pains of torn flesh and muscle at his shoulder, of various other minor hurts that dwindled to nothing against the consuming heat and agony of the poison at his side.

Vision began to spot with dancing lights, his head began to spin haphazardly upon his shoulders, seeming suddenly a separate thing from his body. He slumped, strengthless, as images of the dead forest flashed in his mind. Could he do that to himself, out of his own misguided attempts to heal Bloodraven?

Panic did what simple desire could not. It lent him a burst of strength to jerk backwards—it lent him the will to cease the flow of vitality from one body to another. He sprawled, half off the pallet, legs bent awkwardly and head on the hard stone of the floor, shivering from a cold he hadn’t truly felt before. Side still throbbing in time with the beat of his pulse. He hadn’t the energy to move. Hadn’t the strength to do anything but lie there and let the room spin around him. He managed to turn his head, staring warily at his out flung arm, dreading to see the shriveled flesh of a limb sucked dry of all its vitality. But it was as it had always been, firm and smooth, if unusually pale. He shut his eyes, breathing a sigh of relief.