Resenting the Hero (9 page)

The healer arrived. Finally. She was rummaging through her sack as she ran, pulling out a small bag as she knelt beside my opponent. I watched her take out a small leaf, which she stuck into her patient's mouth. He chewed on it and waited for the sedative to take hold.

The small flow moving through Karish grew weaker, and weaker still, and trickled off into nothing. Karish's own internal protections snapped back into place. I let my Shields drop.

I nearly dropped with them, but Van Staal, who had snuck up behind me, caught me when I would have collapsed. “You'll ruin your clothes,” I warned him. I was glad I could speak at all. Shielding hadn't been much of a challenge that time, but it had eliminated what reserves the dancing had left me.

“Too late,” Van Staal said, hooking an arm around my waist and helping me across the sands. I stumbled with every step. “I'll say this for you, Mallorough, your introduction to High Scape will certainly be remembered. I wouldn't have taken you for the dramatic type.”

He lowered me to a bench at one of the tables, and Mao handed me a mug of ice-cold wine. “Bless you,” I gasped before drinking deeply. A nice light wine that flooded my parched throat. It flooded my brain, too. Wonderful stuff, wine.

My Source came back with a jaunty stride, looking so fresh I wanted to hit him. When I could move. Of course he hadn't been dancing, but it was the principle of the thing. Mao rose to his feet. “Congratulations,” he said because, incidentally, I had won the competition. “It must be wonderful to be able to move so swiftly.” He looked a little wistful as he turned and left.

Karish took Mao's place beside me, elbows propped on the table behind us, legs sprawled out in front. I drank my wine and contemplated what had just happened.

My last opponent was carried away. The dancing competition continued, but I had lost all desire to watch it. I watched Karish, instead.

“Now I know you're not admiring my profile,” he said.

“You channeled his pain.” It was obvious. There had been no disturbance, the channeling had felt strange, the man had been rigid in agony one moment and relaxed the next. It was the only explanation, and it was ridiculous.

He tossed me a quick glance, then pointed at a woman walking by in a truly hideous gown. “What color would you say that is?”

He didn't stare at me and ask if I had lost my mind. He didn't laugh and tell me I was an idiot. Pretty much settled the issue for me. “Are they teaching that sort of thing at the Source academy? How come I've never heard about it?”

“It doesn't really go with her hair, does it?”

“Are you a healer? How does it work?”

“Does she not have a mirror at home or what?”

I was losing patience. “I really can ask questions all night.”

His sigh ended with a bit of a growl. “What?” he demanded testily.

“Did you channel his pain?”

“Don't be ridiculous.”

Too late.
“I know what I saw, and I trust what I see.”

“If nothing else,” he muttered.

“
Did
you—”

“Will you please keep it down?” he hissed.

“Why?”

“I just got out.”

Talk about pulling teeth. “From where? Prison?”

Finally, he looked at me, and he didn't appear at all pleased. “I don't want to be shipped back to Shidonee's Gap just to answer a thousand questions and go through a hundred tests while the council does everything short of splitting my head open trying to discover why I can do this.” With one impatient tug he pulled the ribbon out of his hair, then ran his hand through it, making an appealing mess of it. “And I don't imagine you want to be sitting around in a tavern doing nothing while they pick me over, so leave it alone.”

“So no one knows you can do this.”

“Brilliant deduction.”

“So how did you learn to do it?”

He sighed again. “My favorite professor is an elderly man with joints that give him a lot of pain when it rains,” he explained irritably. “I was helping him rub a lotion into one of his hands and I sort of”—he gestured vaguely—“did it by accident.”

Tending to the elderly didn't really fit Karish's image, but I had more important things to think about. “And he didn't realize it.”

“He'd been taking some wine, too, for the pain. Laced with a sedative. He thought the combination kicked in a little faster than normal.”

“But if you weren't being Shielded, how come you're not dead?”

He shrugged. “I'm not sure. Except, it's such a low level of power, and it's very different from channeling in the usual way, maybe I just didn't need it.”

“Or maybe,” I said slowly, “you don't really need a Shield at all.” Maybe the Stallion was really that good. And maybe I was really that useless. Gods. Wouldn't that just be perfect? Bonded for life to a Source who didn't need me. Training my whole life for nothing.

It was my turn to look away. I blew out a quick breath.

“It's not a theory I'm willing to test, Lee.”

He was trying to reassure me. How sweet. How annoying. “No, of course not.” Maybe I could take up a productive hobby. Gardening was said to be very calming.

“Your dancing is amazing,” was his next comment, straight out of nowhere.

Of course it was. I'd practiced it every day of my life in the seventeen years I'd been in the academy. Just another useless pastime at which I excelled.

“And you were very quick with your Shields when I started channeling. With no warning and exhausted as you had to be, you were right in there. That was really good.”

Oh, lord, he was back with the flattery again. That the motivation was entirely different this time didn't make it any less inappropriate. Did he really think I needed my esteem stroked in that way? It wasn't that I'd found out I was incompetent, just superfluous. An entirely different arena of uselessness.

But it was kind of funny. Here I was thinking up ways to deflate his pride while he was trying to pump up mine. I bit back a smile. If I let him see it he'd think his moonshine was working, and that would never do.

“Endurance. Strong will. Quick thinking. Very good.”

“Are you going to say anything any time soon?”

“What, you expect me to deny any of that?” Just because it was flattery didn't mean it wasn't true.

He grinned. Oh, gods. I held on to my mug very, very hard. “You know, I think I'm going to like you after all.”

I didn't want him to like me. It was way too dangerous. “Go dance or something.” The ordinary kind, not bench dancing. Sources didn't tend to bench dance very much for some reason.

He shook his head. “Can't leave you.”

“I'm too tired to do anything stupid. I'll stay with Mao and Arter. She'll keep an eye on me.”

“Aye, and next time you'll throw my leaving you in my face. Forget it.”

He'd proven himself well enough. I was suddenly quite anxious to have him gone. And really, it wasn't fair to make him sit with me for the rest of the night. “Please, Karish, all this temptation before you.” I nodded at all the pretty people around us. “Something's going to burst.”

He smiled. No, leered. “You offering to do something about it?”

I reached back for one of the dishes on the table and found a wicked-looking knife. I raised it and cocked a suggestive brow.

He paled. “You're a sick, sick woman.”

“Still think you're going to like me?”

He leaned forward and kissed me before I could dodge him. Just a quick brush of lips on lips, nothing to get excited about. I was too tired to get excited, anyway. “All that's gold doesn't glitter,” he said with satisfaction, as though it actually made any sense.

I pulled in another deep breath through my nose and looked out unseeing at the crowds swirling by. Definitely too dangerous.

Chapter Six

I had expected to sleep like the dead that night, after my day of riding and my evening of bench dancing. I didn't. I kept seeing my final opponent arching in pain in the sand. I kept imagining I could hear the crunch of his knee shattering. Over and over again, I saw it, I heard it, and when I did manage to doze off, I dreamed about it.

People were injured while bench dancing. It happened all the time. I'd even witnessed some pretty brutal injuries. But I'd never caused any of them, never been dancing against the person when they suffered them.

It was not my fault. I'd done nothing but dance as the sport was meant to be danced, and he had gotten tired and hurt himself. I knew all that.

But I couldn't help thinking I'd been responsible.

I couldn't help wishing he hadn't suffered that injury while dancing against me. If it had to happen, why couldn't it have happened to the dancer before me or the one after?

That was a selfish thought. But I was a selfish person. I knew this about myself.

The festival was still continuing. The thought of attending any of the events while this person was suffering seemed obscene to me. I told Karish I didn't want to attend the festival that day—he gave some impression of being disappointed—and then I went looking for the injured bench dancer.

That, all by itself, was an extremely intimidating task. I had grown up within the confines of the academy and its grounds. The villages and towns Karish and I had stopped at on the way to High Scape had been small, the people easy to talk to. High Scape was another matter altogether.

For one thing, it was something of a mess. The three waterways divided it into six parts, called quads. Each quad really comprised its own little city, with its own moneylenders' row, bakers' street, and glassblowers' avenue. The night before, Ogawa had told me that the North Quad, the largest part of the city, was the poorest section, and the South Quad held the wealthiest residents, and the quads in between held everyone else.

Finding a nameless stranger in all of that was a daunting task for someone like me, someone unused to tall buildings and hordes of regulars jostling me in the street. It meant going to the festival after all, to hunt down the moderator of the bench dancing from the day before. She had the list of all the competitors and where they lived. The address she gave me meant nothing to me. She told me it was located in the Lower West Quad. The second-poorest region of the city.

To me, wealthy versus poor were vague concepts. The wealthy would have, I imagined, larger homes. Nicer clothes. More space, perhaps. Those were the only differences I could imagine.

Finding my way to the Lower West Quad, I realized it meant something more than that. It meant cobbles missing from the streets, or the streets not cobbled at all. Narrower streets, missing the wooden side paths. No apparent lantern posts. Buildings going unpainted and falling into some disrepair.

People staring at me and obviously wondering what I was doing there.

A good question, I thought.

Punishments for crimes against Pairs were particularly high, but so were punishments for murder. Didn't stop people killing each other. Perhaps it had been just the tiniest bit stupid to wander into this quad alone. But then, who was I going to ask to accompany me? And I would be damned if I would feel the need for an escort every time I stepped out my door.

I stood a little straighter, glared at the environment in general, and dared anyone to molest me.

I could be a real idiot sometimes.

Especially as I had to ask these people for directions.

The braid on my shoulder didn't convince some people that I wasn't some kind of prostitute, apparently the only kind of woman who would willingly talk to strangers in this area. I had to endure a few offers of employment—which I declined most politely, really—before I found the house I was looking for. It was as rickety as all the others. I was disappointed.

I stared at the door for a few long moments. I could hear no sounds from within. Perhaps there was no one in there.

I almost hoped there wasn't. I really, really didn't want to face this person. He was going to be angry. In pain and resentful and afraid and furious. He was going to yell at me.

It was stupid to be intimidated by the thought of a stranger yelling at me. It was only noise, after all, and could do no harm. But people had rarely yelled at the academy. It was unbecoming in a Shield, though some of my Source professors had indulged in it at times. It had always shocked me and had made me more certain that I would never lapse into such behavior.

I wouldn't find out by standing out there.

I pounded on the door. Got no answer. Pounded again.

“So come in, already!” a voice shouted from within.

I paused for a moment, realizing it was kind of careless to walk into a strange house in a strange place alone. When no one knew where I was. But then, it was kind of careless for him to call someone in when he had no idea who they were. We could be careless together. I went in.

The place screamed bachelor. Clothes tossed everywhere, along with the odd food-encrusted dish. My lip curled in disgust, and I wondered why I was there.

I found him in his bedroom, which was also a mess. He was staring out the window, apparently disinterested in the person invading his home. His leg was encased in a splint, he had a day's worth of stubble on his face, and his hair was sticking up in a thousand different directions. The lines about his eyes told me he was in pain, and there was a small bottle on the table beside the bed he was lying on. The bed was small. Its twin on the other side of the room was hidden under a pile of clothes. “Do you switch from night to night?” I asked him.