Shadows and Light (25 page)

“Sled?” Xian asked curiously.

“The name of Rafael’s overgrown donkey,” Nailah supplied.

“You actually named him?” Surprise and pleasure were evident in his lover’s face.

“I had to after I decided to keep him,” Rafael muttered, trying not to blush.

“There are better things to do right now than talk about fool horses and their ridiculous names!” Nailah exclaimed exasperatedly. “Come, I’ll show you how to make a proper poultice for those wounds, boy.” She left, and after making sure Xian was settled on the bench again, Rafael followed her.

They boiled herbs and folded cloths and ground more of her dried stores to a powder, and Nailah showed Rafael what was needed to draw the poison out of the wounds. “The purging will really begin now,” she said, barely visible through the cloud of steam coming from the cauldron. “His healing ability will become less concerned with cuts and scrapes and more concerned with keeping him functioning, keeping organs working and blood flowing. The wounds will have to be kept clean to prevent infection from complicating the whole wretched process.”

Rafael frowned. “Won’t he end up scarring, then? If he stops healing?”

“Scars are the least of Xian’s problem,” Nailah told Rafael bluntly. “My husband and I both scarred terribly.” She held out one of her wrinkled forearms and pointed to pale, ropy cicatrices that Rafael had thought were simply due to age. “They fade over time, though. And the less infection his body has to fight, the fainter they’ll be.” She laid ingredients out on the small table beside her chair. “Wormwood. Witch hazel. Wolf’s Apple.”

“Poisons?”

“And an antiseptic. The poison is all in the dose, boy. Even Erran’s blood can be used to heal, regardless of its many disadvantages. In this case like calls to like and the more we coax out early while he’s still strong the better.” She eyed Rafael sidelong through the cloud. “You can’t whip the man, but you can take a blade to him?”

“I know knives,” Rafael said, a little stiffly. “There isn’t much call to flay a mark before you kill him.”

“Fair enough.” Nailah held up her hands peaceably. “To each their own.” They prepared the rest of the bandages in silence.

Chapter Twenty

The process wasn’t easy after Xian came clean with Rafael, but it was less difficult than it had been. It helped to see his lover so clearly affected by the knife, to see the agony of need drain away under the smooth, steady draw of the blade. It hurt Xian, Rafael could see that, but the pain was also so clearly preferable to what he had been enduring before that Rafael could face his daily task with equanimity.

Despite their care, or perhaps in some ways because of it, Xian began sinking into the withdrawal at a faster rate. It took longer to gentle him out of his constant shaking, and longer for him to respond to their questions. The few times the knife wasn’t enough to stop the shaking, Rafael used the silver needles in his lover’s flesh. The skin turned black where they were inserted and the punctures wept what looked like tar, but they brought the magic to the fore and gave Xian a moment of respite, despite how they had to burn inside him.

Nailah kept herself and Rafael busy, almost too busy for him to worry. She had patients coming at all hours, looking for treatment of a variety of aches and pains and illnesses. Occasionally she was called away to a patient’s home to treat them, and she always immediately appropriated Sled for the task. Rafael didn’t really mind. He had given the care of the animal over to the boy Malcolm, who despite his inability to speak without making it sound like a question wasn’t all that shy, and had plenty he wanted to ask Rafael about whenever a moment presented itself.

“You’ve been to the great city of Clare?” he said one afternoon as they were mucking out the stalls. The day was warmer than usual and the snow had turned to slush on the ground.

“I came from there,” Rafael replied.

“I hear it’s the most fantastic place in the world. I hear you can find anything there, or at least you could, before it fell down. Is it true?”

“Where did you hear about that?”

“The peddlers bring news through, even this far into the Sisters. They say it’s a ruin now! They say ten thousand souls died in a single night! They say the High Ones fought among themselves and set fire to the entire city with their magic. They say—”

“Don’t believe everything you hear,” Rafael said, a trifle too harshly, because Malcolm started and pulled away from him, his face taking on a half-scared and half-apologetic expression it was clearly accustomed to. Rafael didn’t feel sorry enough about it to soothe him, and they worked in silence until the barn was clean. It was only as he was preparing to enter the house that Malcolm spoke again.

“The man who arrived with you? Is he…well?”

Rafael froze for a moment, then forced a shrug. “He’s getting there.”

“Is he a-a High One?”

Rafael didn’t say anything, just stared at Malcolm, who started to squirm under the scrutiny. “Only I know that Mistress Nailah was, everyone knows even though they don’t say. Her husband was as well, he was Gran’s great-great-granduncle, and, even though he didn’t live for long once they got here, Gran always said he was family and that that made Mistress Nailah family, and none of us would ever tell, you know, not like they have in those other places.”

Other places. Places like Byerton and Carlisle and a dozen other small towns along the coast and farther inland, places where the crippled aristocracy of Clare had fled to and tried to dominate with all the desperate strength and ruthlessness of the dying. According to rumor whole towns had been destroyed, their populaces slaughtered for reasons ranging from their disobedience to a desire to invoke terror.

Such stories were probably exaggerated, but Rafael knew that much of it was true. It was the kind of thing that Myrtea would do. Myrtea… She still haunted his dreams at night, now more than ever since he couldn’t rely on Xian to soothe him. He hoped she was dead, prayed she was dead, but there was no way to know. And if she wasn’t…

“I’m sure Mistress Nailah will save him,” Malcolm said softly, breaking Rafael’s uncomfortable reverie. “She’s the best healer there is. She came from Clare when Gran was a girl, and she brought magic with her.”

“Skill is more powerful than magic,” Rafael said, “and Nailah is highly skilled.”

When he mentioned her supposed magical abilities to Nailah later that evening, she scoffed. “Only the young and gullible believe in that sort of magic. Because it’s beyond their breadth of knowledge, it must be mystical. Most of what went on in Clare was purely human, even among High Ones. Our wizards were mystics, and learning to manipulate the magic in Erran’s blood was a natural step for them. For the rest of us, the gifts of the blood never went further than enhanced speed and strength. For me it never even went that far. I was satisfied with youth and beauty for many years.”

“Why did you decide to leave?” Rafael asked.

“Heran decided,” she replied, her voice a little softer now. “He wasn’t one of our tribe originally. He was more than three centuries younger than me, in fact. He arrived in Clare and he was very impressive, for a normal human. A great orator and statesman. I convinced him to marry me and to ascend, but he left family in these mountains. Heran never felt right about leaving them behind, and when the source first began to show signs of failure—gods, it was nearly a century before your time—he was one of the first of us to advocate renouncing Erran’s blood and leaving the city.” She grimaced. “It took him another fifty years to convince me to do it. We left with Xian, but I always knew that my brother wasn’t going to stay with us, not until he found what he was looking for.

“It upset me at the time, but after the change I understood how hard this would be alone. How unbearable. I had my husband and he had me, and after Xian left we were still together, and had each other to rely on.” She paused then said, “He died a short while after that, left me alone. And now here I still am, fifty years on, lasting long enough for my fool of a brother to finally return.” Nailah shook her head.

“I’m sorry,” Rafael offered gently.

“It’s long past now,” she sighed. “More of a cautionary tale than anything, I suppose. You never know how long you’ll have the ones you love.” Rafael said nothing, just handed her the mortar when she motioned for it. They worked silently for the rest of the afternoon.

Chapter Twenty-One

Three months after they first arrived at Nailah’s house, Xian truly lost his mind. Everything else had been happening incrementally and Rafael had expected this aspect of his detoxification to be the same, but instead it was shockingly abrupt. One day he was speaking, albeit slowly, and was able to follow a conversation and recognize his caretakers, and the next he was catatonic. At this new stage Xian gave no indication of being able to see, he barely reacted to voices or sounds and only after hours did he respond to loving torture. He was skeletally thin, and Nailah had warned Rafael for several weeks that Xian was reaching a critical point in his descent.

“His body may not make it past the low point without our intervention,” she warned him.

“What kind of intervention?”

“The uncomfortable kind.” That was all she would say on the matter, and all Rafael could do was more of the same, tugging the lighter and frailer body of his lover into position and carving new lines into his flesh, or tracing over old ones that were barely healing faster than a normal human’s now.

Every wound brought the blackness welling to the surface of his skin, and that skin was like paper, thin and easy to tear. Rafael had to bind Xian tighter now to keep him from injuring himself, if not with his hands then with his own teeth. When he did react to stimuli it was the reaction of an animal, wary and raw. The white orbs of his eyes were shot with purple veins, and more than once he tried to attack his lover.

“He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Nailah said after one such attack. Xian had drawn blood with his teeth before Rafael had pulled back, and watching the pallid, bruised nightmare lick at his crimson lips and whine gutturally was almost more than Rafael could stand. “It’s not as easy to be strong when he bears almost no resemblance to your beloved, is it?” There was nothing mocking in her tone, just compassion, so rare from her that Rafael could barely believe it.

“There’s nothing I can do right now. I feel…useless,” Rafael confessed.

“You do plenty for him. You clean him, you care for him and you watch him. This is almost as bad as it gets, boy.”

“How could it be worse?” he demanded.

“It can always be worse,” Nailah said darkly.

And she was right. The following dawn, not a minute after Rafael had entered the dark, stuffy room and Nailah had left it, Xian stopped breathing. The absence of the low, rasping wheezes was so surprising that it took Rafael a moment to realize what that signified. “Nailah!” he cried, laying his hands on Xian’s sunken chest. The bones flexed easily beneath his touch, far too soft. “Nailah!”

“What?” she demanded from the door.

“He’s not—he’s not breathing.” Rather than coming in, Nailah turned and thumped rapidly through the other room. Rafael heard the ceramic lids of jars being slammed onto the nearest surface.

“Is his heart beating?” she demanded.

Rafael bent his ear to his lover’s chest and listened. There was nothing. “No.”

“Of course not,” she said angrily, “why would he make this easy for us?” A moment later she hurried back into the room. “Move,” she ordered, and Rafael crawled reluctantly back from Xian’s side.

“Fool of a man,” Nailah muttered as she opened the folded white rag in her hand. There were thorns inside, not long but incredibly sharp. “Fool. Idiot.” She picked up a thorn and pushed it to the root directly above his heart. “Selfish. Selfish.” She pressed two more thorns in just below the junction between collarbone and shoulder, and another into the base of his throat. “Impossible man.” Another went beneath his navel, and without ceremony she swept aside the loincloth that covered his groin and pressed a final thorn just behind his testicles.

Rafael winced reflexively watching it but he didn’t do anything to interrupt her. His own heart was trying to race out of his chest, all the latent fear and worry that had died down with the monotony of caring for his nonresponsive lover surging back full force. He watched as Nailah massaged Xian’s chest, pressing down firmly over his rib cage, muttering curses to herself even as worry crept into her face. She rubbed harder, stroking lines between the thorns, unashamedly handling her brother’s body as she scowled.

“What are you doing?” Rafael asked hoarsely.

“The thorns are placed in energy centers in his body. With enough stimulation those centers should reanimate him. The thorns themselves are coated with stimulants that ought to be working.” She scowled down at Xian’s still body. “It should have worked already. The stimulant is also a poison, and I can’t risk giving him any more of it than is already inside of him.”

Rafael could hardly process what he was hearing. “You mean he could die… Now.”

“He’s been one step away from death for days, boy, you know that,” she said harshly.

“But we were waiting for the turning point!” Rafael shouted, losing his tenuous handle on his emotions. “This isn’t a turn, it’s an ending!”

“Sometimes things end!”

“Not like this!” He pushed off of his knees and raced to his bedroom, clawed through his long-forgotten saddlebag until he found the sealed vial of Erran’s blood, then raced back into the room. “Use this.”

“Get that out of here!” Nailah exclaimed. “How can that help—it’s what’s killing him now!”

“You said the poison is in the dose.”

“For the uninitiated. For someone like Xian, or myself, the barest hint of that blood in our bodies again will bring the craving back.” Nailah actually looked frightened. “If I had known you had it with you, I would have forced you to destroy it the first night you arrived.”