She forced her hands down, and down again, as if she were reaching from a height. She would have fallen, but Severn was there, steadying her. She whispered his name, or thought she did. She could feel her lips move, but could hear no sound.
No sound at all save the crackle of magic, the fire of it. She kept pushing; it was an effort. Like bench-pressing weight, but backward. Holding on to that because she was stubborn, she continued.
Severn’s arm was around her; she could feel it. She could no longer feel her feet, and even her legs, which were almost shaking with exhaustion, seemed numb. She whispered his name again. It was as close to prayer as she came.
Hawk, she thought. And Hawk she was.
She plummeted as her hands, at last, made contact.
Kaylin had never tended Barrani before. Oh, she’d helped with the occasional scratch they managed to take—where help meant Moran’s unguents and barbed commentary—but she had never healed them. The Barrani did not go to Elantran midwives. Leontines did; Aerians did; even the Tha’alani had been known to call upon their services.
They were all mortal.
The Barrani were not, and they really liked to rub people’s noses in the fact.
Nor had Kaylin tended their young, their orphans. The only orphans in the foundling hall were human.
She had once offered to help a Dragon, and she had been curtly—and completely—refused. She understood why, now.
“He’s alive,” she managed to say. More than that would have been a struggle. Because alive in this case meant something different than it had every other time she offered this assurance to onlookers, many often insensate with fear and the burden of slender hope.
His skin felt like skin. And it felt like bark. It felt like moss, and fur, and the soft silk of Barrani hair; it felt like petals, like chiton, like nothing—and everything—that she had ever touched before. And there was more, but she hadn’t the words for it.
She almost pulled back, but Severn was there, and he steadied her. She could feel his hair brush the back of her neck, and realized her head was bent. Her eyes were closed.
The room was invaded by scent: rose and lilac, honey, water new with spring green; sweat, the aroma of tea—tea?—and sweet wine, the smell of green. The green. Behind her eyes she could sense the bowers of ancient forest, could almost hear the rustle of great leaves.
But here, too, she found silence. The silence of the smug, the arrogant, the pretentious; the silence of concern, of compassion; the silence of grief too great for simple words; the silence that follows a child’s first cry. She found so many silences, she wondered what the use of language was; words seemed impoverished and lessened.
But she did not find the silence of the dead.
Her hands were warm now. The fires had cooled, banked. What they could burn, they had burned, and embers remained. She moved her fingers slowly, and felt—skin. Just skin.
When she had healed Catti, the redhead with the atrocious singing voice, she had almost had to become Catti. Here, she was alone. There was no wound she could sense, and no loss of blood, no severed nerves along the spine. There was nothing at all that seemed wrong, and even in humans, that was unnatural.
So. This was perfection.
Unblemished skin. Beating heart. Lungs that rose and fell. An absence—a complete absence—of bruise, scar, the odd shape of bone once broken and mended.
She wanted to let go then. To tell Teela that this Barrani Lord—this son of the castelord—was alive and well.
But she didn’t. Because her hands still tingled. Because there was something beneath her that she could not see, or touch, or smell, that eluded her. Like dim star at the corner of the eye, it disappeared when she turned to look.
She opened her mouth, and something slid between her lips, like the echo of taste.
Without thinking, she said, “Poison?”
Which was good, because the only person who could answer was Kaylin. Yet poison … what had Red said? Poison caused damage. And there was nothing wrong with this man.
Except that he lay in bed, arranged like a corpse.
Had she not seen Teela dispose of a Barrani, she would have wondered if this was how immortals met their end. But the dead man had bled, and gurgled; his injuries had been profoundly mundane.
War.
The word hung in the air before her, as if it were being written in slow, large letters. As if she were, in fact, in school, and the teacher found belaboring the obvious a suitable punishment. Humiliation often worked.
It just didn’t work well on fieflings.
The Barrani Lord slept beneath her palms. Time did not age him; it did not touch him at all. But Kaylin, pressed against his skin, didn’t either.
This is beyond me, she thought, and panic started its slow spiral from the center of her gut, tendrils reaching into her limbs.
Severn’s arm tightened.
She heard his voice from a great remove. “Anteela,” he said, pronouncing each syllable as if Barrani were foreign to him, “your kyuthe must know what the Lord is called.” Not named; he knew better than that. And how? Oh, right. He’d passed his classes. She’d had to learn it the hard way.
“He is called the Lord of the West March,” Teela replied.
“By his friends?”
“He is the son of the High Lord,” was the even response. It was quieter but sharper; she could hear it more distinctly. And she could read between the lines—he didn’t have any friends.
“Anteela, do better. Your kyuthe cannot succeed at her chosen task, otherwise.”
But Teela did not speak again.
Lord of the West March. Kaylin tried it. As a name, she found it lacking. He must have found it lacking, as well. There was no response at all. There was nothing there.
Swallowing air, Kaylin opened her eyes. And shut them again in a hurry.
But she was a Hawk, and the first thing that had been drilled into her head—in Marcus’s Leontine growl—was the Hawk’s first duty: observe. What you could observe behind closed eyes was exactly nothing. Well, nothing useful. There were situations in which this was a blessing. Like, say, any time of the day that started before noon.
But not now, and not here. Here, Kaylin was a Hawk, and here, she unfurled figurative wings, and opened clear eyes.
She was standing on the flat of a grassy slope that ended abruptly, green trailing out of sight. Above her, the sky was a blue that Barrani eyes could never achieve; it was bright, and if the sun was not in plain view, it made its presence felt. There were, below this grass-strewn cliff, fields that stretched out forever. The sun had dried the bending stalks, but whether they were wild grass or harvest, she couldn’t tell. She’d never been much of a farmer.
The fields were devoid of anything that did not have roots.
She turned as the breeze blew the stalks toward her, and following their gentle direction, saw the forest. It was the type of forest that should have capital letters: The Forest, not a forest. The trees that stretched from ground to sky would have given her a kink had she tried to see the tops; it didn’t.
But she wasn’t really here.
Remind me, she told herself, never to heal a Barrani again.
She wondered, then, what she might have seen had Tiamaris not had the sense to forbid her the opportunity to heal a Dragon. She never wanted to find out.