She felt the shape of their bodies and the beat—erratic and labored—of their hearts. She heard their thoughts, not as thoughts, but as memories, almost inseparable from her own. She felt their injuries, the broken bones, the old scars from—falling out of a tree? She even snorted. These weren’t men who got caught out in bar brawls.
They weren’t men who were accustomed to war of any kind.
She could save them. She could see where infection had taken its toll, eating into flesh and muscle. Two men. If she wanted them to live, she couldn’t use any more power than was absolutely necessary. No miracles, not yet. No obvious miracles.
But the subtle ones were the only ones that counted.
The bones that would knit on their own, she left; the ones that wouldn’t mend properly, she fixed. She tried not to see what had caused the breaks, but gave up quickly. That took too much effort, too much energy.
When she lifted her hands from their faces, she felt the touch of their stalks, clinging briefly to her skin. She told them to sleep.
She heard Ybelline’s voice. Felt Severn’s hands under her arms, shoring her up as she stood and wobbled. She didn’t brush him off, didn’t try. She let him carry some of her weight as she approached the last two men, their stretchers like pale bruises on the ground.
She felt grass beneath her knees as she crushed it, folding too quickly to the ground. Righting herself, which really meant letting Severn pick her up, she reached out to touch them.
Shuddered.
They didn’t wear helmets. And the most obvious weapon they had—in the eyes of humans, of anyone outside—were their stalks. One man’s were broken. Just … broken. There were no bones in the stalks themselves—but even muscle and tendon could be crushed out of shape, smeared against a skull that was also fractured badly. Bones don’t hurt. The stalks—there were nerves there, so many nerves.
Gritting her teeth, she said, “Ybelline—I think this is going to hurt him. I think he’ll—”
Ybelline knelt in her shadow, knowing which of the two Kaylin meant. She reached out, caught the man’s bruised hands (two fingers broken), and held them fast. Leaning, she bent over his face, and her own stalks, whole, un-bruised, reached out to stroke the sides of his face, his cheeks, his jaw. “Do it,” she said softly.
Kaylin nodded.
Here, too, she reached out with her power, with the power that had come the day the marks had appeared on her arms and legs. Words burned on the inside of her thighs, where no one could see them. They burned up and down the length of her arms, and flared on the back of her neck.
She didn’t care.
It’s very important that no one know of this, Marcus said, in memory. It’s important that you do not reveal your power to anyone. Do you understand, Kaylin?
Get stuffed, she told him.
He fell silent, memory closing its windows. What she had actually said? More polite, longer, a promise of secrecy.
It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, now, but this: healing those horribly damaged stalks.
The man woke when she’d knit bone and brain into something like its former shape; she had known he would. He screamed, once, when she started on his stalks. The scream cut out in the middle, and silence eradicated its echoes.
The last man shouldn’t have been alive. He had taken a single clean wound to one side of the heart, and he had bled so much. Kaylin felt magic in him, around him, when she touched his chest. She let it be, and concentrated, though it was much, much harder now.
But it didn’t matter, for he was the last. The three would live, and the fourth—damn it—he’d live too. She felt her lips cracking as she spoke. Her hands were shaking too much to keep steady; she didn’t even bother to try.
Just this one, she thought. Just this one, and I’ll be good. I’ll be good for months. I’ll be good for-bloody-ever. Just this.
“She’s awake,” someone said. A young someone. Either that or a very skinny midget with a very high voice. Kaylin winced and managed to lift an eyelid. She regretted it almost instantly. There was just too much damn light.
“She’s speaking!” the child said. He said it loudly.
Kaylin opened her eyes—both of them—and winced again, lifting her hands to her face. Getting up was almost out of the question.
“You’re awake, aren’t you?” The child spoke slowly, his Elantran deliberate.
“I’m awake,” she answered. She could see his eyes—they were brown, and they were wide. His stalks were flapping in the nonexistent breeze.
“I’m supposed to tell Ybelline you’re awake. When you’re awake.”
“She must trust you a lot,” Kaylin managed.
The child—boy? Girl?—beamed. “I’m going to grow up to be castelord!”
“It’s a very hard job,” Kaylin replied, wanting him to take his smile and play somewhere else. Feeling bad about it, too. There wasn’t much you could feel that couldn’t be made worse by a solid dose of guilt.
“It’s an Important job.”
“That too. Are my friends still here?”
“Yes!”
“Good. Um, where am I?”
“In the home of Ybelline Rabon’alani,” Severn said, his voice drifting in from an archway that she could barely see. “It’s … more crowded than it was the last time we were here.”
“I’d noticed.” She tried to sit up. Gave up halfway through.
“I brought water, and food. Ybelline had you carried here when you collapsed.” He glanced at the child as he made his way to Kaylin. “I would have waited,” he said, “but Rennick wished to speak with Ybelline—and her advisors, as he calls them—and I thought it best to … translate. She asked Ellis to watch over you.”
“Ellis?”
Severn glanced pointedly at the back—well, top, really—of the child’s head. “He joined us when we were on the way here, and there wasn’t much that could be done to convince him it wasn’t safe. You’re known here,” he added, with a slight smile. “And Ybelline knew you were concerned about the absence of the children.”
Kaylin did not nod. It would have hurt too much. But she did manage a feeble smile. “Where did the—the others go?”
“The Tha’alani guards that were injured are in the longhouse. Two of them are awake, two of them are sleeping. None of them are now in danger. The Tha’alani doctors are quite surprised.”
She winced. “It’s not as if they’ll tell anyone.”
“It’s not the Tha’alani that I’m worried about.”
“Then who? Oh. Rennick.”
“Ellis, come and hold this waterskin for Kaylin. You can feed her anything she’ll eat,” he added. He bent down quickly and kissed her forehead. “Well done, Kaylin,” he said softly. “I don’t want to leave Rennick alone.”
She was stupid; she nodded.
“Oh, and Ellis? She’ll tell you she’s ready to get up and walk around long before she’s actually ready to get up and walk around.”
Ellis looked a bit doubtful, and the waterskin shook in his hands. It looked huge in contrast, like some headless, stuffed toy. “How will I know when it’s okay?”
“When she’s finished eating all the food and drinking all the water.”