Restoration (11 page)

“Two breaks that we could tell, one of them with the bone sticking out. We did our best, but I don't know if ... damn all... damn all ...” The nervous man kneeling in the sand just down the hill from me—Sovari, it was—held quiet until he had controlled the shaking in his voice. It had taken him a number of stammered beginnings even to answer me. “He's insensible. Just as well, as we've got to splint it better if we can find the means to do it. All we had was our scabbards to work with. It was wicked for him.”

I knew that much. I'd heard the bones grinding as the two grunting warriors had pulled and twisted to set them back straight.

“And we've got nothing to dress the wounding in his flesh. Malver has seen hot oil poured in the wound save such a limb ... but we've none, so we've had to leave it...”

“You can only do your best.” I tried fruitlessly to moisten my lips. They felt like tree bark, and my tongue like slate. No moisture existed anywhere within me.

I felt the instant relief of shade as the big man squatted in front of me and stuck a sliver of something warm, moist, and pulpy in my mouth. “Carroc,” he said. “You should suck on it. We've only a bit of water, so Malver's gone scouting. There's good prospects. We've found the carroc, and this kind of wasil usually has springs.”

“Thank you. Where are we?”

“We're not sure. From the sun, we estimated we rode at good speed for almost an hour, which would put us some eight or nine leagues from Zhagad. But in what direction we've no idea. The storm wiped out our tracks. We're in wasil, more sand than rocks, and dunes in every direction.” He hesitated. “We were hoping you'd know.”

My gratitude for the sweet, life-giving flesh of the thick-skinned desert plant was matched only by my respect for Captain Sovari. The captain's hand displayed only the slightest tremor as he touched a man who had just raised a storm that Derzhi lore attributed to the wrath of the gods. Stars in the heavens, I'd held it an hour. No wonder
I felt
like the wrath of the gods.

“We've made a bit of shade over by the Prince. Of course you are welcome to it and everything we ... everything.”

“Not yet. Thank you.” I was doing very well just to exist. Moving was out of the question.

“Anything else I can do for you?”

“New shoulders, perhaps,” I whispered. “Maybe the loan of your skin.” My wings had disappeared with the last of my melydda, so thankfully I didn't have to shift, but the muscles that had held them were still quivering. “A little time.” Maybe a year.

“I've never seen ... the fire ring ... the storm ... I don't even know how to say it ...” His deep voice shook a little.

“Not all ex-slaves can do such things, you know.” I wasn't so sure how I had managed all of it. “Takes a bit of doing even for those who can.”

His awe was diluted by a rueful chuckle. “The Prince is going to be as angry as a trapped kayeet at being pulled out of that battle. Seems you can take care of yourself, but I hope you'll have a thought to protect Malver and me.”

I managed to lift my head enough to glimpse the long body lying motionless in the sand, shaded by a bloodstained white cloak stretched between two swords. “I'll be happy to hear him go at us.”

Sovari's voice sobered quickly. “I, too. I, too.” Only a living man could yell at us as Aleksander was like to. The captain went to check on Aleksander, and I drifted off to sleep.

When I woke, the cold desert night had me shivering. Someone had thrown a haffai on top of me, but the robe had blown off and was bunched up near my head, exposing everything but one arm. I was deciding whether it was worth the effort to retrieve it, when I heard voices.

“... Horses over there at first light to bring the water. They could carry the wood, too, but I haven't a notion how we'll get it cut fit to make a sturdy splint. If I'd just not lost the bloody ax ... Cursed Hamraschi.” The terse, weary voice belonged to Malver.

“Maybe Seyonne can manage the cutting,” said Sovari. “I don't know that he'd need tools.”

“The dark gods save us, Captain.” Malver dropped his voice. “What is he?”

“I think you just said it, friend. The god must be in him. I've never believed in such ... not truly ... but I saw this man a slave in Capharna. They say Ezzarians are sorcerers, but back then he couldn't so much as save himself from old Durgan's lash.”

“That fire was real ... and the storm. Never seen any magician who could do such. And wings ... I've ever been Druya's man, but I thought I was looking on Athos himself.”

“Tales were told back in Capharna, after Lord Dmitri was murdered and the Prince was accused ... tales of a man turning into a shengar, of someone helping the Prince escape through a barred window too small for a sparrow. This one, slave though he was, vanished at the same time as the Prince escaped. And last year, on that night we chased the Hamraschi into southern Manganar, the night of the terror when the troops all went mad, I saw something ... The Prince has never been quite the same since those days in Capharna, and I've wondered ... If the gods wanted to change a man, make him better than he was—”

“Shhh,” said Malver with a nervous hiss. “Rein your tongue, Captain.”

But the captain was not deterred. “—they might send someone to watch him ... to teach him ... one of their own.”

The two men fell silent, and I lay there with my skin on fire and every bone aching and thought that if I were ever to be a god, I would damn well work out things a little better. The wind raced across my skin, causing me to shiver and catch my breath, which set me coughing. With all that misery, I decided that maybe I could move after all and get myself a bit more comfortable, maybe even find a drink if the two soldiers had come up with so blessed a thing. So I stumbled to my feet and hobbled toward the flickering gold of their tiny tarbush fire. No one seeing me limping across the rocks and sand, my ragged clothes flapping in the wind, coughing and spitting out a quarry's fill of dirt, was ever going to mistake me for a god.

 

Aleksander woke up later that evening as Malver was telling me about the sink he'd found—a depression in the wasteland of rock and sand where the scant rainfall and a spring had left a few spike-leafed nagera trees, some date palms, and a good water source. I'd said that with a few more hours' rest, I should be able to ride, at least, and could probably come up with a way to cut wood to make sturdier splints for Aleksander's leg. Malver kept his gaze fixed somewhere in the vicinity of my boots, and his left hand fidgeted with what looked like a piece of bone hung around his neck, a luck charm I guessed. Interesting that he called himself Druya's man but had invoked the goddess mother during the battle.

Sovari was watching Aleksander. I had just downed a cup of nazrheel—the bitter, vile-smelling tea the Derzhi so prized—and between that and the sleep, I was feeling a good deal livelier, when the Prince began to mumble. “Dead men ... kill you for this ...” A moment's rustling and a massive groan, and Sovari and I had him pinned to the ground so he couldn't even squirm.

“You've got to stay still, my lord,” I said. “You won't like the consequences if you try to move.”

His lips were bloodless, his muscles rigid under my hand. “Traitors,” he whispered through clenched teeth. “All three of you.”

“We've nothing to give you for the pain, my lord, and you know I've no talent for healing. I wish I could tell you other. But Galadon taught me a few things when I was in training—”

“It was my father's honor.” Pain and fury had him trembling. “My honor.”

“You lost the challenge, as you knew you would. Your dying would have changed nothing, and that was all that was left.”

He wasn't ready to hear those things. “My warriors—gods avenge me—abandoned. How could you do it?”

I told him about Kiril, then, though I knew what bitterness it would raise to hear how we had planned for his defeat. I told him what I had seen of the battle, every detail I could remember that might show him how hopeless it had been. I hoped he would argue with me, yell at me, spill out the gall so it would not eat at him, but he clamped his teeth shut and turned his head away.

Sovari risked his wrath to give him water, and we got enough in him that even when he spit it out, we knew he'd got some benefit from it. For a long while I saw him forcing his eyelids open, as if somehow refusing to succumb to sleep would be his fit punishment for living, but the exhaustion of his long ride from Suzain, two nights without sleep, the battle, and his injury soon overcame his will. Pain dogged his dreams, and the two warriors and I took turns restraining him through the night, lest his restless shifting make it worse.

By first light I had gotten a little more sleep, and, after a chunk of carroc and another cup of stinking nazrheel—somehow always available in a Derzhi camp no matter how sparse the circumstances—I was feeling well enough to ride with Malver to the sink. To be surrounded by an eternity of sand and gravel—wasil, the Derzhi called this particular kind of desolation—and then to ride over a slight rise to see a small basin filled with lush green was astonishing. The silence of the wasteland was broken by a thousand chittering birds—pipits and grass birds and yellow-tailed finches—and the heady smell of moisture soon had me intoxicated. The grass was cropped close—goats had been here within a seven-day-the trees were sparse, a few thorny acacias among the thick-boled date palms, scrawny doums, and stunted prickly juniper, yet the grassy basin was as beautiful as anything I'd seen in weeks.

Malver filled the waterskins and said he would work on trapping some dinner, while I walked down among the trees and set about the task of cutting splints. My old friend Garen had always been good at shaping wood without tools, and I tried to remember how he'd done it. Something with rope, I thought, and I sat on the cool grass for a time, idly fingering a loop of rope from Malver's saddle and staring at the tree.

So many years gone ... Garen was a miller's son who had gone into the world as a Searcher, one who sought out possessed souls for us to heal. When his father had died, Garen had come home to see to the mill, only to have the Derzhi invade Ezzaria two days after his return. III luck, indeed. But he had survived it, escaped into exile with the Queen and a few others, and gone home again sixteen years later when I brought them Aleksander's gift—the return of our homeland.

Garen was still living in Ezzaria, along with my wife, Ysanne, who had tried to execute me, my friend Catrin, the intelligent young woman who had taken her grandfather's place as a Wardens' mentor, and so many others. How did they fare? Were the demon Gastai still hunting, requiring Ezzarian warding? I didn't know. I had opened the way to Kir‘Navarrin, but I had no idea how the rai-kirah fared, either—whether their presence in that ancient realm had eased their cravings for physical life or whether my efforts to put things right for them had been for naught. But on that sweet morning, with the sun still teasing the sky with pink, my thoughts refused to stray from Ezzaria, my own true home. I had tried to shut them out of my mind—my beautiful, rainswept forestland and my stubborn, honorable, blind people who would slay me if I stepped beneath its oaks again. What was it about this green island in the desert that caused such an assault of homesickness that I could scarcely contain it?

I snapped the loop of rope about my hands, forcing my thoughts back to the present dilemma. Fire. Garen had wrapped rope about a tree and made it burn without consuming the rope, and then tightened the noose and burned it again, slowly cutting its way through the tree. That was a start.

By the time Malver came and found me, the sun was high and murderously hot. He had a brace of sand grouse hanging around his neck, and I was drenched in sweat and staring down at a stack of rough, splintery shards of nagera wood. “Earth's bones!” he said, blinking. Then he raked me up and down with his hooded eyes, astonishment getting the better of his shyness. “Never thought the gods' magic would be all that much work. How, in the name of all things, did they ever get the world put together?”

I started laughing then, and picked up several of my ungrace ful shapings and shoved them into his arms. “I've been trying to find the answer to that question forever, Malver. But I keep getting farther away from it.”

 

I was appalled when Malver removed the blood-soaked wrappings on Aleksander's leg to examine it before we set the splints. Swollen, grotesquely purple, the jagged rent just below his knee, where bone had punctured flesh, still slowly seeping blood, the limb resembled nothing human.
Oh, my Prince,
I thought.
What have we done keeping you alive?
It was the first time I'd had doubts about what I'd done. I did not see how it could be possible to save such a leg, and the thought of Aleksander maimed, hobbling on a crutch as Gordain had done, unable to ride his beloved horses ... He would fall upon his sword first. And the pain of it ... No wonder his face was the color of old linen.

“We're going to have to shift it, my lord,” said Sovari grimly. “Splint it better so we can move you.”

“Get on with it,” whispered the Prince through clenched teeth.

Sovari handed me the Prince's knife sheath. It already had teeth marks in it. When I offered it to Aleksander, he closed his eyes and jerked his head, and I slipped it between his jaws. I knelt behind his head and placed my hands on his shoulders, nodding to Sovari. “Listen to me, my lord,” I said as the two warriors began to strap the new splints about his leg, and I had to press down upon his shoulders to keep him from rising up off the sand in his agony. “Remember how we did this when you became a shengar. How you held onto my voice and took yourself out of your body, letting it transform as it would. Do that now. Take hold of me and let me draw you away. I've experience of my own with this recently. Blaise has been my guardian spirit as you said I was for you ...”