“Here’s what I mean,” he said. “Your supplies are limited. You don’t know the world or the kind of life my people live. Fight alongside me, you use up your supplies and are no threat. Turn on me and join them, you’ll get exactly what you deserve, abject slavery. Sit out the war and try to take over from the Nor, same thing. Your weapons mean nothing without the protection of the Shawar. The Nor will explode them in your hands.”
“No resupply.” Connolly eyed him skeptically. “You sure of that?”
“I see your machines and your weapons and I don’t understand how they work; I doubt any of our blacksmiths, skilled as they are, could repair them or build more.”
“Blacksmiths. Everything hand-made?”
“How else?”
“I see.” He smiled. “Clever.” He pushed at the lank reddish hair falling forward into his pale gaunt face. “Sam, rest of you. I say go. Nothing for us in the shithole this country’s turning into.” He sat.
Hern smiled, nodded to the square blond man. “Georgia Myers.”
“You’ll be in command?”
“Yes. With a staff of meien and your people. I know the land and the enemy.” He raised a brow, grinned. “Believe me, Georgia Myers, I’m not going to waste you on futile charges or suicide forays, nor am I stupid enough to believe you’d waste yourselves in anything foolish.”
“Good enough.” He sat.
Hern looked over the folk who surged to their feet. “Professor… um… Zagouris?”
“You have been watching us. “ He tucked his thumbs behind his belt, unconsciously falling into his casual lecturer’s pose. “Being a historian, I take the long view. Say the battle is over. You’ve won. What happens then?”
“Maiden knows. Too much upheaval. Too many ties and taroms forced off the land. The Heslins out of Oras for the first time in five hundred years. People starving, angry, desperate. Outcasts back from the mountains. No Keepers in the Shrines.” He spread his arms, smiled wearily. “I was born into a position I never wanted. For the past thirty years I’ve been courtier and mediator, wagging my tongue endlessly; I’ve been judge of last resort and overseer; I’ve lived with folk fawning on me while they wormed about to get their hands on gold or power. I’m tired. I want out.” He looked at Serroi a moment, looked back to Zagouris. “I have a dream for the time when there’s peace in the mijloc, the two of us on our wandering again, greeting old friends and making new ones. What I’m trying to say is if you’re worried about putting a tyrant back in power after his people rose against him and kicked him out, forget it. I’m a lazy man and I want a simpler life.” A small throwaway gesture with his sword hand. “But I’m Heslin and I’ve been Domnor since my sixteenth year. Until there’s someone else to do it, I take care of my people.”
“Mmmm. Right. Maybe you’d better tell us more about what your role is right now. I’m a bit hazy about that.”
As Hern began the convoluted explanation of how he’d arrived where he was, Serroi strolled away to stand in the shadow of one of the conifers that surrounded the smallish grassy meadow, more comfortable at the sidelines, watching the faces of the listeners, interested in the response Hern was drawing from them. After a short while she saw a girl come from under the trees and walk purposefully to the man sitting at the end of the council row. There was a familiar tugging, something like a string tied about her liver; she blinked, surprised. Somehow she hadn’t expected to suffer that healing urge away from her world. The girl bent close, whispered to the man. A little round man with a shock of yellow-white hair, his face went grim as the whispering continued. When the girl had finished, he patted her arm and got to his feet, scooped up a black satchel resting against a leg of his stool, and started after her. The string tightened until it was a pain beneath Serroi’s ribs. She hurried after the man, caught up with him as he moved into the trees, put a hand on his forearm. His shirt had short sleeves and the stiff white hair on his arm felt like wire under her hand. “Let me come,” she said. “I must.”
His pale brown eyes were shrewd, his expression unhelpful, but he nodded. “If you must.”
The girl looked over her shoulder, a desperate urgency in her gaze as if by rushing she could avert whatever it was that troubled her. The man plunged after her, a furious frustration in the drive of his walk, the set of his face.
Serroi followed a half step behind him, though she needed no guide to what waited. Then there was another tug at her, a tiny nip almost lost in the greater pain. She looked back and was not overly surprised to see the dark woman Anoike Ley following her. His bodyguard, she thought.
The woman inside the tent was groaning and twitching, too weak to move much or cry out louder. The man was kneeling beside her, touching her face; he started to take her pulse, swore under his breath, put the arm down across her body. “Wait outside, Lyn,” he said. “Don’t argue, child.” He summoned up a smile. “Go to the meeting, we’ll sit with Julia for a while.”
Lyn hesitated, looked from Serroi to the man, to the dying woman, back at Serroi; after a moment she nodded and slipped out. Serroi gazed after her, startled. The healing gift was very strong in that child; the woman’s sickness was churning in her, but she’d sensed Serroi’s Gift and it calmed her a little. Serroi shivered, turned to scowl at the sick woman; the pull was becoming unbearable.
The man was flicking open the latches on the black bag; when he finished, he didn’t pull it open, but rested, his hands on the smooth leather and looked up at her. “Damn them,” he said, a violent whisper; his face went red and he snapped the satchel open, sat staring into it. “They knew she was sick, they knew she…” He clamped his mouth shut, took out a small glass bottle with a milky fluid in it and a slightly bulging paper packet. “No sanitation, no life support… you’re a healer, that man said. Magic. God I can’t believe I’m saying this. All I can do for her here is try to block some of the pain. Can’t even do that much longer. Not without killing her. It’s obscene to be relieved she’s let it go too long so she can’t ask for a massive overdose…
Serroi stopped listening. She knelt beside the woman, touched her; the wrongness was knotted through most of her body, it fought her as she probed at it. She bowed her head, closed her eyes, let the strength of this alien world flow into and through her, clean and fresh, strong as the stone of its bones, the soil that was its flesh. An old and powerful world. And as it flowed into her and through her into the woman, she felt the wrongness breaking up and changing and being re-absorbed into the healthy flesh. She opened her eyes and smiled down at the woman, seeing only the glowing green glass of her hands and the healing body beneath them.
And when it was finished, she took her hands away, looked dreamily at them, sighed and dropped them on her thighs. The earth fire drained out of her, leaving her a little tired, but cleansed and invigorated, rather like a plunge into icemelt. She yawned, surprising herself, lifted a belated hand to cover the gape.
The man-healer looked up. “What did you do? She’s not in pain.” He touched the blanket over her stomach; the swelling was gone. “God, if what I think… I don’t believe it. Everything I know, everything I believe, everything I learned in thirty years of practicing… only charlatans…” He stopped babbling, took hold of the thin wrist, checking the pulse against his watch. “Strong and steady. Natural sleep, better leave her like that long as we can. What did you do?”
Serroi shook her head. “I don’t know. Except that I provide a pathway for a strength that teaches the body to heal itself.” The nip she’d noticed before was pricking hard at her. “I haven’t much choice in this, you know. Where there’s sickness or hurt, I must heal. Sometimes… well, never mind that. Now that it’s begun here, you might as well call in the rest of the sick and wounded. Starting with your bodyguard.”