Isana folded her arms, one finger tapping in slight impatience, and said nothing.
“Hngh,” Giraldi grunted, limping out. “The plot thickens.”
Fade entered a few moments later. He was still dressed in the simple, blood-sprinkled smock of a scullion, though he wore a Legion-issue sword belt and his old blade at his side. He had acquired a worn, old cloak of midnight blue, and wore the military boots of a legionare. A bloody rag was tied crudely around his left hand, but if the wound caused him pain, he showed no sign of it.
Fade shut the door behind him and turned to face Isana.
“Tavi?” she asked quietly.
Fade took a steadying breath. “On assignment. Gaius has him in the field.”
Isana felt the first flutterings of panic. “Gaius knows?”
“I believe so,” Fade said quietly.
“Tavi is alone?”
Fade shook his head, letting his long hair fall forward over his face, as usual, hiding much of his expression. “Antillar Maximus is with him.”
“Maximus. The boy whose life Tavi had to save? Twice?”
Fade didn’t lift his face, but his voice hardened. “The young man who twice proved his loyalty to his friend and the Realm. Maximus laid down his life to protect Tavi against the son of a High Lord. You cannot ask more than that of anyone.”
“I don’t deny his willingness to lay down his life,” Isana retorted. “It is his aptitude for it that concerns me. Great furies, Araris, Antillar has practice at it.”
“Lower your voice, my lady,” Fade said, his tone warning and gentle at the same time.
She never understood how he could do that. Isana shook her head tiredly. “Fade,” she corrected herself, “I’m not your lady.”
“As milady wishes,” Fade said.
She frowned at him, then dismissed the argument with an idle throwaway gesture of one hand. “Why didn’t you stay with him?”
“My presence would have drawn attention to him,” Fade said. “Gaius has inserted him into the newly formed Aleran Legion.” He gestured at the horrible brand on his face, the coward’s mark of a soldier who had fled combat. “I could not have remained nearby him. If I had to fight, it is probable that someone would recognize me, and it would raise a great many questions about why one of Princeps Septimus’s singulares, supposedly dead for twenty years, was guarding the young man.”
“Gaius didn’t have to send him there,” Isana insisted. “He wanted to isolate him. He wanted to make him vulnerable.”
“He wanted,” Fade disagreed, “to keep him out of the public eye and in a safe location.”
“By putting him into a Legion,” Isana said, her disbelief heavy in her tone. “At the eruption of a civil war.”
Fade shook his head. “You aren’t thinking it through, my lady,” he said. “The First Aleran is the one Legion that will not see action in a civil war. Not with so many of its troops and officers owing loyalties to cities, lords, and family houses on both sides of the struggle. Further, it has been forming in the western reaches of the Amaranth Vale, far from any fighting, and it would not surprise me to learn that Gaius issued orders to send it even farther west, away from the theater of combat.”
Isana frowned and folded her hands on her lap. “Are you sure he’s safe?”
“Nowhere would be totally safe,” Fade said in a quiet tone. “But now he is hidden among a mass of thousands of men dressed precisely like him, who will not enter combat against any of the High Lords’ Legions, and who have been conditioned by training and tradition to protect their own. He’s accompanied by young Maximus, who is more dangerous with a blade than any other man his age I’ve seen-save my lord himself-and a crafter of formidable power. Knowing Gaius, there are more agents nearby about whom I was told nothing.”
Isana folded her arms in close to her body. “Why did you come here?”
“The Crown had received intelligence that you had been personally targeted by Kalare.”
“The Crown,” she said, “and everyone else who was at that Wintersend party, and the servants and anyone they might have spoken to, or who might have heard rumors.”
“More specific,” Fade said. “He asked me to watch over you. I agreed.”
She tilted her head, frowning. “He asked?”
Fade shrugged. “My loyalty is not Gaius Sextus’s to command, and he knows it.”
She felt herself smile at him a little. “I can’t trust him. I can’t trust any of them. Not with Tavi.”
Fade’s expression never changed, but Isana felt a flash of something in the scarred slave she never had before-an instant of anger. “I know you only seek to protect him. But you do Tavi a grave disservice. He is more formidable and capable than you know.”
Isana blinked her eyes. “Fade-”
“I’ve seen it,” Fade continued. That same sense of anger in him kept on rising. “Seen him act under pressure. He’s more capable than most men, regardless of their skill with furies. And it’s more than that…”
Isana wrenched her thoughts from her worries and really looked at the scarred man. His skin was too pale, blotchy with patches of red and glistening with a cold sweat. His eyes were dilated, and his pulse fluttered fast and hard in his throat and upon one temple.
“He makes those around him be more than they are,” Fade snarled. “Makes them be better than they are. More than they thought they could be. Like his father. Bloody crows, like the father I left to die..
Fade suddenly lifted his wounded hand and stared at it. He was trembling violently and there were flecks of white on his lips. He blinked in utter bafflement at his quivering hand, opened his mouth as though to speak, then jerked in a convulsive spasm that threw him onto the floor in a violent seizure. Seconds went by as he kicked and thrashed, then he let out a soft groan and simply went limp.
“Fade!” Isana breathed and pushed herself from the bed. The world pitched about, then left her on the floor. She did not have strength enough to stand, but she crawled on all fours to the fallen man’s side, reaching out to touch his throat, to feel his pulse.
She could not find it.
Chapter 20
Isana thrust her hand down at Fade’s chest, calling out to Rill to let her perceive the fallen man’s body through a water-fury’s senses. In the wake of her collapse, the effort was simply too much. Isana’s head felt as if it would burst asunder in an explosion of pure agony, and her own heart labored in a sudden panic as she lost the strength to remain upright.
She let out a weak cry of purest frustration, then gritted her teeth and focused. Giving vent to her emotions would not help the stricken man beside her.
“Help! ‘ she called. It sounded pathetically quiet, and she was sure the sound would not carry past the closed wooden door. She struggled to draw a deep breath and tried again. “I need help in here! Healer!”
At the second cry, the door slammed open, and Giraldi took one look around the room and spat a vile curse, limping badly as he rushed to Isana’s side. “Steadholder!”
“Not me,” she told him, weak and frustrated. “Fade collapsed. Not breathing. Healer.”
The old centurion nodded sharply and rose to rush from the room at a pace that was surely dangerous to his crippled leg. He called out down the hall, and footsteps came running. Guards appeared, first, and within a minute they had escorted a young woman in a simple white gown into the room.
She was a pale creature, her skin so white that it almost seemed translucent, and her hair-quite short, for such a young woman-pale and fine as cobwebs. Isana felt certain that her youth was genuine and not the result of watercrafting talent, though why she felt so Isana could not say. The healer’s eyes seemed too large for her long, thin, somehow sad face, and were of a brown so dark that they looked black. The circles of weariness beneath her eyes stood out almost as vividly as violent bruises, and she carried herself with the brisk, sure manner of confidence Amara would only have expected in someone years older.