“Of course I’m alive. You know I sleep after a difficult healing.”
“I know that ten years ago you would not have called a child’s broken legs a difficult healing.”
Aris frowned, trying to remember. “I suppose . . . it’s part of getting older. I don’t have the strength I had.”
Seri unwrapped herself and stood up. “I think it’s something more. Remember what we were talking about yesterday?” He didn’t; he felt that his head was full of wet cloth, heavy and impenetrable. “Luap,” she said, leaning close to him. “Luap staying the same as the rest of us aged.”
The conversation came back to him dimly, like something heard years before. “That can’t be right,” he said. He wanted to yawn; he wanted to go back to sleep.
“It is,” she said “Come on—get up and eat.” She pulled the blanket off him, and yanked on his arm. Aris stood, stiff and sore, and let himself be prodded down the passage, in and out of a bath, and into the kitchen.
“Breakfast’s long past,” said the cook on duty. “Where’ve you been?”
“He was healing last night,” Seri said firmly. “He exhausted himself, and we let him sleep it out.”
“Oh. Sorry.” She spoke to Seri and not to Aris. “What does he need? Something hearty, or something bland?”
“He’s hungry, not sick. Meat, if you have it.”
“I’ve the backstrap off that stag; I was saving it for the prince.” The cook looked at Seri again, and said, “But Lord Aris can have it; it’ll give him strength.” She pulled a slice from the deep bowl where it had been soaking in wine and spices. “There’s soup, as well, in that kettle there—” She nodded at it. Seri filled two bowls, and brought them back to the table as the cook worked on the venison steak. She grabbed a half-loaf of bread from the stack on another table and tore it in two pieces.
“Here. Ari—get this into you.” Aris sipped the hot soup, and felt its warmth begin to restore him. The fog before his eyes thinned; by the time the cook laid a sizzling steak in front of him, he was alert and hungry. He began to feel connected again. Seri said nothing, just watched him eat, and when he had finished the steak she handed him another hunk of bread. “Come on, now, we’re going out.”
“Out?”
“Yes.” With a cheery thank-you to the cook, she led Aris out into the passage that led to the lower entrance.
“I should tell Garin where I am,” Aris said. He had no idea how late it was, or if Seri had told his assistants and prentices where he would be.
“Not now,” Seri said. Her grip on his arm might have been steel. He strode along beside her, more confused than worried. She slowed a little as they neared the entrance, and nodded casually to the guard she had insisted on posting there. She led Aris downstream toward the main canyon, but turned off the trail to a hollow between two trees. They had often sat there to talk in privacy; the stream’s noisy burling in the rocks just below ensured that. Aris curled up in his usual place, with the tree-trunk behind him and a twisted root as an armrest; Seri stretched out, her head near his knees, her booted feet on a rock. “You went looking for Luap after we talked,” she said. “Did you find him?”
“Not before they called me for the healing,” he said. Suddenly tears filled his eyes. “I failed, Seri: I didn’t have enough power. And who will follow when my power fails completely?”
“You did not fail,” she said. “Something stole your power.”
“What?”
“Listen. Yesterday, I felt something dire, remember? I’ve felt it before; I’ve never found anything I could point to. But when I started thinking about it, I realized that you’ve been having more trouble with your healings in the past few years—since we quit travelling, in fact. I looked up your records last night. Garin helped.”
“You?” Seri’s dislike of poring over archives had long been a joke between them.
“Yes. And since you insisted that I keep accurate notes of guard reports, I could put those together. I hadn’t really noticed, but my comments about feeling an evil influence have been more and more frequent—and correlate with your most difficult healings. No—” She held up her hand as he opened his mouth to speak. “Wait and hear the rest. Think about it. Why haven’t we noticed that Luap was not growing older? And how can he do that? You told me once that for the body, aging meant injuries unrepaired, illnesses not completely healed. You said that of course healing couldn’t keep someone young—but what if it could? Suppose Luap gets his power from you—and that’s why he’s not aging, and you cannot heal as you did five years ago?”
“It can’t be,” breathed Aris. He closed his eyes; he felt as if he’d been kicked; his breath came short. It could not be; it was impossible. But inwardly he was not sure . . . or rather, he was sure that in some way Seri was right. “Not on purpose,” he murmured. “He couldn’t—he wouldn’t—”
“Aris, you cannot stay young forever without knowing it. He must know what he’s doing. I’ll grant this might not be the only way. It could be his own magery, or something the elves granted him. Something else could be sapping your strength. But taking these things together . . . why couldn’t you find him yesterday, and why did someone need your healing just then?”
Aris stared at her, even more shocked. “You don’t think he made that child fall!”
Seri reddened. “No—I suppose I don’t, really. But it happened just when you were about to confront him, and I have not seen you so drained since you were a child. And I must tell you, I have had a prickling all along my bones since yesterday. There’s danger coming.”
Aris stirred restlessly. He knew something was wrong; when he thought about it he had to admit he had been losing strength for several years. He had thought of that as age, when he thought of it at all. He had shrugged it off; his powers mattered only as they served the community, not in themselves. But he could not imagine Luap deliberately risking him—the most powerful healer—the way Seri suggested. Luap might be willful, even devious, but he had never been stupid.
“How could it be?” he asked. “I don’t think it’s true, but if it were true, how would it work?”
“I don’t know. If we knew when it started—”
“We do.” Aris realized that he had known that without knowing what the sign meant. “Remember the first time the king’s ambassador came?” Seri nodded. “He commented then on how young Luap looked for his age; he said something about those who do not grow older being the wisest. I thought he meant the elves.”
“I think he did. He meant the ones who built the stronghold.”
“Well, I heard Luap talking to the Rosemage after Arranha died, and saying how lucky he was to look younger than he was—that it gave him an advantage in dealing with the Khartazh. He asked what I thought, and I said that age seemed to be loss of resilience—the skin stretches out, the joints stiffen. It might, I said, be like a failure to heal. We know that those badly wounded often seem older, even if they live. If it were possible to heal all injuries, even those so small we don’t notice them, wouldn’t that hold off age?”
“I doubt it,” Seri said, scuffing the pineduff with her boot. “If it worked that way, everyone you healed would get younger.”
“And you’re right; they don’t. I said so then, and the Rosemage said the gods meant time to flow one way, not slosh back and forth like water in a pan. But it might have given Luap an idea. If you’re right about him, I think that’s where it started.”
Seri frowned. “But he doesn’t have the healing magery. At least, you never thought so.”
“No. The royal magery, yes: you saw him carve the canyon with it, and he can do many other things. But I’ve never seen him heal.”
“Because healing is giving,” Seri said, as if she’d just thought of it. “You pour out your own strength; Gird recognized that. Luap doesn’t. He conserves; he withholds. He tries to do right; we’ve both seen him do the right thing where someone else might not. But it’s calculation—he must figure out the right thing and then try to do it—he can’t just feel it and do it, as Gird did.”