“Did I ask him to?” she flashed. “I don’t need looking after.”
“I recall a helpless night or two on the iceberg,” Holm said mildly.
She ignored that. “I’m entitled to look after my friend, aren’t I?”
“Tobry said no to healing, very clearly, because it would endanger you.”
“If I could find a way to save him, it might also be the solution to the shifter problems, all the way across Hightspall,” she said cunningly.
“Self-justification now?” said Holm.
“Will you help me?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t have to justify myself.”
“Please, Holm. I’ll never ask you for anything else, ever again.”
“Of course you will. You’ll ask me every time you want something.”
“I don’t want it. Tobry needs it.”
“No!”
“Why not?”
“Do you realise how exceedingly annoying you are?” he said, looking fondly at her. “First you destroy my lovely boat — ”
“I didn’t destroy it.”
“And now you expect me to reveal my darkest and most desperate secret.”
From the look on his face, he wasn’t joking. “Forget about it. I don’t want — ”
“No, I’ve carried it too long. I’m going to tell you why I won’t help you with such a healing.”
He unlocked his bag, his jaw set.
“I don’t want to know,” said Tali.
“Then you shouldn’t have kept pushing and pushing.”
He opened the bag and, from a small, sealed box drew out a scalpel, tongs and other medical tools. They were covered with dry, flaking blood. He held them out on his open palms.
“See these?”
“You were a healer?” said Tali.
“A brilliant young healer — in fact, a surgeon, taught by the great Stophele himself. He said I was the best of all his students.” There was a dark tone to his voice that she had not heard before. “I was wealthy, important, and had everything I wanted. Yet I was proud — so very proud and arrogant that I couldn’t bear to take advice from anyone. I also had a demon riding my shoulder and he wouldn’t let up, and the only way I could get rid of him was by drinking. Manic drinking.”
“Oh,” said Tali. Something bad was coming and she did not want to hear it.
“You can imagine what happened.”
She shook her head. “Something terrible?”
“One morning I was doing a minor operation on my wife, against all advice. A healer should never treat his loved ones save in an emergency, and this was not.”
“What procedure?” she said quietly.
“Just cutting out a cyst. It wasn’t a danger to her, but it was exceedingly painful and needed to be removed. And I was so arrogant that I could not trust any other surgeon, not even with so commonplace a procedure.” Holm met her eyes, and his were so bleak that she had to look down.
“I was also drunk.”
Tali’s face must have shown her shock, for he slowly shook his head.
“I wasn’t drinking that morning — I wasn’t that far gone. But, though I denied it to myself and everyone else, I was still drunk from the previous night. And when I drank, I loved to take risks and succeed in spite of them.
“In my drunken stupidity the blade slipped, and an artery was cut, and my hands were trembling so badly I couldn’t stitch it. My beautiful wife bled to death in front of me, begging me to save our unborn son. She couldn’t understand how so brilliant a surgeon could not do this simple thing, but it was beyond me. I lost them both.”
“Oh, Holm,” said Tali, reaching out to him.
“Don’t try to comfort me. I don’t deserve it.”
“Everyone deserves a second chance.”
“My wife and son didn’t get one.”
“Neither did my mother,” said Tali. “I blame myself, too. If I’d only done something — ”
“You were a child in terrible danger beyond your capacity to deal with, yet you did your very best,” Holm said harshly. “I was an adult, in full control and working well within my capacities. No one forced me to do what I did. It was my decision to drink, my decision to operate, my decision to do so with reckless disregard for my wife and my unborn child. That night I swore neither to drink nor practise healing again, and I cannot break that vow.”
“Not even after, what, thirty years?”
“Thirty-six years; yet there are nights when I still can’t sleep for thinking about it. Times when I have to take a sleeping draught to save my sanity.”
His eyes went to a little potion bottle on the table, then he stood up wearily. “I’m going to take a turn along the wall before bed and see what the enemy are up to. Good night.” He went out.
Tali sat by the fire for a good while, imagining the horror of that fatal day, then his haunted vigil on the wall. She was turning to go when her eye fell upon the bottle containing his sleeping draught.
No! she thought. That would be a monstrous abuse of trust.
Almost as monstrous as what she was contemplating using it for. Holm was right; since Tobry had refused any further attempts to heal him, who was she to interfere?
But she was going to. He would be practising magery up at the dome for another hour, with any luck. She picked up the potion bottle. An eyedropper inside had a mark scored on it, halfway down. Simple enough.
She headed down to the black hole. Knowing that he took his cocktail of potions every night before bed, she dropped the measured amount of sleeping potion in the bottom of his mug, then the same again, to be sure. For her plan to have any chance of succeeding, Tobry must be deeply asleep. The draught did not cover the bottom, so it seemed improbable that he would notice. She went up, replaced the bottle on Holm’s table and returned to her room.
And paced, three steps and three, across and back, for hour after hour. What she had done was an abuse of her friendship with Holm and Tobry, but it was as nothing compared to what she planned to do next. It had to be done, but she wasn’t sure she had the courage for it. She would have to hurt Tobry, do violence to him, assault him.
How would she feel if he did to her what she was planning to do to him? Such feelings of outrage rose that she had to block them out. Tali covered her scalding face, for shame — she could not do it to him. It was too wicked to be borne. Tobry would have to die the way other shifters did: either insane, or put to death…
The next thing she knew, she was outside his door with the knife in her hand. She set her candle down, lifted the latch and eased the door open. He was asleep. She could tell by the way he was breathing.
She checked behind her, though she already knew there was no one in sight. Tali had learned her lesson last time. She crept in, holding her candle high, and watched him for a minute or two. When he did not react to the light, she put it down on the bedside table.
He was quite still. She drew the covers down to his waist and was briefly surprised that most of the scars he’d had when she’d first met him were gone. Of course they were. Shifting one’s flesh from caitsthe to man, or man to caitsthe, healed wounds and did away with all but the largest and deepest scars.
Tali sniffed the cup. She caught a faint whiff of his cocktail of potions, and the sleeping draught beneath that, almost imperceptible. He’d taken it, then. She banged the cup down, as a test. He did not move. He was deeply asleep.
The next part was hard. Having been robbed of so much blood by the chancellor’s healers, the sight of her own blood aroused strong emotions in her. She could not bear to spill it, or waste a drop. But she had to. For Tobry.
Tali had sharpened a small knife for the purpose. She held it to her wrist, breathing hard, afraid to cut in case she cut too deep and could not heal it. But that was stupid; of course she could heal it.
She opened her vein with the point of the knife and caught the pumping blood in the cup. Her mistake last time lay in not giving him enough, only a few spoonfuls. This time she would use the whole cup.