“Wait!”
Aryl broke into a run, hearing Enris behind her. She burst through the blanket that made a door and stopped in her tracks.
Warm and dry. Dim; the oillights couldn’t match daylight. A faint, unfamiliar smell. Two narrow crates were tables; one held an untouched meal, the other an assortment of items that belonged in pockets but not on Cersi. Other crates for seats. A bed. The breeze wafted the blanket overhead.
Like their first shelter at Sona, when they’d had nothing.
Sian surged to his feet at the sight of her; so did Naryn. Little Yao stayed where she was, snuggled in the curve of the Hu man’s arm.
While he—while Marcus lay against pillows, a shadow that smiled and coughed and wasn’t right. Wasn’t right.
“What have you told her?” Naryn demanded.
Enris, who’d entered at her heels, spread his hands in an eloquent gesture. “She didn’t wait.”
Aryl didn’t listen to them. She walked to the bed, found a smile for Yao, lost it when she looked at Marcus. “I’m sorry—” Her voice failed, too.
“Are you all . . . right?” the Human asked. “They told . . . me you . . . were hurt.”
Perfect words, quietly spoken, the small pained gasps for breath the only sign of effort. Why he wasn’t already dead, she couldn’t guess. Bones stood out on his face and hands. The skin of both was purpled by bruises, pale yellow where it wasn’t. His neck had been neatly bandaged; fresh red stains marked a still-open wound. “They took better care of me,” she told him, and planned to ’port their precious Healer into the floodwater at her first opportunity.
“Oran tried. So did Sian.” Naryn was standing on the other side of the bed. She drew the child from Marcus with a gentle hand and handed her a cup. “Yao, our friend’s run out of his drink. Please go and ask Rorn if there’s any sombay left.”
Yao gave Aryl a too-adult look, but disappeared obediently.
“What do you mean ‘tried’?” Aryl asked.
Sian. Healing won’t work, Aryl. Nothing does. With compassion.
Marcus looked anxious, as if he’d transgressed. “Everyone . . . has been kind. Aryl. Don’t . . . be . . . angry.”
Was she that easy to read? Probably. Aryl forced her expression into something calmer. “You haven’t been eating.”
His eyelids had healed, the eyes themselves were unutter ably weary. “Left . . . for the big guy. Not . . . hungry.”
“The real hurt is inside.” Sian touched a forefinger to his own head. Any mindtouch causes pain. He’s severely damaged. There’s nothing I can do.
The mindcrawler.
Aryl sat on the bed and put her hand close to, but not touching, the Human’s.
Aryl? Caution, no more, from Enris.
I have to try.
She waited. Marcus met her gaze for a long moment, then tipped his head on the pillow, the way he had when about to ask one of his odd questions. “This . . . not your fault. You know . . . that.”
“I know.” They’d left him to confront whatever waited at Site Three, alone, because the summons had been impossible to resist. They’d left him a captive, to be abused and hurt, because she’d had no way to find him. They’d saved him as soon as they could, and been too late.
Words. None of it helped. None of it mattered.
But his eyes brightened at her agreement, just a bit. Which did.
Aryl leaned closer. “Marcus, let me try to help you. Please.”
“Problem is me,” he replied. “My fault . . . this, too.”
“No. None of it.”
“You’re a . . . good friend,” this with almost a real smile. “But this is . . . important. The truth between us. Mindcrawler no threat . . . to most Humans. Understand? Only to . . . some. Only to Human . . . telepaths.”
Aryl frowned. What was he saying? He had no Power.
Marcus continued. “Strong Human telepath . . . can talk like you do. Not teleport.” This with relief. “They can protect themselves. Others—” his hand lifted to his own chest “—vulnerable. Understand me? No ability. Only weak mind . . . easy target . . . weak.” A tear slipped from one eye, left a glistening trail along one cheek.
He wasn’t weak, in any way. “I cut off its head,” Aryl assured him. Whatever “it” had been. Not Human. Ugly. “Did they tell you?”
Enris leaned over her shoulder. “Made a mess,” he added. “You know Yena.”
The Human’s eyes widened, then he sputtered a laugh. “Friends,” when he could talk again. “Good friends.”
Now, she urged him silently. While trust was greater than fear.
As if he’d heard, Marcus shifted his hand until their fingertips met.
Aryl had touched his mind before. She knew, as the others didn’t, where the danger of trespass lay within the Human, the whisper-thin distance between emotion and intention, between memory and self. Careful to stay away from his thoughts, she lowered her shields and let her inner sense float outward.
No room for doubt. Sian was trained in healing a mind; she’d done it only once, in desperation, to help someone she loved. Myris.
Well, she loved this not-Om’ray, too, this Stranger who mangled words and smiled with his eyes, who’d set aside his life’s work to protect a people he hadn’t known existed a year ago. Who lay here in trust, more alone than anyone or anything in the world, while she was surrounded by the glow of her kind.
... Something.
There. Aryl didn’t reach. She paid attention.
More. Pain . . . confusion . . . fragments of emotion unwound, like a dresel wing unfurling from its stalk, slowly at first.
Memories came too, rattled like pods drying in the wind, bound in fear and pain. His capture. Rough hands. Waiting . . . waiting . . . knowing the worst was to come. Revulsion. Despair.
Aryl let the memories slide past, didn’t react even to her own face, hair wild, eyes calm, the blur of a knife. Though she smiled inwardly, sharing a joy as fierce as any Yena’s.
More.
Her breathing wanted to flutter like his; she moved somewhere else.
Here!
Discord! NOISE! Every biter in the canopy, buzzing in her head at once.
It wasn’t sound at all.
Aryl stayed. This was important, whatever it was. Her mind raced through words and images, tried to comprehend what wasn’t real. Noise or silence? Old bone or rock? Om’ray or Human? Differences fought each other, weakened her concentration. She became desperate for anything familiar.
Here. Safely distant from Marcus, a presence solid as the buttress roots that held the great rastis so they bent to the M’hir Wind but didn’t fall. Always.
He shouldn’t be with her, not here; that he was meant everything. Aryl steadied, sent sincere affection to her Chosen, then returned to what confused her.
Not-real. And not-Marcus either.
Tracks in moss. V-shaped ripples in a stream.
These—these were the wounds left by the mindcrawler as it ripped through the Human’s mind!
Her mother had scanned her. This wasn’t the same. This was no trained intrusion after a secret, an unpleasant invasion that left its victim whole, if exposed. This was the swarm consuming what it touched, full of greed and heedless of harm.
With mounting horror, Aryl followed the damage. She tried to grasp its extent, to find a place to attempt healing, but the more she looked, the more she found, as if the wounds festered and spread.
Or did they spread because she looked? Is this what Sian meant?
She backed away.
What to do? She had to do something . . . what? She didn’t know how to help an Om’ray with such hurts.
How could she help a Human?
Aryl. Her name; his grief. Stop. There’s nothing we can do.
Enris was right. She knew it, though it was agony to be helpless. She tightened her shields and opened her eyes.
Marcus’ eyes were still closed. He trusted her. Had he believed she could help?
All she’d done was learn she couldn’t, Aryl told herself bitterly. “Marcus—”
He opened his eyes, appeared dazed, but before she could say anything else, a small figure appeared. Yao flung herself on top of the Human and whirled to face her, teeth bared. DON’THURTHIMDON’THURTHIM!!!!
Aryl wasn’t the only one to flinch from the raw Power of that sending.
“We didn’t hurt him—” Enris began.
LEAVEHIMALONE!!
Marcus eased his tiny protector to the side, where she crouched like a quivering stitler about to launch. “Aryl would never . . . hurt me, Yao,” he soothed. “No . . . one here would . . . hurt me.”
Unimpressed by words, Yao continued to glare at Aryl. I won’t let them. Quieter, more polite, but with no less determination.
She should have expected this. Yao was the only one of them who wouldn’t see a not-Om’ray lying here. All she saw was the truth: here was someone kind, like a father, who suffered. Aryl nodded to herself, then consciously thought of Marcus, of her feelings for him, and shared them with the child.
“Oh.” Yao’s eyes opened wide and she settled back. “You’re his friend, too.” She grinned, as content as she’d been furious an instant before. Her tiny hand found the Human’s. “Have you tried Comspeak yet? I’m very good at it.”
“You are.” Marcus smiled happily at the child, then looked at Aryl. “Aryl, too? Good! Aryl—” A stream of gasps and babble came out of the Human’s mouth.
“I don’t—”
Aryl stopped as the babble reshaped itself into words. “—understand me now? I . . . worried sleepteach could affect . . . fetal development . . . but Naryn . . . found an Om’ray way. All Sona can talk . . . to me . . . to anyone who . . . comes here. Amazing . . . You, too?”
Sona’s Dream Chamber. They’d used it to teach the language of the Trade Pact?
And she’d worried about supplies from the village.
The Strangers will be back. Naryn, flat and sure. We all know it.
Not in time to save Marcus. You should have waited—
Till you woke up? With a flash of irony. Tell that to the other seven hundred.
Marcus enjoys hearing it, Enris pointed out.
Indeed, the Human, oblivious to the emotions of the Om’ray around him, was still smiling. “Aryl,” he urged, “say something!”
She had to smile back. “How do—am I—I am speaking it!” The movements of her mouth and tongue were strange, like trying to shout and whisper at the same time, but he took her hand and squeezed it.
“Comspeak,” he assured her. “Wonderful to hear . . . in your voice, Aryl. Wonderful.”
This in two days, Aryl told herself, appalled. What else could they have done?
“Keep an eye on him, Yao. I’ll be back soon,” she told Marcus.
Once she knew.