His awareness of her slowly sharpened, giving him a clear view of her injuries. The frostclaw had indeed slashed her belly and nicked her womb, but the child was yet small. Kerrigan redoubled his spell and fed the tendrils into the baby. He detected no injuries, but checked again.
Nothing. The child was not reporting pain, but something didn’t feel right. The child’s sense seemed diminished in some way. He feared for a moment that the mother’s distress was affecting the child, so he cast a quick spell that dulled her pain and lowered her anxiety. The muted sense of pain she did still project coincided with her wounds, but this did not satisfy Kerrigan.
He pushed his awareness more into the child, and then ran out through the umbilical cord, tracing the link back with its mother. Halfway there he found it. The frostclaw had managed to slice a goodly way into the umbilical cord, cutting off the baby’s supply of blood. Since the cord had no nerves, it could not report pain—hence his inability to detect the problem immediately.
Slowly, delicately, Kerrigan began knitting tissue back together again. He monitored the baby and felt the child become more vital. He checked once again to assure himself that the child was fine, then pulled back out. He repaired the cut to the womb, and then to the mother’s abdominal wall. Finally, he sealed her skin.
He opened his eyes, then sagged back on his heels, before flopping on his side, breathing hard. The left side of his face lay in the snow, which burned a bit against his flesh, but he barely noticed that pain. What little he did notice surprised him, because his healing of the mother and infant should have been enormously painful. Every bit of pain Sulion-Corax would have felt while the wounds were healing had to be experienced. In casting the healing spells, he knew he could let her feel it, or he could accept it into himself. While he would not have wanted her to experience any of it, he never made the conscious decision to pull it into himself.
He considered and discarded the idea that the anesthetic spell he’d cast had taken care of the pain. Since the spell was commonly used, this little solution would have been learned long ago. Based on his conversations with Rym, he wondered if accepting the pain was some sort of brake Vilwan had imposed on magickers or if there was something else happening.
Lombo got his massive paws beneath Kerrigan’s shoulders and pulled the mage into a sitting position. “More than bone-weary?”
Kerrigan blinked. “I’m fine, Lombo, thank you.”
He looked around and saw everyone in the same positions they’d occupied when he’d begun the healing. Alexia looked down at him. “Can you help her?”
“It’s done.”
Will had ridden over and arched an eyebrow in surprise. “Done? You just barely touched her, then fell over. A heartbeat, maybe two.”
“Really?” Kerrigan shook his head. He’d cast the spell the way he always did. No, wait… The obvious and urgent need of the situation had been what he focused on, so he wasn’t concerned with himself and how he would do the casting. He quickly thought back to the spells he had cast when fleeing the pirates, both when leaving Vilwan and then leaving Port Gold. He had used incredible magicks, but their use had not exhausted him.
His weariness even now was not physical, but mental. What he had done was very difficult, even under the best of circumstances. For him to have accomplished it so quickly—his mind had clearly been racing, using the magick to repair the damage. That he had done it in so little time left him in shock.
And with a big question. I am not physically exhausted, the energy used to work the magick did not come from me. What, then, was its source?
Kerrigan looked up and smiled. “Well, that gives me a lot to think about.” He struggled to his feet, leaning heavily on Lombo.
The red urZrethi waved her bladed appendage toward the far mountains. “Please, all of you shall be welcome in Bokagul…” Her voice tailed off into a hiss as Bok came up, and she shifted to urZrethi. Of what followed Kerrigan only caught the word “bok” and it was said with disgust.
Kerrigan staggered through the snow to where Bok crouched with hands wrapped round his knees. He rested a hand on the green urZrethi’s shoulder, then looked at the other. “Bok is my servant.”
She tightened her eyes. “He is bok. He is an outlaw. You will keep him restrained.”
Kerrigan patted his matted hair. “Of course.”
Bok warbled placidly.
The urZrethi eyed him closely, then looked over at Princess Alexia. “It’s not far, and you shall be most welcome. The Girsce family rules this duchy of Bokagul, and you will find their gratitude most lavish.”
Silide-tse Jynyn did introduce herself to Kerrigan, then introduced him to the various sisters and cousins of the female whose child he had saved. It actually struck him that saving the child was more important than saving Sulion-Corax. As was explained to him, she had had a dream a week previous and had headed out with her entourage to gather snowberries from a particular grove. The dream had indicated that these berries would be the first solid food the child would eat, so the dream took on the command of law. The blizzards from the north had caught them away from Bokagul, and the Au-rolani renegades had caught them on their return to Bokagul.
Getting the wagons down into the valley had proved less of a problem than Kerrigan would have imagined. With the urZrethi, Lombo, and lots of rope and horses, the descent went fairly easy. Peri did not remain in her cart for the trip down the hill, but instead was introduced to Silide-tse. The urZrethi warden gave her a message and directions on where to reach the entrance to the Girsce domain.
The journey northwest took four hours, and mountain shadows shrouded the valley as they made the trip. The bodies of the frostclaws had been tossed onto their sleighs as Lombo had not mangled them overmuch and they were reported to be good eating. Kerrigan had never tasted their meat before, but Crow gave him an encouraging nod, so he withheld comment.
At journey’s end they drew into a narrow valley that twisted back and forth several times before opening into a slightly larger valley capped by a sheer stone wall. The cul-de-sac was large enough to fit their entire company, but only just barely. When riding through the narrow confines, Kerrigan had looked up and noticed that a small number of archers could harry any troops trying to lay siege to the entrance, and he was pretty sure this was a point not lost on the urZrethi.
The entrance to Bokagul itself impressed him. The sheer wall rose a hundred yards and glistened with ice that formed from melting snow above. At the base stood four figures carved in bas-relief from the grey stone. The two in the middle were smallest, and represented urZrethi. They stood small and squat, their hands touching the rune-decorated circle defining the entrance. Above them, and much taller, were two shapeshifted urZrethi who had the birdlike legs many used for walking through the snow. Moreover, their upper arms had been transformed into wings, which touched wingtip to wingtip over the entrance’s circle.
Silide-tse paced beside him. “You know, Adept Reese, the urZrethi believe, someday, that the truly gifted among us will be able to shape wings and fly.”
He nodded. “I have heard the legend. It is a wonderful dream.”
“Yes, it is.” She smiled. “Perhaps the child you saved will be the one with a light enough spirit to reach that goal.”
“I should be delighted if it were so.”
Silide-tse bounded ahead, but before she could extend a hand to touch the keystone, the massive disk rolled aside. Peri stepped back out into the cold, festooned with delicate gold chains and rings that sparkled with jewels, and cloth of gold that replaced the modest garments she normally wore. She was even laughing, which wasn’t that rare an occurrence, but remarkable enough to surprise Kerrigan.