Maggie Furey - Sword of Flames

Hearing its name, the dog whined, and Remana reached out to stroke the broad white head. The dog looked up sharply at the touch of the strange hand, but had already decided that, as a friend to her mistress, the Nightrunner woman was acceptable. Slowly, the white-plumed tail began to wag—then a large black nose came up over the edge of the table to sniff hopefully at Remana’s mug. “You should be so lucky!” Remana chuckled, removing her soup to a safe distance. “This is the first thing I’ve had to eat all day!” She turned back to Emmie. “My word, she’s going to be a beauty. All she needs is fattening up…”

Emmie saw the shadow of a frown cross Remana’s broad forehead. “The problem is, there won’t be enough food to go round, will there?” she prompted the Nightrunner woman.

“Oh, we’ll manage—don’t you worry.”

Remana’s cheerful front did not fool Emmie in the least. “How?” she asked bluntly. Since the arrival, two nights ago, of the ragged band of fugitives from Nexis, matters had been going from bad to worse in the smugglers’ lair. The secret network of caverns had seemed such a haven at first to the hungry, exhausted refugees, after the horror of the attack on their compound, the hellish journey to freedom through the sewers beneath the city, and the cold, cramped, perilous voyage back to the Nightrunner hideout on a ship so overloaded that the gunwales threatened to dip beneath the surface with every passing wave. For the Nexians, however, relief at their salvation had been short-lived.

Some sixty folk had escaped the city with their lives, and the smugglers’ caverns were far from capable of accommodating such an influx. The result had been chaos. Emmie, Remana, and Jarvas—the leader of the refugees—had been hard-pressed indeed to find sufficient space to cram the Nexians into, while the poor, unsuspecting smuggler families had been aghast at the invasion. To be honest, Emmie could hardly blame them. The fugitives had nothing but the rags they stood up in, and each and every one of them reeked from their journey through the sewers. Arrangements had to be made for bathing and feeding them, and the overworked sanitation arrangements in the cavern network, which depended on the twice-daily rise of the tide through channels beneath the stone, were fast becoming unbearable. And worst of all was the disease.

Emmie sighed, regretting for the thousandth time that they had been forced to make their escape through the sewers. It had been inevitable, she supposed, given their chilled, half-famished state, that her people would fall easy prey to the diseases that proliferated in those narrow, stinking tunnels. Most of the Nexians were already worn down with grief and hardship—for there was not a family present who had not lost loved ones to the dreadful slaughter that the city guards had carried out in their compound. And so many of Jarvas’s refugees were among the vulnerable groups who had been unable to support themselves in the city: the old, the very young, those who were crippled or unfit to work, and those already suffering from illness in the first place.

“Damn it!” Emmie hit the table with her fist and bit her lip to keep from shedding tears of weariness and frustration. Since the loss of the physician, Benziorn, in the attack on the refugees’ sanctuary, Emmie had been the only remaming Nexian with any knowledge of healing. All the responsibility rested on her shoulders now. Assisted by Remana’s herbwives, she had been on her feet for the last thirty-six hours, tending the sick, advising the others on what few precautions they could take to prevent the further spread of disease—and arranging for the disposal of the dead. The fourteen corpses, three of them pathetically small, that had been shipped out that evening for burial at sea, were the ultimate evidence of her failure—and that was what hurt Emmie the most.

“Don’t.” Remana’s strong hand closed over her own. “You can’t take everyone’s burdens on your shoulders, lass. We’ll get through this crisis in the end.”

“The ones that survive it.” Emmie barely recognized the dull, defeated voice as her own.

“And most of them will—you’ll see,” Remana retorted briskly. “Most of those that died were old, lovey, and already near the end of their days. And the little ones—well, what chance would they have had to grow up in Nexis, the way things are these days? At least you’d given them that chance in the first place, Emmie—you and Jarvas. As for the rest-well, it looks as though they’ve turned the corner now, thanks to your nursing. Don’t dwell on the few you lost. Think instead of the many you’ve saved.”

“Thank you, Remana.” Emmie squeezed the older woman’s hand gratefully. “That helps a little. But what are we going to do for the survivors? You’ll never manage to feed and clothe them all, and I know your own people are giving you trouble about the allocation of living space…”

“I’ve dealt with my own people already, thank you,” Remana said darkly, “and that’s the last we’ll hear on that subject, I expect I have extra fishing boats going out to help ease the food shortage—” For a moment, her face brightened. “What a blessing this sudden change in the weather is! By the gods, but it put new heart into me, to see the sun again!”

“Weather?” Emmie frowned, perplexed.

“What? You mean you haven’t even put your nose outside for the last two days? You haven’t seen it?” Remana cried. “Why, a miracle has happened, lass. It’s spring again!”

Emmie shook her head in disbelief. It had seemed so long… After so many months of snow and cold and dismal darkness, she could barely remember what spring was like.

“Just wait until tomorrow,” Remana told her. “Wait until you see it for yourself. I’ll take you out for a sail—it’ll do you good.”

“But I can’t!” Emmie cried. “I have to…”

“You have to do nothing of the sort,” Remana snorted. “Tomorrow you’ll rest, my girl. Everything’s under control,” she went on in quieter tones, “or it will be soon. You leave it to me. Tomorrow I’m sending messengers to my sister Dulsina, who is with the rebels in Lady Eilin’s Valley. They are much better supplied there than we are; they can help us out with extra food. I had thought to send your able-bodied Nexians—those still capable of wielding a weapon, and anyone else who wants to go—to join them. That should give us enough space here to cope with the remainder. What do you think?”

“Oh, Remana—thank you!” Emmie cried. The weight of worry that had suddenly lifted from her shoulders made her feel light-headed. “What would we have done without you?”

“I don’t know what you’d have done without me—but I know what you’re going to do for me,” the Nightrunner woman replied briskly. “First of all, you’re going to have something more solid to eat than soup, then you’re going to bathe—and then you’re going to my room, where you’ll sleep undisturbed until you’ve slept yourself out. Is that clear?”

Emmie nodded gratefully. “Yes, I think I could sleep now,” she said.

But despite her optimistic words, Emmie found that sleep was hard to come by once she was settled beneath thick quilts in Remana’s warm bed, with her white dog curled by her side. Now that her mind was no longer preoccupied with the practicalities of settling her folk, she found her thoughts straying helplessly to those who had not survived. So many had been lost—people she had known and cared about. Poor Benziorn, her mentor and teacher in the healing skills, was missing, and unlikely to be alive. And poor Tilda… With a shudder Emmie remembered the sword that had pierced the streetwalker’s belly, spilling her guts out onto the bloodstained ground. And what of Tilda’s young son, Grince? He had rushed back into the burning warehouse to rescue Storm’s litter, not knowing that the pups were already dead.