Sheri Tepper: King’s Blood Four

“The shade you have raised remains, Necromancer. Will you not remove it?”

“The shade remains only for a time, Godspeaker. Go to your rest. Come morrow it will be gone.” As it would be. I had no intention of letting them discover the trick.

The Healer followed me, mute, until we drew near the river. I gestured her ahead to the place where Yarrel and Chance waited, a dark blot upon the earth between them. She ran toward them. I tried to say something to her, command her, but my body had gone dead, as though all the energy which had forced me to the ruin and into the masquerade had drained away leaving me empty. I felt horror, breathlessness, an aching void, then fell, hearing as I did so the Healer’s voice crying:

“She is dead, dead.”

I WOKE WITH THE HEALER’S HANDS ON MY CHEST, my heart beating as though within them. Some mysterious message seemed to move between my eyes and hers, shadowed against the dawn sky.

She said, “Well, this one lives, and he is no Necromancer. Nor, I’ll warrant, was it any Wizard’s message which sent you to me. Why did you bring me to her?” She gestured with her chin to the place Tossa lay, tight wrapped in her own cloak, a package, nothing more.

“I could not have healed her even had she been alive when I came. She is an Immutable, not open to healing.”

I struggled away from her hands. “I thought, if we brought her outside their land…”

“No, no,” she said impatiently, with a gesture of tired exasperation which I was to see often. “No. It is something they carry in them, as we carry our talents in us. Not all of them have it, but this one was armored against any such as I.”

“You could tell? Even with her dead?”

“Newly dead. If I had had great strength, and if she had not been what she was — well, it might have been done. But, she was what she was. And you are what you are, which is not a Necromancer from Himaggery’s Demesne.”

Chance stepped forward to offer her a cup of tea, his old head cocked to one side like that of a disheveled bird, eyes curious as a crow’s. He made explanation and apology. I felt no pride at all in the trick I’d managed, but the Healer seemed slightly amused by it, in a weary way. I would have been amused, perhaps, if it had worked. As it was, I felt only empty.

“What happened to me?” I asked.

“It was as though you had been the girl herself,” the Healer answered. “Arrow shot, heart wounded. But, there was no mark on you. Were you close kin? No, of course not. Stupid of me. She was an Immutable. What was she to you?”

I didn’t answer for I didn’t know. The moment passed. What had Tossa been to me? Chance murmured something by way of identification of her, a guide, a mere acquaintance, daughter of the governor of the Immutables (at which Silkhands drew breath). What had she been to me? I was terrified, for I could remember what she had been but felt nothing at all, nothing. The Healer caught my look and laid her hands upon me. Then it was all back, the agony of loss, the terror of death.

“Will you bear it?” she asked. “Or, shall I heal it?” In that time it seemed an ultimate horror that I could be healed of the pain while Tossa lay unmourned. I said:

“Let me bear it — if I can.” I was not certain I could. They carried her body back to the edge of the trees, wrapped well against birds and beasts, and buried it under a cairn, leaving a message there to her father for those who would come searching. Chance trembled at the thought of that man’s anger following us; the Immutables were said to be terrible in wrath. We went off to the ruins as I wept and ached and drew breaths like knives into me. She had been a girl, only a girl. She had been. She was not. I could not understand a world in which this could be true and the pain of it so real. I did not know her at all; I was her only mourner. This was more horrible than her death.

The Healer called out as we approached the ruins. While the others circled it, I went through the tumbled stones to retrieve my shirt. The trickery had been laid bare, but it was a good shirt and I had no intention of leaving it there. The route I had taken on the night before eluded me; I came at the slit windows from a different direction. There was a sharp, premonitory creak, then the earth opened beneath me to dump me unceremoniously into a dusty pit. My head hit the floor with a thump. When I stood up, dazed, it was to find myself in a kind of cellar or lower room which smelled of dust and rats. The walls were lined with slivered remnants of shelves and rotten books. Something small turned under my foot. I picked it up, saw another, then another, stooped to gather them up. They were tiny — no longer than my littlest finger — game pieces carved from bone or wood, delicate as lace, unharmed by time. Pieces of a rotten game board lay beneath them, and a tiny book. I gathered it up as well, even as I heard Chance calling from above.

I wondered afterward why I had moved so quickly to hide them and put them away in my belt pouch. It would have been more natural to call out, to show them as a prize. Later I thought it was because of the way we had lived in the School House. There had never been any privacy, anything of one’s own. There were few secrets, virtually no private belongings. Secret things were wonderful things, and these were truly marvelous, so I gathered them as a squirrel does nuts, hiding them as quickly. They were not paying any attention to me at any rate, for the Healer had attracted it all. She had found all her belongings gone, Borold and Dazzle gone, and was in full lament.

“My clothes,” she wailed. “My boots. My box of herbs. Everything. Why would they do that?”

“Probably because they thought they were following you,” said Yarrel, sensibly. “To that Wizard Peter pretended the message came from…”

“Oh, by the ice and the wind and the seven hells,” she said. “They would be just such fools as to do that.” Then she fell silent and we didn’t find out for some time what that was all about. There was nothing for us to do but travel together, for the Bright Demesne, of the Wizard Himaggery lay south, the way we were going.

We slept before starting out, I crying myself to sleep, hurting because of Tossa, saying to myself, “This is what love is.” It was not love, not at all, but I did not know that then. When we woke it was with a high riding moon to light our way south.

During the way south I learned something more of women. Yarrel taught me. He did not see the Healer as anything mysterious or strange. He saw her as a woman and treated her, so far as I could see, as he had treated Tossa, with a certain teasing respect which had much laughter in it. The first village we came to he insisted we buy her a pagne to wear, she having nothing with her but the one dress and light robe, both becoming raggedy from the road. Once the people saw a Healer was come, however, nothing would do but that they stoke the oven in the market place and bring the sick to lie about it. She, all glittering-eyed and distant, walked among them touching this one and that until, when she was finished, most had risen on their feet and the oven was cooled no warmer than my hand from her draw of power from it. They paid her well, and she insisted on repaying us for the pagne, though I argued it was small pay for healing me.

“I have your company,” she said simply, for once not going on like a coven of crows gabbing all at once. She was tired. I could see it in her face. “It is good to have company on the road, even pawns and boys, if you take no offense at that.”

We told her we were not offended by truth. Later, when we stopped for the night, she wrapped herself in the bright pagne and combed out her hair. I thought once again of birds, but this time of the clamorous, unpredictable parrots with their sudden laughter and wise eyes. Her hair was the color of silver wood ash, and her eyes were green as leaves in her pale, oval face. Chance was once more gloating over his charts, and she leaned on his shoulder to trace our way south among the hills.