Crucible (32 page)

And yet, this magnificent creature, who had cared so much for Lyn, loved her and promised her companionship, Chose her. Not out of necessity or because she was told to, not because it was expected or because she was settling for second best, but because she
wanted
to. She wanted Elfyn.

She wants . . . me.

She allowed the tears to flow again as Ylladriel's eyes
mirrored her own. She felt the Companion's touch again in the back of her mind, gently caressing her, reassuring her that she was there. And Elfyn now understood that grief, when shared, could also be a healing gift.

“Don't you dare leave me, Ylladriel.”

:I promise to do my best. Perhaps we should get back so as not to worry the others.:

Elfyn got to her feet, her hands and skirts covered in mud. The note had fallen from her pocket, and she spotted it sticking out of the muck.

:What is that? It looks familiar.:

“It's the note Lynal left me. When you and she visited me?”

:Yes, I remember that. She scribbled it down in haste. We had received word of a problem in town and were called to observe by another Herald.:
Ylladriel got to her feet, though her legs looked wobbly. She shook her head, sending mud flying in all directions.
:You kept that note all these years?:

“The note said for me to ask your forgiveness. I think Lynal knew this day would come.”

:Let me see it.:

Elfyn opened the piece of paper up in the waning light and held it up so Ylladriel could read it. Laughter like bells filled the space between them as well as in her mind. Was her Companion laughing?

:My dear Elfyn! Why would you believe this note told you to ask my forgiveness?:

“Because . . . because that's what Herald Lorin told me it said.”

She experienced Ylladriel's surprise.
:You can't read?:

“No.” Elfyn lowered her head. “I can't. And I never told Lynal that either.”

Ylladriel nudged her nose against Elfyn's shoulder and then dipped her head to push at her arm. Elfyn smiled as she wrapped her arms around Ylladriel's neck, just as she'd seen Lynal do many times.
:First thing I shall
do is teach you to read. We can't have Lorin pulling the wool over your eyes again.:

“What?” Elfyn stepped back as Ylladriel took steps away from the riverbank. “He did what?”

:The note says, and I quote, ‘Mom, we were called into town. Won't be back. Until next time, I love you. Lyn.':

Elfyn stopped. Ylladriel focused her blue eyes on her. “That's what that said?”

:As I said, we were called away. She wanted to let you know she wasn't mad. Unfortunately, the Circuit took too much of our time. She always wanted to return home. We . . . had planned on a trip back later this year.:

Elfyn couldn't help but drown for a moment in the overwhelming regret of losing so many years to pride, to not knowing what the words said. For assuming she knew her daughter's heart, and yet misjudging it so cruelly. “She . . . wasn't mad at me.”

:Lyn? Why would she ever be mad at you? She loved you unconditionally, Elfyn. Just as I do.:

Again she felt a crushing need from Ylladriel that mirrored her own, the desire to be close, to hold tight to one another so that neither of them fell into a pit of despair because together they could move one step at a time, one day at a time.

“Do you think they knew this would happen? Lorin and his Companion? I mean, by sending me out here and pulling the wool over my eyes? Did they know that you would Choose me?”

Ylladriel leaned her head against Elfyn.
:We Chose each other.:

Healer Vixen held very, very still and tried not to stare at the three drawn arrows aimed at her. The bowmen aiming those arrows were a fairly scruffy lot, so she assumed they were bandits.

Although she didn't look behind her, she knew there were three more blocking her possible escape, should she try to turn her horse Brownie around and make a run for it. She knew that, because Brownie kept turning his head and looking at them, and what Brownie knew, she knew.

“I hate to dash your hopes, lads,” she said, “But the only things in my packs are food, clothing, and herbs, and not even the sort of herbs that would give you a good time. I'm just a Healer. Nobody pays us for what we do. If I have more than a handful of coppers and a couple of silver to my name, I'd be shocked and amazed. But if you want that, you can have it.”

Why they hadn't figured that out for themselves, seeing as she was dressed head to toe in Healer Green, she couldn't imagine. Didn't
everyone
know what Healer Green meant?

And surely they weren't stupid enough to think they could drag her off and rape her? There were a lot of long and often very gruesome stories about what happened
to men who raped Healers.
It's not wise to molest a Healer. The people who know how to put you together also know how to take you apart.

“Healer's exactly what we're a-looking for, lady,” said the middle one.

And as she digested that, one of the ones behind her rode up and threw a bag over her head and upper body and began tying a rope around her. Since he left her arms free at the elbows so she could still hold Brownie's reins, and since the bag wasn't utterly nasty, she decided discretion was the better part and all that, and held still.

When they were done trussing her up, someone took Brownie's reins out of her hands, and she transferred her grip to the cantle of the saddle. Then, with no further talk, Brownie responded to the tug on his reins and moved into a walk.

:Do not like,:
he complained. She didn't blame him. Horses were creatures of habit, and being led was
not
what he was used to.

:Be good,:
she cautioned him. It would do no good to start fighting now, while she was completely outnumbered and there was no one near enough to come to help. Obviously these people wanted a live Healer for something, and she might as well find out what it was. Besides, people knew her schedule. This was the middle of summer. There had been no bad weather to delay her. If she didn't turn up at Gaveford within the next few days, people would send for the Guard and come looking for her themselves. It was a pity she couldn't leave a trail of some kind for hunters to follow, but they would probably have a good tracker, and she had other ways to attract attention.

And they
thought
they were keeping her from seeing where they were taking her. Little did they know she was just about the only Healer she knew who wasn't primarily an animal Healer but still had had Animal Mindspeech. She could see everything through Brownie's
eyes, and she kept careful track of where the six of them were hauling her.

They left the road fairly quickly, following game trails through the forest. Now maybe for a city-bred, city-born person, this would have been plenty confusing, even without a bag over her head. But Vixen had been riding this part of the world for five years now, and she had been riding Circuits in near-wilderness for most of her life as an active Healer. Between what she could remember and her ability to get her bearings through the eyes of birds, she was pretty sure she'd be able to make her way back to the road before she starved.

She looked over those captors she could see through Brownie's eyes. When they had first ambushed her, she'd been too busy staring at their weapons to notice much about them. She made up for that now.

Horses couldn't see the color red, of course, so that skewed things. Everything looked as if it were bathed in greenish light, and anything that would have been red was probably going to look yellow to Brownie. But it didn't skew things so much that she couldn't adjust. All of these fellows fell along the “brown-haired” spectrum, anyway. The one holding Brownie's reins probably had the lightest hair, and the one trailing farthest behind had the darkest. All of them were bearded, scarcely a surprise, given that camping in the middle of the wilderness was not conducive to shaving. The oldest wasn't more than forty at most, the youngest just out of his teens. They were pretty shabbily dressed, but not in rags. Their weapons were quite good, and their horses were in excellent condition. They rode silently and in precise order.

Well, that's both good news and bad.
Good news, because it meant that these men were disciplined, and probably had a strong leader they were accustomed to obeying. That was bad news for the same reason. If, as seemed to be the case, he'd sent them out looking for a Healer, presumably her safety was assured for the
moment. On the other hand, it was going to be a lot harder to escape from people with discipline.

This business of seeing through the eyes of an animal was something quite new for Vixen; Herald Vanyel had suggested that she try it and had coaxed her through a number of different exercises until she managed it. She'd thought it was a waste of time but had humored him. Now, well. . . .

She spotted a blackbird flapping up from a bush beside the game trail through Brownie's eyes, and she quickly reached for
its
mind before it got away. As it burst through the canopy, she got a good view of her surroundings from above. Good enough that she knew where she was, more or less. She let the bird go and returned to watching the path through Brownie's vision.

Her suspicion that these bandits were very disciplined was confirmed when a man on foot—presumably a sentry—appeared on the path out of nowhere, so far as Brownie was concerned. He shied slightly, as did two of the other horses. There was a whispered exchange, and the sentry faded back into the forest.

And she had to admit to some admiration when they finally got to the camp. Because it looked nothing like a typical encampment. Instead of a cluster of shelters or tents in a clearing, these men had made little individual campsites at the feet of the trees. Each one had a tiny, pocket-sized fire rather than a single central cook fire. These tiny blazes gave off very little smoke, and what there was would be filtered up through the branches of the trees until nothing escaped the canopy.
Even if you had a height advantage, you'd never spot this place from above.

From Brownie's viewpoint, it was impossible to tell how big the encampment was. She suspected she'd have to traverse the whole thing on foot to do that—and she doubted she'd ever be allowed to do that. So she couldn't tell if the tent they finally stopped at was deep in the heart of the camp, or near the end of it. It
was,
however,
under one of the biggest of the trees, because it was very much the biggest tent there. It was almost large enough to stand up in. Presumably, it belonged to their leader.

The man who seemed to be in charge of this lot rode his horse up beside hers and pulled the sack off her head. “Ain't no point in tryin' to run, Healer,” he said, gruffly. “You won't get twenty strides before we catch you.”

Now, Vixen's usual response would have been some sort of sharp retort. But it occurred to her that they might not know who she was. And if they didn't know who she was, she might want to keep her actual talents secret. So instead she bowed her head and said, meekly, “I wasn't even going to try.”

“Good.” Nodding with satisfaction, he cut the rope that bound her at the knot and unwound it. She sat there for a moment, making a of show out of shaking out her arms and hands.

“Cap'n's in there,” he said, nodding at the tent. “Needs seein' to.”

“Then I'll need my baskets,” she replied, patting one of the wicker panniers on Brownie's rump. When he looked at her askance, she shrugged apologetically. “My Gift isn't very powerful, I'm afraid. I'm mostly an herb-Healer.”

The man startled her by firing off a dreadful curse. “Who
are
you?” he demanded.

“Healer Rosie,” she replied—which was, after all, strictly the truth. Her real name
was
Rosie, although absolutely no one knew that but her. She hadn't used that name for decades, and certainly no one who had once known fat, unhappy Rosie would recognize her now.

The man cursed again. “Well, you'll have to do,” he said, and he offered her his hand to get down out of the saddle. If she'd been acting normally, she'd have ignored it. Healer Rosie, however, accepted it and waited while he and another man got the panniers down off Brown's back. Only then did she stoop and enter the tent.

It might be the biggest tent in the encampment, but that didn't mean it was all that big. There was just enough room in it for her, the panniers, a little stool that evidently served as a table, and the man on a bed of bracken and blankets.

It was immediately obvious what was wrong with him. He was white and sweating with pain, and his right arm and leg were bent at entirely unnatural angles and in places where they shouldn't be bending at all.

“I'll need you,” she said, before the two men putting down the panniers could get away. “Both of you.”

The pure, plain truth of it was that she would have needed them even if she had admitted to her full powers. The only way to get bones broken like this set properly was the hard way. One man sitting on the “Cap'n's” chest, holding him down, the other pulling on first his wrist, then his ankle, while the Cap'n screamed around the stick he had clenched between his teeth while she carefully manipulated the bones into place, and then holding the respective limbs rigid while she splinted, bandaged, and plastered them.

Her helpers fled as soon as they could. By that time, the Cap'n was lying as limp as a wet rag, hair and face soaked with sweat. “Don't move, please,” she said, remembering to keep her tone soft. “The plaster needs to set.”

The reply was a long, fervent, and involved curse, but it didn't seem to be particularly directed at her. She ignored it, testing the plaster periodically until she was satisfied that it had, indeed, set, although it wasn't going to be cured until tomorrow.

“Why aren't you that Vixen woman?” the Cap'n finally grated, his voice harsh from screaming.

“I beg your pardon?” she replied, rummaging in her panniers for something to kill some of his pain.

“There was supposed to be a Healer—a
real
Healer—named Vixen on the road,” he growled. “Instead, my men find
you.”

She reminded herself forcibly that she was
not
supposed to be Vixen, and bit back several sharp and sarcastic retorts. “Perhaps it was the will of the gods,” she said, in as neutral a tone as she could manage.

He snorted. But before he could say anything, she pulled out the packet of herbs she had been looking for. “I'll need boiling water and a clean cup,” she said. “This should let you sleep.”

“At least you're not completely useless,” he growled, then bellowed for his men.

She did
not
sweeten the bitter mixture, nor offer to. Instead, she let him choke it down, without straining it.
The more herb he gets into him, the longer he'll sleep, anyway,
she thought, keeping the satisfaction she felt at the faces he was making to herself.

When he finally fell asleep, she stood up and walked out of the tent, to be immediately confronted by a heavily armed man. “Ah!” she said. “Good, someone to get my horse and help me pack up. I've done everything I can for him, now it's just time. You can break the plaster off his arm and leg in about six weeks. I'll be on my way now.”

“Uh,” the man said, clearly taken by surprise.

“Go on, go on, I need to be back on the road as soon as I can,” she urged. “Get my horse, and I can be out of here. If you need to put that sack back over my head, that's fine, but let's get on with it!”

“'Fraid that won't be happenin', Healer,” said another voice behind her. This one was a sardonic drawl, with no hint of apology in it. “You'll be stayin' here.”

Damn. I was hoping I could bluff my way out.
“That seems unfair,” she said, turning to face the speaker. “I've done everything in my power. It won't make any difference to your leader now whether I am here or not.”

“Life ain't fair, Healer,” the man said, grinning. “And you're stayin'. An' don't go bleatin' about how you're gonna be missed. Road's dangerous. Anythin' can happen.
So why don' you just come along of me, an' we'll get you settled in your brand new home.”

It wasn't phrased as a question. With a sigh, she followed him when he crooked his finger at her.

• • •

At least they gave me a real tent.

It was just barely big enough for her and her belongings, but it was a real tent, as opposed to the much ruder shelters made of bent boughs and a sort of rough thatch of branches. Like the Cap'n, she'd been given a bed made of bracken, which she immediately sprinkled with insect-repelling herbs before laying her blanket-roll on it. Like everyone else, she had a tiny firepit in front of her tent, a seat made of a piece of log next to it and a crude bucket (made of another piece of hollowed-out log) beside it, full of water. And that comprised the extent of the amenities, such as they were.
At least I am always prepared to camp,
she thought with resignation, and a great deal of regret, thinking of the much more comfortable bed at the inn she had been heading for before this—detour.

“You settled, Healer?” It was the sardonic man, who seemed to have some measure of authority.

Being “Rosie” is a great deal more difficult than I had anticipated,
she thought, once again biting back a sarcastic reply. “I suppose I am,” she said, crawling out of the tent on hands and knees, since it was too small to stand upright in. She knelt in the door, and looked up at him. “What is it you want of me?”