Crucible (8 page)

“I want to be able to heal again,” Kade said.

“And so you shall,” the healer replied.

:Did you catch the hitch in his voice?:
Nwah said.

:Don't ruin this,:
Kade replied.
:He can help me. Can't you feel it?:

Anxiety clutched her stomach, but the desperation coming from Kade rolled over Nwah even more strongly. He needed this. He needed someone who could help him heal again, and if this man could help Kade get better, how could she argue? But still she hated what she felt. What would it mean if this man could help Kade where she could not? What would happen if Kade found that he didn't need her? She looked at Kade as he stood before the Healer, and she felt a welling of jealousy that nearly blinded her.

“What are Agathan structures?” Kade asked the man.

“I'll show you, my friend, but first you'll need to go through my cleansing trials, just as all the others have.”

“Indeed we did,” said a brushy-haired man from the ring of observers. “We paid our way, too.”

Kade glanced from the man to Lord Pelten.

“I don't know that I'll be able to pay anything,” Kade said.

This clearly bothered the man. “This can't stand, Lord Pelten,” he called. “I'll not take second place to a freeloading newcomer fresh from the woods—and a foul smellin' one at that.”

Lord Pelten's gaze slid from Kade to Nwah, and she felt hackles rise at the same time the corners of the Healer's lips rolled upward.

Stop it,
she told herself.
A jealous
kyree
is a nuisance,
she thought, retrieving a saying from her mother so many moons before.

The Healer looked at the man who challenged him. “No one will be left behind, my friend,” Pelten said. “It is uncivil to treat a young man of low position like that, don't you agree? We all have to start somewhere, after all.”

The gathering turned their stares to the man, and he backed down.

“You will all get what you've paid for and more. But I will need a while to bring our new friend to proper readiness.”

With that, the Healer gave a beatific smile and spread his arms wide.

“New friend, Kade, will you undergo preparation as the others have?”

“Of course,” Kade replied.

“Then I will work with our friend for the rest of this evening, and we will begin to study the structures together at first light tomorrow. Until then, I suggest you enjoy your dinners and rest well.”

The Healer took Kade by the arm and turned toward a building made of lumber and coarsely patched stone.

“Come along, young Kade. Feel free to bring your animal along.”

:Do you want to come?:
Kade asked.

Nwah hunched her shoulders. The building looked tiny and tight. The doorway was open to reveal pitch-dark like a cave inside. Just the idea of entering it made her lungs ache. And she didn't like the expression on the Healer's face, either. He seemed a loner, separate in some way, with the same aura as an alpha pup grown into a pack chieftain. It made her even more uncomfortable, though she couldn't tell how much of this discomfort was due to fear for safety and how much was based on pure jealousy.

The night had grown dark now, too.

The wood smelled of dew and had begun to rustle with the movements of predators in distant hollows.

The sky above glittered with the night's first stars.

Beyond that, she could feel Kade's focus was on the Healer.

Which meant it was not on her.

:I prefer to be outside,:
she said.

The woman whom Lord Pelten's healing had rescued spoke.

“I can manage the beast if you want,” she said.

Nwah grumbled.
:Perhaps she can best manage a gashed thigh,:
she said.
:Perhaps that would test this Healer's gift better?:

“No,” Kade said to the woman, not rising to Nwah's anger. “She'll be fine on her own.”

“All right, then,” Pelten said. “Let's go.”

The two disappeared into the room, and lantern light soon glowed from within.

“Well,” the woman said, looking over the gathering. “All this being healed can make a lass mighty hungry. Who's up for a round of ale and a little dinner?”

The group clamored and stood in unison. Footsteps rumbled and voices rolled together. A short while later, the clattering of soup ladles and then the sounds of laughter and song filled the area.

Nwah took a spot under the brambles at the edge of the clearing, watching and feeling pangs of hunger. Perhaps she should have gone and hunted by herself, but her gaze kept going to the hut where Lord Pelten had taken Kade.

She wanted to see him return.

She lay on the ground under the briars and put her chin on her front paws. The soil smelled thick. Her whiskers drooped to touch the ground.

:Are you all right?:
she finally brought herself to ask Kade.

:I'm fine,:
Kade replied.
:But I'm busy.:

The answer was like a claw to her gut.

:I'm busy.:

Those words were like coarse grindstone.

:I'm busy . . . I'm busy.:

The words echoed in her mind and became mixed with the sounds of laughter from the humans around the stewpot.

She heard them discuss the lessons they were soon to take together. They spoke of dreams and hopes, of setting up apothecaries or serving to rid their homelands of disease.

One man pulled out a fiddle, and a jaunty melody filled the evening.

A pair did a jig.

It all burned against her fears.

She wanted so much to talk to Kade again, but she had seen him walk into the hut with this man, a man who could give him something she couldn't, and she was afraid. She had felt the irritation on Kade's voice when he said
:I'm busy:
, and she couldn't bear the idea of hearing those words again.

Nwah thought about her mother, then. She was doing that a lot these days. She remembered huddling up against her mother's warmth with her siblings in their den.

Then, for the first time, she admitted the full truth.

Perhaps she only then had fully realized it.

She was afraid to be by herself.

And laying there in the isolation of her rejection, listening to heartfelt strains of music . . .

A
kyree
does not actually cry.

This is because a
kyree
does not have the same tear ducts as a human does.

And so she cannot cry in that way.

Nwah whined, though.

Her eyes closed to shut off the world. The corners of her lips drew down, and she let a thin moan slide away from her like a puddle of blood that flowed straight from her veins to seep down into the soil beneath her. Kade had said he would not leave her, but he had done this thing without her thoughts. He had trusted this man without her ideas.

She didn't want to be jealous.

She wanted it to all just go away. She wanted it to all just shut off.

At that moment a line of magic in the forest around her nearly caused her to gag.

It tasted of salt and the remnants of lightning over a damp field as it clogged her throat.

She poured her anger and her jealousy and her pure fear into that taste, and power from the forest flowed into her. She breathed it in, and she let it mix with her own suffering. Then it was as if she were everywhere at once, as if she moved with everyone in the village—the fiddler, and the dancer, and a man at the cauldron slurping the disgusting remnants of his stew broth. She saw what everyone saw, and she heard every conversation that was being held. The scent of food made her stomach clench.

And she felt something else, too.

It was the woman, now gone from the village proper, now slipping around the village in the dark shadows of elm and sycamore, carrying a bag full of gold and silver collected from the travelers here. She was picking her way toward the hut where Lord Pelten had taken Kade.

Something was wrong.

The tendrils of Nwah's magic wrapped themselves around the woman, and she felt the ties the woman had to the Master Healer who had taken Kade into his offices. Nwah felt the plans these two had made, understood the deceit they had concocted. Then she sensed the pair of horses that were tethered to a tree behind the healer's hut, already saddled and prepared for travel.

Yes, something was terribly wrong.

Nwah's body rose as if on its own.

She bolted across the open clearing, firelight reflecting from her tawny fur making her look like a blur.

:Kade!: s
he called.

There was no answer.

:Kade!:

The door loomed as the woman drew closer.

Nwah took a last leap, focused her power onto the door, and clenched her shoulder as she crashed into it.

The sound of splintering wood was intense.

Nwah's breath left her lungs as she hit the floor, rolling in shards of wood. Her legs slipped and splayed as she tumbled.

Lord Pelten looked up from the table upon which Kade lay unconscious and flat on his back. The room was small, and lit by a pair of candle lamps at two corners. One of Pelten's hands was on Kade's skull, and he held a stiletto in the other, its blade poised over Kade's temple in preparation for some horrific vivisection.

“What are you doing?” he said.

Nwah growled, and tried to stand.

Pelten smiled as he took her in, the stiletto still gleaming in the candlelight.

“I knew it,” he said. “The two of you are special, aren't you? I sensed it earlier. A rogue Healer of a boy and a Mage Companion
kyree
.”

Nwah bared her teeth and gave a hopping limp. Her hip hurt from the impact, but she saw Kade's body and gathered her wits.

The woman's form filled the doorway, the bag of coins slung over her shoulder.

“Come, Pelten,” she said. “We agreed to leave tonight.”

“No, Lavie,” he called, turning to face Nwah fully. “We can't go now. These two are different. If I can learn how this has happened, it could give us powers beyond understanding.”

She gave a birdlike glance over her shoulder. “There's no time.”

But Pelten ignored her to advance on Nwah.

Nwah's yowl split the night. She dropped her magic and leaped upon the Healer. Her reflexes were quicker than a human's, and her eyesight more precise in the
darkness. She extended her claws and raked Pelten's forearm. The reek of his blood was immediate and filled her senses as her body crashed into his.

They both went tumbling, his stiletto falling to the floor.

She sank her teeth into the Mage's shoulder and raked his ribs.

Pelten screamed, deep and loud and filled with the raw panic made of pure survival instinct. From outside, Nwah heard villagers as they came near.

She had Pelten pinned, though.

She enjoyed the way his body squirmed with fear. She smelled the fever of his blood. It tasted meaty and made her ache with the glorious anticipation of raw hunger.

Lavie, the woman, seemed frozen to her place at the doorway.

Nwah sensed Kade's body on the table.

Her sense of justice welled up, her anger raged.

She hated this man. Despised him for destroying the one thing she cared about. She raised her claws, spat her challenge, and showed him her already crimson fangs.

Fear colored the Healer's face.

:No,:
a thin voice cut through the mist of her rage.

It was Kade.

Calling to her.

Kade. Her pairmate.

:Hate isn't the answer,:
he said.

Nwah hesitated.

Her claws remained raised, but her jaws clamped shut, and she took a cleansing breath.

Kade's touch calmed her mind.

She glanced at the table and saw him reaching toward her, his eyes glassy and watery. Now that his link was open, she felt his intoxication so fully that she nearly swooned herself. And she felt the depths of his essence again, depths to a degree that he had not let her feel for so long.

“What's happening?” a man asked from outside.

More footsteps came.

“What are you doing here?” another voice confronted the woman.

She turned, hiding the bag of coins with her nonchalance.

Kade rose, then, shaking his head due to whatever cobwebs Pelten's ministrations had left.

“These two,” he said with a groggy tongue, “are thieves.”

One of the villagers hefted an ax.

“Tell us more,” he said.

• • •

:You saved my life,:
Kade said to Nwah as they left the village and picked their way through the woods.

The villagers had captured Pelten and Lavie and had soon recognized them for the charlatans they were. A brief discussion led them to decide against punishing them here and now; instead, they arranged for a traveling party to deliver the pair to the Collegium to expose them to their own brand of justice. Lord Pelten, it seemed, had likely been banished from those halls some months back for his views and practices, rather than for anything resembling “Agathan structures.”

From what Nwah could gather, it would not go well for him.

She opened herself to Kade as they climbed a ridge.

:It's about time I was able to return the favor,:
Nwah replied.

:I'm sorry I got us into that in the first place,:
Kade said.
:I—I didn't understand what was happening.:

:It's all right.:

:I just wanted to be able to . . . :

Nwah chuffed at him. The sound would have been enough if Kade had been
kyree
, but even she knew it was lacking now. She wished he weren't so despondent.

:Perhaps we should travel to the Collegium ourselves,:
she said.

:You would do that?:

Nwah said nothing, but she thought about warm sun on her pelt.

:I am sorry for my jealousy,:
she said.