Fire Kin (4 page)

I was tempted to blast the door shut with magic behind me, but there was little point. First, because the Templar wards would set up a fuss if I tried to magically influence what they protected and second, because, unless my instincts were failing me, Ash was strong enough to undo any door I bound.

His powers and mine—though tending in different directions—had always had a strange sort of sympathy. We had worked well together and had little trouble unraveling the magical pranks each laid for the other. It was a sort of challenge between us.

I'd only had a chance to take three quick breaths of the cool night air when Ash opened the door and stepped out to join me. I didn't look at him. Instead I stared up at the sky, watching the moon half-hiding behind the drifting clouds. We would have rain tonight. Which would make the job of the Templars, patrolling the darkness, even less pleasant.

“You know,” he said softly, almost as though he was speaking to himself, “you're ruining my plan.”

I didn't take the bait. He wanted me to ask what plan.

“What plan might that be, Ash?” he said after another moment, his voice high pitched and squeaky in the way it always was when he wanted to annoy me with a bad imitation of my own.

“I'm not in the mood for you, Asharic,” I said sharply. “I have things to do.”

“After thirty years, that's all I get?”

“Did you expect more?” Now I did look at him, hoping my face would stay calmer than the angry memories rising inside me. Hoping he would take the hint and leave.

“Yes,” he said simply. “Like I said, I had a plan.”

“If I let you tell me what it was, will you go away?”

He stilled. And I could tell my words had stung him. Well, good. Better to hurt him a little now and make sure he knew where he stood. Save us both a lot of hurt later from breaking open old wounds that should be left alone.

“If that's what you want,” he said.

“It is,” I replied firmly. “So tell me.”

“You've changed,” he said.

“You've been gone thirty years. Everything's changed.”

“Is that so?”

“You've changed too,” I countered.

“But not for the better, judging by your welcome.”

“I don't have time for catching up with ancient history. I have work to do. In case you haven't noticed, there's a lot happening here.”

“Ah, and Lady Bryony has to hold it all together, as usual.”

“Not all of us can cut and run at the least sign of trouble,” I snapped.

Ash flinched, and the expression bit at me against my will.

“It's late,” I said more gently. I didn't want to hurt him. I just didn't want him here. Didn't want to have to think anything about him. Wanted to return him back to the tightly walled up caves of memory where I'd consigned him all this time. “I have to go.”

“I was going to tell you my plan,” he said.

His voice was soft, almost sad, and I felt myself waver. I'd always been a fool for that tone. “What plan?” I asked against my will.

“The plan where the first thing I'd do if I ever saw you again would be to kiss you,” he said.

I nearly choked. Then managed to find my voice. “Well, I hope you're a wiser military strategist than you are a romantic one.”

“You don't like my plan?”

“It's not a plan. It's a fantasy.”

“I liked it.”

Part of me liked it too. The foolish part of me that held the remnants of the woman I'd been thirty years ago. But we were about to go to war and I had no time for fantasy. “Good night, Asharic. Please don't follow me.”

“Good night,” he said. I walked a few steps and no footsteps came after me. Instead all that I heard was the soft “I missed you” that floated toward me like a gossamer dagger.

BRYONY

In
the end my night bore no resemblance to good at all. I lay awake and stared at the ceiling, only to fall into a sleep haunted by the sense of something wrong that made my heart pound even in dreams.

Sometime near three, I came awake in a flash when someone knocked on my door, my response honed by years of hospital duty. I slipped out of bed, into a robe, and reached the door to my rooms before I'd barely finished tightening the belt around my waist.

The face that greeted me outside my room was pale and drawn. Sam, one of the youngest of the sunmages—barely out of the academy six months—jerked his head down in a hurried nod of greeting. “Lady Bryony. You have to come.”

His sandy eyebrows—match to his always rumpled sandy hair—nearly met in the middle of his forehead, the frown emphasizing the worry in his blue eyes.

“What's wrong?” I asked, hoping it was just something straightforward like a birth come too early or a person taken by sickness in the night.

“Burns, my lady. Lots of them. Please come.”

My stomach twisted. Burns.
Veil's eyes
. What had happened? But demanding that Sam tell me the whole story would only delay me getting to the patients who needed me. “Of course. You go. I'll come when I've dressed.”

Sam nodded and sped off with no further pleasantries, which said something about his state of mind. He, like a lot of the younger healers, was always almost painfully polite when addressing me. That was the problem with cultivating a reputation as one not to be crossed. Eventually no one wanted to even approach crossing you. There were the odd exceptions, of course, senior healers and everyone that Simon DuCaine seemed to drag into his orbit. And my fellow Fae didn't exactly tug their forelocks, though they did maintain the proper courtesies.

I went back to my bedchamber to change, snatching a dress at random from my armoire and pulling it and undergarments on with no care for how they looked.

Burns. I hated burns. They caused so much pain to those who suffered them. That was the hardest part. The human healers didn't, as far as I could tell, feel the physical sensations of their patients, but we Fae did. Not full strength but we caught echoes of the sensations flooding the nerves of those we treated. And when the pain was very bad, even an echo could be hard to take.

Perhaps I should have grilled Sam after all. Then I could prepare myself. Plan ahead. Different kinds of burns required different treatment, but no doubt my staff would have that part under control. I trained them well and St. Giles ran like the finest clockwork money could buy most of the time. Tonight wouldn't be one of the exceptions if I could help it.

•   •   •

The babble of voices and the spiking flows of human and Fae healing powers at work reached me well before I got to the top of the massive staircase that descended to the ground floor of the hospital from the third floor where my rooms were.

Too many voices. It sounded as if every healer who worked at St. Giles had been pressed into duty. I hurried my step, pushing away the worry winding its way around my spine with cold tentacled fingers. Exactly how many people had been hurt? And what in seven hells had happened?

The tentacles turned to claws as I reached the second-floor landing, where I could actually peer over the railing to see into the foyer. I hadn't seen this many people crowded into the entrance of the hospital since the night that Treaty Hall had exploded a month or more ago.

I spotted Lily's red head in the middle of the swirl, helping to direct patients and families. Which meant that Simon couldn't be far away. I hurried down the remaining flights.

Simon met me at the foot of the stairs.

“What happened?” I demanded.

“Bunch of idiots decided to go Beast baiting. They were in one of the taverns right on the edge of Gillygate, celebrating the fact that they'd managed to corner a few and inflict some damage, when the Beasts decided to bait back. Apparently an oil lamp got knocked into a couple of bottles of whiskey and the whole place went up.” He started walking back toward the throng of people.

I followed. “How many are hurt?”

“We have about thirty with burns, a few more with minor injuries. And five dead,” he said grimly. “The worst of the burns are in here.”

We'd reached the biggest of the ground-floor wards, which was reserved for times like this. It held twenty beds, and ten of them were occupied with men surrounded by healers. The stink of burned flesh hit my nose and I sucked in a breath, determined not to let it bother me.

Mercifully nine of the patients were unconscious, whether from their injuries or the work of my healers, I couldn't tell. One, however, was screaming as one of the Fae healers tried to lay a dressing on the red raw ruin of his arm.

“Why is he conscious?” I asked, approaching the bed.

“I tried to send him to sleep,” Bard said with a frown. “It didn't work. And I can't get a sedative into him while he's screaming like that.”

I looked at the man. Black hair, brown eyes that were half-closed as he screamed. He looked as though he might be just twenty or so. There was another angry burn on his left cheek, spilling down onto his neck and upper chest. Not as deep as the burn on his arm but nasty enough.

“Let me try.”

I stepped up to the man and reached for the nearest body part I could get hold of—his foot in this case—and sent an urgent surge of power through him, willing him to sleep. It rolled over him and then bounced back at me. Damn. Bard was right. Which meant the patient was either warded or not entirely human.

“Fetch some nightleaf.” It was the concoction we used to knock out Beasts on the rare occasions we had to, one of our strongest sedatives. Bard nodded and the orderly who was helping him hold the man down bolted off. I sent a more subtle thread of power toward the man, trying to sense a ward or indeed if he had more than human blood in his veins. I felt no echo of power, so that was a relief. A human under a ward strong enough to resist my magic would be a concern on more than one level. It would have to be set by another Fae, and I was the strongest Fae in the City that I knew of other than Asharic. Who was unlikely to have been warding random humans since his arrival.

That much settled, I turned my attention deeper, trying to decipher the different flows of energy in his body. Finally I caught it, a faint thread like the silver gleam of moonlight on dark water. A familiar sensation that I associated with Beast Kind. Someone in this man's ancestry had definitely had some Beast Kind blood. It wasn't strong, likely a few generations back, but it was enough, as with many of the mixed-blood humans in the City, to give him an odd reaction to our normal treatments.

The orderly returned with the potion. I took it from him, made a quick calculation of the man's weight, and diluted it a little with water. He wasn't a full Beast after all. Then I summoned my most commanding tone, the one I used to put the fear of seven hells into my staff, and leaned close to him. “Stop. Screaming.”

He blinked and looked at me for a moment. I held the vial of potion in front of his face. “This will take the pain away. But you have to stop screaming long enough to drink it. Do you understand me?”

He nodded. His skin was an unpleasant grayish shade beneath its olive tones, and sweat beaded on his forehead. He pressed his lips together, so hard the edges of them turned white. The echoes of his pain battered at me, making my nerves twinge in sympathy. I pushed the sensation away before it could distract me, using my training to close my mind to the pain as much as possible.

“Good.” I held the vial to his lips. “I know it hurts. But drink.”

He nodded again and his hand came up around mine, painfully tight. He tilted his head back and tipped the contents of the vial into his mouth, swallowing desperately. Then his lips clamped shut again.

“Well done. Now lie back. Carefully. We'll support your arm.” The orderly was, thankfully, several steps ahead of me and was busily placing pillows so that the man didn't have far to slump backward. I put a cushion of power around his arm, shielding it from the contact of the mattress and the rest of his body, counting silently in my head. By the time I reached fifteen, the man's face relaxed into slack insensibility.

With the patient now rendered unable to resist, I set to work. Heat fairly radiated from his arm, and the protesting nerves and dying flesh called out to me. I drew on my power and sent it into him again, hoping like hell that his blood wouldn't resist my healing in this as it did the command to sleep. If it did, and if it resisted the human mages as well, then he was likely to lose part of the use of his arm. The burn was deep and the muscle would warp beneath the scar tissue. His Beast Kind heritage would, if he was lucky, defend him from infection and prevent him from losing the arm entirely. But it wouldn't save him from being partly crippled if my magic didn't work.

Several seconds passed as I poured power into him, trying to push past the hints of resistance I felt. I was beginning to think that it wasn't going to work, that I should ask the orderly to bring Simon over, when something gave inside him and his body began to respond. Heat receded. Tiny vessels began to mend, flesh to heal. I breathed relief and focused again, lessening the flow of power to a steady stream rather than a torrent. No point draining myself when there were many more patients to come after this.

I nodded to Bard and told him to move on to another patient and settled myself for a long night's work.

•   •   •

It was a long night—or a very early morning—I was never sure which to call it. In the Veiled Court and the Veiled World, time is more flexible than it is in the City. Night and day do not necessarily follow strict rules, depending on who holds sway in any given realm. The Veiled Queen, seemingly fond as she was of humans, had let the Fae mostly have free rein in that respect. And in the court itself, more than just time bent to her will. It was hard to keep track of time when the mere mood of the queen could change the land from night to day.

As the sky outside the windows began to show the first hints of light, we had tended to almost all our patients. I left the other healers working on the last few–those with the most minor injuries who'd been able to wait for treatment—and made my way around the wards and the waiting areas, soothing anxious relatives and friends.

By the time the cathedral bell tolled eight, I was ensconced in my office, occupied with the records and logistics the frantic night had left in its wake. I filled in forms and gave directions to the staff to ensure we were restocked and to adjust the schedules to accommodate the new patients during the sleepless night. We needed to be ready for whatever this new day would bring.

I took comfort from the familiar surroundings of my office and from the feel of the hospital around me. St. Giles was part of me now, sunk deep in my bones. I don't know if I'd been thinking straight when I left Summerdale thirty years ago and come here, seeking a place where things were different. Different from the self-absorbed, self-willed, restricted world of Summerdale. The world that used people's lives as pawns.

I'd wanted to use my healing abilities for good, to make a difference rather than tending to minor hurts incurred by pampered Fae in pointless challenges. I'd wanted meaning. And I'd found it, much to my surprise. The humans had welcomed me, taught me as much as I taught them, taught me more perhaps. They'd changed me for the better. They too were part of me now.

And I would do my best to help keep them safe and to mend their hurts if safety became impossible.

I was just giving instructions to the hospital's head housekeeper, a short, wiry woman who'd worked at St. Giles as long as I had and had the all-too-human gray hairs to show for it, when someone knocked on the door. This time there was no urgency to the sound and I finished speaking to Agatha before I acknowledged the knock. She bobbed her head to let me know she had all my instructions clear—she never wrote anything down—and Liam stepped through the door to replace her when she left.

“Good morning, Lady Bryony.” He bowed courteously.

“Good morning.” I picked up the pile of papers in front of me. The patient names and details of what had happened during the fire that we'd gleaned from those we'd treated. I assumed the Templars would want to talk to some of them, particularly the three survivors of the group who'd started the trouble. “These are the notes on last night.” I offered them to him.

Liam held up a hand. “That's not what I came for, my lady.”

“Is something wrong?” I asked, coming to my feet. I'd thought I'd managed to dispel all the tension of the night before, but his words sent it winding around my muscles again, which, strangely, made the fatigue I'd been ignoring even more apparent. I hadn't been getting more than a few hours of sleep a night for weeks now and I was starting to feel it. Maybe that was why I had been so rattled by Asharic's unanticipated reappearance last night.