Healer's Touch (17 page)

I'm hardly the person to convince her otherwise.

As aloof and brooding as he might be, there was really only one way she could interpret that comment. And the thought of that, the memory of the way he'd looked at her when he'd said it, made her heart hammer and her belly coil with something that felt akin to fear, but wasn't fear at all.

Smiling to herself, Inella hopped down from the barrel and fetched her ledger.

 

It wasn't the worst part of the neighborhood, but it was no bastion of good taste and luxury either. Houses stood crammed one against the other, most divided up into individual apartments, and untended children thronged in the narrow lane. A public well at the mouth of the mews served the water-needs of the surrounding streets. Karal knew how convenient it was to have a close source of water—some folk in Belthalas had to walk blocks with buckets, or hire a service to carry a daily supply to their door. He remembered Sylphae's network of aqueducts, bringing clean water right into people's homes, and the underground sewers that carried away waste, a system designed and constructed by Kurgae'in in the days before the Oath, back when Sylphae was a Darjhian city. Such a feat would be difficult to accomplish in a city already built, but with vision and hard work it could be done.

A head of disheveled hair—a familiar pale blonde—drew his eye as he neared the end of the mews. The girl was maybe eight. She knelt on the lane, drawing on the cobbles with a piece of shale she held in her left hand. Her right arm was in a splint.

“You must be Krista,” he said as he approached her.

She squinted up at him, unsmiling.

“You favor your mother.”

“Who are you?” she demanded, unimpressed.

“He's the Kurgan, stupid,” a young boy told her, skipping forward with a wide grin on his face, inspecting Karal from head to toe with a brazen curiosity.

Karal fixed him with a quelling look, folding his arms across his chest. The boy only mimicked his stance and returned his glare.

“And you would be Vin, I expect. I need to talk to your grandmother.”

The girl pointed with her good arm toward one of the houses. “Downstairs.”

He nodded his thanks.

The best that he could have said about the house in question was that it was in decent repair. Ducking inside, he paused to let his eyes accustom themselves to the dimness. The entry hall was cramped and grubby, a trail of wear on the floorboards leading down an unlit corridor with several doors leading off. To either side of the entrance, one set of stairs led up and another down. The sounds of an argument reached him from the lower stairway. As he descended, the voices got louder, one angry, one desperately placating.

“But we have no money!” a woman said, her voice trembling on the verge of tears.

“Exactly my point,” came a terse male voice. “You have no money. So what ought I tell my employer? I can assure you, he is a businessman. Tales of misfortune have little power to move him. He wants what he is owed.”

Karal halted on the stairs, just out of sight.

“He can have the house,” the woman said. “And every penny we have paid him so far. That's more than half the value of the house when we bought it.”

The man laughed. “The house is now a pile of rubble. It has no value. Moreover, the city expects the debris to be cleaned up, at the owner's expense. My employer will be happy to take on that responsibility, but only if we can come to an acceptable agreement on what is owed to him. When you borrowed that money, the house itself stood as collateral. Now the house is worth less than nothing. Like any good businessman my employer is calling in the loan. If you have no money to pay him, perhaps we can come to some other arrangement…”

A pause. Listening, Karal gritted his teeth, his fists tightening at his sides until his fingers hurt.

“What kind of arrangement?”

The man's voice lowered, a hint of cajolery coming into it. “You have a daughter. She's pretty enough and not too proud to spread her legs. And your granddaughter, she is very pretty as well…”

By the god's blood.

His vision narrowing to a tiny circle in a sea of red, Karal rushed down the stairs and onto the landing where Inella's mother stood in her doorway. The man had one grasping hand on her arm, preventing her retreat back inside, his thin, pointy face almost nose to nose with the stricken woman. Both of them turned, eyes wide, at Karal's arrival.

Grabbing the man by the shirtfront, Karal shoved him back against the wall. Inella's mother shrieked, her hand flying to her throat. The man's eyes were no less fearful than the woman's, boggling in his face as he pried weakly at Karal's grip. Karal wanted to rip them from his head.

“My employer will not stand for this!” the little prick hissed, sweat beading on his brow. “Gart sur-Brandal does not tolerate his servants to be abused!”

Karal leaned in close, his voice falling to a whisper as he looked the whoreson right in the eye. “I cut the pricks off men like Gart sur-Brandal, right before I fuck them in the ass.”

The man went white and the sudden smell of urine filled the small space as his bladder purged. Karal smiled.

“How much money do you owe?” he asked Inella's mother.

“Six hundred falcons,” she whispered, holding to the doorframe for support. She looked ready to faint. He could hardly blame her.
Six hundred falcons?
A goddamn fortune to people like these. Even on her back, it would take Inella years to earn that amount of money. But Krista…Karal knew of places where a pretty, underage girl with such distinctive coloring would fetch ten times what her mother ever could.

He swallowed the bile that rose in his throat. Turned back to the worm he held against the wall. “My factor will visit your employer tomorrow morning. If Gart sur-Brandal knows what's good for him, he will be very generous in his negotiations. And if I ever see you here again, I'll cut your liver out and feed it to you. Do you understand?”

The little weasel nodded, sweat dripping down his ashen face. Karal opened his hand and let the man fall. “Get the fuck out of here before I change my mind and send you back to your boss in long strips.”

The man scrambled to his feet and lurched up the stairs, the echoes of his gasping breaths lingering in his wake. Karal turned to Inella's mother. She stared at him as if he were Gorgorn himself.

“Thank you,” she squeaked.

He nodded, rolling his shoulders to relieve some of the tension in his bunched muscles, resisting the urge to chase the man down and throttle him. He realized abruptly that he was clenching and unclenching his fists, and forced himself to stop. “He won't come back. I'll have my factor make an offer to purchase your debts, one that sur-Brandal will not be able to refuse.”

“But…why would you…?” She fell silent, her features hardening with suspicion.

“Inella does not need to know of this,” Karal explained, knowing exactly what the mother was thinking, and vaguely wondering why it felt so important to him to disabuse her. “I would not have her hold herself in my debt. She has nothing to fear from me, ma'am. On my honor.”

The woman's eyes grew alarmingly moist, and Karal cursed inwardly. Damn weeping females. “Your daughter is a good employee. She's bright and punctual and organized, and she does what she's told. Most of the time. I want her to be able to keep working for me. That's all this is.”

Well, that, and the fact that he couldn't stop picturing her naked with her legs spread and him between them. But he guessed Inella's mother would not like him better for knowing that.

The woman's chin lifted. “Thank you then.” She stood to one side of the door and gestured within. “Will you take some refreshment?”

“My thanks, but no. I'm here because there's been a mishap at the shop.”

Her face paled, no doubt fearing the worst. It was only last week that a house fell on her daughter, after all. “Oh?”

“A caustic liquid spilled on Inella's skirts. She's fine, just a few minor burns, but her dress and boots are ruined. She sent me round to fetch another dress and some shoes.”

“Of course,” the mother said, hurrying into the apartment. She returned with a drab gray dress of threadbare wool and some scraps of rotted leather and wood that at one time might have been shoes. He took them gingerly, worried they might fall apart in his grasp.

“Thank you, Karal-
shahar
,” she said, laying a hand on his arm. “We…I would be honored if you would share a meal with us. We don't have much, but what we do have is largely thanks to you. If you would be so kind…perhaps tonight?”

Oh, for the love of Salgrim. With difficulty, Karal refrained from letting fly with a spate of obscenity. His cock had been plaguing him since leaving Viera's apartment last night, and he'd been looking forward to seeking out that whore from the Bull's Bollocks. A meal with Inella and her family meant that his prick would go hungry again tonight. As much as he was beginning to enjoy her company, he had needs that required attention.

“I would be delighted,” was what his mouth said.

Her smile was so sincere he left before he could say something even more stupid.

On his way back to the shop, he stopped at a local cobbler and, using Inella's old, tatty shoes to judge the size, picked out a new pair of boots for her. He told himself it was merely pragmatism. After all, he couldn't possibly expect her to get any work done wearing shoes that were falling apart. And since the nice calfskin boots with the shapely heel and silver hooks were just five harts more costly than the ugly, utilitarian ones, it only made sense to get her those.

Chapter Eleven

Aru woke at his kitchen table, his head resting on his folded hands. Morning sunlight slanted in the window, illuminating motes of dust that floated in the air like falling snow. Sitting up, he dragged in a sharp breath as his stiff muscles protested his odd sleeping position, though last night had certainly been more restful than the one before it, spent curled up on the bench in the courtyard.

The house was silent, though he could hear noises outside, mundane sounds of humanity that should have comforted him but didn't. Rubbing his hands up and down his face, he thought briefly about eating. Instead, he went to the water barrel in the corner by the pantry and splashed his face and hair. He stood for a few moments, water dripping from his hair to soak the collar of his shirt, staring at nothing, trying to think of what to do next.

Forget her,
he told himself, knowing it was useless but needing to convince himself all the same.
Get past it and forget her.

From under the washbasin, he retrieved the bucket they used to collect the remnants of old candles, to be melted down and reused. Feeling scoured raw inside, he went to the staircase and began clearing away the last traces of her from his life.

He was halfway up the stairs when the small scrape of a key in the lock froze him. The door opened. His heart began to thud, so loud he thought his eardrums might burst. Her scent came before her, carried on a slanting bar of morning sunlight, that elusive combination of hyacinth flowers and her own warm skin. His cock thickened as the fragrance hit his nostrils. With great care, he placed the candle-stub he held into the bucket, then straightened, not turning to look at her. Not daring to.

“I told you not to come back.” He could hardly hear his own voice over the thrum of blood in his ears. “What do you want?”

She stepped inside and closed the door. “We need to talk.”

Gritting his teeth, he stalked down the stairs and brushed past her. Why did she have to make this so difficult? He headed for the kitchen, refusing to look her way. “There's nothing more to say. Get out of my house.”

“Karal was at Barrago's Hold.”

Her words halted him at the kitchen door. For a moment he could only stand there as the floor seemed to sink beneath his feet, and him with it, all the breath leaving him in a painful rush. His stomach tightened until he was afraid he might vomit all over himself.

She knew. She knew.

“He told me everything. What you are. What you will do one day, if you haven't already. Why it frightens you so much.”

He could hear the tremor in her voice, the brittle edges of her self-control, and the revulsion he knew must be lurking just beneath. A knife in his belly could not have hurt more than her scorn. “Say your piece and be gone.”

“It's a terrible thing, Aru. I'm sorry…”

He turned, glaring at her, trying to ignore the way she looked, how her deep red dress hugged her curvy body, how the sunlight gleamed from dark, auburn waves still damp from washing, how her skin shone with the clean luster of youth and life and health. Trying to ignore all the things that made him want her. “Of course you are. Who would not be, knowing the truth? I'm sure you were sickened at the thought of…baring yourself for a vile monster such as me.”

She frowned at him—he could have sworn she was annoyed. “Sick, yes. Sick to my stomach at the thought of you alone and comfortless all these years, keeping this horrible secret and having no one to confide in. Sick at heart, because you didn't feel you could tell me.”

God, he was suddenly so angry he could hardly see. He could feel his limbs begin to quiver with the need for violence. “Your pity is worse than your disdain,” he snapped. “And it changes nothing.”

Her eyes were glinting, moisture building in them. “You're not a monster, Aru. I'm not afraid of you.”

Almost without realizing, he hurled the bucket he still held across the room. It shattered against the wall, candle-stubs and wood staves flying. He saw the way she jumped, and felt a burning heat rise in his chest. He came at her, a bizarre thrill seizing him as she took an involuntary step back, then another. Her eyes locked onto his, round and fearful, and he kept advancing until her back met the closed door.