The Sleeping King (70 page)

“Hurry,” Eben urged.

She looked up at Cicero. For just an instant she let all the despair in her spirit show in her eyes. A flash of sorrow reflected in his. Then he nodded his encouragement.

And she opened her pouch.

The pristine white fabric spilled out into her hands and she fumbled with the cloth, trying to unfold it and find the front. In her haste to get the thing on before she could chicken out she could not get it over her head. Many hands helped her, and in a moment the four-pointed blue star with its white heart and sun rays was centered boldly upon her chest. She smoothed her hand down the unfamiliar insignia. Her mind refused to accept what her eyes saw.

“What do I do?” she asked Rosana blankly.

Rosana cried, “Just run out in the middle of the fight and start healing. They all will leave your colors alone. Heal everyone who needs it, no matter their race nor which side they fight on. Since the Boki allow Balthazar to live with them, I think they know the rules and will let you heal their kills.”

She looked up at the raging battle doubtfully. “I'm supposed to walk out into the middle of that?”

“Aye. You are White Heart now. No one touch you.” Rosana muttered a fast incant and cast a glow spell on Raina. Against the pristine white of her tabard, it lit the night like a torch. “Go!” Rosana gave her a little push.

Sha'Li and Cicero pulled back the brambles to make an opening for Raina. She stumbled forward. Stood upright. And started forward, terrified.

The nearest combatants hitched in their swings as they caught sight of her. Both the rakasha and the Boki who were fighting disengaged from their combat and stepped back to let her pass between them. She walked forward, dimly noting the sounds of their resumed combat behind her.
Heal everyone.

Leland. Must get to Leland.

She fixed in her mind's eye the last place she'd seen him and broke into a run, aiming straight for him. The ground was rough, and she tripped several times over what she hoped were tree roots but suspected were not. Once a hand even reached out to steady her when she would have fallen in a patch of blood-soaked mud. She did not stop to thank the warrior, for Leland lay somewhere before her, dead, a stake through his heart.

Shockingly, the battle seemed to part in front of her like butter melting away from a hot knife. She judged she'd nearly reached the spot where he went down and pulled up to have a look around for him. A fierce knot of fighting centered upon the spot where Leland and his men had been mowed down. How was she ever to get through that? She flinched as a sword swung perilously close to her head.

“Gads, White Heart! Apologies. I saw ye not!” someone yelled from her left.

She gathered all her remaining nerve and stepped forward. “Make way for the White Heart!” she shouted.

The effect of her words was stunning. Boki and human alike fell back, lowering their weapons to let her through. It was surreal, passing through the battle almost as if she were a brightly glowing ghost, surrounded by gore and violence but touched by none of it.

She continued forward, stumbling over something soft and slippery. She dared not look down to see what it was. She was hanging on to her sanity by a thread as it was. She spotted a pile of green and yellow obscured by the churned filth of the battlefield. She leaped forward, searching frantically for the familiar visage and graying hair of her mentor.
There.
She fell to her knees beside him and used the hem of her pristine tabard to wipe the mud and blood off the slack face. It was Leland.

His face was pale. Peaceful.

She laid her hands upon his two shoulders, barely all of him that was intact, and quickly recited the incant to call forth life-restoring magics. The energy rushed painfully through her and into Sir Leland.

Nothing happened.

Nothing happened
.

She did it again, drawing more magic forth from within herself, blasting him with a burst of life magic a full-sized dragon could not ignore.

And still Leland lay there, lifeless. Dead. Gone.

She rocked back on her heels in disbelief. He couldn't be gone. He'd genuinely cared for his people. For her. Given her wise advice. Protected her from those who would harm her or take advantage of her.
Please resurrect,
she begged his spirit. But something within her doubted that he wished to return to this world of pain and suffering, not when his beloved wife waited for him so patiently beyond the Veil.

The fog that had momentarily shrouded Raina's mind began to shred. Screams and blood and bodies began to register upon her stunned senses. With awareness came tearing grief so sharp it caused her physical pain. A keening wail rose up in her and found voice, rising to mingle helplessly with the moans of the dying. Her innards felt as though they might fall right out of her and she clutched her middle in agony.
No. Nononononononono …

But the bloody truth sprawled before her eyes, undeniable. Sir Leland was dead. She had reached him in plenty of time for the magic to work, and she had given him more than enough of it. Maybe that stake had made his spirit irretrievable. Now she had to trust him to the miracle of resurrection and Leland's own will to live.

She noticed spatters of blood upon her clothes, obscene against the whiteness of her tabard. She scrubbed at them, succeeding only in smearing the blood into crimson streaks across her front.

Putting on the White Heart colors had been a waste. She'd given up her freedom, her future, her dreams—everything she'd fought so hard for—and it had all been for naught. She'd failed to save the one person in the world who'd ever shown her a parent's selfless love, completely free of any ulterior motive or hidden agenda.

She'd failed. Utterly and completely.

As she knelt in the mud, her hands lying useless in her lap, her shoulders gradually slumped lower and lower as if a great load and then a greater load still were being piled upon them. And at long last, she finally cried. For her lost childhood, her lost home, her lost family. For everything and everyone she'd run away from in her desperate quest and for the unbearable price of it all.

 

CHAPTER

27

Will jumped as Eben groaned beside him. “No. Oh no. Not my lord. Aaah, my lord—” The jann started to rise up from his hiding place, but Cicero and Sha'Li leaped on the grieving jann and forcibly held him down.

“Eben,” Cicero muttered urgently, “there's naught you can do now.”

Will frowned over at Rosana. He thought he spied tears glistening on her cheeks. “What's happening?” he whispered to her.

“Raina, she reached him in plenty of time. Which means the landsgrave's spirit refused to come back when she tried to restore his life.”

“What does that mean?” Will pressed.

She gazed at him sorrowfully. “Hyland is dead. His spirit must resurrect if he is to return. If and until that happens, Landsgrave Hyland is gone.”

“Oh.” It felt like someone had just hit Will in the gut with a heavy rock. He looked out at the ghostly white form of Raina rocking back and forth on the ground over Hyland's crumpled form. “We should go to her.”

Sha'Li snorted. “Look you at the same battle I do? A killing field it is. No mercy, no quarter. And not so well the pinkskins fare. Slaughtering everything crossing their path are those Boki.”

Will gazed out upon the battle, stricken. She was right, of course. But it felt wrong just sitting here, letting all this death unfold before him. Thing was, there wasn't really anything their little party could do to stem the flow of a battle encompassing hundreds of combatants. And more important, they were so close to finding the Sleeping King, and that must take precedence—

Will's brain hitched. He flashed back to the anguish and determination on his father's face as Ty had led them away from the massacre of Hickory Hollow. This must have been exactly how Will's father had felt, the thoughts he had been thinking, that awful night.

It was a hard thing, knowing that a goal you held dear was more important than the lives of dozens of your friends and neighbors—or of hundreds of soldiers, who'd done nothing wrong but follow orders. It sat ill within Will. But what choice did he have? Since the moment his father had revealed the existence of the Sleeping King, Will's path had been set. He could not stop until he found the king or died permanently in the attempt.

He jolted when a whispered word floated out of the darkness behind him. “Willcobb.”

Stunned, he half-turned on his belly to look over his shoulder. Thar'Ok and a half-dozen Boki warriors loomed in the shadows behind him.

“What—” Will stared.

The orc shaman waved him urgently to silence, then gestured for all the members of the party to come to him. With varying degrees of trepidation and suspicion, Will and the others complied. Thar'Ok drew them several dozen yards away from the main body of the battle.

“Willcobb. Now be time.”

Will stared at Thar'Ok. “I beg your pardon?”

“Go now. Wake king.”

“But I don't know where to go—”

Thar'Ok cut him off. “We show. Come now.”

“But Raina—our healer—”

“She Balthazar,” the orc intoned in disgust. “We bring. You go.”

Will looked to the others questioningly. His inclination was to trust the Boki. Stars knew, Thar'Ok didn't have to come out here and expose himself to danger from Anton's men like this. The others in the party hesitated, but eventually they all nodded. Sha'Li was last to join in.

Will answered for all of them, “All right. We go. Lead on.”

The orcs turned and melted into the night with Will and his companions close on their heels.

*   *   *

Something touched Raina's foot. She jumped and looked behind her to see a badly mangled arm attached to a bloody shoulder that led to an even bloodier face with desperate human eyes looking out of it.

“Please, White Heart. Save Hyland's men.”

Oh, stars. The rest of them.
With alacrity Raina reached down and threw healing into the man to stanch the worst of his bleeding and stabilize him enough not to die.

“You knew him?” she asked hoarsely as the man gasped in pain beneath her hands.

“I am … was…”—a groaned curse—“… his sergeant at arms. He told me to stay back and the others to stay with me, but I couldn't let him die alone. I led the men to 'im. And now they's all dead.”

“Where? Show me?” Raina asked urgently. Of a sudden it was incredibly important to find Leland's men and save as many of them as she could. The sergeant crawled over to a corpse a few feet away. “There be Donal,” he pointed out.

She hit the young man with the same healing that had failed on Sir Leland, but this time her target blinked his eyes open almost instantly. She choked back a sob. Six more times she used life magic, and all six times it worked. Why, oh why, couldn't it have worked on Sir Leland? On the remaining men, she threw enough healing into them to fix the worst of their injuries and see them safely off the field.

The last one sat up with a jerk, raising his sword to swing at the hamstrings of a nearby Boki.

“Stand down!” the sergeant barked to the fellow. “Lower your weapon!”

Raina frowned up at the soldier, startled.

The sergeant shrugged. “Sir Leland saw to it we knew the rule.”

“What rule?”

He frowned that she did not seem to know the tenets of her own order, but nonetheless explained. “Tradition holds that if the White Heart heals a man and he departs peacefully from the battle, his opponents will let him withdraw unharmed. But if my men reengage in the fight, we be fair game to die again. Not to mention we risk the displeasure of the White Heart, who do not take kindly to spending their precious magic saving a man's life only to have him throw it away again.”

Ahh. A good rule.
She could see the sense of it.

“May I just say how good it is to see my mistress's tabard abroad again. You wear it well, young lady.”

She shook her head, unable to speak past the sudden lump in her throat.

Hyland's men all rested their weapons on top of their heads. She assumed that was some sort of signal to the Boki that they intended to withdraw from the fight without engaging any further. The men started to move toward the south end of the battlefield, and Raina stood up with the idea of leaving with them.

The sergeant spoke to her gently. “Your work is not done, White Heart. Many more wounded and dying lay upon the field. Until your healing is spent, you must stay.”

Raina looked around in dismay at the carnage.
Of course. Heal everyone you see, regardless of race or affiliation.…

He continued, and she could almost hear Leland's voice saying,
Heal without prejudice, green and pink, flesh and fur, alike. The Boki are living creatures and as deserving of your skill as me and my men.

As the sergeant limped away with his men she took a deep breath, turned, and reached for the dead orc lying at her feet, minus the entire right side of his head. She laid her hands upon him and blasted him with a life spell. The Boki did much as Leland's men had done. He blinked awake, face now intact, looked confused, spied her tabard, and comprehension lit his black eyes.

He nodded and grunted something in orcish that sounded like an expression of gratitude. He climbed to his feet and held a hand down to her. Startled, she took it. The orc hoisted her to her feet and then some, nearly sending her flying with his strength. Another grunt that sounded apologetic and then the fellow put his sword on his head and jogged off the field. Stunned, she watched him go. And then she turned to the next corpse, another Boki.

She worked her way in an expanding circle around the field, doing her best to conserve her energy and give each man just enough magic to save his life. How many humanoids and orcs she healed she had no idea. She decided then and there never to keep count of such things. How long she stayed upon the field she also had no idea.