would raise a great many questions about why one of Princeps Septimus’s
“Gaius didn’t have to send him there,” Isana insisted. “He wanted to isolate him. He wanted to make him vulnerable.”
“He wanted,” Fade disagreed, “to keep him out of the public eye and in a safe location.”
“By putting him into a Legion,” Isana said, her disbelief heavy in her tone. “At the eruption of a civil war.”
Fade shook his head. “You aren’t thinking it through, my lady,” he said. “The First Aleran is the one Legion that will
Isana frowned and folded her hands on her lap. “Are you sure he’s safe?”
“Nowhere would be totally safe,” Fade said in a quiet tone. “But now he is hidden among a mass of thousands of men dressed precisely like him, who will not enter combat against any of the High Lords’ Legions, and who have been conditioned by training and tradition to protect their own. He’s accompanied by young Maximus, who is more dangerous with a blade than any other man his age I’ve seen-save my lord himself-and a crafter of formidable power. Knowing Gaius, there are more agents nearby about whom I was told nothing.”
Isana folded her arms in close to her body. “Why did you come here?”
“The Crown had received intelligence that you had been personally targeted by Kalare.”
“The Crown,” she said, “and everyone else who was at that Wintersend party, and the servants and anyone they might have spoken to, or who might have heard rumors.”
“More specific,” Fade said. “He asked me to watch over you. I agreed.”
She tilted her head, frowning. “He asked?”
Fade shrugged. “My loyalty is not Gaius Sextus’s to command, and he knows it.”
She felt herself smile at him a little. “I can’t trust him. I can’t trust any of them. Not with Tavi.”
Fade’s expression never changed, but Isana felt a flash of something in the scarred slave she never had before-an instant of anger. “I know you only seek to protect him. But you do Tavi a grave disservice. He is more formidable and capable than you know.”
Isana blinked her eyes. “Fade-”
“I’ve seen it,” Fade continued. That same sense of anger in him kept on rising. “Seen him act under pressure. He’s more capable than most men, regardless of their skill with furies. And it’s more than that…”
Isana wrenched her thoughts from her worries and really looked at the scarred man. His skin was too pale, blotchy with patches of red and glistening with a cold sweat. His eyes were dilated, and his pulse fluttered fast and hard in his throat and upon one temple.
“He makes those around him be more than they are,” Fade snarled. “Makes them be better than they are. More than they thought they could be. Like his father. Bloody crows, like the father I left to
Fade suddenly lifted his wounded hand and stared at it. He was trembling violently and there were flecks of white on his lips. He blinked in utter bafflement at his quivering hand, opened his mouth as though to speak, then jerked in a convulsive spasm that threw him onto the floor in a violent seizure. Seconds went by as he kicked and thrashed, then he let out a soft groan and simply went limp.
“Fade!” Isana breathed and pushed herself from the bed. The world pitched about, then left her on the floor. She did not have strength enough to stand, but she crawled on all fours to the fallen man’s side, reaching out to touch his throat, to feel his pulse.
She could not find it.
Chapter 20
Isana thrust her hand down at Fade’s chest, calling out to Rill to let her perceive the fallen man’s body through a water-fury’s senses. In the wake of her collapse, the effort was simply too much. Isana’s head felt as if it would burst asunder in an explosion of pure agony, and her own heart labored in a sudden panic as she lost the strength to remain upright.
She let out a weak cry of purest frustration, then gritted her teeth and focused. Giving vent to her emotions would not help the stricken man beside her.
“Help! ‘ she called. It sounded pathetically quiet, and she was sure the sound would not carry past the closed wooden door. She struggled to draw a deep breath and tried again. “I need help in here! Healer!”
At the second cry, the door slammed open, and Giraldi took one look around the room and spat a vile curse, limping badly as he rushed to Isana’s side. “Steadholder!”
“Not me,” she told him, weak and frustrated. “Fade collapsed. Not breathing. Healer.”
The old centurion nodded sharply and rose to rush from the room at a pace that was surely dangerous to his crippled leg. He called out down the hall, and footsteps came running. Guards appeared, first, and within a minute they had escorted a young woman in a simple white gown into the room.
She was a pale creature, her skin so white that it almost seemed translucent, and her hair-quite short, for such a young woman-pale and fine as cobwebs. Isana felt certain that her youth was genuine and not the result of watercrafting talent, though why she felt so Isana could not say. The healer’s eyes seemed too large for her long, thin, somehow sad face, and were of a brown so dark that they looked black. The circles of weariness beneath her eyes stood out almost as vividly as violent bruises, and she carried herself with the brisk, sure manner of confidence Amara would only have expected in someone years older.
The young woman went to Fade at once and knelt to place her fingertips on his temples, her manner competent, professional, if somewhat weary. “Stead-holder,” she said, as she concentrated on her own furycraft, her eyes closed, “can you tell me what happened to him?”
“He collapsed,” Isana said. Giraldi returned, and she was torn between a surge of gratitude and one of embarrassment as he simply hefted her back into her bed. “His conversation began rambling. He was shaking. Then he fell down into a fit. He stopped breathing, and I couldn’t find his pulse.”
“How long ago?”
“Not two minutes.”
The young woman nodded. “There’s a chance, then.” She raised her voice until it carried like a trumpet, ringing off the walls with a volume worthy of a centurion on a battlefield. “Where is my tub?!”
A trio of groaning young legionares came through the door bearing a heavy healing tub, sloshing water over its edges. They plunked it down even as the young healer divested Fade of his cloak, sword belt, and boots. At a nod from her, the guards in the room lifted his limp body into the tub.
The healer knelt behind the tub and placed her hands on Fade’s head. “Step back,” she said, in a tone that suggested she said it often. The guards hastily withdrew from the tub and out of the room. At a nod from Isana, Giraldi went with them.
The healer was silent for several seconds, her head bowed, and Isana had to restrain herself from shouting for the girl to hurry. Then the air in the room began to tighten, somehow, an odd sensation, like an unseen wind pressing against Isana’s skin. The healer’s fine hairs began to lift, one by one, away from her head, as if carried in a gentle updraft, though Isana could feel no air moving. She was still for a moment, then breathed out in a murmur, and what looked like tiny flickers of lightning played over the tub.
Fade reacted violently, body suddenly arching up, drawn as tightly as one of Bernard’s hunting bows. He stayed that way for a moment, then subsided into the tub again and started coughing, a wet and fitful sound.
Isana’s heart leapt up as the slave breathed again.
The healer frowned more intently, and Isana saw the water begin to stir in the tub, as it did when she worked her own healing furycraft, though only for a moment. Then the healer grimaced and lifted her hands from Fade’s head. She moved around the tub and lifted his wounded hand. She unbound the kerchief wrapped around it and leaned down, sniffing. She drew her head away in a sharp little motion, turning her face away from the injury, then lowered his hand into the water.
