blankets that lay atop his legs as he sat up in bed, felt the itchy, greasy sensations of his hair, which had soaked up the sweat of his pain and was more than overdue for a wash. He prodded at his bare ribs with a finger, felt a faint divot in the flesh and a deep ache in the muscles of his torso, but nothing that approached the earlier agony. He remarked to himself on just how much he owed his elven host, then cut the thought short before it could drive him right back into the arms of the brooding funk he was struggling to evade.
Gradually, he removed his fingers from the wound, letting his hands flop to the mattress beside him, but continued to poke at the injury with his mind. He dwelled on the sense of warmth that had flowed through him at the healer's touch, the 'taste' of her mana flooding over his soul, the sensation of his flesh stitching itself together. For just an instant his spirit quivered on the verge of discovery, an understanding of a new and brighter magic than any he had practiced before. The lingering pain in his wound lessened by a featherweight. And a part of Jace exulted, warmed by a spark of joy not in using the power for his own ends, but with the experience of a magic worth casting purely for its own sake.
And then the moment was gone, blown away along with Jace's concentration as someone pounded on Emmara's front door with a brutish, heavy fist. Jace fell back against the pillow with a gasp as the sharp sound not only came to him faintly through the floorboards, but directly into his mind via the spell that kept a portion of his senses hovering in the room below.
Curious and perhaps more than reasonably annoyed at the interruption, he directed the spell to flow outward, moving it past the many pillars that supported Emmara's manor, slipping it through the wood of the heavy portal, allowing him to take a good solid gander at the man outside. He saw nothing of note, just a large, vaguely gorillalike fellow with a crate under one hand. A courier of some sort, obviously.
But Jace's paranoia was in full bloom, and he took a moment to really concentrate, to scan the surface thoughts of the man outside. It was difficult, reading his mind through a lens of clairvoyance, but that just made it a better test of his recovery.
And then Jace was out of bed, stumbling and slipping against the lingering pain, careening off the wall as he lost his balance, reaching desperately for the nearest teleportation pillar.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Kerstophe shifted foot to foot, burning with nervous energy, as he waited for a response to his knock. In the crook of his left arm, he adjusted the wooden crate, utterly empty. In his right hand he held a thin stiletto, held backward so the blade was hidden up his voluminous sleeve.
He heard a faint rattling from behind the heavy door, and a small portal-one so expertly blended in with the contours of the wood that he hadn't noticed it was there-slid open, revealing roughly a quarter of a pretty elven face. 'Yes? Who is it?' 'Delivery for you, m'lady,' he said, voice respectful but as bored as any good courier's.
'What is it?'
'Couldn't say, m'lady. Nothing written on the outside, and it's certainly not my place to open it or to ask.'
'All right. A minute, please.'
Kerstophe's pulse quickened, and he felt excitement radiating from his chest-to say nothing of places somewhat lower down. It always got him worked up, this moment just before it happened. Especially when his 'partner' was a pretty girl.
He heard the thump-and-clatter of a bolt being drawn and a chain being unhooked, and the door swung wide. He smiled down at the elf with an almost excessively friendly grin.
'Emmari Tandars?' he asked, dramatically mangling the pronunciation.
'Close enough,' she offered with a smile.
'Fantastic,' he said. With a smooth motion born from years of practice, he reversed his grip on the stiletto, stepped in close until their bodies nearly touched, and sank the blade deep into her flesh, directly beneath the sternum, angled upward.
They gasped as one, she in stunned agony, he in pleasure. The elf staggered, and he withdrew the blade and shoved, so that her body tumbled backward and out of the doorway, dead before it hit the floor. Just as casually he knelt to lay the empty crate on the floor beside her, then stood, calmly shut the door, and wandered back down the steps to join the traffic on the street below.
A dozen passersby or more, and nobody had seen a thing.
Jace, clad only in the leggings he'd worn in bed, dashed out from behind the door and dropped to one knee beside the fallen elf. His hands were already reaching for her, his jaw clenching at the sight of the growing pool of blood, when her eyes snapped open like the jaws of a drake. Jace released a breath he hadn't even realized he was holding.
'Emmara?' he asked, his voice soft.
'That really hurt,' she grumbled, slowly sitting up. Already the wound in her gut had started to close, the blood to dry. Jace knew that if she hadn't begun the healing spell in advance, the wound would have been lethal; as it was, the ugly bruising around it didn't fade with the wound itself, and he knew that Emmara was likely to be in more than a little pain for days to come.
'I'm so sorry to put you through that,' he told her. 'But I didn't have time to set up any sort of illusion-at least not anything he'd believe after sticking a knife into it.' He reached a hand out to help the elf rise. 'I just-
Glaring a mixture of anger and pain, Emmara pushed his hand away and rose, albeit shakily, under her own power. Then she turned that heavy gaze directly on him, matched by Liliana's own glare as the necromancer emerged from behind a nearby pillar. Both women stood with arms crossed, scowling darkly, warped and twisted reflections of one another.
'What?' he asked them.
'Would you care to explain, 'Berrim'?' Emmara demanded.
'I figured-' he began.
'Were you afraid I wouldn't be up to defending myself?' she continued unabated.
'And you should certainly know better in my case,' Liliana added darkly. 'Oh, heavens! We're in trouble! Let's wait for the wounded man to come charging in to save us!'
'I-' he tried again.
'You have any idea the sort of damage your lunging around could have caused?' the elf demanded. 'And I don't just mean to me! There's a reason I had you resting in bed, you idiot!'
Liliana, Jace thought sourly, is a bad influence on her. 'I didn't race down here to save you two!' Jace shouted, clutching his ribs as the dull ache returned. 'I did it to save him!'
That, at least, was sufficient to draw a confused silence. Jace took the opportunity to move from the door and collapse into the nearest chair-a velvet-upholstered monstrosity that might well have been older than the elf who owned it.
'You,' he said, stabbing a finger at Liliana, 'would have had one of your specters eat his soul, or maybe rotted his flesh off his bones into a puddle of really smelly goo.'
'Of course,' she said.
'And you,' he continued, turning to Emmara, 'well, I've never seen you in danger, but I'm betting that your response to a man trying to stick a knife in your gut would be a lot uglier than your healing spells.'
'You'd win that bet,' she told him, still puzzled.
'So,' Jace said, trying to lean forward in his chair and failing, 'then what?'
Liliana and Emmara looked at one another.
'Is there anyone here,' Jace asked, 'with the slightest doubt that your delivery came courtesy of Tezzeret?'
Emmara frowned. 'It would be quite a coincidence for it to be anyone else, under the circumstances. Unlike some people, I don't have whole swathes of angry enemies clamoring for my head.'
'Exactly!' Jace exclaimed, as though pouncing on a long-sought prize. 'Emmara, the only reason Tezzeret could have to come after you is because you're a friend of mine.'
