“Dear Merry, Alex knows,” Jesse said. “Please try to understand. It’s time for me to let you go.” Jesse looked toward Snake with sightless eyes. “Let us have a little while alone, and then I’ll be grateful for your gift.”
Snake stood and walked out of the tent. Her knees shook and her neck and shoulders ached with tension. She sat down on the hard, gritty sand, wishing the night were over.
She looked up at the sky, a thin strip edged by the walls of the canyon. The clouds seemed peculiarly thick and opaque tonight, for though the moon had not yet risen high enough to see, some of its light should have been diffracted into sky-glow. Suddenly she realized the clouds were not unusually thick but very thin and mobile, too thin to spread light. They moved in a wind that blew only high above the ground. As she watched, a bank of dark cloud parted, and Snake quite clearly saw the sky, black and deep and shimmering with multicolored points of light. Snake stared at them, hoping the clouds would not come together again, wishing someone else were near to share the stars with her. Planets circled some of those stars, and people lived on them, people who might have helped Jesse if they had even known she existed. Snake wondered if their plan had had any chance of success at all, or if Jesse had accepted it because on a level deeper than shock and resignation her grip on life had been too strong to let go.
Inside the tent someone uncovered a clear bowl of lightcells. The blue bioluminescence spilling through the entrance washed over the black sand.
“Healer, Jesse wants you.” Merideth stood outlined in the glow, voice stripped of music, tall and gaunt and haggard.
Snake carried Mist inside. Merideth did not speak to her again. Even Alex looked at her with a fleeting expression of uncertainty and fear. But Jesse welcomed her with her blinded eyes. Merideth and Alex stood in front of her bed, like a guard. Snake stopped. She did not doubt her decision, but the final choice was still Jesse’s.
“Come kiss me,” Jesse said. “Then leave us.”
Merideth swung around. “You can’t ask us to go now!”
“You have enough to forget.” Her voice trembled with weakness. Her hair clung in tangles to her forehead and her cheeks, and what was left in her face was endurance near exhaustion. Snake saw it and Alex saw it, but Merideth stood, shoulders hunched, staring at the floor.
Alex knelt and gently raised Jesse’s hand to his lips. He kissed her almost reverently, on the fingers, on the cheek, on her lips. She laid her hand on his shoulder and kept him a moment longer. He rose slowly, silent, looked at Snake, and left the tent.
“Merry, please say good-bye before you go.”
Defeated, Merideth knelt beside her and brushed her hair back from her bruised face, gathered her up and held her. She returned the embrace. Neither offered consolation.
Merideth left the tent, in a silence that drifted on longer than Snake meant it to. When the footsteps faded to a whisper of sand against leather, Jesse shuddered with a sound between a cry and a groan.
“Healer?”
“I’m here.” She put her palm under Jesse’s outstretched hand.
“Do you think it would have worked?”
“I don’t know,” Snake said, remembering when one of her teachers had returned from the city, having met only closed gates and people who would not speak to her. “I want to believe it would have.”
Jesse’s lips were darkening to purple. Her lower lip had split. Snake dabbed at the blood, but it was thin as water and she could not stop the flow.
“You keep going,” Jesse whispered.
“What?”
“To the city. You still have a claim on them.”
“Jesse, no—”
“Yes. They live under a stone sky, afraid of everything outside. They can help you, and they need your help. They’ll all go mad in a few more generations. Tell them I lived and I was happy. Tell them I might not have died if they had told the truth. They said everything outside killed, so I thought nothing did.”
“I’ll carry your message.”
“Don’t forget your own. Other people need…” She ran out of breath, and Snake waited in silence for the command that would come next. Sweat slid down her sides. Sensing her distress, Mist coiled tighter on her arm.
“Healer?”
Snake patted her hand.
“Merry took the pain away. Please let me go before it comes back.”
“All right, Jesse.” She freed Mist from her arm. “I’ll try to make it as quick as I can.”
The handsome ruined face turned toward her. “Thank you.”
Snake was glad Jesse could not see what was about to happen. Mist would strike one of the carotid arteries, just beneath the jaw, so the poison would flow to Jesse’s brain and kill her instantly. Snake had planned that out very carefully, dispassionately, at the same time wondering how she could think about it so clearly.
Snake began to speak soothingly, hypnotically. “Relax, let your head fall back, close your eyes, pretend it’s time to sleep…” She held Mist over Jesse’s breast, waiting as the tension flowed away and the slight tremor ceased. Tears ran down her face, but her sight was brilliantly clear. She could see the pulse-beat in Jesse’s throat. Mist’s tongue flicked out, in. Her hood flared. She would strike straight forward when Snake released her. “A deep sleep, and joyful dreams…” Jesse’s head lolled, exposing her throat. Mist slid in Snake’s hands. Snake felt her fingers opening as she thought Must I do this? and suddenly Jesse convulsed, her upper spine arched, flinging her head back. Her arms went rigid and her fingers spread and tensed into claws. Frightened, Mist struck. Jesse convulsed again, hands clenching, and relaxed completely, all at once. Blood pulsed in two thin drops from the marks of Mist’s fangs. Jesse shuddered, but she was already dead.
Nothing was left but the smell of death and a spirit-empty corpse, Mist cold and hissing atop it. Snake wondered if Jesse somehow had felt the pressure grow to breaking point, and had stood it as long as she could to save her partners this memory.
Shaking, Snake put Mist in the case and cleaned the body as gently as if it were still Jesse. But there was nothing left of her now; her beauty had gone with her life, leaving bruised and battered flesh. Snake closed the eyes and drew the stained sheet up over the face.
She left the tent, carrying the leather case. Merideth and Alex watched her approach. The moon had risen; she could see them in shades of gray.
“It’s over,” she said. Somehow, her voice was the same as ever.
Merideth did not move or speak. Alex took Snake’s hand, as he had taken Jesse’s, and kissed it. Snake drew back, wanting no thanks for this night’s work.
“I should have stayed with her,” Merideth said.
“Merry, she didn’t want us to.”
Snake saw that Merideth would always imagine what had happened, a thousand ways, each more horrible than the last, unless she stopped the fantasy.
“I hope you can believe this, Merideth,” she said. “Jesse said, ‘Merry took the pain away,’ and a moment later, just before my cobra struck, she died. Instantly. A blood vessel broke in her brain. She never felt it. She never felt Mist. Gods witness it, I believe that to be the truth.”
“It would have been the same, no matter what we did?”
“Yes.”
That seemed to change things for Merideth, enough to accept. It did not change anything for Snake. She still knew she would have been the cause of Jesse’s death. Seeing the self-hatred vanish from Merideth’s face, Snake started toward the crumbled part of the canyon wall where the slope led up to the lava plain.
“Where are you going?” Alex caught up to her.
“Back to my camp,” she said dully.
“Please wait. Jesse wanted to give you something.”
If he had said Jesse had asked them to give her a gift, she would have refused, but, somehow, that Jesse left it herself made a difference. Unwillingly, she stopped. “I can’t,” she said. “Alex, let me go.”
He turned her gently and guided her back to the camp. Merideth was gone, and in the tent with Jesse’s body or grieving alone.
Jesse had left her a horse, a dark-gray mare, almost black, a fine-boned animal with the look of speed and spirit. Despite herself, despite knowing it was not a healer’s horse, Snake’s hands and heart went out to her. The mare seemed to Snake the only thing she had seen in — she could not think how long — that was beauty and strength alone, unmarked by tragedy. Alex gave her the reins and she closed her hands around the soft leather. The bridle was inlaid with gold in Merideth’s delicate filigree style.
“Her name is Swift,” Alex said.
Snake was alone, on the long trek to cross the lava before morning. The mare’s hooves rang on the hollow-sounding stone, and the leather case rubbed against Snake’s leg from behind.
She knew she could not return to the healers’ station. Not yet. Tonight had proved that she could not stop being a healer, no matter how inadequate her tools. If her teachers took Mist and Sand and cast her out, she knew she could not bear it. She would go mad with the knowledge that in this town, or that camp, sickness or death occurred that she could have cured or prevented or made more tolerable. She would always try to do something.
She had been raised to be proud and self-reliant, qualities she would have to set aside if she returned to the station now. She had promised Jesse to take her last message to the city, and she would keep the promise. She would go to the city for Jesse, and for herself.
Chapter 4
Arevin sat on a huge boulder, his cousin’s baby gurgling in a sling against his chest. The warmth and activity of the new being were a comfort to him as he stared across the desert, in the direction Snake had gone. Stavin was well and the new child healthy; Arevin knew he should feel grateful and glad of the clan’s good fortune, so he felt vaguely guilty about his lingering sorrow. He touched the place on his cheek where the white serpent’s tail had struck him. As Snake had promised, there was no scar. It seemed impossible that she had been gone long enough for the cut to scab over and heal, because he remembered everything about her as clearly as if she
