Talon Brightshield's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Talon Brightshield knelt beside the cot and pressed both palms to the boy's broken arm. The bone had punched through the skin near the elbow. The mother was watching. The surgeon had already turned away. Talon closed his eyes and asked his god for the smallest measure of grace, because he had promised himself, on the day he took the oath, that he would never refuse a child. The light came slow. It always came slow for him. A pale warmth crept from his chest down his arms and into his hands, and the boy gasped as the bone slid back under the skin. Talon felt the price arrive at the same moment. His knees buckled. A hot line of pain ran up his own forearm, matching the boy's break, and he bit down on the inside of his cheek to keep from crying out. The boy whimpered too. Healing hurt them both. That was the part no one had warned him about when he first felt the magic answer. He finished the seam of skin and let go. The mother wept and kissed his wrist. Talon tried to stand and could not. A junior sister from the hospital caught him under the arms and dragged him to a bench against the stone wall. His vision went gray at the edges. His hands would not stop shaking. He had healed one arm. One. And already his legs would not hold him, and his own elbow throbbed as if someone had struck it with a hammer. Around him the long hall stretched on, cots in rows, arched windows letting in dusty light, and a line of hurt people still waiting at the door. He counted six he could not reach today. Maybe not tomorrow either. A single working of the gift emptied him for days. He pressed his forehead to the cool stone and made himself look at the small statue set in the alcove above the bench: the mourning god with one hand laid over the heart, the shield-name carved into the base. Talon had come to Embermere to be a paladin worthy of that figure, to use the gift for the people who could not pay a surgeon. He understood now what the gift cost. He could keep his oath and burn himself down to nothing inside a season, or he could learn to give less and refuse more. Neither answer was clean. He wiped his mouth, put his hand flat on the bench, and forced himself to stand. The next patient was a girl with a fever. He walked to her cot without using the magic. That was the choice he had made, and he would have to make it again tomorrow.