Verecleeve's Arc

Chapter 4 of 8

Jorum's words about the healer stayed with Verecleeve for three days. A woman who sealed wounds with the Magus arts. He could not kill a man she stood beside. So he stopped hunting the Magus and started hunting her. He asked at the docks. He asked among the Sea Runners loading crates. A gray-haired girl mends the fighters at the temple, they told him. She comes to the yard when the sun sets. He found her there, kneeling over a bleeding sparrer. Her silver hair fell past her shoulders. A blue stone hung at her chest and glowed as she pressed her hands to a gash on the man's arm. The wound closed under her palms like water smoothing over. This was Grondallynn, the healer who kept the Magus alive. She looked far younger than Verecleeve expected, and her green eyes were soft, not cruel. He waited until the fighter stood and walked off. Then he stepped from the shade, rifle across his chest. "You ride with the man in black robes," Verecleeve said. "The one they call the Destroyer." Her hands stilled. Fear crossed her face, quick and plain. "You've come to kill him," she said. It was not a question. "Then you'll want me dead too. Everyone thinks I'm his." "Aren't you?" "He holds my sister." She said it flat, the way people say things they have said to no one. "Two winters now. I mend his men, I mend him, and she keeps breathing. I stop, she stops." She wiped blood from her fingers. "I heal fighters here for coin. It's the only work that's mine." Verecleeve studied her. He had spent months building the healer into a wall he could not break. Now the wall was a frightened girl saving strangers to feed a hostage sister. His grip on the rifle loosened. "If he dies," Verecleeve said, "your sister goes free." "If he dies and I'm not there, he kills her first." She stood. "His men have orders. My magic is the only leash on that." "Then leave the leash where I need it," he said. "When I come for him, you step back. You don't seal his wounds. That's all." She searched his face for the trick in it. "And my sister?" "Tell me where he keeps her. I'll pull her out before I pull the trigger." Grondallynn was quiet a long moment. Then she pressed the blue stone against her chest and nodded. "A stone tower, three days east," she said. "He moves the girl there before every job. His next blade comes east under a full moon. He'll be at the tower to meet it." Verecleeve felt the ground shift under him. The healer was not his enemy. She was his map. But now a second life hung on his aim, and he had three days to reach a tower he had never seen. "Three days," he said. "Then he's not the only one traveling east."