The Schemes of Dragons

IX

WYNNETH WAS STANDING next to Alemar when he suddenly stiffened. His eyes glazed. She caught him as his knees buckled. His weight dragged her toward the ground.

"Tregay! Iregg!" she called toward the nearest pair of rebels. "Help me!"

The men sped to her and lowered Alemar to the forest loam. She bent over him, heart pounding, and waved her hand in front of his face. His gaze penetrated her palm, past her face, toward some distant vista. She had seen him don the same expression one week earlier, when he had healed Milec's dead flesh.

"He's casting a spell," she said. A tingle of anxiety stood the hair on her arms on end. Why would he need to work such potent magic without prior notice? His amulet coughed, green illumination blazing through his shirt as if it were gauze. She covered her eyes.

"Elenya," he murmured.

Elenya-in need of healing? "Saddle your oeikani," Wynneth told the group that had collected. "Something's gone wrong at the silk farm." Three men dashed away.

Alemar screamed and clutched his temples. His body arched until everything but his head and feet left the ground. Wynneth gasped. Her husband collapsed, eyes closed, breath rapid and staccato.

She raced through her memories of the instructions he had given her of what to do should something like this ever occur. "Get me a moist cloth," she told Iregg, as she stretched out Alemar's bent legs and draped his hands across his chest. She seized several ferns and fashioned a crude pillow, which she tucked behind his head. Iregg scampered back from the spring, holding out a dripping scarf.

Wynneth draped the fabric over Alemar's nose and mouth. The vigor of his inhalation sucked it partway down his throat. She yanked it free, spread it open again, and held it taut. What next? After moisture for the lungs-yes! Cover the ears, cover the eyes, do anything to block out the outside world, give him less to deal with.

Tregay held the wet scarf while she unwrapped her sash from her waist. The rebel raised Alemar's head and Wynneth coiled the silk around, covering the prince's eyes and ears five layers deep. Finally only the top of his pate peeked out. Tendrils of glossy black hair rose of their own accord, like thin, angry snakes. Tiny pops of lightning zigzagged from strand to strand.

A tear ran down the length of her nose and hung suspended from the tip. She soaked it up with her sleeve. The static from his hair stung her hand, but she left her palm against his forehead. No fever. Instead, a breath of frost scooted up the bones of her arm to her chest. She shivered.

"Blankets!" she snapped. One of the camp women-Wynneth was too distracted to notice who-abruptly unravelled the three she had been cradling. Wynneth cast them over her husband.

His breathing steadied. Tregay was able, at last, to lift his hand away from the scarf. The cloth hung stiffly, like a tent, most of the moisture gone. Wynneth ordered another to be dipped in the spring.

Alemar's teeth chattered. Wynneth nearly called for more blankets, but the shaking eased almost immediately. As she placed the new damp cloth over his lower face, the tightness left the corners of his mouth. The muscles in his neck settled back, leaving smooth, relaxed contours. He moaned, and seemed to sink into a normal sleep.

"Crumbly logs, bitter sawdust, and poison bark mushrooms," she murmured-an old curse, suitable for mothers who did not wish use stronger terms in front of their children. It relieved her tension better than true profanity.

She sighed and looked about. She counted five missing men, off to the silk farm. She prayed that they would bring back bearable news.

Alemar was still slumbering fitfully when a cloud of rythni abruptly swarmed out of the forest canopy and circled just above him. Wynneth blinked and fell back, startled by their agitated swirl of motion. The other rebels, who had earlier retreated a dozen or so paces away to give a worried wife some privacy, cried out and pointed. In spite of the little people's frequent presence, the humans rarely spotted them, much less viewed them so plainly as now.

The rythni warbled forlornly at the sight of the stricken prince. One slim individual settled on his upper chest, reached under the damp cloth, and tugged his beard. Wynneth recognized Hiephora by the fine gold chain around her neck.

"He's not sleeping. He collapsed," Wynneth said, remembering to lower her voice.

"He must wake up. His sister needs him," the queen answered stridently. Wynneth caught her breath. The rythni had actually spoken to her. That only confirmed the gravity of the situation.

"What do you mean? Do you know what happened?"

"Betrayal," Hiephora trilled mournfully. As she spoke, a second rythni lit clumsily on Alemar's body. The newcomer staggered, wings drooping. Her tiny, boyish chest pulsated visibly, like that of a frightened bird. Her panting was so loud Wynneth could actually hear it. "Cyfee here saw it happen."

Cyfee, when she had recaptured some of her wind, blurted, "She was attacked in the place where the men make worms spin fiber for them. She stopped them all, but she is near death. Alemar must come." Wynneth perceived that "stopped" was as close as the little creature could come to the word "killed."

"What happened to Enns and Dushin?"

The rythni wrung her hands. "Dead. Enns was the traitor."

Wood spirits preserve us, Wynneth thought. "Where is Elenya now? Still at the silk farm?"

"No. Hidden. I can lead you there."

Wynneth knelt down and shook Alemar. His head flopped limply from side to side. From his instructions she knew not to force him awake. Yet if the rythni spoke the truth, the men who had ridden to the farm would not find the princess.

Wynneth made up her mind. "Load Alemar onto a travois," she told a pair of rebels. "He has to travel immediately." She turned back to the exhausted rythni. "Lead us."

Alemar woke to the sound of tree limbs dragging through the humus, uprooting the rotting leaves and twigs. His body bounced and pitched, held fast by padded bonds. He opened his eyes and saw a oeikani's rump. The knot of hair at the end of its tail swished just above his head. Behind him another oeikani followed in the hoofprints of the first. Wynneth gazed down from the saddle, saw that he was conscious, and called for the party to halt.

She and Tregay untied her husband. The latter eased slowly off the travois, letting them support him. His knees and spine gradually remembered how to hold him upright. His eyeballs seemed to bounce loosely back and forth, as if too small for their sockets. Each time they struck his skull, pain careened away from the impact point, darted to the back of his head, and blazed a trail into his neck.

"Elenya…" he murmured. Memories of his sister's mental plea flooded back. Sword deep in her breast. Enns dying beside her. Had he healed her? Yes, he had tried. Before he had blacked out, he had sealed the wound as she drew the blade out. But then?

He coughed, dislodging a foul mouthful of phlegm. He had felt unwell after healings, but never this devastated. The effects of healing Milec's corpse still debilitated him. The severity of his sister's wound and her distance from him had strained him beyond his limit. He needed rest.

But not now. The job was unfinished. "Where are we?" he asked.

"We're approaching the main road east of Eruth. Cyfee is leading us to Elenya."

"Cyfee?" He glanced up. With a flutter of wings, fast as a hummingbird, the rythni darted into the air above the path ahead, chirped, and sped down it. Still groggy, he belatedly recognized the note as the rythni word for haste.

"Can you ride?" Wynneth asked.

"I'll try," he said. Tregay and Iregg lifted him into a saddle. He drooped forward, hands full of mane, letting the animal set the pace.

By the time they reached the road, he was sitting upright, though he wished he were not so high. When he swayed, the ground seemed as though it were racing up to meet him.

They spilled out onto the beaten dirt track. Barely wide enough for three oeikani abreast, the route served as the main link between the sparse settlements of the Garthmorron area. They rode faster, no longer hampered by the obstacles of native forest. Suddenly Hiephora zoomed out of the foliage and landed on Alemar's shoulder.

"Men come. Hide."

Alemar repeated the command. The rythni had given sufficient warning. The rebels peered out from thick cover, hands on the broad noses of their mounts to signal the beasts to be completely silent. Three stout woodsmen, one middle-aged, the other two just out of adolescence, rumbled by on a creaking wagon. A body lay on the planks of the flat bed behind their seat.

"Enns," Wynneth whispered.

Alemar spotted the word carved into the corpse's forehead. His teeth settled against each other so hard it aggravated his headache. The wagon rattled out of sight.

He sighed. Let the Dragon's scouts make of that what they would. Of more immediate concern was the knowledge that once the men reached the village, a search party would gather and set out. How much farther? He sent an inquiry via his amulet, and received no response. Elenya was not wearing hers. Or she was dead.

"Let's go," he said anxiously.

Cyfee lit on a tall frond of bracken. Elenya lay supine, nearly invisible beneath the emerald fern canopy. Alemar knelt down, waving the others back. Hiephora landed on his shoulder; he didn't notice her. A light bluish pallor clung to his sister's face. Her chest didn't rise and fall.

"No!" he cried. He reached behind her neck and lifted her into a sitting position. She coughed.

Alive! His hand shook so badly she nearly slipped from his grasp. Then he went cold. Bright red blood trickled over the edge of Elenya's lip. A few specks ejected by the cough dotted the front of her doeskin tunic.

She was bleeding inside.

Immediately he lay her back down, and shouted at the rebels surrounding him, "Stay back. Her wound has hemorrhaged. I must have no distractions."

He summoned the power. It coursed feebly out his fingers. Not enough. He needed time. But she was dying. If he didn't save her now, this very hour, he couldn't save her at all. He must try to do what he had failed to do from a distance.

"Hold me," he told Wynneth. Without the need for explanation, she sat down behind him and enveloped him, arms circling his torso, an arrangement that would keep him steady, come what may. He took Elenya's hands inside his own, his bare one on top, the one with the gauntlet beneath.

The gauntlet crackled. The talisman itself could not help him; its design prevented that. It merely reflected the intensity of the energies he summoned. He took one deep breath-

And he was inside. The power hummed, drawn from some last, unsuspected reserve. How much he didn't know, and he didn't waste time speculating.

He sped along the track of the sword gash, bolstering the repair he had begun hours before. Flesh rejoined flesh. Blood seeped from dozens of tiny ruptures. He sealed the holes, but the pooled blood remained in her lung and in the interstices of her chest cavity.

A jolt. Pain. He gritted his teeth and focussed on the blood. Red mist flowed out of Elenya's nose and mouth. Her lung emptied. She groaned as Alemar purged the last of the internal pools. He inspected carefully to be certain he had found all sources of the bleeding.

Scars next. He began to weave the flesh more tightly still, speeding nature's work. Lung and bone first, then muscle and connective tissue. Simultaneously, he stimulated her marrow to produce replacement blood.

His stomach heaved. He choked. The sorcery evaporated. In agony, against his will, he let go of his sister.

A great blackness welled around him, threatening to swallow him. He sagged back against Wynneth. He yanked off his gauntlet and amulet, so that they would not suck vital life force from him. He had not healed Elenya thoroughly, but though he strived, he failed to summon even one more drop of magic. He had not been on Retreat since his days in the desert, had never had an opportunity to fully restore his powers, and at last whatever reservoir he had tapped during those years had been drained.

But Elenya was out of danger. That was the important thing. He fought off demons of sleep. They needed a place to recuperate-a few days of refuge away even from their comrades.

They were near Garthmorron.

"My grandfather," Alemar murmured to Wynneth, his voice slurred by exhaustion. "Find him. The rythni will help. Take me there. Take Elenya there. Send the others away." He fainted before he finished the final word.