Chapter 192: The Healer Who Raised Him

(Valerian Alzette POV)

Corporal Marsh had been telling everyone for three days that he was ready to go home.

The wound in his thigh had closed a week ago. It was a good closure. I had done it myself, and the scar was flat and pale and would barely show by next summer. By every measure a soldier could see, he was healed.

"Stairs," I said.

He looked at the watchtower steps, and then at me.

He went up anyway. At the eleventh step his hand found the rail. At the fourteenth, the leg began to shake, very slightly, as legs do when the muscle has been cut and closed and hasn’t yet been told it is allowed to work again.

He reached the top and turned round, breathing harder than he wanted me to see.

"Fine," he said.

"I know you are," I said. "Your leg isn’t. The wound is closed. You aren’t. You go home when you can do that twice without the rail."

He came down slowly. He didn’t argue.

Closing is the easy part. Any healer worth the name can close. What comes afterwards, the weeks in which a body relearns what it used to be, is where people quietly fail. I had spent five years teaching that to one particular boy. I was still not certain it had taken.

The camp had moved twice since the worst years of the war, and it had shrunk by half since the spring. It sat now at the eastern end of the Halden road, a day’s ride from the fort if the horses were good, close enough to the border to take its wounded and far enough from it to let them sleep.

Peace had been signed at Halden three days ago. The wounded had all been told. They were still wounded.

Izabella found me at the foot of the tower.

She had a relay packet in her hand, and she was holding it a little away from herself, as people hold things with the Crown’s seal on them.

"It came in with the afternoon rider," she said. "There’s a second seal under the first."

There was. Beneath the Crown’s was the mark of the western command, and beneath that, in wax gone slightly crooked, Anthony Vortex’s own.

I broke them and read.

The First Princess had been attacked the day after the signing, on the western ridge at Halden, by an assailant not yet identified. She had lost a great deal of blood and was stable under the care of the escort’s healer. Four Academy students had reached her during the attack. All five had survived.

All five, in the course of the same unexplained event, had advanced from D-Grey through D-White to C-Black.

Their core walls were stable. Their channels were not keeping pace and were adapting at a rate the healer of record could not account for. She had restricted all cultivation and attribute use. She requested a senior specialist with experience of severe channel and cultivation injury.

The Crown concurred, and asked the western command whom it could spare.

The western command, it appeared, had decided it could spare me.

I read the list of names at the bottom twice. The second time, I read only the last one.

Vortex.

He would say he was fine. He had once said it sitting upright in a moving cart with a broken wrist, and meant it, and then gone to sleep.

Two stages in one afternoon. I had seen people try to force one. I had seen what was left of them. I had never seen anyone come through two, and this dispatch said five people had.

It didn’t say how. It said unexplained. From a healer who wrote as plainly as this one, that meant she had looked as far as her evidence went, and found the edge of it.

It said nothing either about how he had come to be on that ridge, or what he had done when he got there. I found I could guess at the second. I put the guess away. Guessing about a patient before you have seen him is how good healers become bad ones.

The orders that came with it were careful.

I was released to Halden as a visiting specialist, for as long as the patients required. I was to examine, advise and treat in consultation with the healer of record. I was not to command Academy students, nor to interfere with the escort’s security, nor to set aside any instruction given by the Headmaster of Zenith.

Whoever had drafted them had worked with Theoran before.

Anthony’s endorsement was four lines long. It said that Master Alzette knew the clinical history of one of the patients better than any healer living, and that his judgement in matters of channel injury was the best the western command possessed.

It did not say that the patient was his son. That was like him. He writes down the thing that is useful, and lets it stand in for the thing he means.

Folded inside the packet was a second, smaller sheet, sealed separately, addressed in the same hand. Alash.

I didn’t open it. I put it in my coat.

Izabella was still standing there.

"Is it the boy?" she said.

"It’s five of them."

"Is one of them the boy?"

"Yes."

She looked at me for a moment, and then she held out her hand for my notes.

Izabella had led the camp’s healers whenever I was called away, since before the boy first walked into it at ten years old. The handover took less time than I had feared, because she had been doing half of it already without telling me.

Marsh went home when he could climb the tower twice without the rail. The burns in the end tent needed their dressings changed morning and evening, and the youngest of them would lie about the pain. The sergeant with the bad lung was not to be allowed near the cook fires, whatever he promised. The two fevers in the long tent were turning, and if either turned back, she was to send for the surgeon from the fort road and not wait for me.

She wrote it all down without looking up.

"Anything else?"

"No."

"Then go," said Izabella. She folded the notes. "And tell him I was right about sleeping after meals."

"He’ll say you weren’t."

"I know," she said. "Tell him anyway."

I left with four riders from the camp guard an hour before dusk. The military road was good, and there were fresh horses at the waypost. We rode through the night.

I hadn’t ridden through a night since the war. I found I hadn’t forgotten how much I disliked it.

***

(Alash Vortex POV)

I slept, in the end. Sorel saw to it.

Yesterday morning, in the infirmary, Daphne had stood in front of Sorel’s table with her wrapped wrists folded and said it herself, in about four sentences. I stood behind her and answered the questions I could. The one I couldn’t, I told Sorel I couldn’t, in front of Daphne, as agreed.

Sorel looked at me for a long moment. Then she took Daphne’s wrist and sent a thread of mana in, and held it there a long time.

"I can’t find what you’re describing," she said at last. "That doesn’t mean it isn’t there. This equipment wasn’t made to look for it."

Then she wrote. I read it upside down, which is a skill every healer learns young.

Patient reports an unexplained connection with L. Vortex. Onset unknown. Not Healing Bond, per L. Vortex, who states he cannot give the source of his knowledge. No finding on examination. Under observation.

"Anyone on your treating team reads this," Sorel told Daphne. "That’s what it’s for."

"Then they read it," said Daphne. "Anything else, they can ask me."

Then Sorel looked at my face, as Daphne had promised she would, and sent me to bed before noon.

I would have called that the highest form of medicine if she hadn’t come back at dusk to make sure I’d stayed there.

I woke this morning feeling like someone who has slept once after not sleeping, which is not the same as feeling rested. The pull behind my breastbone was where I’d left it. This week’s report to Theoran had grown overnight from the date to the date and one sentence, which I counted as progress.

Sorel examined all five of us every morning now, as Theoran had ordered, and sent every finding east by relay. My turn came after breakfast.

I sat on the edge of the bed and asked about Elizabeth.

"Warmer," said Sorel. "Lie back."

"And James?"

"Hand off his chest. Mostly. Lie back."

"Sophie’s still frosting cups."

"Less. Lie back."

"Daphne’s wrists..."

"Are wrapped, and are none of your business until you’ve let me look at your chest." She put two fingers on my wrist and the thread went in. "You’ve asked me about four people. You haven’t told me how you are."

"I’m fine."

"That’s not a finding."

She read me in silence for a while.

"A specialist’s coming from the western command," she said, without looking up. "The relay came in late last night. He should be here this morning."

"Who?"

"Master Valerian Alzette." She didn’t look up. "Your file says you studied under him."

"Five years."

"Then you’ll know what he’s like."

I did. I had spent five years running up his hills.

Sorel finished, and wrote something down, and didn’t tell me what it was. I suspected it was my pulse.

***

He came through the gate a little after mid-morning, with four riders behind him who looked as though they had been on horses all night, because they had.

I was standing in the infirmary doorway, which had a view of the gate. I had been standing in it for some time, for reasons I didn’t examine.

He swung down off his horse and stood at the gate with his hands clasped behind his back while Renn read his orders.

I knew the stance before I knew the face. I had watched that back walk the edge of a moonlit field for five years while I ran round it carrying a pillow he had made twice as heavy as it had any right to be.

Renn read every page. He took his time, and the man at the gate let him take it.

Neither of them looked impatient. They were two people who did the same kind of work in different directions, and each of them recognised it in the other. Renn handed the orders back. They exchanged a few words I couldn’t hear. Renn pointed at the infirmary.

Valerian turned and looked straight at me.

There was more grey in the blond than I remembered. Otherwise he looked exactly as he had the last time I saw him, before Zenith, which was unfair of him.

He crossed the courtyard without hurrying.

Behind me, the escort healer looked up from a bed, saw who it was, and straightened. Valerian has that effect on healers. They have all heard his name, and most of them have heard it from someone he saved.

He stopped in front of me.

"Alash."

"Master."

He looked at me. It wasn’t a long look, but it was a thorough one, and I knew exactly what he was doing with it, because he had taught me to do it.

"Go on," he said.

"Go on what?"

"You know what."

I did. Five years of it: out loud, in front of the patient, until you stop being wrong. I had never once had to do it with myself as the patient.

"Fatigue," I said. "Mild."

"Mild."

"Moderate. Barrier strain behind the breastbone, improving. Channels adapting faster than they should. Slept last night."

"And the night before?"

I considered lying to him. I had never once managed it.

"Less."

"You’ve left something out."

"I don’t think so."

He looked at my right hand. It was pressed flat against my chest, over the place where the pull lived. I hadn’t noticed putting it there.

I took it away.

"You always leave out the part that hurts," said Valerian.