Bones of the Empire (33 page)

Mairlee eyed Turess with curiosity, but then turned to Estin and put one hand on his shoulder and another on Feanne’s. “It is time for all of us to go. Feanne, I need to borrow your mate for a bit. By my brood, I’ll bring him back in one piece if I am able. If not, I will bring you what I can.”

Before Feanne could answer, winds slammed into Estin again. Feanne was ripped from his arms after a few seconds. When the winds stopped, Estin lay on his back in an enormous damp cave, where the whistling of air moving through the passage echoed eerily.

“We have a discussion that needs speaking,” Mairlee announced, walking over to stand above Estin. The dim lighting of the cave made it difficult to make out her features, but for some reason, Estin felt acutely afraid of her. Her eyes caught the light oddly for an elf. “I need you to ensure that Feanne fights this war to the best of her ability, which I believe may be what Turess was alluding to. In your current condition, you will die in the first battle. I can see it in your pattern. Your death will ensure most of us die, as well, if you were to die in Turessi. Even I cannot save you, and without you, no one can save me. I need you alive, no matter the cost.

“Once, you said you did not know if Raeln lives yet. His pattern will intersect with yours again if you live. If you do not…him and I will die on the same day, I believe.

“I can fix this, Estin. Time and Turess’s teachings will do much the same, but neither of us will live long enough to see that happen. You need another month of dedicated work to regain any semblance of the skills you once had. We have perhaps a month before we need to be standing in the temple…the bones of the old empire, as Turess puts it.”

Sitting up, Estin swallowed his fear and focused on the very rational way Mairlee was discussing their deaths. “Show me how to get my magic back, if it matters so much.”

Mairlee snarled and spun away from him, stomping one slippered foot, which echoed as though the impact were far greater than her size would have allowed. “My people swore in Turess’s time that we would not do that again. I will not break an oath to my kin. I cannot teach you anything, Estin. Teaching magic is forbidden.”

“Then tell me what’s wrong with me.”

That seemed to strike Mairlee as funny, making her grin as she paced around Estin. “Mortals were never meant to harness magic, let alone the kind of magic you used to rewrite Feanne’s pattern in this world. I sincerely doubt mortals have harnessed that magic, still. Using the spell you did tore away part of your own life, much as flesh can be ripped and must take time to heal. As with other wounds, waiting alone is rarely enough—one must rebuild lost strength. Your wound is far from healed, yet Turess is trying to help you regain a muscle that has withered. The wound will tear open again when you push too hard. You will die, likely at the worst possible time. If that happens, you will get me killed too. When I die, the pattern appears to show that my kin will also die. We are supposed to be apart from the pattern, but those days are gone.”

Estin tried to follow Mairlee’s explanation, as well as her movement. Between the dark and her rambling, he felt both were beyond his ability to keep up with.

“So many risks with either path,” she mused, shaking her head.

“What can we do?” he demanded, and Mairlee jumped a little, as though she had forgotten he was there.

“Do?” She stopped pacing and knelt in front of Estin, bringing her face close enough that their noses nearly touched. “I told you I cannot teach you, Estin. If I give you the answer, it will not have the same significance as you figuring it out yourself. You always have been clever. Rely on that.”

Estin stared back at Mairlee, unwilling to look away first. He slowly thought through what she had just told him.

When Estin had first been learning to heal from Feanne’s mother, Asrahn, she had begun by teaching him how to tend to wounds of the people in the camp. He had set bones, sewed cuts, and nursed many through illness. Asrahn had insisted that magic alone could not be relied upon to heal. When you needed it most, you would be without it and would watch your friends die if you did not know what else to do. By using magic only when other means had been exhausted, many more patients would live.

“You said this is a wound…something torn,” he reasoned aloud.

Mairlee stared intently at him, waiting for something.

“I can’t put a sling on this or stitch it. You cannot teach me…but that doesn’t really matter here. I can’t heal myself of the inability to heal, can I?”

“No,” she replied, a slow smirk creeping across her lips.

“Can you heal this?”

“Not exactly, Estin. The wound is a part of your body and spirit, as much as your very life is. It is tied to this—” She poked Estin in the chest harder than he would have expected. “—this flesh. As long as your mortal body continues living, you will have this deep wound. Were we to work with you for the entire rest of your short life, you would be just a shadow of the person you were before the wound.”

Estin thought on that. He had brought the dead back in the past, though he had needed a sort of magic that was now gone, thanks to the mists. Cities had once used circles of magic to concentrate healing energies into one spot for the purpose of magnifying the power of a healer. It allowed them to bring back the dead, no matter the condition of their body, within a short time after their hearts stopped. His magic alone could revive someone within seconds of their heart stopping, but those circles were lost with the coming of the mists. The only one he has seen functional in years was a thousand miles away.

“Resurrection circles—”

“Are no longer an option. You are limiting your thoughts.”

Glowering, Estin continued. “The circles are old magic. My teacher said that no one knew where they were first created.”

“No one? How droll.”

“You taught Turess how to make them, didn’t you?”

Mairlee grinned and shrugged. “Not I, but you are thinking properly now. The circles were a gift. It allowed mortals to do something for themselves, instead of always begging when a loved one died unexpectedly. At times, it felt as though mortals were lining up at our hiding places.”

“You can do the same thing without a circle? You can resurrect the recently dead.”

“I can. Rather a pointless request, though. That magic is meant to do one specific thing and is quite limited. You are wounded, not dead.”

Estin leaned forward, tapping his nose against Mairlee’s. She did not back off at all. “You need to get rid of my mortal body, if the wound is tied to it. The circles allowed us to restore incredible wounds, even regenerating lost limbs if the recipient was strong enough. Our limited magic became far more powerful at those places. Can you destroy my body and remake it?”

“What you are asking is for me to kill you and attempt to bring you back through sheer force of will. No mortal being has that kind of power.”

“You aren’t a mortal, Mairlee.”

Mairlee chuckled and remained dangerously close, somehow projecting a sense of danger that made Estin want to back away. “I am aware of that.”

Finally sitting back, Mairlee got slowly to her feet, making quite a show of the act, as though Estin was to believe she was as old as she appeared. “Estin, I can repair what you did to your own spirit to bring Feanne back, but it will have its own risks. If I do what you have asked…and I succeed…your magic will return and you will be as strong as you ever were…but doing so will likely also strengthen Oramain. I do not know if he still exists, but if Dorralt has control over him, we are then strengthening our enemy. Worse still, it will weaken me to the point that Dorralt may manage to kill me. This is a profound risk for both of us. It will take me months to recover my own magic fully, though I will still be able to fight when the time comes.

“Alternatively, I can kill you and be done with this. I believe that if done properly, it will destroy Oramain and take away a potential ally of Dorralt. In doing so, I believe Feanne will refuse to fight, and that will likely lead to all of our deaths. I cannot predict the outcome of either action with any surety. That is why I brought you here alone. I will let you make that decision. For once, I cannot make a decision with any confidence.”

“You want me to tell you whether to kill me?” he asked, laughing as he got up. “Who would say yes?”

She shrugged. “If I kill you, a possible outcome is that Feanne may live up to a year longer. She will lead the assault on Turessi in anger, seeking to end her own life. She may have a greater chance of living through this that way. If I kill you and attempt to heal you, you might be able to keep her alive using your restored magic. There is no sure outcome, and either could save or doom her. That is why I ask you. I can see as easily as anyone that you would let me kill you if it would protect her. It might…it also might not.”

The chill of the cave’s dampness was quickly replaced by the cold touch of fear from thinking through his options. She was right. If he could save Feanne by dying, he would accept that. Not knowing which way would help and which might endanger her, he had no idea what to say.

“Can we fight Oramain if he is still out there?” he asked at length.

“I can stand against Dorralt and keep him from destroying your army,” Mairlee replied. “Oramain can raise an army of his own to rival anything you can field. Add to that the armies already serving Dorralt, and they will overrun all of us. But yes, Oramain can be defeated, but not at Dorralt’s side. Together, I doubt anything in Eldvar is strong enough to hold them back for long. Not I, not my kin, possibly not the mists. If restoring you gives some of my power to him, Oramain might not need Dorralt anymore.”

“And killing me will destroy him?”

“It might.”

Estin looked up with a touch of surprise. “Might?”

“He is no longer a part of you. His fate should be loosely tied to yours. Your empowerment is his, and your death is his.”

“Should be? Killing me might not destroy him?”

“Correct.”

“And so fixing me might not empower him.”

“Also correct.”

“How risky is this, Mairlee?”

She frowned. “I will need to rest for a week or more afterward, and once this war is over, I will need to slumber for a year or more. It will take nearly all of my strength to do this without killing myself in the process. I have no fear of that outcome, but it is a mild risk that I am willing to take. Think of what I am about to do as being similar to what you did to yourself to bring back Feanne, except that I will mend in time.”

Spreading his arms wide, Estin said, “Heal me. I’ll take those odds. Feanne once told me that I had the best luck of any unlucky person she ever met. I swore I would never leave her again. If we die, we die together.”

Mairlee meandered away from Estin and then back, eyeing him head to paw. “How much of your childhood do you remember, Estin?”

The question took him by surprise, destroying his resolve. He found himself fighting emotions and thoughts he had tried to suppress for a very long time. Sniffling, he looked down at his feet, trying to avoid letting Mairlee see the pain he knew would be evident on his face.

“Please, Estin. I want to know if I have made a mistake.”

Nodding, Estin kept his eyes anywhere but on Mairlee. “My childhood was spent hiding in Altis from people who would have killed a child for sport…”

“Before that. You know what time period I mean.”

Estin snarled and glared at her, wondering what game she was playing with him. There was no malice that he could see on her face, no mockery of him.

“My parents were beaten and eventually killed while I watched,” he confessed, struggling to keep his tone emotionless. “I fled…ran for as long as I could.”

“Details, please. Starting from when you left that hut.”

Estin blinked in surprise. Mairlee could have been guessing, but it felt so close to home that he knew he had flinched. “I took everything I could carry and ran. I remember…I saw bodies everywhere. It’s all a blur. I don’t remember any of it clearly. Even after we found the village where I was raised, I can’t piece much of it together.”