Lightborn (33 page)

T
elmaine felt the Lightborn magic swirl and flex around her, and the sense of weightlessness that great magic evoked in her. She had a sudden, vagrant memory of herself as a small child delighting in jumping from chairs, from stairs, and even—when she could cozen a male relative into lifting her up—from high garden walls. Before jumping became yet another thing a duke’s daughter did not do.

And she was simply
elsewhere
. She stifled a cry behind her hands. Yes, she had been witness and privy to the impossible since she and Ishmael had arrived on Balthasar’s doorstep, but not direct witness to something as impossible as
this
.

Then she heard the rasping, rattling breathing from in front of her. Smelled mint and dried flower petals that could not mask the reek of disinfectant and medicinal alcohol, burned flesh, and dire illness. Her first fluttering sonn returned a vague outline of a raised, rectangular shape, not a man, but a coffin. She had no sense of his vitality. She all but fainted before reason overruled the horror with the certainty that if he were not still alive, she would not be hearing that
breathing
.

She cast again, more firmly. Tam had placed her at the foot of the bed. The form was a cage beneath the bedclothes, so that they not press against his burns. She could lift the bedclothes and reach beneath; that would be practical, but a trespass so indecent she could not consider it, absurd as that might seem.

Dukes Imbré and Rohan slumped in chairs on one side of the bed, Vladimer on the other. He had been leaning forward when Tam stripped awareness from him, and had slipped from the chair partially across the bed, and now lay awkwardly hunched with his wounded shoulder beneath him, his head turned away and resting on his brother’s pillow. He wore a heavy dressing gown, and his feet were bare, exposing the deformity of the one leg. There was no cane within his reach.

Even so, she instinctively put space between herself and him. Steadying herself briefly on Rohan’s chair, she moved between them, her skirts brushing Duke Imbré’s sprawled legs, wincing for the indignity at so noble and faithful an old man. He had slumped sideways in his chair, his outstretched hand lightly clasping the archduke’s, as a man might a sick boy’s. He had been a father himself when the archduke was born; his daughter had been the archduke’s wife.

She knelt, crushing her mother’s skirts, and crept her fingers forward, nudging aside the upper slopes of the tent, touching bandages. Even through the bandages, she could feel the heat of the archduke’s fever. His skin, raw with burns and pain, scorched her fingers and burned through to her heart.

Now that she had touched him, she dared sonn his sunken face, thinking it must offer no new horrors. But it was an accusation in itself, the ruin of all that graciousness, strength, and abundant vitality. She made a sound half sob, half plea for forgiveness. The man under her hand groaned and twitched his head toward the sound. A breath shaped itself around a name, a woman’s name. Briefly, amidst pain, came the memory of a woman’s laughter, a silk-sheathed waist supple between his hands, a woman’s fingers walking, teasingly, down the skin of his abdomen. Telmaine’s face heated in a most incongruous embarrassment. The name had sounded quite unlike the name of his wife, and no respectable woman wore clothes that left the body so revealing to touch. That the widowed archduke had a mistress was common knowledge, amongst men, at least.

She pushed her left hand forward, beside her right, as though he were a weight she expected to lift, spreading the load. She took a deep breath, and let her magic, her healing, surge into him. And instead of an immensely heavy load, suddenly she had a lofting spirit, light as air, beneath her hands.

But the archduke was smiling, dreaming of the lady with the supple waist and lewd manners. Telmaine was the one who was leaden-boned, scarcely able to brace her hands against the bed and Rohan’s chair and get her feet under her without tearing out the hem of her mother’s dress.