Mystic and Rider (Twelve Houses) (19 page)

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Authors: Sharon Shinn

BOOK: Mystic and Rider (Twelve Houses)
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“It’s like you picking up your sword and spending the day practicing a new maneuver,” Kirra said. “Your muscles will be sore the next day. And the day after that, as you keep practicing. But pretty soon you’ll get used to it, and the ache will go away. It’s like that. Sort of.”
Donnal had put down his dishes and risen to his feet. “Let me see what I can do,” he said, and his body dissolved into a swirl of color. Almost immediately, it had re-formed itself into a lethal red shape of grace and power.
Tayse’s breath hissed in. “I’m glad most of these creatures stay on the other side of the Lireth Mountains,” he said.
Senneth nodded. As an adult raelynx, Donnal was significantly heavier and larger than the immature one, though he had the same patched and tufted fur, the same black eyes and pointed nose. The kit had been too fast and too strong for humans to catch; she thought an adult let loose in an unprotected countryside would be an absolute terror.
“Seeing you,” she said slowly, “I begin to think I wouldn’t have been able to hold this one if we’d come across him much older.” She reached out a hand to Donnal, who nudged it aside with his nose and then took it in his mouth in a light, playful grip. She could feel the needle-sharp front teeth, the powerful back teeth.
“I thought you said you acquired this skill in the Lirrens,” Tayse said.
She gave him a faint smile. “I never said I was good at it. I’m learning as I go.”
Donnal released her and padded off on silent feet to where the baby cat lay. Senneth turned to watch, monitoring the encounter as much with her mind as with her eyes. At Donnal’s approach, the smaller animal scrambled to its feet, mewling like a house cat. It backed off, every sinew tense, every sense straining to assess this new danger. Donnal circled it once, seeming to sniff the air between them, never getting too close. Then he sat on his haunches and merely watched the other raelynx.
“This could take a while,” Kirra said, standing up and shaking out her bedroll.
“And might cause a backlash if these raelynxes aren’t pack animals,” Tayse said.
“I know,” Senneth said. “I’m not letting go.”
So she sat for the next thirty minutes, body loose, mind engaged, half-watching and half-feeling the tentative friendship ritual unfold between Donnal and the kit. She barely noticed Justin arriving back in camp, his footfalls almost silent, hardly realized he was holding a low conversation with Tayse. She couldn’t have said what Cammon and Kirra did to prepare the camp or themselves for oncoming night. She was concerned only with the slow, grudging trust the young raelynx offered his companion. She felt it when his muscles relaxed, when he dropped back to the ground and lay his head on his outstretched forepaws. She was so closely connected to him and his animal senses that she could almost smell what he smelled, Donnal’s comforting and familiar scent. When Donnal settled his big body next to the smaller one for warmth, she almost jolted backward, so strong was her tactile impression.
She felt her own bones rumble when the raelynx started to purr.
Slowly, partially, she withdrew her magic from the raelynx’s consciousness, waiting to see if he noticed, if he made a sudden bolt for freedom. Donnal could not hold the kit in check the way she could, not with sheer will, but the smaller cat seemed to have transferred some of his dependence to Donnal, seemed willing to be led by the older animal. Thus she could ease away, let up some of her fanatically close attention, relax the cramped grip of her magic.
It was strange the way the sense of the ordinary world came back to her, in one vivid rush. Suddenly, she became aware of sitting cross-legged on the ground, rocks and sticks pressing into the backs of her legs, her mouth dry with thirst, the smoke of the campfire drifting pleasantly past her cheek. The world smelled like burning wood and decaying leaves and winter. And she had the headache to end all headaches.
She put her fingers to her temples and rubbed, then massaged behind her ears and along the tops of her shoulders, but she knew this would do no good. She needed to apply pressure in places she couldn’t reach, and even so, the pain was unlikely to go away. Her head felt filled with venom; her spine was a conduit of agony. She closed her eyes briefly and wondered if sleep would help at all.
When she opened her eyes again, Tayse was kneeling before her.
“I still don’t understand why Kirra can’t help,” he said.
At the moment, she thought, it was because Kirra was already asleep. Senneth could make out three wrapped bodies lying motionless beside the fire. Tayse had apparently taken first watch. “I might ask her to, if it’s no better tomorrow,” she said. “But, as she said, it’s not the kind of pain that usually can be eased by magic.”
“You were rubbing your shoulders. Does that help? Does it help if someone else does that for you?”
She was so surprised that for a moment she didn’t answer. “Yes—sometimes—a little. What really helps is a much stronger pressure than most people can bring to bear at a couple of points along my back.”
“Tell me,” he said.
She looked at him doubtfully for a moment. During this whole trip, he and Justin had been shaving every day or so, certainly when they had access to indoor accommodations, and he had shaved that morning; his face was entirely visible to her. Yet between the flickering of the firelight and the habitual caution of his expression, it was a face that was almost impossible to read. Strong bones, stubborn mouth, watchful black eyes. A quick intelligence, almost feral, honed by the survival skills of mistrust and combat. She was not used to expecting kindness from him. Or perhaps she did not want to come to count on it. He had been kind more than once, in a somewhat begrudging way, as they made their journey so far. She was so sure, if he chose, he could be almost unbearably brutal.
“Sit behind me,” she said finally, and he moved. She could feel his hands rest lightly on her shoulder blades, waiting for the next direction.
“It is actually three places at once,” she said. “Two points on the back of my neck, a little behind my ears, and then a place on the very center of my spine.”
She could feel his left hand moving slowly down the knobs of her backbone, the thumb gliding first over one small lump, then the next. “There,” she said, when he found the place. He pushed in a little as if to make sure. Her breath sounded almost like laughter. “Yes, that’s it.”
His right hand came up and hooked itself around the back of her neck. His hand seemed so big she thought he could encircle her throat with it; he had no trouble stretching it to reach the two pressure points she described.
“Yes—that’s right—exactly,” she said. She was on her knees, resting back on her heels; now she braced her hands on the tops of her thighs. “Apply as much pressure as you can in all three places, all at once,” she said. “You’ll be afraid that you might hurt me, but you won’t. Unless I scream or something,” she added with an attempt at humor. “But most people can’t push hard enough to really make a difference.”
“I probably can,” he said, and she couldn’t tell if he was smiling or not. “All right. Hold yourself steady.”
And with no more warning than that, his fingers and thumbs gouged into the centers of pain along her body.
She had to choke back her first gasp of shock as his hands took hold. She had tried this trick once or twice before, with Kirra or other mystics whom she trusted, and she would get a moment or two of relief before the pain would come rushing back. She was not sure how it worked. It was as if her muscles or her veins or some grid of nerves paved pathways along her spine and up her neck, and troops of relentless torturers marched unimpeded along those roads. A block along any one of those routes could momentarily divert the armies, leave them milling about impotently for a minute or two, till the block was lifted or the soldiers found a way to surmount it.
Tayse’s hands created dams and bulwarks; the armies of suffering came to a halt and bivouacked. Senneth took two deep breaths, savoring what was at least a temporary cessation of pain. The pressure of his hands was forcing her forward, bending her almost double. She resisted with most of her strength but still could not push herself upright against him. She could feel bruises forming where his fingers dug into her flesh.
She did not want him to lift his hands.
“Does this feel right?” Tayse asked.
“Yes,” she said, gasping out the word. “It feels wonderful.”
“I’m hurting you,” he said. “You trade one ache for another.”
“Different kind of hurt,” she managed. “Better.”
He said nothing more, just held his hands in place, fending off enemies. She did not know how long it would take before the armies grew sullen and wandered off, defeated. No one had ever been able to give her even this much relief in the past.
“I think—we should see—how effective that has been,” she said at last, when her own body was starting to hurt from fighting the pressure of Tayse’s, when she was sure his hands must be tight and sore. Slowly he eased away from her, as if lifting his hand from a wound that might start bleeding again. She heard him fold his arms across his chest.
She straightened up but did not make any other move, holding her head still, waiting for the misery to flood back. It did not. She felt odd, as if she had been dipped in fire and then battered with rocks—a few days ago—as if her body remembered such a recent pain that it did not want to move quickly to invite a new one in. And yet she did not actually hurt, not now. She just remembered hurting, and she was grateful that the pain was gone.
She turned slowly on her knees, pushing herself around with her hands in the dirt. “Thank you,” she said, and even she could hear the wonder in her voice. “No one’s ever managed that before.”
“I have strong hands,” he said. “Any time you need a task that calls for such a thing, I can help you.”
“I can’t tell you how good that is to know,” she said.
He regarded her a moment, though her back was to the fire and her face must be in total darkness. His own showed no particular softness. “Get some sleep,” he said. “You must be the most weary of all of us.”
“Thank you,” she said again and came somewhat creakily to her feet. Even that motion did not bring back the pain; her brain felt remarkably light. She summoned a burst of energy to check her net around the raelynx, but it was sleeping peacefully beside Donnal and showing no inclination at all to run. Picking her way carefully through the three bodies around the fire, she found her own bedroll and lay down in utter exhaustion.
CHAPTER 11
 
T
AYSE was far in the lead the next morning when he glimpsed the riders coming toward them. In this part of the country, the road looped around curves and up and down small rises of land; he was able to make out a few individuals in the party before they vanished again. One or two wore maroon sashes across their chests or braided into their horses’ bridles. They all looked well-dressed and well-fed.
He wheeled back to look for his own fellow travelers, half a mile behind him. It annoyed him that, even after weeks of riding with this group, he had the same reaction every time he rejoined them after some brief absence:
I thought there were more.
Ridiculous. There were only six of them—there had been only five until they rescued Cammon—they had always been a small party. And yet they were so varied, so strong-willed and individual, that it was like riding with twice that number, or triple.
But maybe this time he could be excused for his first quick thought. They might travel as a party of six, but there were only three of them on horseback as they headed toward him. Justin was somewhere to the rear; Donnal, he assumed, was still in raelynx shape, pacing a few feet off the road. Cammon led the extra horse.
“Riders coming toward us,” Tayse said as he pulled up in front of them. “Maybe ten minutes away. Might be twenty of them.”
“Soldiers?” Senneth asked.
He shook his head. “There are a few guards in the group, but it’s not a fighting party. Maybe a lordling on a journey with some warriors alongside him.” He glanced at Kirra, the one most familiar with aristocracy. “They’re wearing the Rappengrass colors.”
Kirra tilted her head to one side, and her hair rippled down her shoulder. He still wondered how she could keep herself so tidy on the road, her hair always clean and golden, her face always fresh. Magic, probably. Senneth did not seem to waste her energy on such inessentials.

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