The Mage Wars Read online

  Skan quickly bent his head to keep from betraying his glee. Lady Cinnabar rarely used that rank of hers—she was one of Urtho’s most trusted advisors when she chose to actually give that advice—but when she did, mountains moved, oceans parted, and strong men trembled until she was safely satisfied. If it had only been a case of one-on-one combat, Urtho could have sent the Lady in against Ma’ar and been secure in the knowledge that Cinnabar would return from the combat with not a single hair disarranged and Ma’ar would be on all fours, following at her heels, begging for her mercy.

  But she never, ever, forgot courtesy, even when most angry. She bade Aubri and Skan a polite farewell, instructed Calla and Rio to stay with Tamsin to review the rest of the patients from Shaiknam’s command, and only then stalked off.

  Tamsin chuckled; Skan joined him. Aubri stared at the two of them in wonder.

  “What has gotten into you two?” he asked finally, eaten up with curiosity.

  Skan exchanged a knowing look with Tamsin, a look which only sent him into further convulsions of laugher. Skan answered for the both of them.

  “Lady Cinnabar has Urtho’s ear in a way that no one else does,” he explained. “I think she’s a combination of younger sister and respected teacher. And when she’s angry—aiee, she can melt glass! She won’t be satisfied with simply talking with Urtho and getting a change in those orders, she’ll insist on seeing Garber and Shaiknam and delivering a choice lecture in person. By the time she is done, you won’t be the only one nursing a scorched tail!”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Since Gesten was obviously not going to be satisfied until after he had done something about the situation with Shaiknam, Amberdrake put off his own breakfast until after he had a chance to schedule a conference with Urtho. He had hoped to simply slip in and have a quiet chat with the wizard, but that was not in the stars; Urtho was chin-deep in advisors long before Amberdrake arrived at his Tower, and it was obvious that there were other matters far more pressing—or disastrous—than the assignment of a handful of hertasi.

  The situation would probably be taken care of, at least in the short term, as soon as senior Healers Lady Cinnabar and Tamsin got wind of it. It could easily be dealt with permanently later, when Urtho had a moment of leisure to spare and Amberdrake could have that quiet word with the mage. Provided, of course, that Lady Cinnabar herself did not save him the effort and broach the subject to her kinsman. That was only reasonable. But Gesten was not noted for taking a reasonable view when it came to things he considered important, so Amberdrake avoided a confrontation by avoiding him. Instead of returning to his tent for a solitary breakfast, he went to the mess-tent shared by all the kestra’chern. The food would be exactly the same there as he always had when he was alone; Gesten generally fetched it directly from the mess-cooks. And even though he enjoyed the peace of a meal by himself, it was part of his duty as the highest-ranking kestra’chern to spend as much time in casual company with the others as possible. While the kestra’chern had nothing like a regular organization, it fell upon Amberdrake to see that no one was overburdened, that those who needed help got it, and to keep this corps of support troops functioning as smoothly as the rest of the army. They were all Healers, after all, and not just “of a sort.” They had a real impact on the combat-troops.

  A delicate undertaking, being “leader” of a group with no leaders—and not a position he would have chosen if it had not been forced upon him.

  Whatever was going on that had Urtho up to his eyebrows in work hadn’t yet worked its way down to the underlings, it seemed. The tent hadn’t more than a half-dozen kestra’chern seated at their makeshift tables of scrap wood, sipping bitteralm and conversing over bread and porridge. That wasn’t unusual; kestra’chern were not early risers, given that they generally worked late into the night. No one seemed overly tense or upset. They all greeted Amberdrake with varying degrees of respect and warmth, and went back to their conversations. Amberdrake got himself another cup of bitteralm and a slice of bread and a hard-boiled egg, and took a seat near enough to all of them that he could listen in without being obtrusive.

  Two of the women had been having a particularly intense conversation; soon after Amberdrake seated himself, it grew increasingly heated. He knew both of them, and neither were Kaled’a’in; one was a robust redhead called, incongruously enough, Lily. The other, named Jaseen, was a thin, ethereal, fragile-looking blonde who could probably have taken any man in the infantry and broken him in half without working up a sweat.

  It was Jaseen who was the angriest, it seemed, and all over a client that had been reassigned to Lily. Amberdrake bent his head over his cup and listened, as her voice rose from a whisper to something a great deal more—public.

  “I don’t care where he’s been assigned or who did it!” she hissed. “You don’t have the background to handle him, and I do—”

  “You don’t have the skill!” Lily interrupted rudely. “And I do! That was why he was reassigned to me—”

  “Oh really?” Jaseen replied, her voice dripping with sweet acidity. “I suppose that now the ability to drive a man into exhausted collapse is called a skill and counts more than experience!”

  Lily sprang to her feet, both hands clenched into fists, and her face flushed. “Superior skill in anything is nothing to be ashamed of!” she cried.

  “Tell her, Lily,” urged one of the bystanders, as another rose from his seat and moved to Jaseen’s side.

  They’re taking sides. It’s time for me to stop this! Amberdrake got up quickly…

  And just in time; Lily pulled her arm back to deliver a slap to Jaseen’s cheek. Amberdrake moved quickly as a striking snake and grabbed her wrist before she could complete the blow.

  “What are the two of you doing?” he not-quite-shouted, bringing the argument to a sudden halt. All parties involved stared at him in shock; they had clearly forgotten that he was there.

  He let go of Lily’s wrist; her cheeks scarlet with shame, she hid both hands behind her back. He looked from her to Jaseen and back again, making no secret of his disapproval.

  “I know that the tension has gotten to everyone, but this is no way to handle it! You two are acting precisely as our critics expect us to act!” he accused. “Don’t you think that you’re both being utterly childish? Bad enough that the two of you started this—but in public, in a common mess-tent! The Healers use this tent, and what would one of them have thought if he had come in here to find you two brawling over a client like a pair of—of…” He shook his head, unable to force himself to say the word.

  Now it wasn’t only Lily who was flushing; Jaseen and the two who had taken sides in the argument had turned scarlet with humiliation as well.

  Now that he had their attention, he would need to engage in a verbal dance as intricate as anything woven by a priest or a seasoned diplomat. Somehow he must chide both of them without touching on the tragedies that had made them kestra’chern in the first place.

  No one knows hurt and heartache like a kestra’chern, his teachers had said, Because no one feels more pain than their own. Not so with us. There were tragic stories behind every pair of doe-soft eyes and tears behind all the comely smiles in this camp, and no one knew that better than Amberdrake.

  “Neither of you has ever lacked for clients,” he scolded. “It is not as if you are not well-sought-after! And if you hear anyone rating you like athletes, I want to hear about it! You both have the same rank; you differ only in your strongest characteristics. This client you argued about—he has specific needs. Jaseen, what comes first—your own pride, or the client’s well-being?”

  At all costs he must never say the word “poison” around Jaseen—she had spent three years imprisoned for poisoning her lover, only to be freed when his brother confessed that he had done it. By then, the “tender” ministrations of the guards had left her a changed woman.

  She hid behind the curtain of her hair, but her blushes were still clearly visible. “The client,�
�� she replied, her voice choked with shame.

  “Exactly,” he said sternly. “That is what we are all here for. And what is the second rule, Lily?”

  Lily had trained as a fighter—and had served in Urtho’s army. Injured, and left for dead, the experience had shattered her nerves, and the injuries themselves left her unfit to face combat again. Lily had been treated as a hopeless cripple, destroyed in both nerve and body, until she fought her way back to what she was now. She looked him in the eyes, but her face was so scarlet that it matched her hair. “The client receives what he needs, not what he wants.”

  “And you may—if, in your sacred judgment, and not merely your opinion—deliver what he wants after he gets what he needs,” Amberdrake told them both.

  Jaseen sniffed a little, and looked up at him to see if she’d had any effect on him with that sniffle of self-pity. Amberdrake’s expression must have told her that she wasn’t winning any points, for she slowly raised her head and brushed her hair back, although her red face was a match for Lily’s.

  “Jaseen. Just now it was my judgment, as it was the judgment of your old client’s Healer, that he needed a little less cosseting and a little more spine.” He leveled his gaze right into her eyes so that she could not look away. “You are quite good at sympathy, but your chief failing is that you don’t know when to stop giving it. Sympathy can be addictive, and can kill strong men as surely as a diet of nothing but sugar.”

  She whispered something inaudible, but he was good enough at lip-reading to know she had said only, “Yes, Amberdrake.” He turned to Lily.

  “It was your job to challenge him. I hope that you did—I will only know after his Healer talks to me. And by ‘challenging’ him, I don’t necessarily mean physically. You could even have challenged him by making him earn what he got from you.” The fact that she avoided his gaze told him she hadn’t exactly done that. “We aren’t even primarily bed-mates,” he reminded both of them sternly. “That’s what makes us something more than—what our critics claim we are.”

  Both these women had mended from their past shatterings—he knew that, every kestra’chern in this encampment knew that. If they hadn’t been, they simply wouldn’t be here. They’d been given guidance in reassembling themselves from the splintered pasts fate had left them, and were obligated by that training to help others as much as they had helped themselves. Amberdrake would not permit incompetence—and although he was not officially a “leader,” he had that much power among the kestra’chern without needing the title. In his experience, true leaders seldom had or needed flamboyant titles.

  Jaseen and Lily bowed their heads, their blushes fading. “Yes, Amberdrake,” Lily murmured. “You are right, of course. But it’s easy to forget, sometimes, with the way we’re treated…”

  “People treat you as what they wish you were, and that is not always what you are,” he said gently, reminding them both of their pasts. “You must always remember what you are. Always. And always believe in each other.”

  Jaseen nodded wordlessly.

  He raised his voice slightly so the rest of the observers could hear better. “Whatever the kestra’chern have been in the past, we are now something very important to these warriors. The war may turn upon what we do. We are the rest after the battle, and the blanket to warm them when they shiver. We are comfort in the darkness when death has become far too personal; we are the listeners who hear without judgment. We are priest and lover, companion and stranger. We are all the family many of them have, and something so foreign they can say anything to us. They need us, as they need their rations, their weapons, their Healers. Keep that always in mind, no matter how you are treated.”

  Both of them stood taller and straighter, and looked him right in the eyes. Several of the others nodded in agreement with his words, he noted with satisfaction.

  “Now, let’s get back to the business of living,” he told them. “You are both too sensible to quarrel over this.” He summoned an infectious grin for the two recent quarrelers and the others, and it caught all around. “We could be spending our time complaining about the seasons. Or the weather. Something productive, something useful.”

  With that he turned back to his own neglected breakfast, to leave the two of them to patch things up on their own. Or not—but they were both responsible adults, and he was fairly certain they would behave sensibly.

  They whispered tensely for a few moments, then took themselves elsewhere. Well, that was fine—and even if they were foolish enough to continue the quarrel, so long as they did so privately, Amberdrake didn’t care…

  I’m slipping, he thought, as he held out his cup for a hertasi to refill, and rewarded the little lizard with a weak smile. I would have cared, a while ago. I would have stayed with those two until I was certain they had reconciled their argument. Now, I’m too tired to make all the world happy.

  Too tired, or, perhaps, just too practical. He used to think that everyone could be friends with everyone else, if only people took the time to talk about their differences. Now it was enough for him if they kept their differences out of the working relationships, and got the job done.

  I’m settling for less these days, I suppose. I just pray there isn’t less out there to settle for. Right now he couldn’t have said if this lack of energy was a good thing, or a bad one. It just was, and he harbored his resources for those times when they were really needed. For his clients, for Urtho, for Skan—if he spent every last bit of energy he had, he’d wind up clumsy at the wrong time, or weak when the next emergency arose. That—

  “Are you Amberdrake?”

  The harsh query snapped him out of his reverie, and he looked up, a little startled. A young man stood over him, a Healer by his green robes, and a new one, by the pristine condition of the fabric. The scowl he wore did nothing to improve his face—a most unlikely Healer, who stood awkwardly, held himself in clumsy tension, whose big, blunt-fingered hands would have been more at home wrapped around the handle of an ax or guiding a plow. His carrot-colored hair was cut to a short fuzz, and his blocky face, well-sprinkled with freckles, was clean-shaven, but sunburned. Not the sort one thought of as a Healer.

  Well, then, but neither was I…

  “Are you Amberdrake?” the youngster demanded again, those heavy hands clenched into fists. “They said you were.”

  Amberdrake didn’t bother to ask who “they” were; he saw no reason to deny his own identity. “I am, sir,” he said instead, with careful courtesy. “What may I do for you? I must warn you, my client list is fairly long and if you had hoped to make an appointment—”

  “Make an appointment?” the boy exploded. “Not a chance—I want you to take my patient off that so-called ‘client list’ of yours! What in the name of all that’s holy did you think you were doing, taking a man that’s just out of his bed and…”

  The young Healer continued on in the same vein for some time; Amberdrake simply waited for him to run out of breath, as his own anger smoldered dangerously. The fool was obviously harboring the usual expectations of what a kestra’chern was, and compounding that error by thinking it was Amberdrake who had solicited his patient for some exotic amorous activity.

  All without ever asking anyone about Amberdrake, his clients, or how he got them. One word in the Healers’ compound would have gotten him all the right answers, Amberdrake thought, clenching his jaw so hard his teeth hurt. One word, and he’d have known clients come to me, not the other way around… and that “his” patient has been sent to me for therapeutic massage by a senior Healer. But no—no, he’d much rather nurse his own home-grown prejudices than go looking for the truth!

  When the boy finally stopped shouting, Amberdrake stood. His eyes were on a level with the Healer’s but the outrage in them made the boy take an involuntary step backwards.

  But Amberdrake only smiled—a smile that Gesten and Tamsin would have recognized. They then would have gleefully begun taking bets on how few words it would take Amberdrake to ve
rbally flay the poor fool.

  “You’re new to Urtho’s camp, aren’t you?” he said softly, a sentence that had come to represent insult among Urtho’s troops. It implied every pejorative ever invented to describe someone who was hopelessly ignorant, impossibly inexperienced—dry-seed, greenie, wet-behind-the-ears, clod-hopper, milk-fed, dunce, country-cousin—and was generally used to begin a dressing-down of one kind or another.

  The boy had been with the troops long enough to recognize the phrase when he heard it. He flushed and opened his mouth, but Amberdrake cut him off before he could begin.

  “I’ll make allowances for a new recruit,” he said acidly. “But I suggest that you never address another kestra’chern in the tones you just used with me—not if you want to avoid getting yourself a lecture from your senior Healer and possibly find yourself beaten well enough your own skills wouldn’t help you. Did you even bother to ask why ‘your’ patient was sent to me? For your information, ‘your’ patient was assigned to me by Senior Healer M’laud for therapeutic massage, and I had to seriously juggle my overcrowded schedule to fit him in. I am doing you a favor; the man needs treatments that you have not been trained to give. If you had tried, you probably would have injured him. If you had bothered to ask your senior Healer why he had scheduled this patient for other treatments, instead of barging in here to insult and embarrass me, you would have been told exactly that.”

  The boy’s mouth hung open and his ears reddened. His eyes were flat and expressionless, he had been taken so much by surprise.

  “Furthermore,” Amberdrake continued, warming to his subject, “if you had taken the time to ask your senior Healer why anyone would send a patient down the Hill here to the kestra’chern for treatment, you would have learned that we are considered by all the senior Healers to be Healers with skills on a par with their own—and that there are some things that you, with all your training, will never be able to supply that a kestra’chern can. Our preliminary training is identical to yours—with the exception that most kestra’chern don’t have the luxury of Healing Gifts to rely on. We have to do our job with patience, Words, and physical effort. Healing means more than mending the body, young man—it means mending the heart, the mind, and the spirit as well, or the body is useless. That doesn’t make us better or worse than you. Just different. Just as there are times when you heal what we cannot, so there are times when we can mend what you cannot. You would do well to learn that, and quickly. Inexperience can be overcome, ignorance be enlightened, but prejudice will destroy you.” He allowed his anger to show now, a little. “This war is not forgiving of fools.”