The Nightborn, Isabel Cooper [fiction novels to read TXT] 📗

When they’d been fighting the demons, he’d put his faith in her as unquestioningly as he’d done in Altien when a particularly complex bit of healing or a large and thrashing patient—or a possible murderer in an alleyway—required two of them. He’d never thought to doubt. It had been a brief feeling, but its absence hurt all the same. Worse, it meant that he could offer no reassurance.

“You deserve better than all this,” he said.

* * *

Gentleness called forth the tears that Branwyn had been too overwhelmed to shed from pain. Her body still lacked too much water for them to do more but prickle at the back of her eyes, but they were there. Zelen had known her for all of two weeks, knew that she could’ve killed two people brutally, and still his hand around hers and his fingers in her hair were the gentlest touch she’d known since she’d become a Sentinel and a weapon.

She swallowed and welcomed the pain. It centered her.

Did she deserve better? The Rognozis aside, she’d killed people, gotten others killed, and chosen her path. She hadn’t had very many choices, but who did? The farmer’s child and the wheelwright’s apprentice didn’t exactly make mindful choices about their future. Neither had Zelen, gentle and deft and barred from his calling for stupid reasons of status.

Hazy, slurred, she formed words. “Ever’one deserves better than all this.” She gestured to indicate the world. It hurt, though not as badly as it would have a half hour earlier. “It’s…” A quotation drifted up through rapidly thickening layers of mist, a passage from a book she’d read on some road. “‘A web’s pretty ’nless you’re a fly.’”

“And she quotes Cosnian while drugged,” Zelen remarked. At first, Branwyn thought he was talking to her and pretending to have an audience.

No, his friend was there, setting down large basins of hot water and thick, folded towels. She remembered bathing as a thing normal people did and liked the idea, then looked at Zelen and quickly away. They’d almost been lovers. Now, given what she might have done…

“My name is Altien,” said the third person in the room, “and with your permission, I’ll assist you in bathing while Zelen acquires clothing. I know that a female attendant is usual, and I’m male, but I promise you that while I’m sure you’re comely by the standards of your people, I don’t have such exotic tastes.”

Branwyn blinked, then giggled, from the formality and the drugs but also from relief. “Yes,” she said, “an’, Zelen, get weapons. Wards.”

He gently set her hand down and rose. “Quite so. I’ll be back soon—can’t imagine the family’s left any very lethal guardians in the cellars.”

“I’ll listen for screaming,” said Altien. “Madam, I suggest that you let me sit you upright, if you have the strength.”

She did, barely. The door closed behind Zelen, and Branwyn looked after him for a long moment. “He deserves better,” she said.

“You would each say that you survive in a satisfactory enough fashion.” Altien began cleaning her wounds with the careful, impersonal precision that Branwyn was used to from healers. “I would say that you’re both correct, in both senses, but I’m not infatuated with either of you. I’m going to cut this garment off. The strain of removing it will do your muscles no good, and any value it once possessed is certainly gone.” His tentacles twitched in distaste.

“We’re not infatuated,” Branwyn said, barely noticing as Altien produced a pair of small scissors from his garments and made short work of her now-filthy dress. “Just…pleasan’ company.”

“Nonsense.” Altien returned to the task at hand with an occasional sibilant noise when the cleaning process bared a particularly hideous bruise or swelling. Branwyn supposed it was the waterfolk equivalent of tsk. “Your attempt to deceive either me or yourself is impressive, however, given the sedation. I’ll credit your nature. On your stomach now—I’ll brace you.”

After a second of pain, during which the dragon-eye and willpower managed to keep Branwyn from screaming, she changed position and found herself very glad that Zelen wasn’t the one ministering to her, suspected murder aside. She’d been bathed by healers before—Sentinels, like all weapons, needed the occasional cleaning and repair, and the knee wasn’t her first broken bone—and had come to accept the temporary helplessness, but being taken care of would have weighed on her far less easily when it was a lover doing it, or an almost-lover, or the subject of infatuation, if Altien was right.

Branwyn suspected that Yathana would’ve agreed with him. She expected to hear the dry, sardonic voice doing so in her head, and the silence hurt more than the skinned places on her spine that Altiensarn was attacking with soap.

You can’t help that. Don’t dwell on it.

“Drugs work on us,” she said to give herself another focus for her thoughts, “jus’ takes a lot. Mostly. A friend of mine’s completely immune, but that’s…” She shrugged. “I’osn—idionsa—” She knew the word, but it was a corkscrew that her tongue couldn’t follow.

“Idiosyncratic? Hmm.” Branwyn felt cool salve on her back, then bandages being wound around her torso. Altien eased her backwards, which didn’t hurt as much as the reverse motion had done. Propping her head on the edge of a basin, he began washing days of filth out of her hair. “An interesting order, the Sentinels. I would avoid pressure on your right shoulder as much as possible. The bone isn’t broken, and I don’t believe you’ve torn the muscles significantly, but it’s a near thing.”

“Oh,” said Branwyn, and a thought floated up in an increasingly thick fog. “How’d you find Zelen? Or other way?”

“He provides healing services to those who can’t afford professionals, thus taking some weight off the Mourners. I came to these lands to study humans, specifically their physiology. Our meeting was natural.”

“Of course,” said Branwyn. She closed her eyes.

A little while later, the basin moved. “There,” said Altien. Branwyn was aware of motion in the region of her shoulders and hips, of