Chapter 5 The Hollow Tree #3
“What happened?” asked the deofol. “This was meant to be a simple healing.”
“We discovered a bloodbath,” said Fairhrim. “The Druids are dead. Murdered by the Dreor. They were coerced into producing the Pox.”
The axolotl’s gills puffed out in alarm. “I beg your pardon?”
“I know,” said Fairhrim. “I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t just seen it.
There’s an enormous state-of-the-art pharmaceutical manufacturing facility under the Faerwundor.
Larger than ours—more advanced than ours.
And a cellar full of the Pox ready for distribution.
And dead Druids all over. Bring Wardens.
The entire place is swarming with Dreor.
Bring Haelan with you—Cath’s team. We found one Druid alive—perhaps others managed to survive. ”
Xanthe’s axolotl was normally a cheeky thing full of ready retorts, but she did nothing but float speechlessly.
“It’s all in the Faerwundor,” said Fairhrim. “All the evidence.”
The axolotl shook herself into action. “I’ll go to Xanthe immediately. Are you all right here? Shall we send someone to you?”
“We’re fine,” said Fairhrim. “Unhurt. Focus our resources on the Faerwundor. We’ll get to a waystone.”
The axolotl nodded, spun into a circle, and disappeared.
Osric jolted with a series of shivers so strong he almost cracked a tooth. “I’m f-fucking freezing.”
“Me, too,” said Fairhrim.
“Did you share seith with me, in the water?”
“Yes. Seith transfer.”
“You can do that?”
“I can, yes. I’m training others. Few Haelan have learned the technique over the years. It requires exceptional control of seith—it can go badly wrong.”
“You’re incredible,” said Osric.
Fairhrim edged her way towards him in the mud. “Let me see if we even managed any improvements in your condition, after all that.”
She reached a hand to him. Her tācn glowed white. She cast one of those live diagnostics—the ones she hated casting, because they were such a drain on her seith. The skin at her knuckles was already peeling.
“Don’t do it,” said Osric. “Your Cost—”
“I need to know,” said Fairhrim.
Osric closed his Cost-blinded eye and watched. Fairhrim manipulated the pictorial with sweeps of her palm so swift that he couldn’t follow. Was she in his neck? His arm? His lungs? How was she deciphering this mess of crisscrossing seith channels?
She gasped.
“What?” asked Osric.
Fairhrim enlarged the diagnostic. A tiny juncture between two seith channels was the source of her gasp. “It can’t be.”
“What can’t be? What is it?”
Fairhrim ignored his demands for an explanation.
Her brows were pulled together. Her forehead was damp, but Osric could not tell whether it was river water or perspiration from her seith exertion.
She rotated the pictorial again, her eyes bright with curiosity.
Skin curled away from nail and knuckle because of her Cost.
“Stop,” said Osric. “It’s not worth hurting yourself—”
The glow of her tācn faltered and went out. Fairhrim, blood oozing from her hands, had seen what she needed to see. She turned to Osric, round-eyed.
“What is it?” If Osric had had the strength, he’d have gone for her hands and pulled them to his chest like a supplicant.
Fairhrim stared at the spot where the diagnostic image had floated. Dawn kissed a water droplet on the bridge of her nose. “There’s a single node—last time I assessed you, it was all but rotted away, I’m sure of it. And now it’s there. And it looks whole. It looks like it’s functioning.”
“You’re—you’re not playing with me?” asked Osric.
“No,” said Fairhrim. “I would never. Between this and the slowdown I’d observed…”
Osric felt the return of the giddy swoop of hope. He allowed himself to thrill with it. It was better than the hallucinogen high. It was real. “Gods. No wonder people hope. Hope feels so good.”
“It does, doesn’t it?”
And Fairhrim did something she had never done before: she smiled at him.
The brightness of it eclipsed the rising sun.
Osric felt as though he was seeing her for the first time, or that a veil had been lifted, or that that he’d been looking at a half-open Frostbell for months, and it had just bloomed and revealed this—this arresting, annihilating, soul-wrecking loveliness.
Emotion coursed through him: bewilderment, hope, the purity of gratitude. She was healing him. She was giving him the gift of more time on this imperfect earth.
“I need to examine you properly,” said Fairhrim.
She spoke in that punctilious way of hers, of which Osric had grown fond.
“We’ll have to get a diffractor on you. Perhaps I’m misremembering that node.
I’ll have a look at my notes from the last scan.
I do have a good memory, but one never knows—after that hallucinogen, my brain still doesn’t feel right. What?”
A curl of hair was plastered against her cheek, damp with river water.
Osric pushed the hair behind her ear. “You’re brilliant. You’re terrifying. If it wasn’t so impossible, I’d be at a real risk of falling in love with you.”
Hope was the colour of the blush across Fairhrim’s cheeks.