CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The doctor instructed Shironne to precede her up the narrow stairwell. Shironne gathered her house robe up in one hand and kept the other on the wall as she felt for each step, the doctor close behind to catch her should she stumble. She warned Shironne when she reached the last step, and they came out into a hallway where the sounds of the tavern’s guests crept up into the air, confusing her for a moment. Then she realized that the hall must be open to the tavern on one side like a mezzanine. Merival stopped not far away, and the doctor took Shironne’s hand again and led her into a room off that hallway.

The doctor dismissed the serving girl, closing the door firmly behind her. “I hope she didn’t upset you, dear.”

“Not at all.” Shironne stood just inside the doorway, uncertain where anything was once the doctor turned loose her hand. She didn’t want to move and trip over something. The doctor walked ahead of her, the faint scent of soap following in her passage. She must be tall, Shironne decided, not as tall as Mama but taller than Mikael.

“Forgive my inquisitiveness, Miss Anjir,” the doctor said, “but I’ve been wanting to talk to you for some time.”

The doctor—infirmarian, Shironne recalled—kept her curiosity to herself well. She could barely sense it peeping out from behind the woman’s control. “You’ve come to observe me working before. What do you want to know, ma’am?”

“There’s a chair to your left, about a foot away. If you reach out your hand, you should be able to touch it.”

Shironne followed her instructions and located a wooden-backed chair. She levered herself down into it, grateful that she still had Mikael’s gloves. She heard another chair move, wood scraping across a wooden floor, and then the doctor sat.

“You said you knew that Mikael will dream tonight. Is that imminent?”

Shironne considered the question. She reached out to touch Mikael’s mind with her own. His thoughts whirled about, a sure sign that he was still awake. She told the doctor that.

“Interesting,” the doctor said coolly. “That will give us a few minutes to talk, at a minimum. I wanted to discuss with you why you’re here.”

“I’m supposed to see what’s in his dream, I thought. Like a witness.”

The doctor sighed. “Yes, that’s the overt intention, but there’s a more important reason you’re here. The reason that it’s you, dear, and not some other sensitive.”

“I’m an oddity,” Shironne said. “I know that.”

“You’ve done interesting work for the colonel. He’s told me you can draw information out of things—or out of people, for that matter.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Would you try something for me?”

The doctor kept her curiosity tightly controlled, but Shironne could sense it like a fish just under the surface of the water. “What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to feel my arm, along one of the bones.”

“If I do that, I’ll be able to get into your head, ma’am.”

“I’m aware of that.”

Shironne considered the request and then pulled off her gloves and laid them in her lap. “If you’re certain. What am I looking for?”

“I want to see what you tell me.” She placed her bared arm under Shironne’s fingers.

Shironne felt the woman’s intellect stirring, like wind rustling through piles of leaves. Deborah Lucas, who tried very hard to control her thoughts, counting numbers in her head to keep her brain occupied. In the Family, that was how they were trained to control their errant emotions. That revelation made Shironne curious about how she’d come to the same conclusion herself a couple of years ago.

Shironne felt the skin, a woman older than Mama, who’d had a child once. The muscles under her skin spoke of carrying and lifting. Deeper, Shironne sensed strong bones, not gone to brittleness with age. She felt down the length of the arm, up to the elbow, where bone scarred by an old break burned when the weather turned.

Deborah’s thoughts winged near her fingers like birds, and Shironne knew she’d found what Deborah wanted her to find, because one of the birds told her. She lifted her fingers from Deborah’s arm. “You wanted to see if I could find where your sister broke your arm when you were seven.”

Deborah rolled down her sleeve, brisk sounds. “Did you?”

“Yes, but . . . I can’t be a doctor, ma’am. I can’t see.” She’d picked that idea out of Deborah’s head as well.

“No. I don’t suppose that you could attend the college to study there. There are things you wouldn’t be able to do. However, you have the ability to see things that none of the rest of us can. The Family has records of sensitives like you who did an amazing variety of things with their talents—translators, doctors, engineers.”

Deborah referred to her powers as talents, something she needed to remember. “Truly?”

Deborah laughed, her amusement overriding her self-control. “Certainly, dear. It runs in certain bloodlines, although it’s not common.”

“Are . . . were they all blind?”

“No, I’ve only ever read of one being blind, and I have researched this quite a bit. We don’t know exactly how the inheritance of these things works.” She shifted out of her chair and then stood. “Tone deafness does run among sensitives, though, to varying degrees. Whatever you do, don’t ask Dahar to sing.”

Shironne sensed humor behind that. Deborah actually regarded him fondly, Shironne decided, despite his lack of vocal ability. “I’ll remember that, ma’am. Do other talents run in Families, like Mr. Lee’s?”

“His ability is extremely unusual,” Deborah qualified. Her voice took on a guarded tone, as if she didn’t want to say too much.

“I’ve never heard anyone else’s dreams.”

“There have been other dreamers. Mostly among, I must add, the House of Vandriyen. However, I’ve never before heard of one who combines that with Mikael’s ability to broadcast, nor of one who focuses on death as he does. He has what I perceive to be an unprecedented combination of talents.”

Colonel Cerradine had told her most of that long ago, but without revealing any names. “So his parents didn’t have them?”

“Just as yours apparently did not. Sensitives seem to be shaped not only by what they inherit from their parents, but also by what happens to them,” Deborah told her. “I have a theory that Mikael’s odd dreaming stems from his father’s death. I believe that Mikael was on his way to being comparatively normal, but as his father lay dying he reached out to Mikael, trying to tell him something. Perhaps who’d shot him; we don’t know for certain. But that experience triggered Mikael’s change from normalcy to this unique fixation on others’ deaths.”

Shironne considered that idea, working out an analogy in her head. “Most of us are like clay balls, then, but a few are a different shape because someone smashed us before we were fired?”

Deborah laughed. “Very impressive, Miss Anjir. Let’s say reshaped instead of smashed.”

Reshaped sounds better. “So you think something made me odd as well?”

“Well, I believe you had to inherit the possibility of it, dear, but the correct trigger was required to cause you to become such an extreme sensitive.”

“What would have changed me?” Shironne asked.

Deborah’s mind tucked itself away from that question, not wanting to divulge that answer. “It’s difficult to be certain,” she equivocated. “I understand you have a scar on your hand.”

“Yes, ma’am. I fell once and cut my hand.”

“May I look at it?”

Shironne couldn’t guess at the reason behind the request. She tugged off the right glove and held her hand out, thinking that if Deborah took it, she might be able to find the answer.

Two gloved hands took hers, rotating it slightly as if to improve the view. “It seems to have healed well. This happened when you were, what, eleven?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Her mother had to have told the colonel about the embarrassing incident. “It seemed infected for a while, and Mama worried about it, but then it healed.”

“How interesting,” came the enigmatic response. “Did you know that the Anvarrid cut their palms as part of their marriage rituals? They mingle their blood, an ancient custom, although most don’t make more than a tiny cut. That’s what this scar reminds me of.”

Shironne sighed. “Yes, Mama told me that too.”

“Ah. Tell me, dear, what do you know about the history of my people and our fortresses?”

Shironne felt her brows drawing together as she tried to figure out where the doctor’s seemingly rambling thoughts had gone. “Not much. I learned Larossan history, not the Six Families.”

“Then let me tell you a few important things. The Founders built the fortresses, breathed life into them, and ordered them to watch over each Family. But like any other living thing, sometimes one of the fortresses becomes ill. For that reason, the Founders also created touch-sensitives, a small cadre of individuals able to communicate with the fortress. A fortress could tell the sensitives what ailed it, and they, in turn, could fix it.”

“It spoke to me,” Shironne said, suddenly feeling breathless.

“Yes, Mikael told me you were quite startled.”

“I didn’t realize it was alive,” she admitted. “I mean, legends say it’s alive, but I never thought it would talk.”

Deborah reflected mild amusement. “Yes. Most people assume it’s alive in the same way that a mushroom or a potato is alive. Not very, I mean.”

The mental image of the Family living in a giant potato floated into Shironne’s mind, and she had to press her lips together to keep a laugh inside. This wasn’t an appropriate time for humor. “But how do your people fix the fortress, then, if it can’t tell you what’s wrong anymore?”

“I’m told there are ways of working around that problem,” Deborah said, “built in for the eventuality that the touch-sensitives—or interfaces, as they were once called—didn’t survive. You know from your own experience that when such abilities first manifest, it can be debilitating. Many touch-sensitives starve to death before they learn to tolerate food again, and some simply never learn to cope, and choose to join the snow.”

Join the snow was a Family euphemism. Shironne knew that because Mikael knew it. There had been a time when those who couldn’t deal with life in the fortress would simply flee it in the winter and lie down in the snow to die. It was an ancient term, which carried a great deal of racial guilt behind it, because most people who did that had done so because they felt they were a burden to the Family. Shironne shook her head, not wanting to chase down the meanings of that at the moment.

“So we manage without,” Deborah continued, “although the communication isn’t as clear as it would be if a touch-sensitive was there to interface with the fortress. Languages are naturally limiting, I’m told, especially when it comes to Anvarrid. However, my point is that the Families very quickly learned that touch-sensitives have myriad other uses. Translating, interrogation, investigation. I believe you’ve done all of those for the colonel at one point or another. And you’ve seen that your talents can be used in the medical sphere as well.”

Shironne thought she finally understood. “So you want me to be a doctor for the Family.”

“Hmm . . . not exactly where I was going with this, dear, but I have to admit I wouldn’t mind your help in the infirmary. Aron says you’re well versed now in human anatomy, although you’ve generally worked with dead specimens.”

“Then what?”

“You have abilities that are very useful to many people. Those talents, however, include the ability to walk into Mikael’s dreams. You may not be aware of this, but he usually manifests a reflection of the victim’s injuries. Almost as if he’s a living record of that information, because he can’t truly recall the dream himself, just as most of us forget our dreams.”

Yes, there was a memory in Shironne’s mind now of Mikael waking with blood soaking his shirt, of short breath and tight lungs and fear. He’d done that the last time, forcing other sensitives to endure it. He feared it would kill him one day. He’d feared that for a couple of years now, because it had been growing worse and worse. Her breath grew a bit short in response.

Another thing I shouldn’t know.

Shironne took a deep breath. “You think I can help him, don’t you?”

“I think that if you see into his dreams, he won’t have any need to show them to anyone else. I hope that having someone to interpret his dreams will cause him not to reflect the victims’ wounds.”

“That would be better, wouldn’t it?” she asked aloud.

“For Mikael? Without a doubt. Better for the sensitives in the fortress as well. But . . .” She paused, as if about to say something terrible. “He struggles to escape his dreams, like he can’t let go of the victim, and I fear that one day he’ll follow one down into death.”

And she suddenly grasped exactly what the doctor intended with this conversation. For Deborah Lucas, it wasn’t about Shironne coming to help the Lucas Family with their lonely fortress. It wasn’t about aiding their doctors or finding murderers for Colonel Cerradine. Her powers had a more important use.

The doctor didn’t care about helping the rest of the world nearly as much as she wanted Shironne to save Mikael Lee from his own dreams.

And Deborah was pressing her—gently—to determine whether she would be there the next time Mikael Lee had a terrible dream. She couldn’t actually ask that, though. It was forbidden. The very question implied a relationship between Shironne and Mikael that was unacceptable in the eyes of the Lucas Family. To them, Mikael was an adult, and she was a child.

For four more months.

Shironne shifted in her chair. “You want me to walk into his dream to stop him from getting lost and hurting himself.”

“Yes,” Deborah said. “But you need to consider whether you want to risk this. After the last dream, some of the other sensitives had bruises and were short of breath. His dream affected them, and I can’t guarantee that it won’t affect you that way if you try to help him tonight. I would rather have had your mother here for this discussion, but I’ll ask you, taking into consideration that among Larossans, you’re an adult.”

And she was quite desperate. Shironne could sense that, despite Deborah’s calm voice.

“I have no doubts, ma’am. I want to help.” No, that wasn’t what the doctor needed to hear. Shironne lifted her chin, facing where the doctor sat. “I want to help Mr. Lee.”

Relief surrounded the doctor like a fog, quickly settling away. “I am grateful, Miss Anjir.”

Fear began beating at the back of Shironne’s mind, a whisper from a room down the hall. Shironne shook her head to dispel it, but it continued to rattle away. “I think Mr. Lee is about to start dreaming,” she warned. “He’s frightened.”

Deborah stood. “Then we should go see if you can break into his dream, don’t you think?”