7.

 

Ayae considered running. The windows in the hospital were not big, but she was small enough to slip through and, even in the gown she wore, she believed that she could make her way down the warm cobbled road to her house and be gone before the first of the sun began to soak through the canopies of the mountains’ forest.

But she had nowhere to go. If she went back to her house, once she’d pulled on old trousers and new shirt, found her boots and filled her pack, hiding what gold she had at the bottom, she would step to the doorway and simply stop. The dark shadow of the tree before her would offer no hint of direction, other than to point back into her house with its cut branches. It would urge her to stay. To stay in the place that was the only security she knew. A small spark of anger ignited in her stomach with the thought. She had not been born in Mireea, but it was her home.

Her home.

The door to the ward opened, revealing the two guards who stood straight and still as a large, hairless man stepped between them. Dressed in expensive red leather trousers and gray silk shirt, and wearing boots made from soft, supple leather, it was his hands that drew her attention. They were littered with scars. The succession of tiny white marks looked as if they had been made by a plague thousands of years old. His eyes, when they turned to her, were similarly afflicted, faint, white specks drifting over the pale gray iris, as if once a milky blindness had threatened him.

“My name is Fo,” he said, approaching her, his scarred hand held out to her. “I’m a Keeper from the Enclave in Yeflam.”

Fo, the Disease. He looked neither sick nor afraid. Ayae shook his clammy hand and introduced herself hesitantly.

She was aware that she was in the presence of a man who did not age, a man whose life was meshed in myth and rumor, but whose grip was firm. He was a Keeper of the Divine, a man who had been cursed—or blessed, depending on who spoke—with immortality. Fo also had the power to infect a living creature with illness, design and create new diseases, but offer no cure. He was one part of the Enclave, the organization that ruled Yeflam, drawing men and women into their city on the promise of utopia on the day they ascended.

Still holding her hand, he sat opposite. “I hope you’re feeling better. The healer here tells me that you’re fine, but—well, let us just say, I like to see things myself.”

“I’m fine.” Ayae attempted to pull her hand back, but could not. “Reila knows what she is talking about.”

“Reila is a fanatic: a ‘healer’ who would rather work with herbs and alchemy than magic, but who draws from her own blood when she must.” His voice was cool. “A year ago, a young healer came to Mireea to set up shop. He had a touch of the gods in him. A tiny curse, you could say, enough that he could mend a wound and intuitively pick up an illness. He was a rarity—a young man who wanted to help, and sought neither riches nor fame doing so. The Lord Wagan sent him back to Yeflam in chains two months after his arrival, as your same healer had him arrested and roundly denounced him in front of the Lord and Lady.”

“He killed two people.”

Fo gazed at her, his gray eyes unblinking.

Unwilling to be put off, Ayae continued, “One had a broken leg, the other a cancer in the stomach. Reila said he treated neither.”

“And you believed her?”

She had. With a quick tug, she pulled back her hand and rubbed the sweat from it. “I’d never heard of anyone dying from a broken leg before that.”

The Keeper’s eyes blinked, slowly, then shook his head. “I see I will have a lot of work to do with you.”

“You’ll have nothing to do with me.”

His hairless eyebrows rose at her tone. “You emerged from a burning building without a mark on you, child. You survived an attack from a Quor’lo—”

“A what?”

The large man rose, a frown added to his list of expressions. “A Quor’lo. Moves, acts, smells just like it would alive, but its body is given life by a living person elsewhere.”

“Does the captain know? If this has—”

“He knows.” At the front of her bed, he met her eyes. “Bau already informed Heast what it was, though I imagine that the captain’s meticulous mind would have found it quickly enough. You needn’t worry about the Quor’lo. Right now I am sure they are discussing it, wondering where it is hiding, and if they can capture it. I can only imagine that the man who pulled you out of the fire is helping them greatly.”

“Zaifyr?”

“That’s his name, is it?” The Keeper’s tone suggested familiarity, though not friendly in nature.

“Who is he?” Ayae asked.

“At this moment, I am sure he is nothing more than a man employed by Captain Heast.” Fo’s scarred fingers laced together. “However, you have changed the subject. I am here to talk about you. You emerged from a fire without a burn today, but should I hold your hand again I would feel it smolder.”

Her hands slipped under the blankets, falling warmly against her legs. “I was just lucky.”

“There’s no such thing.” She met his strange gaze, but said nothing. “I imagine, since you live on this mountain, you think anybody with a touch of power in them is cursed by the gods.”

“I don’t want any of that,” she said, quietly. “I just want to be able to tell my partner that I am just who I am. I just—I don’t want this.”

“You think you can give up what is inside you?” Fo’s scarred hands dropped to the metal end of the bed. “What remains of the gods finds us. In wombs, in childhood, in the summers and winters of our lives. Once it has found us, only death can drive it out. If that two-bit copper healer told you she could do that, she has done nothing but lie to you.” His long fingers curled, one at a time, over the bed frame. “But you have nothing to fear, child. Not from this. Trust me. Trust us. My brothers and sisters and I study the remains of the gods. They lay around us as they lived: on our land, in our oceans, and in our skies, the power that made us originally still there, wishing to create.”

“Wishing to create?” Ayae met Fo’s disease-scarred eyes. “What is it that you’re implying? That I have been infected by a god?”

“Possession is not infection.” His smile was faint. “I can tell you that on a number of levels, child.”

“Then what?”

“We are being recreated, reborn. The power in the gods does not wish to die with its host. It is searching for escape, for a new home, and it has found you, just as it found me. With it, you and I are in evolution to take back what was once ours.”

A laugh escaped her mouth at the ridiculousness of the statement, but a second did not follow. The bar beneath Fo’s hands had bent and she waited for him to lash out. What did he expect? She had grown up hearing stories of men and women who were cursed, stories of wives taking children away from fathers who melted, of lovers devoured by their partner with teeth made from stone, and of blindness and deformity that resulted in abuse. In the orphanage, children had teased others with the term, used it to suggest that the newest among them might harbor such a power, that it might be the reason they had no family, no home, and could not be trusted.

“You’ll see in time,” was Fo’s soft reply. “Tomorrow, I expect you at the Spine’s Keep. You have a lot to learn, Ayae. It may be that you are no more than a copper healer, but I doubt that. A Quor’lo does not brave Samuel Orlan’s shop for the cheapest of coin.”

Turning, he stalked away, and for a moment, Ayae wanted to call out to him, to demand an explanation of his last words, but her attention was drawn to the bar that Fo’s hands had curled around. There, dented with a strength she did not have—did not know anyone to have—was the perfect impression of his fingers.