In the darkened hallway, Alon pressed his hand to his hammering heart. The cool metal of his brace offered no relief. Sister María Lunurin was a typhoon wrapped in warm brown skin and white cotton. Her two disparate worlds were trying to grind her people into dust, yet she still believed she could hold them safe with nothing but a steely gaze and two strong hands. Some of the incipient tragedies she brought to his door, Alon wasn’t sure he could help, but he’d never deny her. Being within sight of her made him feel like a twelve-foot surge was bearing down on him under the wings of a storm. It was exhilarating, terrifying; it made him feel like he could do anything.
Nothing he did quelled her effect on him, not since she had called his name and awoken the tide in his blood, when he’d been a boy of thirteen. A decade of exposure hadn’t diminished her effect.
Alon shook his head to clear it and crossed to the kitchen where Kawit was preparing a tray of snacks and tea for his guests. Something was very wrong with Inez, and he could already tell the cistern water Kawit had drawn wouldn’t suffice. Catalina would never have agreed to come to him for anything minor. Nor would Lunurin risk such a visit.
“Tito Kawit, could I have a bowl of sea salt?”
Kawit pulled open his extensive salt cabinet. “Is it sickness or an injury? I’ve a theory that the Bool coconut salt is less draining when working on fever patients.”
“I’m not sure. No fever, I think.”
Kawit was also tide-touched, but his gift was quite the reverse of any tide-touched Alon had ever met. When he touched saltwater, all the salt flowed to him, rather than his spirit becoming one with the salt. His affinity was decidedly not one for healing, but he’d perfected myriad other skills. It had made it much easier for him to hide from the Inquisition’s purges over the years.
Kawit’s gnarled fingers danced over a dozen jars and bags of salt. He settled on a small wooden box. “Try the mangrove leaf salt. Let me know what you think.”
A white salt with irregularly sized square crystals was scooped in a dish alongside the refreshments for the guests. Kawit ignored Alon’s best efforts to take his burden. He managed the tray and his severe limp with his usual stubborn pride. Kawit had been injured in the same laho-riled storm that shattered Alon’s right hand, necessitating the brace of gold rings Alon wore.
Back in the treatment room, Kawit passed around cups of ginger tea and suman, sweet rice cakes wrapped in banana leaves. Alon mixed salt into the water pitcher and eyed Inez inhaling the food with concern. She sat hunched, one arm wrapped protectively around her middle.
Alon settled on a stool, trying to make himself smaller, not liking the way the whites showed around Inez’s eyes when he stood over her.
Lunurin wasn’t normally this opaque about whatever problems she brought to his door. Tonight, she had volunteered nothing. Even she must be nearing the end of her impressive strength. There was a brittleness about the eyes that made him want to wrap a shawl around her shoulders and tuck her into a guest room for the night.
But given the way Sister Catalina eyed him, thin-lipped, he doubted that was an option. She’d never done more than tolerate him, and since Christmas she’d been downright chilly. She had no grasp of why Lunurin trusted him over any of the Tianchaowen herb-healers in Aynila, and begrudged every familiarity he showed her. As if he hadn’t known her first.
Alon was one wrong move away from Catalina grabbing her sister and sprinting for the exit. Were it not for Lunurin, he’d be happy to let her. He didn’t understand how Lunurin could love a woman who had no idea what she was, nor what her power meant, even if she was beautiful. Perhaps Lunurin preferred it that way, to be seen as only human, as Sister María and nothing more.
In the ten years since Alon had met her, she’d certainly adhered to the desperate furious promise she’d screamed into a laho’s teeth that night on his brother’s ship, when Alon had been sure they were all about to drown.
Once the women had recovered from their harrowing trip and Inez stopped shivering, Alon asked, “Inez, can you tell me what’s wrong?”
She turned doe-brown eyes first on Catalina, then toward Lunurin. Even tucked into the corner on a stool, she seemed to stand sentinel.
Lunurin pressed the knuckles of two fingers to her sternum, a nervous quirk of hers, whenever she was upset. “Inez is pregnant. She’s too far along for me to attempt the usual remedies. We need your opinion.”
“How far along?” Alon held out his palm to the girl. “May I have your hand?”
Inez sat upright. The overlarge habit drew tight against her abdomen, the size and shape of the problem suddenly very apparent. Alon felt for her pulse, reaching for the salt-warm push-pull of her blood. Pregnancy in a girl this young was dangerous all on its own.
“How long do you think?” Alon repeated, when no one volunteered the information.
Inez shook her head in bafflement, her thin wrist trembling in his grip. Alon felt like he was cradling a bleeding-heart dove in his palm. He gentled his hold.
“No more than six months?” Lunurin hazarded, and there was something in her voice, an unspoken weight. Catalina flinched.
“Why did you wait so long?” The words slipped out, with less professional calm than Alon usually managed.
He instantly regretted them when Inez began to tear up. Aman Sinaya have mercy but she was a child, a little girl, how had this happened?
“We didn’t know,” Catalina snapped, looking like she’d rather stick a knife in his belly and feed him to the crocodiles in the Saliwain than ask for his help.
Alon released Inez’s wrist and lifted his hands up in surrender. “Forgive me, but with these things the longer you wait to come to a healer, the fewer options there are. I’d like to try something, but I need access to her bare stomach. Will you step behind the screen with her? There is a tapis skirt and a shawl if she has no breast band.”
The sisters went behind the screen in the corner of the room and Alon retreated to Lunurin’s side, his back turned to give them privacy.
“Six months?” he asked softly.
She swallowed hard and nodded.
“Lunurin, I can try, but without another healer to help me, I could do more harm than good. I’m glad you didn’t dose her. She’d have bled out before you could’ve gotten her here.”
Lunurin turned faintly green. “I was afraid you’d say that.”
She pressed her knuckles to her pendant so hard her hand shook. Alon gently touched her wrist. She dropped her hand and Alon snatched his back, startled and half-ashamed of his own audacity, but she looked stricken.
“Who’s the boy? I can help him pay the bride-price to Catalina’s father if that’s the issue,” Alon said. “She’s young but we can monitor her closely, get her eating right…”
Lunurin hated to ask money of him, more even than she hated how her coming endangered the secret of his healing, but he didn’t begrudge her gold any more than he begrudged her Aman Sinaya’s mercy. He had a duty, that was what being tide-touched meant.
Lunurin shook her head. What came out of her mouth might have been a sob in a woman less stringently in control of herself. “Alon, Father DeSoto did this. Sister Philippa knows, and if I can’t solve the problem by morning, she’ll tell the abbot and he’ll expel Inez from the convent. Catalina is her only family.”
Bile crawled up Alon’s throat, while the terrible knowledge in Lunurin found a home in his chest, weighing his middle with edges sharp as a dozen batangas swords.
Aman Sinaya have mercy. The old priest must be at least fifty. Inez was a little girl, she hardly came up to Alon’s ribs, a child! Was she even twelve?
Lunurin seized his shoulder as every drop of water in the room leaped to his hand. Alon stared at the tea from Lunurin’s cup that now balanced on the tip of his index finger. He couldn’t usually pull water fresh enough to drink. It was the reason he tried to use freshwater for healing when people didn’t know what he was. It was harder to affect freshwater.
Very slowly, he tipped the tea back into the cup. Alon folded into a cross-legged position. He locked his hands together over his ankles and held his breath until the nearness of the saltwater flowing up the Saliwain River did not pulse just outside the window, begging him to make use of it. He couldn’t usually feel the bay this far inland, and that was a blessing. He prayed the rains would come soon and wash the salt back out to the bay. It was hard enough to conceal what he was without constant temptation.
Alon cleared his throat. “Forgive me.”
Lunurin let him go. He tried not to miss her nearness.
Rustlings and muttering came from behind the screen, along with a low exclamation of alarm. Lunurin bent, pressing her face into her knees. For a terrible moment, he thought she would weep. But when she looked up, her eyes were dry, burning with a rage that was not human, brewing with the storm that always lived in her bones. How could everyone else not see it, and love it, and fear it in equal measure?
“Please, tell me there’s something you can do. I can’t let this happen. If this happens, I won’t be able to let him live—” Her teeth clicked together.
Alon took her hands from her knees and pressed them to his brow. “Anything in my power, it is yours.”
She sat, statue-still, for several beats, before pulling her hands from his. “Thank you, but you shouldn’t. You are the Lakan’s son.”
“You are a Datu’s daughter; your duty is the same as mine.”
“Was. Now I am a nun, no one’s daughter. I have only Catalina and Inez.”
Lunurin’s eyes burned as if to say, Please, you must see, this is my family. So many strangers’ lives we have saved, but they are all I have in the world.
“She’s decent.”
Alon stared. Inez’s distended belly was layered with bruises, some old and fading to yellow and green, some violent indigo, fresh as his dye-pots.
Alon sucked in a breath. “Are you bleeding?”
“No.” Inez didn’t meet his gaze.
“Did someone do this to you?”
“I did it.”
Alon went to dip his hands in the pitcher of saltwater.
Very gently, he laid damp hands on Inez’s belly, then closed his eyes and felt, not for Inez’s blood but the warm salt of the womb, for the other heartbeat. Everyone, even those who had never been named to the three goddesses, had a hint of the tide in their blood. He sank into it like salt into solution, following the flow.
In Inez’s belly, the fetus was well-formed with a strong heartbeat, perhaps five and a half months along. The afterbirth was large, with huge throbbing blood vessels and an alarming lack of small ones. She’d bleed out fast if he tried to force an early labor. He couldn’t do this alone.
Alon opened his eyes. He could not let this tragedy play out. Alon checked Inez’s pulse at her throat. He evaluated the color of her eyes and how much flesh clung to her narrow ribs. Then he dried his hands. For a full examination he’d need more water, and there was no way Catalina wouldn’t recognize what he was.
“Is the baby healthy?” Catalina asked.
“Yes, it is, though I’m sure Inez hasn’t felt that way with how underfed she is.”
“Thank God in Heaven.” Catalina made the sign of the cross.
“I’m not dying?” Inez asked.
“No, just hungry and stressed. Now that we know, I’ll be able to help. We’ll find you somewhere safe to stay until the baby is born. Make sure you’re fed and resting. But you need to tell me, Inez, is that the kind of help you want?”
At last Inez met his eyes. “I want it to go away. I want it to stop growing and hurting, and making me so tired I want to die.”
“Inez!” Catalina gasped, scandalized.
Alon held Inez’s gaze. “Yes, alright.”
“Can you make it go away?” Inez asked.
“Not alone, but I can take you to someone who can help,” Alon promised.
Catalina let out a shout of frustration. “No! You aren’t taking my sister anywhere else in the dead of night unless you tell me where and why. Why should I trust you to know anything about midwifery? We shouldn’t be wandering around the city at night at all!”
Alon didn’t have any answers Catalina would like.
Lunurin cut in sharply, “Cat, please, he’s trying to help.”
“How is this any safer than the Palisade doctor?” Catalina demanded.
Lunurin unfolded from her stool. “Alon won’t tell the abbot. Alon won’t hurt Inez. I trust him, and you trust me. You wouldn’t have followed me this far if you didn’t.”
Catalina’s expression crumpled. Inez, biting her lower lip, said, “It’s okay, Ate. I trust Lunurin too. We’ll go together.”
Alon’s gut twisted in unease. “I can’t bring you all. Just Inez.”
Catalina’s rejection was flat. “You aren’t taking my sister anywhere without me.” You aren’t taking Lunurin out of my sight either went unstated.
Even Lunurin turned to him, a furrow between her dark brows. “Who are you taking Inez to? I thought after last year all the others… were gone.”
Alon winced. “My mother—my teacher—isn’t dead, like I told you. The Lakan found it politically expedient to declare her dead. She went into exile.”