Valor of the Healer Read Online Free PDF

whether you’ve seen or heard anything tonight that I can use to catch the scoundrel.”
    She’d seen. Heard. Touched. Healed . A slave’s hard-learned lessons insisted that she speak, while something else within her balked. Those pangs out of the stranger’s head, explosions of sensation and emotion, still reeled through her mind. One true memory stood out, that of his hand on her head, and his voice whispering that she didn’t have to apologize for her power. He’d tried to kill the man she feared above all else. And she didn’t want to betray him.
    Caught between conflicting impulses, Faanshi shivered. She felt each little quake rattling through her down to her very bones, and the hysteria-tinged fury she had to withhold nearly strangled her. “I—”
    Ulima clasped her shoulder, a bulwark against her fright. “Come now, akreshi . Do you wish to drive her into another fit?”
    “I’ll be but a moment longer. If my girl here has had a fit, I mean to know its cause.” The duke’s brows lowered. “Did you see anyone tonight, Faanshi? Don’t make me ask again.”
    That was enough to breach the wall around the girl’s words. “There was a man,” she babbled, shame at her confession sweeping through her. “He had ash on his face. He was hurt, and there was another man with him. I heard them run away into the night.”
    The duke shot to his feet, his gaze whipping to the high window. “Another one,” he breathed. “No wonder the bastard was able to go out the window so swiftly, with a partner ready and waiting.”
    Released from his grip, Faanshi held herself rigid to keep from shaking as Ulima draped her meager blanket about her shoulders. “Will that satisfy His Grace?” her okinya said. Beneath the deference, her words were stern and cold.
    Grinning, the duke turned and patted Faanshi’s head. “Indeed. I daresay she’s earned an hour out tomorrow and a cake from the kitchen. I’ll have a word with the cook. Get her settled. Then come back up and look after my wife.”
    “As my lord commands, so it shall be done.”
    The blanket was a talisman, and Faanshi clung to it as much as she dared while remaining on her knees. The duke bid the old woman a good night—but not her, for she was the slave, undeserving of such niceties. Then he was gone, and only when the cellar door shut behind him did more words tumble out through the cracked wall around her throat. “Don’t tell him. I’ll do anything you bid of me, okinya , but I beg you, don’t tell him what I did.”
    Despite her tattered pride, her voice broke on the last few words. Yet she would not hold them back. It put them both in danger—great merciful Djashtet, they could both be whipped if the duke found them out—but the memory of the stranger was a gleam of defiance in her heart. Moreover, Ulima seemed to understand, and as she helped Faanshi back upon her cot, her whispered reply carried a great weight of resolve.
    “No, my child, I don’t believe I shall.”

Chapter Three
    Kestar Vaarsen, riding into the town of Camden with his patrol partner Celoren, glanced west to the nearby mountains—and instead of the wall of dark clouds that had threatened a thunderstorm for hours, he saw a burst of radiant sunlight.
    The sight transfixed him. But before he could point it out to Celoren, before he could even take a second look, the light vanished. He might have dismissed it as a trick of the eye, save for a nagging sense that something important had just happened. Or soon would.
    Another premonition .
    He’d had them before. Each one that came to him on a patrol led invariably to an incident of magic—and to a mage that he and Celoren, as Knights of the Hawk, would have to apprehend and turn over to the Church. But even as they found an inn they could afford in the town, tended the horses and downed a dinner of pork stew, bread and cheese, nothing more came to him than that fleeting vision of sunlight. Neither his amulet nor Celoren’s,