Read Online Valor of the Healer by Angela Highland - Free Book Online

too sounded shaken. Her bow dipped, but only fractionally, and as she stepped sideways to give her companion room to approach, the arrow aimed again for Julian’s throat.
    The healer drew close enough to lift a hand to his shoulder, without yet making contact. “I don’t like to do this without leave. May I?”
    For an instant profound weariness blurred Julian’s world, until he couldn’t distinguish Alarrah’s plea from the voice emblazoned across his memory.
    I beg your forgiveness —
    “Do what you must,” he said, the words thick in his throat.
    Nodding, Alarrah pressed her hand against his shoulder, and magic soaked like whiskey through his battered frame. Yet it was subtle only for one heartbeat. In the next, it rekindled the lingering power from the girl at Lomhannor Hall. Fire pulsed from his shoulder down to his leg—and without warning that leg gave out beneath him. The ravine and everything in it whirled and spun out of place. All that kept him from hurtling face-first into the fog rising across his senses was a pair of arms seizing him before he could fall.
    “What in blazes are you doing to him?”
    Julian tried to shove Rab away, but couldn’t summon the energy to lift either hand, false or true. He couldn’t call up any words at all, much less the reprimand he should have hurled at him for losing his temper a second time. He couldn’t even keep his eye open.
    “Great Lady, he has been healed!” Alarrah, for the first time since the elves had sought Julian and Rab for hire, sounded openly shocked. “How long ago did this happen?”
    “Haven’t you been listening? Will you believe us now, or would you rather insult our honor and our race a little more?”
    “Answer her question, human!”
    “Curse it, Jannyn, ease down! Alarrah, what did you sense?”
    The voices wove through Julian’s consciousness, as disconnected from their owners as he began to feel from his body. He sagged, aware that Rab was helping him move a few steps, holding him upright. Disgusted, his young partner said, “We escaped the Hall almost a day ago, and we’ve ridden nonstop since! For gods’ sake, can he rest now?”
    “It’s true.” Alarrah again. “His bones and flesh have been mended. Magic sings in them. If it’s still this strong after nearly a day—Mother of Stars—the girl who touched him would be the most powerful healer I’ve ever seen.”
    Someone else answered—who, he couldn’t name. He was falling backward, with baffling but not unwelcome slowness, guided by supportive hands. Where he came to rest wasn’t important, for relief that he no longer had to move swamped him in an all-consuming wave.
    Julian surrendered, and let the wave carry him off.
    * * *
    Morning sunlight slanted down into the hollow, warming one side of his body when he awoke. For long moments Julian lay without moving, his attention caught by a cloud of gnats floating several feet above his face. Like the insects, fragments of recollection drifted across his consciousness, making no individual sense, nor any connections with any of the others.
    Slowly the fragments meshed into a coherent whole. He lay upon a bedroll, nestled in a niche in the hollow’s rocky walls, reachable by the sunbeams angling down past the waterfall but keeping him out of sight. A folded cloak pillowed his head. Beneath a woolen blanket his right arm was propped against his side, and the absence of the accustomed weight of his false hand pulled him into wakefulness without alarm. Even as he groped with his living hand to make certain that his knives were still where they belonged, he called out to the one who knew to remove the wooden hand and leave his weapons alone.
    “Rab.”
    “Here.” Nine-fingered Rab appeared beside him, ducking his head to look under the overhang beneath which his partner sheltered. The younger man didn’t cut his usual immaculate figure. His eyes and jaw were shadowed, the first by weariness only somewhat blunted since the