The Golden Swan by Nancy Springer Read Free Book Online Page B

tried to bathe me. He had managed to warm it somehow, even. I had never been one for much bathing, as I suppose he could see, but I felt too wretched to protest. I lay and let him run the cloth over me, and every once in a while a soft sound would escape my lips. I scarcely noticed when he stopped his sloshings and lavings, muttering to himself fervidly. I scarcely noticed when he laid something on my chest and placed his hand on top of it. But when the slight weight stayed there for some time I made the painful effort to open my eyes.
    Frain was standing over me, looking desperate. The thing on my chest was the iron knife he always wore at his belt. I saw, wondering but without alarm, for with tight-lipped concentration he took away his hand and laid it on my forehead, pressing gently. I felt the tremor of effort in that hand. For a long moment he held it there. Then he jerked it away, cursing quietly. He turned toward the wall, his shoulders bent and askew, and I made an inquiring sound.
    â€œDair?” He looked over to see me looking back at him. He smiled darkly and came to get his knife off my chest.
    â€œOld habits are hard to break,” he joked, his voice tight. “I was trying to heal you. I used to be a healer, long ago, before—before I got hurt.”
    Something in my silence helped him to go on.
    â€œThere is a power in metal and in the sons of metal-smiths,” he explained. “I could take anything made of iron, a knife blade or whatever, and lay it on together with my hands, and the power would flow through me. I thought maybe—” He stopped with a shrug. “The power is gone,” he said after a moment. “I cannot heal anyone anymore, and least of all myself.”
    I gazed at him, my own woes forgotten. I signaled my interest with voice and gesture, urging him to say more. He sighed and sat on the stool by my bedside. A long silence followed.
    â€œIt’s not just the hands,” he said finally. “It’s not just that—Tirell has crippled me. Everything went together, power, prowess, happiness—I’ve become crippled some other way, somehow. Something inside is hurt. My father lost his healer’s power to greed and shame, he told me. Well, I don’t know the name of the thing that has taken hold of mine, but it has an ugly face.”
    He got up abruptly and went out, and I went to sleep.
    I felt better. Perhaps the seasickness had run its course, but I think Frain had helped me. Not that there had been any mystic power of healing in his touch, but just that he had cared enough to try—I had seen what effort it had cost him to try. And he had trusted me enough to talk to me. I felt better.
    Fran brought me broth in the morning, and I kept it down. And I kept down the sops and slops he brought me thereafter. And a few days later I got up from my bed and wobbled out on deck. The sailors grinned at me and let me alone. Frain stood by me in awkward silence.
    â€œI am glad you are better,” he said finally, and I felt he could not have said it if it were not to some extent true.
    He was still distant with me, still put off. But he talked to me more easily and more often as the days went by. He was tense and unhappy, for he liked the sea no better than I did, and the sailors knew it and baited him about it. So he was lonely, and even a mute woodwouse of a companion served better than none. We passed the time with simple games, naughts and crosses, dice and the like. And he would talk about Tirell—how he had loved Tirell. Doglike devotion, folk call it. And he had loved his father Fabron as well, though more as an equal—and Vale itself, his homeland, he spoke of it with longing and love. One day when we had a bit of charcoal at hand he drew me a crude map of Vale on the ship’s deck.
    â€œMountains all around. The river runs down from the northern ones, the dragon range, where there are snow-caps, and empties into a cavern