Valor of the Healer by Angela Highland Read Free Book Online Page B

down from the ride up the mountain. But he trusted no other mount but Tenthim to carry him through several hours’ hunting for fleeing would-be murderers. And more than his companion’s good spirits, the prayer Kestar whispered kept him moving into the gathering morning.
    Holy Anreulag , grant that there will be something to find .

Chapter Four
    Once they’d put several ridges of the Garmbinn Range between themselves and their pursuers, Julian began to think they might in truth elude capture. But not until they plunged into the trackless forest northwest of the mountains did he consider why they’d been able to flee in the first place—and then only because Rab brought it up.
    “You’re all right? That girl really did heal you?”
    Darkness had yielded to day, though Julian had no idea of the hour. They’d stopped to rest the horses on the deer track they’d been following, a trail so narrow they had no room to dismount, and the younger man had turned in the saddle to face him. The canopy of leaves diffused the sunlight, blurring the angles of green-tinged rays until they could have shone from any direction at all. After damage that should have flattened him—that had flattened him—and urgent hours of riding, he was almost spent. But where agony should have blazed, there was only electric warmth in his flesh, flashing out from where his wounds had been and leaving disconcerting tingles in its wake. With them came the recollection of haunted eyes and a hand whose one touch, he realized in cold dismay, had saved his life.
    “I’m all right,” he muttered. “We’ve got to keep moving. The elves expect us by nightfall.”
    Rab’s blond brows crinkled, and though his words still held his usual cultured drawl, his sky-blue eyes were unsure. “You were shot, your leg was broken, yet you’re not even bleeding. Who and what by all the gods was that girl?”
    “How am I supposed—” Exhaustion made Julian’s first few words sharper than he intended, and he bit back the rest. Their erstwhile target’s trackers needed no more ripe an opportunity than a distracting argument to catch up with them. Nor could he ignore the anxiety that stripped years from his partner’s features. Rab never wore that look unless he was alarmed, and it took fire, tornado or earthquake to alarm Nine-fingered Rab. Julian massaged his shoulder, wondering how one girl could rival such acts of the gods, because clearly she’d alarmed them both. More calmly he went on, “You know as much as I. Mage. Girl. I had no time to tell more than that.”
    “If she’s a mage she’s elf-blooded, in part or in whole. Our clients aren’t going to like this.”
    “Assuming they don’t know about her already, one of many questions I intend to ask at our rendezvous.” Grimacing, Julian nudged his stallion Morrigh back into motion and waved his partner forward. Rab, with his unhindered vision, had to go first.
    Only Rab’s right hand remained on the reins, though, as he rode his horse Tornach on ahead. Through the four fingers of his left hand he twirled one of his treasured daggers, back and forth, till the blade’s dance made it seem as though he were playing with a fragment of light. With one last look back, he said, “They also won’t like that we haven’t taken down the target.”
    “We’ll handle that when we arrive,” Julian ground out through clenched teeth.
    He didn’t like their failure either.
    * * *
    It took several more hours of hard riding, deeper into the wet forest reaches between the mountains and the coast, before they reached the ill-maintained road that was their destination’s first marker. On a bend that twisted from west to southwest, they found the pile of fist-sized, moss-blanketed stones that might have been an ancient cairn. Three of these, by seeming happenstance rolled onto the ground ten paces away, turned them southward into the trees. Slow going through falling dusk brought them to the great skeleton of an