After stoking the fire, Yalad drew a chair close to Sandalath and sat, leaning back and stretching out his legs. ‘This is welcome warmth, yes?’
Prok found another ballad, beginning the song loud and stentorian, rocking in his chair to some unheard musical accompaniment, the hand holding its tankard of wine lifting up and down to set the beat.
Wincing, Yalad sighed. ‘Do you ever wonder, milady, why so many of our songs do little more than moan over things lost or never owned in the first place?’
No. Not really. ‘Our good surgeon, sir, knows better than to choose the more raucous ones, lest Commander Ivis arrive again at the most inopportune instant, with us witness to the rise of startling colour to his face.’
‘He was mordant on your behalf, milady. Surely you understand that.’
‘Of course, and by such willingness he charms me, gate sergeant.’
Yalad smiled. ‘That admission would see him crimson.’ He slowly shook his head. ‘And Ivis as old as he is, I’d never thought to see him on such uncertain footing. The charm, milady, is yours, and makes him young again … but in a most unsettling way for us who serve under him.’
‘I would not see his authority undermined, sir,’ Sandalath said, frowning. ‘Advise me, if you will, on how best to blunt what charms I may possess.’
‘I cannot, milady,’ Yalad said, ‘as no man here would even think of withering such gifts, natural as they are.’
She regarded him beneath veiled lids. ‘Sir, you learn well the language of the court. Or is there more of the courting in it than is seemly?’
‘No,’ he replied. ‘I know well my station, milady, and more to the point, yours. It is an otherwise grim season we suffer here, and so we take such pleasures as we can find.’
She continued studying him. ‘I envy the cleverness in you, gate sergeant. If I possess charms, they are sadly childlike. A sheltered life shrinks the world for the one who suffers in it. All too often, innocence yields naivety, and when pushed from the small world into the
vaster one beyond, the creature finds herself both unknowing and lost.’
‘Your confession humbles me, milady.’
She waved a hand. ‘It is nothing. I stood atop a tower, witnessing the death of too many men and women. I never thought that war would come so close, no longer a thing in the distance, beyond some border. Now, it strides across familiar ground, and makes that ground newly estranged.’ She started as a log abruptly shifted in the hearth, sending up a flurry of sparks. ‘It does little good,’ she added, ‘when the walls breathe, and, I fear, blink.’
‘You are safe, milady,’ Yalad said. ‘Failing any other option, we’ll starve them out.’
Further conversation between the two was interrupted by the arrival of Surgeon Prok, his song done. Clumsily, he dragged a third chair up, and then slumped down in it with a heavy sigh. ‘You can strip the bark from a tree and think nothing of it,’ he said, nodding to himself. ‘But peel back a man’s skin and, ah, entire worlds are jarred askew. We shiver and are made vulnerable.’ He smiled across at Yalad. ‘I make my war with ruined flesh, gate sergeant. To make it right again. But you, with that blade at your side, you make the trees bleed.’
Yalad frowned. ‘It’s said the priests have found a sorcery that heals, Prok. They name it Denul. Perhaps what ails you is your impending obsolescence.’
Prok’s florid face broadened in a smile. ‘No risk of that to the soldier, though. Obsolescence.’ He stretched the word out, tasted it, and seemed to find it foul. After a moment, he leaned back, raising the tankard before him. ‘I have imbibed of that sorcery, Yalad. You wonder at with whom you bargain, with such sudden power in your hands. Imagine, if you will, a future in which healing is possible for everything, every ailment, every wound. Should a remnant of life linger in the flesh, why, we can save the fool. The question then is: should we?’
Sandalath glanced at Yalad, and then said, ‘But why would you not, surgeon? I would think, in such a future, you would find an answer to your desire – to make things right again, to mend the broken, to heal the diseased, or the wounded.’
He tilted the tankard in her direction. ‘To the crowded future, then.’
She watched him drink, and then said, ‘Even magic cannot refuse death.’
‘True enough,’ he allowed. ‘We but prolong the moment of its arrival. Denul becomes a cheat, milady, to delight in the instant but dismay in the distance. It is more than life that is extended, it is also the agony of failure, for fail we will, and fail we must. Yalad’s war has its victories and its losses. It surges ahead, and then yields ground. It can even end, for a time. But the healer knows only retreat, and each step yielded is bitter, the ground soaked in blood.’
‘Then the sorcery is a boon,’ she replied. ‘Indeed, it is a godly gift.’
He met her eyes, and she saw through their reddened gleam to a sudden, raw pain. ‘Then why, milady, does it taste so sour?’
‘That would be the wine, Prok,’ Yalad said, with a faint smile.
He shifted his gaze to the gate sergeant. ‘Yes, of course.’
A few moments later, Commander Ivis entered the chamber, pulling off his heavy cloak. He paused for a moment to study the occupants of the room, and then, with the briefest of glances at Sandalath, made his way across to the kitchen.
Ivis was a rare presence at the dinner table these evenings. His habit of walking the grounds beyond the keep walls often devoured half the night. Once, in her room and readying for sleep, Sandalath had paused at the window, and, looking down, saw the commander standing at the graves of those household staff who had been murdered by the daughters of Draconus. She could not be sure, but she thought that the mound he faced belonged to the old surgeon, Atran. When she was alive, he had affected distracted ignorance of her desire, as if taking pleasure was a notion he had no business entertaining, given his duties. Sandalath suspected that he now regretted his aloofness.
‘I wonder,’ mused Prok once Ivis had gone, ‘if it takes a surgeon’s eye to see what ails a man, or woman, when that person has made disguise a profession.’