A troll child, small only by comparison, no taller than a human child of perhaps six years, though broader through the shoulders and chest in the way that stone-kin tended toward even young, all stone-colored skin and too-large amber eyes that had gone dull with the specific exhaustion of something that had been hurting for a long time and had stopped expecting it to end.One leg hung at an angle beneath him that was wrong in a way that Kara’s healer’s eye catalogued in the first second and refused to stop cataloguing: twisted, unset, the damage old enough to have begun adapting to itself.The wound at his side was worse.An angry, swollen thing, the skin around it threaded with black that moved beneath the surface with a slow, deliberate pulse; not the spread of ordinary infection, not the creep of simple rot, this had direction, as if it knew where it was going.
The cavern had gone reverently quiet at the suffering of something small and innocent.
Even Nick stilled at the bars, the gold burning in his eyes going from fury to something harder and quieter.
The king was not watching the child.He was watching Kara.
She felt the weight of it, the deliberate, intense quality of his attention, the sense of a test being administered without the courtesy of announcing itself.He had brought the child out for a reason.He was watching her respond to the child for a reason.Understanding assembled itself in her chest like words fitting together to make a sentence, and the conclusion it formed was one she greeted with full and sincere resistance.No.The thought arrived with great clarity.No.Absolutely not.We are not doing this.I am not being emotionally manipulated by a troll king into healing his child so he can feel benevolent about keeping us prisoner.I see exactly what this is.I am not falling for it.
The troll set the child down on a stone slab near the center of the chamber.The movement was careful, practiced, as if they had been carring for him for some time.
The child, Torvik, whimpered, a thin, exhausted sound, and turned his face toward the stone like he was trying to press the pain somewhere it couldn’t follow him.
And Kara’s heart did what it always did when someone around her was hurt, which was to betray her completely and without apology.She was totally doing this.
Because pain was pain, and a child was a child, and she had been a healer long enough to know that her instincts did not ask for specific confirmation before engaging.They simply engaged.She had tried, on multiple occasions, to discuss this with them.The instincts had declined to participate in the conversation.
She took one step forward before she’d made the conscious decision to move.
The Troll King noticed.He was watching for exactly that, and the slight shift in his expression when it happened was not satisfaction, exactly, but something adjacent to it.The look of something that had wagered correctly on the nature of a person and was not surprised to be proven right.
His voice, when it came, was quieter than she’d yet heard it, lower, stripped of its chamber-filling authority, something almost private in it.“What do you see, witch?”
Kara’s jaw was tight.“A child suffering,” she said, because it was the truth and she was not in the business of performing indifference she didn’t feel.
The king’s gaze sharpened by a fraction.“And?”
She crouched, the motion bringing her level with the stone slab, with the child’s dulled amber eyes, and with the black-veined wound that pulsed with slow, deliberate wrongness.Her fingers hovered over the injury without touching it, close enough that the wrongness of it registered against her palm like a change in temperature–cold where there should have been heat, still where there should have been the ordinary living warmth of flesh trying to repair itself.
That was not poison.
Kara turned the sensation over carefully, the way she turned unknowns over, methodical even when everything else in her was reacting.Poison had a logic to it, a direction, a relationship to the body it was damaging.This was something else, something with the texture of intention to it, a deliberate quality, a sense ofpurposethat was entirely incompatible with any natural illness she’d ever encountered.It moved against the grain of living things the way a current moved against a swimmer, pushing and pulling the person at its own whim.
It felt like the pulse from beneath the stone.The same quality.The same cold signature.It felt like something that had come from below.
“Nick.”She kept her voice level.
“Kara.”His came back taut and compressed, warning and pleading occupying the same syllables, the gold of his eyes in her peripheral vision bright and fixed on her hands.
“There’s corruption in this wound.The same kind—” She stopped.Recalibrated.“I’m not going to do anything dramatic.”
From somewhere behind her, Aphid made a sound that managed to convey, without words, that he found this statement to be statistically optimistic given the available evidence.
The child turned his head.His amber eyes found her face with a slow, searching focus.The pain she saw in those eyes punched Kara in the gut.As a healer, her natural instinct was to fix it as quickly as possible.As a future mother, she wanted to wrap him up in her arms and tell him that it would be okay, thathewould be okay.
Torvik looked at her the way children looked at things they hadn’t decided about yet.Measuring, direct, without the social performance that adults layered over genuine attention.Finally, after several minutes of quiet while he took her in, he asked, “Are you an angel?”
This time there was more than one covered laugh.
She refrained from rolling her eyes, barely.
“No, little one,” Kara said, gently.“I am probably as far from an angel as a human can get.But, I’ll take it as a compliment that you asked.”
“You’re glowing, like an angel,” Torvik said, his weak voice filled with awe.
“Nick, am I glowing, like when I used my gypsy healer magic?”she asked him through their bond.She didn’t feel like she was glowing.Though, she could feel her power pulsing under her skin.
“No,”Nick said, his voice a sharp growl.“Could be his innocence, or illness is allowing him to see something the rest of us can’t see.”
