He snatched another round of sausage and shrugged. “I’m healing people.”
She rolled her eyes and grabbed the plate, setting it behind her. “No more food until you tell.” Playing was a long-forgotten art, but the twinkle in his eyes encouraged her.
He looked forlornly at the remains of his piece of sausage and whined, “I’ll starve.”
She showed no signs of softening, especially since he was looking less tired now, the grim lines around his mouth fading. “Not if you tell me what you’re doing here.”
He leaned back against the wall and crossed his arms behind his head. “Torture will never make me divulge the secrets I keep.”
She took a piece of cheese and waved it invitingly. “How about bribery?”
“That might work,” he conceded. “Why don’t you try it?”
It took her three times before the food that she tossed at him made it to his mouth.
“AH right,” he surrendered. “I am a sylvan.”
Rialla waited but he didn’t elaborate. “What’s a sylvan?”
“Where’s my bribe?” he replied.
She hit him in the nose with a piece of cheese. He caught it before it hit the bed and examined it with satisfaction before eating it.
“Sylvans are users of natural magic like the shapeshifters, though our talents lie in different directions. They are closer to the animals of the forests, while we are guardians of the greenery. We are a simple folk, and it is easy enough for us to blend in with the humans, so our enclaves are not hidden the way those of the shapeshifters are.” He paused and closed his eyes, leaning against the wall, but he caught the small piece of hard sausage she threw at him anyway.
“There are not many enclaves, though,” he said finally, rubbing his beard. “Over the centuries they have died out, one by one. The enclave that I belonged to is the only one left in Darran. We claimed to be a religious order, worshipping Naslen, lord of the forests—I suppose that the story is more true than not. There are many such groups of humans, caught in the past, holding to the old ways and the old languages. They are tolerated, even in Darran, because they have always been there. The sylvans blend in with the others.
“My enclave is in a minor estate of a great noble—so minor that in three generations the lord had not visited it. The old lord died, and his son decided to visit each of his new holdings; I believe that he had some debts, and was evaluating his lands for later sale.
“I was walking alone, and I came upon a child; a human girl-child that some of the lord’s friends had found earlier. Her body was badly broken.” Tris looked grim.
“I knew her, had watched her grow from a toddler to an explorer. Her mother was an excellent weaver, and I had often gone to the human village to trade food for cloth. They had four grown boys, and this girl-child. You have to understand, Rialla. The reason that our enclave had survived as long as it had was that it was forbidden to work magic around humans. Absolutely forbidden. I knew this, and understood the reason for it.”
His voice dropped almost to a whisper as he continued. “But this was a child, a child that I knew and liked. She was dying as I watched. So I healed her body, until there was no evidence that any violence had occurred. Rape is as much a wound of the soul as a wound of the body, and I gifted her with forgetfulness. With luck no one would have ever known, not even the child.
“When I was through healing her, I woke her, teased her about sleeping in the woods and escorted her home. Her father I took aside and warned that I had seen one of the lord’s guests eyeing her. He assured me that he would keep her in the cottage until the lord and his entourage were gone.
“When I returned to the enclave, I found that someone had seen me violate our law. I was tried and sentenced to banishment. They took me far from the enclave and bound me with magic and rope. If I managed to free myself, I could live—but never be welcomed in any enclave.”
“You broke free?” asked Rialla.
He shook his head, smiling at the memory. “No. I struggled for a while, but the man who’d tied the rope didn’t want me to live. I was contemplating my probable fate when an old woman came upon me. She poked her finger in my face and said, ‘Look you, I have a bargain for you. You are a healer, and I have need of such. I have a knife, which you need as desperately.’ ” Tris grinned at Rialla. “She was so scared her finger trembled with it, but she didn’t let her fear stop her. When I agreed to help, she cut the rope; so here I am.”
“How did she know you were a healer?” asked Rialla.
“She has a gift that occasionally allows her to see such things.”
Rialla nodded, accepting his answer. “Do you like it here among humans?”
He nodded slowly. “Better than the enclave. They were wrong. It is an evil thing to have the power to help others, and not to do so.”
“Is that why you helped rescue Laeth?” asked Rialla.
Tris gave her an enigmatic look then shrugged. “Part of it.”
He rose restlessly from the bed and gave Rialla a hand up off the floor. Her leg had stiffened, so he helped her hobble to the bed. Then he slid the closet door closed, picked up the plate and waved the lights down.
“Good dreams, healer,” said Rialla.
He nodded and pulled the door closed behind him.
“So what will Lord Winterseine do with a newly recovered runaway?” They were deep into a game of Dragon that Rialla was winning when Tris spoke. Over the past few days, they had played a game whenever Tris had a moment to spare; not that Rialla minded. She enjoyed the game as much as he did—even if he won most of the time.
“You’re just trying to distract me,” she complained at his interruption. “This is the first time I’ve had a ghost of a chance of winning since the first game we played, and now you want to take even that away from me.”
“You are getting paranoid, aren’t you?” He commiserated with deepest sympathy. Rialla flashed him a rude hand gesture before she turned back to the game board.
Tris laughed, then said, “Seriously, Rialla, he’s not going to hamstring you or beat you, is he?”
Rialla moved her frog to an empty square on the board, and shook her head. “No. That happens sometimes in Ynstrah and some of the provinces in the Alliance where they depend on slave labor in their agriculture. Occasionally they’ll hamstring a runaway here, but only one of the less valuable slaves—more to serve as an example than to keep the slave they’ve crippled from running again. A dancer is too valuable to damage that way.”
She smiled dryly at Tris. “That’s not to say that he’ll let me go unpunished. The Master has an aptitude for creative retribution.”
Tris was staring at the game, but Rialla had the feeling that he wasn’t really seeing it. He finally moved a piece and looked up. “Are you sure that you want to go back? You’re paying an awfully high price for a chance at vengeance.”
Rialla nodded, moving the frog again. “It’ll be worth it if it works. If it doesn’t…” she shrugged. “There are other reasons as well. You told me that you’ve traveled. Have you ever been on the other side of the Great Swamp?”
Tris shook his head.
Rialla shifted on the bed, trying to find a comfortable position for her leg. “Did you ever wonder why Sianim is so anxious to stop the fighting between Reth and Darran?”
He raised an eyebrow and shook his head. “I should have. It is hardly in Sianim’s best interest to prevent wars.”
“Exactly. When the Spy master called me in to persuade me to accompany Laeth here, he explained his reasoning. Apparently there is a good possibility that there will be an invasion coming from the eastern side of the Great Swamp.”
“There are always wars among humans,” commented Tris. “I would have thought that Sianim, with its mercenary hoards, would be delighted at the thought of another one.”
Sometimes Tris had a way of making the word “human” sound like a name that gutter-bred children called each other to start a fight. Since he seemed not to hold her humanness against her, Rialla let it pass unremarked.