And now, she was as demanding of everyone else as her parents had been to her. More than that, she was as demanding of herself as they used to be.
Well, that was why she would have gotten involved with an arrogant manipulator like that mage in the first place. She doesn’t see herself as “deserving” anyone who cares, so she picks someone who reminds her of what she grew up with. And then treats him the same, since she never learned to do otherwise.
He ran his fingers across his forehead as the creaking of the table behind him told him he had managed to convince her to trust him that far. I can’t undo decades of harm in a few candlemarks. Start with the easy stuff and release the pain. Then take it from there.
Amberdrake turned back to find her on her stomach, draped from neck to knee with the sheet, as modest as a village maiden. He selected one of the oils, one with a lavender base; that would be clean and fresh enough to help convince her that he was not going to seduce her. Then, before she could react, he turned the sheet down with brisk efficiency worthy of Gesten, poured some of the oil in his hands to warm it, then rubbed his palms together. A moment later, he was kneading the muscles of her back and shoulders.
He had not been boasting; he was particularly good at massage. Lady Cinnabar did prefer his services to anyone else in or out of the camp. Slowly, as he worked the knots of tension out of her back and shoulders, he sensed other tension ebbing. His expertise at massage was convincing her that he was, at least in part, what he claimed to be.
Some of the barriers she was holding against him came down. But he did not take immediate advantage of the altered situation.
No, my dear Icicle; I intend to show you that I am everything I said I was and a lot more besides.
You are a challenge. And I never could resist a challenge. And Urtho, damn his hide, knows that.
When Winterhart realized that the man really did know what he was doing—at least insofar as massage was concerned—she let the fear ebb from her body. The more she relaxed, the more his hands seemed to be actually soothing away the pain in her poor back.
Odd. I always thought massage was supposed to be painful. . . .
In fact, it was so soothing that she felt herself drifting away, not quite asleep, but certainly not quite awake. Several moments passed before she realized that the tingling sensation in her back really was something very familiar, after all. The difference was that she had never experienced it before as the recipient.
Her eyes opened wide although she did not move. She didn’t dare. The man was Healing her, and you didn’t interrupt a Healing trance!
“Well,” came the conversational voice from behind her. “You certainly have broken up your back in a most spectacular fashion.”
He was talking! How could you trance and talk at the same time?
“Your main problem is with one of the pads between the vertebrae,” the voice continued. “It’s squashed rather messily. I’m putting back what I can; if I can get the inflammation down, that will clear the way to stop most of the pain you’ve been enduring.”
“Oh—” she replied, weakly. “I’d thought perhaps that I had cracked a vertebra.”
“Nothing nearly so exciting,” the voice replied. “But this could have been worse. It is good that Urtho sent you to me when he did. Do you feel any tension here. . . ?”
Winterhart felt a spot of cold amid the sea of warmth in her back. This man was amazing; the Healers she knew could activate the nerves in a specific point of the body, but never a specific sensation. By the time her training had been terminated, she could not activate a circle of nerves smaller than her thumb’s width without causing the patient to feel heat, cold, pressure, and pain there all at once. And here this—this kestra’chern—was pinpointing the nerves in a tenth of that area, and making her feel only a chill. Not pain!
She could only grunt an affirmative and let her defenses slip a little more. He knew what he was doing, and he felt so competent, so good. . . .
Amberdrake let the fluids around the damage balance slower than absolutely necessary, partly out of caution but mostly to buy some more time.
This was not going to be as easy as he had thought.
Winterhart was like an onion; you peeled away one layer, thinking you had found the core, only to find just another layer. She had so many defenses, that he was forced to wonder just what it was she thought she was defending herself against.
“How did you manage to do this?” he asked quietly, letting the soothing qualities he put into his voice lull her a little more. “This kind of injury doesn’t usually happen all at once; didn’t you notice anything wrong earlier?”
“Well, my back had been bothering me for a while,” she replied with obvious reluctance, “but I never really thought about it. My fami—I’ve always had a little problem with my back, you know how it is, tensions always strike at your weakest point, right?”
“True,” he replied, wondering why she had changed “my family” to “I.” How would revealing a family history of back trouble reveal anything about her? “And your back is your weakest point, I take it?” He thought carefully before asking his next question; he didn’t want to put her more on the defensive than she already was. “I suppose you must have seen how busy all the Healers were, and you decided just to ignore the pain. Not necessarily wise, but certainly considerate of you.”
She grunted, and the skin on the back of her neck reddened a little. “I don’t like to whine about things,” she said. “Especially not things I can’t change. So I kept my mouth shut and drank a lot of willow. Anyway, after the defensive at Polda, one of the Sixth Wing gryphons was brought in with some extensive lacerations to its underbelly, delirious, and when I tried to restrain it, it nearly went berserk.”
Interesting. Resentment there. As if she somehow thought that the gryphon in question had been acting unreasonably.
“Who was it?” Amberdrake asked.
“What are you talking about?” she replied suspiciously.
“Who was the gryphon?” Amberdrake repeated mildly. “I knew about Aubri’s burns, but I didn’t know anything about a Sixth Wing gryphon with lacerations. I was wondering if it was Sheran; if it was, I’m not surprised she reacted badly to being restrained. She was one of the gryphons that Third Wing rescued just before Stelvi Pass. Ma’ar had them all in chains and was going to pinion them. We don’t know what else he did tp them, but we do know they had been tortured in some fairly sophisticated and sadistic ways.”
There. Make her think of the gryphon in question as a personality, and not an “it.” See what that unlocks.
“It could have been,” Winterhart said slowly, as if the notion startled her. “There was a lot of scar tissue I couldn’t account for, and it was a female. . . .”
Amberdrake probed the injury again, before he spoke. “Ma’ar saves some of his worst tortures for the gryphons. Urtho thinks it’s because Ma’ar knows he thinks of them as his children, not as simply his ‘creations.’ “
“I didn’t know that.” Silence for a while, as the flames of the lanterns overhead burned with faint hissing and crackling sounds. “I like animals; I was always good with horses and dogs. That was why I became a Trondi’irn.”