Chapter 9: Medicine

"Where are you?" Idris said again.

The room stayed silent except for the wolf.

It had crawled out from under the bed and stood with its forelegs braced on the mattress, howling at the ceiling.

The body lay under his hands, cold and slack.

The shade had gone.

Idris scanned the room, the lamp, the draped window, the tall wardrobe.

At the foot of the bed the lamplight flickered in a way it shouldn't have.

Something very thin seemed to be standing in it.

He put a hand out toward the flicker.

It was colder than the room.

"There you are," he said, and his voice cracked. "Don't you dare. I haven't even finished being angry about the rehearsal."

The flicker shook.

Idris turned back to the body and pulled his sleeves up.

He had seen this once, in his first life, in a man whose inner fire had cracked after a bad trial.

The old healers had said what you did.

You did not push.

A cracked core was a bowl with a seam, and you could not mend a seam from one side.

You mended it from both.

He laid his left palm over the Marshal's heart and his right over the Marshal's navel, and drew a long breath.

The golden warmth in his belly rose.

It went down his arms in two steady streams and into the cold body.

Where the first stream touched the crack in the Marshal's core, something answered.

Not the way a patient's body answers, with warmth and a pulse.

It answered the way a tuning fork answers its twin.

Idris frowned.

"Odd," he said.

He pushed harder.

The crack in the Marshal's core drew his qi in, greedy, unrelenting, and more of him went out than he had meant to give.

His own hands began to shake.

The room grew very far away.

Qi alone would not be enough.

It needed a door, and the Marshal's body was not letting anything in by the usual paths.

Idris looked at the pale mouth.

"I'm sorry," he said, to the body and to the flicker. "I'll apologize later. It's medicine."

He bent down and kissed him.

It was not like the first kiss.

There was no fever in it, no hunger.

He breathed into the Marshal slowly and steadily, and the gold went from his mouth into Dain's, and kept going.

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