The Vacant Throne - Ed Greenwood [93]
After a moment of scrutiny, her face clouded as if she was trying to remember something that would not come to mind, Embra shrugged and closed her hand over its tiny beauty. Murmuring a few swift words, she opened her hands again, cupping them to cradle the Silvertree relic, and snapped an incantation that rolled and echoed in Raulin's ears, and made Hawkril turn his head from the whirl and ring of steel for just an instant.
And light blossomed above her palms, swirling blue and green, softer and more gentle than any tongue of flame. As the radiance flared, the figurine and the pot were gone.
Embra pointed her cupped hand like a claw at Sarasper's shoulder, as if her fingers were daggers, and then drew her hand slowly back almost to her shoulder… and the great shard of wood in the healer's shoulder trembled, shuddered, and slid slowly and stickily forth.
A great gush of dark blood followed it, and Raulin clutched frantically at Sarasper's wound to try to stanch the flow. Blue-green light licked around his fingers, and he drew back with a wondering look at Embra, shaking his hands to drive away a sudden tingling within them. Radiances swam in from the empty air to circle the old healer's wound… and then rush into it.
Light flashed and was gone. In its wake the blood stopped coming, though the shredded flesh remained bloody and torn, and the mask of agony that was Sarasper's face did not ease or show any signs of awakening.
"Guard him, Raulin," she murmured, trailing just the tips of her fingers along his shoulder as she stepped past the kneeling procurer.
"L-Lady, is he-?"
"Guard him," she said without turning. "I've done what I can for now. Hawk needs my spells more, and-Hawk!"
Her last word was almost a scream. Raulin spun around, the old man under his hands momentarily forgotten, to stare at the doorway.
Hawkril Anharu was doubled over in pain, facing the door with his great warblade trembling in his hand. Another sword was standing out of his guts, and only the still-raging firespell Embra had hurled in his aid was keeping the slayers in the passage back from charging through the doorway. They were cursing and trying to stab past the spinning balls of flame that roiled and bobbed above the threshold, but the swaying armaragor was just beyond their reach.
Embra plucked at Hawkril's arm, bending with him to peer at his wound-as the balls of flame in front of her flickered and began to fade. Her head turned, dark tresses swirling, and she screamed, "Raulin!"
The youth launched himself up from the floor in a running leap that carried him past the sorceress-another figurine slapped into Embra's palm as he swept past-to a chair near the door. Snatching it up, he ducked to his knees so as to be under the failing flamespell, and threw the chair wildly out into the passage. There was a brief tumult of thudding boots, men stumbling back into each other, and startled oaths.
Snarling, the bard's son snatched up another chair and held it in the last of Embra's dancing fires-until it caught alight, and he was holding a mass of flames. Grimly, biting his lip, he held the blazing chair in the doorway, crouching as far and as small behind it as he could.
Embra spared the lad not a glance. She'd knelt in front of Hawkril, heedless of the blood, to look up grimly into the clenched teeth of the warrior's sweat-soaked grimace. Gently she said, "This is going to hurt, but try to stay standing right here-and don't fall on me."
Eyes like flame burned into her as he nodded, once. Embra set her teeth, put the figurine in her mouth, and hauled the sword out of him.
Hot blood almost blinded her as she let the blade clatter down beside her, but she thrust two fingers into the wound before it could close, replacing them with the figurine in sobbing haste. Holding her hand over its small, rough base, she shouted the words of the healing spell she knew by heart now… and another Silvertree relic melted away to nothing under her fingertips