Raven's Strike (Raven #2)(23)

He sat on the bed with a grunt of relief, and she helped him swing his legs up.

"Now," she told him, after she'd stripped off her wet outer clothing. "I'm going to see if I can't make you more comfortable. If you tell Brewydd about this, I'll never hear the end of it. Pain is your body's way of telling you that you need to rest, or you'll do permanent harm. Nothing I can do will make you heal faster, but I can take away the pain for the night."

She touched the arches of his feet, then the ankles, working slowly up with just a breath of magic. When she touched his knees, his whole body relaxed.

"That feels wonderful," he breathed.

"It'll feel better before I'm done," she said, kissing him softly on the mouth. "But you'll curse me in the morning when I release the magic." She slid her hands up the outside of his thighs and over his hips.

"Have I told you I love you today?" he asked, eyes closed in bliss.

"You're just afraid of what I'll do to you if you don't," she said absently, her attention on the magic that she threaded carefully over his hurts.

He opened his eyes and put a hand under her chin. "I'm not afraid of you," he said, tugging her down for another kiss, this one carnal and knowing. "I love you," he said, when she lifted her head.

She found her lips curving upward on their own before she turned back to her work. "The forest king told me the shadow-tainted creatures were called by a rune in the temple. He said the only one who could have created the rune was a Shadowed."

"Ah," said Tier. "I know you were hoping against this."

She paused in her spell casting, blowing a stray hair that had escaped its braid out of her eye. "A Shadowed brings sorrow behind him in a blanket of death."

"Is the Shadowed a return of the Unnamed King?" asked Tier.

"No," she said. "He's a man who enslaves himself to the Stalker and takes power and immortality as his pay."

"There have been others?"

She nodded, tracing a faint scar on Tier's chest that he'd gotten fighting the Fahlarn before she'd met him. It came from a near-mortal wound that Tier seldom talked about. "A few."

"The Stalker is the thing that the wizards of Colossae imprisoned by destroying their city."

Seraph flattened her hand, warming it on his skin. "They didn't destroy the city, Tier. They sacrificed it."

He shifted restlessly under her hand. "You've told me that before. You mean they killed everyone who lived there except the wizards who cast the spell."

"Yes and no." It was an old story, but it wasn't one Travelers talked about much. "Every morning, Alinath gets up and the fires are lit in the bake ovens, just as your family has done since the bakery was built centuries ago. The whole village has tasks that have been performed every day - rituals of living. There is power in that, Tier, just as there is power in the spark of life that is the heart of the difference between your body and a clay pot. The wizards extracted the power of everyday rituals, of generations of living, as well as the deaths of their families and friends who had trusted them. The mages killed the people whom they loved, and there was power in that, too, more than death by itself would have brought. They used all that power and knew it wasn't enough to destroy their creation, only keep him in check."

"What does the Stalker want?" asked Tier, ever the storyteller. "What did it do to frighten the wizards into killing their families?"

"The Traveler word that translates into Common as Stalker also means the death of the prey that is stalked - not for food, but for the sheer love of destruction." She shrugged unhappily. "That's all anyone knows of it - just that the Colossae wizards named it the Stalker, then destroyed their lives in order to contain it."

"The Unnamed King nearly destroyed humankind."

Seraph nodded. "Mistwights live on small prey. They don't play with their food like a cat might. The tainted one we found was deliberately terrorizing the smith because it enjoyed it. So perhaps the Stalker drives those who serve it to terrible deeds. Certainly death follows the Shadowed and those who are tainted."

"You said Benroln was shadowed," said Tier.

She nodded. "It's unusual. Most of the shadow taint we Travelers see is still damage done by the Unnamed King."

"How did it happen?"

"I thought at first it was Volis who did it," she told him. "He was certainly tainted himself - as were all the Masters of the Path. But my old teacher, Arvage, told me once that he thought the Stalker was constrained from forcing his will upon others, a constraint not faced by the Shadowed for some reason. If that is true, then it was the Shadowed who was responsible for the taint that stained the Path wizards and Benroln."

"What is the difference between a man who is shadow-tainted and one who is the Shadowed?"

"A taint is imposed upon you," Seraph said. "It takes little sins - buried resentments and angers - and builds upon those until they are pulled to the forefront. Bandor hit your sister - peace, Tier, it wasn't his fault. I was just using that as an example of how much tainting can change a personality. If you fight the taint, it will eat away at you until you are little more than a beast and can no longer hide the madness. The Masters lived with it for years as far as I can tell."