The girl's chains made her heavy and awkward to hold. Several times Numair had to call to the two ahead of him to stop while he tried to readjust his grip and prevent her from slipping over his horse's damp shoulder. In the end he gave his reins to Kel, who walked her horse close beside his, and pulled the girl so tightly against him that he could feel the bumps of her spine pressed into his chest. He kept one arm wrapped around her midriff and the other across the front of her shoulders, just below her throat. The eminence of her was all around him and he was made almost dizzy by the disparity of its brilliance and the ruined body that it clung to, which smelled so foully of smoke, sweat and the indescribable, greasy smell of sickness. She was hot with fever, as though they had not left the smothering heat of the forge, and the small of her back was moist with sweat against his stomach. It was difficult, he realised suddenly, to think coherently about what power it was that radiated from her and he understood at once Neal's reluctance to speak about it to him. The act of considering it only made it harder to comprehend, like trying to recall the details of a receding dream. That it was not the presence of a Gift was the one thing he could conclude with certainty. What it was he could only guess at with the farthest corner of his mind, thinking sideways the way a hunter looks at a cautious animal that will flee once it knows it has been seen. `
"Kel," he said softly, as they rode through the trees towards the lit windows of his cottage, "How old would you say she is: eighteen or nineteen?"
He saw Kel's light eyes appraising the girl's limp body, "Not older than twenty-one."
Numair sighed and his breath made the loose curls on the back of the girl's neck flutter. Seeing Kel's enquiring glance at his face, he said, "I was thinking… If we knew she had come of age while in Tortall we might make an appeal to the King for her citizenship. No Tortallian could be legitimately reclaimed as a slave by anyone."
"She's dying," whispered Kel, so bitterly that Numair was taken aback, "What will Isaac want with her corpse?" She was close to angry tears; her throat was hoarse with keeping them back.
Numair shifted his arms so that they were crossed over the girl's chest, gripping her by the shoulders, closed his eyes and muttered something very quietly under his breath. Kel could not tell if it was an incantation or a thought spoken aloud, but afterwards he looked at her again with an odd, blank expression and said, "She might want to die, but I shouldn't think she will. To be honest, Kel, I'm not sure if she can."
Kel stared at him and was about to speak when the door of the cottage opened and Daine stepped out into the yard, Sarralyn peering out from behind her mother's legs. They halted and Daine shooed Sarralyn inside, then came and took the girl from Numair as he lowered her carefully from his horse. Despite his caution, the girl fell like a badly-thrown sack of flour and Kel was startled by the strength with which Daine caught her in a harsh jangle of chains. Neal dismounted hastily and moved to help her carry the girl into the cottage just as he and Numair had hoisted her from the forge. While Kel turned their horses loose into the cottage's paddock, Numair hurried to the well in the yard, pulling the bucket up from the depths with firm, hand-over-hand tugs.
"I want to see what it is I'm dealing with," he said to Kel when she joined him at the well, and they filled three pails of water to bring into the cottage. Daine and Neal had laid the girl down on the table, where her violent shivering was making the rough planks of the table top tremble. Her tremors worsened and she convulsed with coughs that were thick and painful-sounding. Daine held a clean cloth to the girl's lips and brought it away stained with blood. She looked at Neal with deep concern, "Some kind of lung disease?"
He nodded slowly and rested the back of his hand against her brow, making a small, unhappy noise at the blazing heat he found there. He began to roll up the sleeves of his tunic, pointing to the water Kel had just poured into the cast-iron pot that hung above the fire, "Get that water away from the heat. We need to lower her temperature."
"Here," said Numair, "Let me take these wretched chains off."
He stood over the girl and took her manacled wrists gently in his hands. The air grew heavy with power for a long moment, then the locks on the manacles burst open like chestnuts exposed to an open flame. Numair pulled them away, revealing the chaffed, scarred skin around the girl's wrists. Neal rubbed both of her hands between his own, massaging blood back into her fingers after the constriction of the chains. Once Numair had freed her ankles as well, the girl rolled onto her side and curled up with her knees against her chest. Neal sighed and placed one hand on the side of her head and the other on the flat place between her shoulder blades, which bulged so prominently beneath her filthy undershirt that they seemed almost wing-like. His eyes unfocused and Kel imagined his healing stretching out tentatively in careful tendrils, traveling through flesh and muscle to the girl's heaving lungs. But Neal's head snapped back after only half a second and his hands jerked away from her body as if stung.
"What is it?" asked Kel, grabbing him by the arm to steady him.
"I'm not sure. There's some kind of obstruction, something I can't explain." He pressed his fingers against his closed eyes, then seemed to draw himself back together and nodded once, sharply, as if making a quick decision, "Strip her and get her into cold water. I'm going to fetch someone better experienced than I am."
He pushed through them to the door and was gone before they could ask who he was going to call. Kel thought Numair seemed to know because he nodded after Neal, then turned and scooped Sarralyn up under the arms, bending his head to put her on his shoulders. He told Daine he was going to put her to bed if she and Kel thought they could manage the girl themselves. Daine let him go, rising up on her toes to give Sarralyn a soft kiss on the cheek. The little girl was sleepy, rubbing a fist against her eyes, but kept twisting around to stare at the girl on the table as Numair carried her out of the kitchen. Kel could hear him talking quietly to her in the next room as he got her ready for bed and once he gave a low laugh at something Sarralyn had said or done. Taking a deep breath, Kel drew her dagger and began to cut away the girl's clothes while Daine filled the tin bath with cold water from the well, then threw the remnants of the clothes into the fire. Beneath her clothes the girl was very thin but wiry with muscle from years of hard labour. The bruises from Kel's lance were an ugly purple and there was deep bruising around her left ankle as well, where her foot had caught in the stirrup. Despite the bruises, what caught Kel's immediate attention were the girl's knees, which were not bruised or scarred but seemed oddly shaped. Daine had seen it too, and she reached over and touched one knee lightly with her fingers, "Does she limp?"
"Yes, very badly. When she walks it looks as if she can't bend her knees properly."
Daine pressed her thumb against the knee and said, "Her kneecaps have been broken badly and left to heal in the wrong way. I saw a donkey with a knee like this once," she moved her hand up to touch a bump on one side of the girl's ribcage, "There's an old rib injury here, which is something I might expect to see in a slave: from a beating maybe, or a fall. But the knees are strange."
They pulled her carefully into a sitting position and found the long, thin welts across the skin of her back and shoulders from the horsewhip. There were nearly a dozen of them, a few of which had split and still bled a little. One particularly deep cut ran horizontally just below the nape of her neck and when Kel dabbed at it with the hem of her tunic, the girl flinched and seemed to come almost awake, half opening her eyes. Beneath the fresh welts, Kel could just make out thick, raised scarring from some worse event in the past.
Together they lifted her from the table and set her down in the tin bath, trying to keep her back clear of the water so that it wouldn't irritate the bleeding welts. Kel held the girl up and watched Daine throwing handfuls of water over her chest and face, where rivulets of sweat ran down from her hairline. Like Numair putting Sarralyn to bed, Daine spoke softly to the girl, telling her how pretty her dark curls of hair were beneath the sweat and coal dust. She called her names Kel remembered her own mother calling her when she was very young: darling, sweetheart. Kel's throat grew tight as she listened to her and she felt hot tears forming from a mixture of overwhelming anger and deep compassion. Then all at once the girl's shaking stopped and she lurched out of Kel's grip, her eyes fully open. She stood up from the water, which streamed down her naked body, and Kel saw with alarm that her nose was bleeding heavily. After only a moment, her knees buckled and she fell back into the bath with a splash. Kel and Daine both brought their hands up to their faces as water leapt up out of the bath and when they lowered them again, the girl between them had changed.
"O gods," whispered Daine, staring wide-eyed at the form in the bath. Its body was the girl's, skinny and bruised, but the head on her neck was no longer hers. It was the head of a dog: a black, long-nosed, sharp-eared jackal.
A noise from the cottage doorway made Kel tear her eyes from the dog-headed girl beside her and look up at Neal, who stood, astounded, just inside the kitchen with someone else coming in behind him. Alanna pushed past rather irritably and stopped, taking a long look at the scene before her with glinting violet eyes.
"Well," she said, "You lot have had an interesting evening."
