Page 19 of Elven Throne

The consuming glow of the healer’s magic was gone now, but her burns were almost as bad as Rebecca’s. The woman’s squinty eyes had returned to their beady blackness, though now she looked far older than the ancient healer Rebecca had come to know. Decrepit. Spent, empty.

The natural effects of powering herself up the way she had to end their battle—at her age and with so much life behind her and so little left ahead.

Zida wheezed out a rattling breath and turned her head a fraction of an inch to look up at the elf cradling her in her arms.

This was the woman’s deathbed, wasn’t it?

Or it would have been, if Rebecca hadn’t succeeded against nearly impossible odds.

“I had my suspicions, kid,” Zida wheezed, her voice a dry husk as every breath rattled in her chest. “But now I know what you are. I thought there were none of you left.”

“That makes two of us,” Rebecca replied, then coughed through the rawness searing her throat and almost screamed again beneath the pain.

They needed no more explanation than that.

Zida had proven herself as aShi’il Taaríthof the daraku—a powerful and exceedingly rare anomaly among her kind. As far as the legends went, allshi’illived as healers, but as a last resort at the eleventh hour, they possessed the ability to do what Zida had just done, if it meant protecting those in her care when all other options were exhausted.

Mutually assured destruction for theshi’ilandfor their enemies.

Only this one had had the Bloodshadow Heir to aid her in her cause.

And now Zida knew without a doubt who and what Rebecca truly was. No way to hide it anymore. No use pretending otherwise.

The sickening creak of burned flesh stretching tighter across the old woman’s face when she attempted a smile filled the back of Rebecca’s throat with a stinging burst of bile.

“Just you and me again, huh?” Zida asked, her eyelids heavy and drooping within her singed face. “Two legendary blockheads who shouldn’t even exist anymore.”

Rebecca grunted. “Legends are overrated.”

“So is this shit,” the healer croaked, sagging against her protector, on the verge of falling apart or dying, and they both knew it. “You tried. Didn’t work. So now’s the part where you leave and let me sneak out the back door. I’m done.”

“I’m not.”

Rebecca hardly had the strength to lift her hand after absorbing all the destructive energy of Zida’s uncontrolled power. Her Bloodshadow magic had filtered it through a protective burst, singling out every member of Shade to prevent them from being targeted like the griybreki, but it hadn’t left her in the best of shape.

Still, she’d pushed herself to greater limits than this before.Othershad pushed her farther too.

It was immensely difficult but not impossible.

Just staggeringly painful and utterly exhausting when she tightened her grip with one arm around the healer as much as possible, setting her palm against the old woman’s rattling chest. She hovered her other hand over her own heart to heal two bodies that had nearly been fused together—and would have been, if her magic had been any less precise.

The pain of her own flesh stitching itself up from the inside—bone and sinew and muscle knitting together, layer after layer, beneath the golden-orange glow erupting in her palm—was even worse than what had returned her to consciousness.

All that existed in those moments as she worked, forcing her magic to continue over the overwhelming pain and the need in the back of her mind to finish this for both of them, Zida shivered and trembled in Rebecca’s arms. Hissing in sharp, seething breaths as Rebecca’s magic reversed the damage to her body bit by bit.

But the healer didn’t complain. She hardly made a sound.

When it was finally over, Rebecca knew she’d be fine. She’d done this thousands of times before. Nothing felt wrong or like it wouldn’t heal the way it was supposed to.

Zida looked like she had no problem accepting the healing either, despite her full-body trembling. But with her, looks could be deceiving.

The old daraku was so old, so far past her prime, she could have handled only so much anyway. Rebecca’s magic was powerful, but it drew the line at bringing others back from the dead. Or reversing the effects of age and the ultimate end that came for everyone, eventually.

Rebecca was about to try her voice again and ask how the healer felt, but a haggard, booming shout stopped her, followed by clattering chunks of rubble being shoved aside amidst heavy shuffling and intermittent clacks across the asphalt.

A second later, Bor’s hardened, battle-weary face, smudged with dirt and oily, dark-green griybreki blood, appeared to their left, just above the edge of the crater, his staff in tow.

The hunched giveldi stopped abruptly when he saw Rebecca sitting up against the wall of a crater with Zida still sagging against her. Wide-eyed horror rippled across his face as he glanced from Rebecca, to Zida, to the appalling depth of the crater and back to his Roth-Da’al once more.

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