Healer

Chapter 4

     Rhysand would be spending the night with his mate tonight in the city. He had been splitting his time between his home in Velaris and The House of wind since Azriel fell ill. He had hesitated to leave the healer alone in the house with Cass and Azriel. Cass had been especially on edge since his mate had been away for a few days and breaking Talia out of Hybern on little more than a whim hadn't helped. He would be with Feyre tonight, though.
Having the healer here offered him some relief from the urgency, it felt like maybe they had finally done something that could actually help. The hope it gave him had broken through the dread and revealed an exhaustion that only a long night in his own bed could relieve. He had been hiding a lot from his family, some of which had been confirmed and then revealed tonight. This "illness" had repercussions for all of them, and could give them a taste of the future in the bitterest way. He looked up and saw Cassian walking down the hall toward him, on his way back to Azriel's room. He had changed out of his armor and into more comfortable clothes. He approached his brother, his face in shadows.

"You're headed home?" Cassian asked.

"Yeah. I need the rest." Rhysand answered, running his hand through his dark hair. "You'll be fine?"

Cassian nodded in reply before pointing back down the hall toward Rhysand's office. "What was that about?"

Rhysand sighed, knowing that Cassian's suspicion was warranted and came from the same deep pit that had been opening before him for days now. "The healer heard what you said when we left the room earlier. That you feel she might have been involved in the attack." Cass opened his mouth to protest but Rhysand kept going. "She said she can't do her job to the best of her abilities without trust between us, so she asked me to look inside her mind. At what she saw and did that night." Cassian's mouth closed, his eyes widening slightly in surprise. Before he could ask, Rhysand went on, "She has been trained against daemati. She could tell Feyre and I were speaking earlier." He shrugged. "I should have realized that that could have been obvious to someone with her abilities." The other male crossed his arms then, waiting for Rhysand to confirm his suspicions or prove them wrong. "What I saw matched what Azriel had seen and said, and gave me no reason to believe she was involved in his attack. If you see her, Cass, why don't you ask her herself. She's been through a lot. Including being used by males who couldn't find it in themselves to treat her...."
He trailed off for a moment. Cassian understood. She, as a high fae female, deserved to at least be treated as such. "All she wanted that night was to escape. I'm sure you're familiar with that feeling." Cassian knew better than to argue and nodded his goodnight before walking to Azriel's door. As Rhysand entered the great hall and spread his wings, he shook off the scene he had stolen from the healer's mind. The part that Azriel couldn't have shared with him. The part he hadn't seen. In that moment, standing in his office, he had learned that she was just as broken as any of them and that made it harder to lie, to present one's self as something that it isn't. He knew from experience.

     Talia stopped outside the door to Azriel's room and took a deep breath, wiping the last of her tears away from her lashes. They had been few but embarrassed her none the less. She needed to present strength now, and nothing else but again she had had to bare a piece of her that was still raw to someone she barely knew. As she reached for the handle, she could hear heavy footsteps coming down the hall toward her. She turned to look, her hand resting on the cool metal. Cassian was approaching. He had changed out of his armor and seemed less tense, for the moment at least. He nodded and motioned for her to go ahead. She entered the room ahead of him, the soft faelight still casting the room in a tired glow. 

She realized she hadn't truly seen the sun in a long time, and she imagined what the room might look like as it streamed in through the windows. Cassian sat in an armchair near the fireplace opposite her and watched her approach the bed. The shadowsinger looked no different as he had the hour before. She would have asked to shut the windows due to the chill emanating from him, but it wasn't at all cold in the room. She shuddered anyway, knowing that it was the magic eating him alive that sucked the warmth from his once tan skin.
She had her back to the wary Illyrian, hoping her calm would calm him too. After her conversation with Rhysand, she could feel the tension release a bit, his shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch, and she hoped she could do the same for the third brother. She had given Rhysand no reason not to trust her and she would do the same with Cassian, only it would take different methods. And time. She stood for a moment, looking at Azriel, eyeing every inch of his face and his arms where they lay atop the blankets. She was thinking through how she might go about her process with Cassian watching her from across the room. She wanted to be alone but she couldn't ask him to leave. Not now. Maybe she should just go about it as though he weren't there. Maybe it would make him curious, maybe it would help him see that she is in this and she means well. Yes, she would carry on as though she and the shadowsinger were alone in the room.
She nodded to herself and strode unevenly to the other side of the bed, just as she had done before. Best not to have her back to the audience. Best he could see everything she was doing. She kicked off her shoes without looking up and stepped up on to the frame of the bed so she could reach him more easily. She pushed his left sleeve up again, above the elbow and placed both hands on his forearm. Beneath his icy skin and iron muscles, her healer's hands reached up to his shoulder and down into his body, searching for those venomous tendrils and placing a protective wall where they sought to push in. At the same time, her phantom fingers fluttered about, looking for fresh entry points and aiding the shadowsingers own healing powers in cutting the tendrils off and closing the wounds.
Had she been a fortnight earlier, she could have stopped the spread of the Hex altogether this way, but now, it was a catch-up game in hopes of adding a few days to their search for solutions. Her eyelids fell closed as she worked. She was outside of herself again, but within minutes, the cold of his skin began to bite into her hands and the wood from the bedframe cut into her bare feet. She bit her lip in contemplation as she opened her eyes to survey her options. She refrained from looking at her watcher across the room as she carefully climbed up on to the bed, avoiding the wing at her right and remaining as far as she could from his side. From here she made herself comfortable and reached for his arm once again.
This was draining for her, most healing being one or two major areas of focus where her powers could settle in, but this was all over his large frame and each small pinpoint took a new ounce of focus and skill. She closed her eyes again and let her head hang slightly, concentrating.