The Assassin's Destiny (Isle of Dreams) (33 page)

Mistral was almost sobbing by the
time she and Cain laid Fabian across their bed.  Denied sleep for two
nights and exhausted by the battle, her mind had gone beyond the limits of
reason.  She was wretched with fear, trembling and disorientated. 

‘Get that arrow out.’  Cain
instructed her sharply while he unfastened his saddlebag.  ‘But make sure
you don’t break it.  We don’t want to be digging around for the arrow
head.’

Mistral reached out with a
shaking hand to touch the shaft of the arrow and saw a tremor of pain run
across Fabian’s face.

‘No!  It’ll hurt him!’

‘It’s already hurting him! 
Just get it out!  I need to mix an antidote while you do it!’

Mistral gritted her teeth and
tightened a hand around the arrow.  Fabian’s pain-filled eyes flickered
open and stared unseeingly into hers.

‘I can’t do it!’  she cried
hysterically, watching Fabian’s eyes slowly close once more.

‘Well I will then! 
Move!’ 

Cain shoved her out of the
way.  Wrapping a clean linen cloth around the shaft of the arrow he began
to pull.  Fabian’s eyes abruptly flew wide open.  Cain tugged sharply
at the arrow, wrenching it out with one clean pull.  Fabian cried out then
his eyes rolled back, his face slack. 

Mistral stared in horror at his
waxen face, ‘You’ve killed him!’

‘No I haven’t Mistral!’ 
Cain snapped.  ‘He’s blacked out.  Now if you can’t calm down you’re
of no use to me.  Get it together or get downstairs!’ 

Mistral stared with wild eyes at
Cain for a moment then forced in a deep breath. 

‘Tell me what to do.’

‘Take his shirt off and clean the
wound.’  Cain ordered sharply.  ‘I’m going to start mixing
antidotes.  We’ll start with something simple … bloodwort –’

While Cain moved away from
Fabian’s side and knelt to rummage through his saddlebag Mistral stared
frozenly at the still body on the bed.

‘Mistral, get on with it!’ 
Cain hissed over his shoulder, his hands full of coloured bottles.

Taking a shuddering breath,
Mistral reached out and began to unbutton Fabian’s blood-soaked shirt. 
She gently teased the fabric back, wincing at what it revealed.  The wound
was deep.  Dark gore seeped from the glistening hole.  Purplish
staining at the edges told her instantly that Cain was right.  A strong
poison had been on the arrowhead.

Forcing herself to focus on the
wound and not Fabian’s unmoving face, Mistral began to work.  She cleaned
the wound methodically, drying it carefully while she listened to the soothing
clink of Cain’s glass bottles. 

‘Right, let’s try this for a
start.’

Cain moved quietly over to the
bed and passed Mistral a small bottle filled with a ruby coloured liquid.

‘I’ll lift him.  You need to
get as much of this into him as possible.’

Cain was a lot smaller than
Fabian and struggled to hold his unconscious body while Mistral prised his
mouth open.  Somehow they managed and Mistral poured the contents of the
bottle into his mouth.  When the last drop had been drained she looked at
Cain. 

‘That’s all of it.’

‘Good.’  Cain grunted and
slowly lowered Fabian back against the bed.

‘How do we know if it’s worked or
not?’  Mistral asked, her eyes lingering on Fabian’s deathly pale face.

‘When he either wakes up … or
dies.’

Mistral eyes jerked up to meet
Cain’s.

‘In the meantime we need to do
all we can.  We should stitch the wound to stop any infection getting in
–’ Cain noted her stricken expression and frowned.  ‘Mistral?  Can
you stitch it or do you need me to?’

Mistral stared at Cain, the task
he was charging her with seeming insurmountable.  She could do that for
Fabian couldn’t she?  Help heal the man she loved?  She found her
voice at last, a quiet whisper that seemed to come from someone else but said
the words she wanted. 

‘I’ll do it.’

By the time she had finished
stitching the wound in Fabian’s shoulder the twins had returned from the
stables and prepared a meal.  She could smell a stew cooking and hear them
talking quietly in the room downstairs.

‘Mistral?  Cain?’ 
Phantom’s voice called softly.  ‘There’s some food here if you want to
eat.’

‘One of us should stay with him.’
 Cain said quietly. 

‘I’ll stay.  I couldn’t eat
anyway.’  Mistral muttered, not taking her eyes from Fabian’s face.

Cain picked up his saddlebag and
walked downstairs, leaving her alone with Fabian.  Time seemed to slow
again as Mistral sat and stared numbly at his unmoving body.  She noticed
everything but nothing meant anything to her.  It was as though she were
on the outside of a window looking in.  She could hear Cain and the twins
talking in low voices downstairs.  Prospero twitched in his sleep at her
feet and growled softly.  Outside one of the horses neighed and further
away she could hear the sound of bird song.  Mistral realised dimly that
the small window in the bedroom was filled with grey light.  A new day had
dawned. 

Fabian suddenly gave a long
rattling gasp.  Mistral’s eyes snapped back to him, a gasp of terror
leaving her as he began to convulse violently.

‘Cain!  Something’s
happening!’

Prospero leapt to his feet and
growled at the sound of urgency.  Cain and the twins burst into the room,
Phantasm immediately pulled her away as Cain bent over Fabian and felt his
brow.

‘He’s running a fever.  My
antidote hasn’t worked.  Damn it!’  Cain swore and shook his
head.  ‘He really needs Theriac to survive this.’

‘Which bottle is that in?’ 
Mistral demanded urgently and yanked herself free of Phantasm to run downstairs
for Cain’s saddlebag.

‘I haven’t got any.’ 

‘We’ll make some!  What do
you need?’  Mistral cried, staring at him with panicked eyes.

‘We can’t.’  Cain said
flatly.  ‘It has over seventy ingredients and takes at least a day to
prepare.  We don’t have the ingredients or the time.’

‘Wait!’  Phantom cried
suddenly.  ‘Theriac!  I know that stuff!  I read about it in
Master Nox’s tower room!  I bet he has a bottle on that table!’ 

‘Oh!  You’re right!  He
does have a bottle!  I remember nearly knocking it over and he practically
had a heart-attack!  It’s the dark green one with flat sides!  If we
leave now we could be back within three hours!  We’ll get fresh horses
from the Equus for the journey back –’

Phantasm and his brother were
already running down the stairs before he had finished speaking, his voice
abruptly cut off by the slamming of the front door.

The silence that followed was
broken by the sound of Fabian’s laboured breathing as his body fought the
poison that was killing him.  Mistral stared blankly at Cain while he
worked to try and lower Fabian’s fever, the unspeakable fear clawing at the
edge of her mind rendering her completely useless.

‘Mistral …
Mistral
!’

She blinked and switched her
frozen stare to meet his.

‘Get me more cold water and clean
cloths!  We need to get this fever down or he won’t survive long enough
for the Theriac to arrive!’

Mistral nodded and forced herself
to move and obey his requests, bringing a constant supply of fresh water and
cloths up from the kitchen and hovering anxiously beside Cain to watch him
apply them to Fabian’s skin.  The light filtering in through the window
grew stronger as the morning wore by, the bright rays throwing into sharp
relief the sunken face on the pillow. 

‘I’ve done all I can.’  Cain
said softly and sat back, rubbing a hand over his exhausted face.  ‘We
should eat, keep our strength up.’

‘I couldn’t.’  Mistral
whispered, barely noticing when Cain left to go downstairs.

Mistral stared unblinkingly at
her Mage, rigid with tension, waiting for the sound of hooves in the courtyard
to tell her that the twins were back. 

‘Cain!’ 

Mistral’s gasp of joy bought Cain
running to her side.

‘Look!’  she hissed
excitedly, staring with wild hope at Fabian, watching his shivering gradually
slowing and then stopping altogether.  

‘That’s good isn’t it?’  she
whispered elatedly to Cain, her eyes not leaving Fabian’s pale face.

Cain didn’t reply and Mistral
turned to stare at him, the hope fading from her eyes at the flatness of his
expression.

‘Cain?’

Cain sighed, ‘I’m sorry Mistral,
but it’s not good.  His body has given up fighting the poison.  It’s
just a matter of time now.’

Denial escaped her lips in a
desperate hiss.  She sank onto the bed, watching the man she loved
dying.  Before her very eyes the life seemed to seep from his body until
his chest was barely moving with each shallow breath.

‘But ... he can’t die!’ she
turned to stare beseechingly at Cain.

Cain looked at her steadily, ‘He
can and one day he will.  He may be a Mage but he chooses to be a
warrior.  We all die like this one day.’

Mistral shook her head, frantic
with agony, ‘No!’

Cain’s voice was calm, ‘Yes
Mistral.  We each know our fate.  We’ve known it since the first day
of training.’

Mistral gazed at Fabian, her eyes
moving over the face she loved, so still, like he was already dead, ‘No. 
I can’t live without him.’

‘You can and you will.’

‘How?’  Mistral demanded in
an agonised whisper.

‘Because he would want you to.’

Mistral stared blankly at her
dying Mage while Cain’s words rolled around in her head ...
Because he would
want you to …
Like stones falling into water, the events of the last few
weeks dropped into place, making sense in her numb mind.  Fabian’s sudden
inexplicable desire for her to be married to him.  To have the De Winter
name and inherit the estate if he were to die.

To die.

Abruptly, Malachi’s words of the
Craft doing anything to protect its vessel sprang into her mind.

‘The Craft!’  she
gasped.  ‘It’s meant to protect the person it exists within!  Why
isn’t it healing him?’

Cain sighed, ‘I think it’s
probably the only thing keeping him alive right now.  Any of us would have
died within minutes of being shot with that poison.  But it can’t heal him
Mistral.  Theriac is our only hope now.’

Mistral stared at Fabian,
desperately willing the mysterious force that existed inside him to keep him
alive for just a little while longer.  The Craft.  That inexplicable
power that lay within him.  Had it somehow known its vessel’s time was
drawing to a close?  By the nature of Bonding, hers and Fabian’s souls were
inextricably linked.  Did the Craft then see her as an extension of
Fabian?  Like some satellite vessel that also needed to be
protected?  Had it prompted Fabian to ensure her continued existence
without him by the only way he could?  By giving her his name before he
died?

Panic clawed at her, threatening
to overwhelm her.  She leapt from the bed and stared wildly at Cain.

‘I – I need some air –’

‘Go.  I’ll stay with
him.’  Cain murmured, not taking his eyes from Fabian’s waxen face.

Mistral stumbled down the stairs,
her mind wheeling frantically.  Fabian dying now seemed inevitable. 
She began to hyperventilate as she faced the unthinkable prospect of a life
without him. 

Cain was wrong.  There was
no way she could live without him.  The very thought of the half-existence
she’d led the year before proved that.  She knew without a shadow of doubt
that her stubborn nature was too strong to let her simply give up and die the
way Elnora had.  She would force herself to take endless Contracts until
she accepted the final, fateful one that would be her last.  Like Cain had
said,
we all die like this one day.

Mistral could see her future
stretching out before her, bleak and desolate to the day she welcomed her
warrior’s fate.  Leo’s words to them on their first day had made it clear
to them all what their fates were.

Leo
…

As
Mistral thought his
name she knew with absolute certainty that her ambitious Training Captain would
never let her die, not if she had the Sight.  Even if she was too wracked with
grief to master her gift he would keep her imprisoned in the Valley in the hope
that she might recover one day and become of use to him once more.  

Weak with despair, Mistral leaned
her hands against the kitchen table and stared blindly at Cain’s worn leather
saddlebag.  Her hands suddenly tightened on the edge of the table, so hard
that splinters dug into her skin but she wasn’t aware of the pain, only the
idea forming in her mind.

Cain’s potion kit. 

Her solution was sitting there on
the table, right before her eyes.  She wouldn’t have to go on without
Fabian.  She wouldn’t become a slave to Leo’s ambition.  She could
escape the emptiness of a life without Fabian. 

And be with Fabian.

Blinking back the tears that
threatened, Mistral suddenly knew what she had to do.  With a trembling
hand she slowly reached out and lifted the flap.  Moving slowly, she slid
her hand into the bag and felt around carefully for the distinctively square
shaped bottle that held Cain’s own potent brand of poison.  Her answer. 
Her escape. 

‘What are you doing?’ 

Cain’s soft voice made her
jump.  She spun round to see him standing near, regarding her with
suspicious eyes.

‘I – I was looking for the
bloodwort.  I thought we could try that again until the twins got back,’ she
lied quickly, keeping her gaze locked on his.

‘Liar.’  Cain stepped past
her and reaching into the bag.  ‘You were looking for this weren’t
you?’  he pulled out a black bottle of poison and held it up, eyeing her
accusingly.

Her gaze flickered over the
bottle in Cain’s hand then she suddenly lunged for it.

‘I never had you down as weak
Mistral!’  Cain hissed furiously, snatching the bottle away.