Telepath (A Hyllis Family Story #4) Page 9

  Eva had a focused look, “I think I remember reading about it. They used to call it a PDA, right?”

  Daussie nodded, “Short for patent ductus arteriosus. It’s supposed to close within a day or so after birth. When it stays open, it’s called ‘patent.’”

  Tarc realized the strap of tissue he’d seen in Susie’s older sister was the closed off ductus arteriosus.

  Daussie continued, “The PDA mixes oxygenated blood from the lungs with un-oxygenated blood so you don’t get as much oxygen as you need. The other problem it causes is that, after fetal life, the pressure coming out of the left side of the heart goes up to become much higher than the pressure coming out of the right side of the heart. This means the flow’s mostly from the aorta into the lungs. That over-pressurizes the lungs and makes the right side of the heart work extra hard.”

  “Oh,” Tarc said with sudden realization, “that’s why the walls of the right side of her heart were so much thicker, right?”

  Daussie nodded. She got a sad look. “Of course, back in ancient days they had some medicines that could help, but most importantly they could do surgery. They opened up the chest and just tied off the PDA.”

  Kazy, who’d been listening with wide eyes, said, “And you guys can’t do that?”

  Grimly, Eva said, “No. And it breaks my heart to have a sweet little girl like this that we can do nothing for.”

  Entreatingly, Kazy said, “But wasn’t what you did for Farlin kind of like surgery? You know, trimming away some of his bone to let the spike on one end fit into the marrow hole on the other?”

  Eva nodded in acknowledgment. “With Daussie’s ability, she can do simple little surgeries just to remove things. In fact, you could argue that she’s better at it than the ancients were. She doesn’t have to cut the patient open and run the risk of infection.” She shook her head slowly, “But there aren’t that many surgeries where all you need to do is cut something away. Cutting something out certainly isn’t a solution for an artery that needs to be closed off like in this little girl. Besides, when we worked on Farlin, Tarc blocked the nerves that went to his arm so it didn’t hurt. He can’t do that for the chest, there’re too many different nerves.” She sighed. “This problem’s way beyond what we cure. We should be grateful his mother didn’t like my soup analogy and left. Now we won’t have to look her in the eye and say there’s nothing we can do.”

  “Couldn’t you just give her enough poppy paste so she falls asleep like Farlin did?”

  Eva gave Kazy a surprised look, “He fell asleep?”

  Kazy nodded, “I was trying to get him to relax, telling him it wouldn’t hurt all that bad. When he fell asleep, it made me really happy that he trusted me on that. He didn’t wake up until you put his bone back in place.”

  Eva looked excited, “You told him over and over to relax?”

  Kazy nodded.

  “Maybe you hypnotized him,” Eva said, sounding excited. I’ve read about it, but I’ve never been able to do it.”

  Daussie said, “Hypnotized? What’s that?”

  “They write about it in some of the books. It was apparently a way to put people in a trance. Some people would go so deep in the trance they could have surgery, or you could help them remember things they’d forgotten. Sometimes you could help them break bad habits. I was pretty excited about it and tried to figure out how to do it but it never worked for me.” Eva’s eyes flashed in the lamplight, “I’ll help you find some of the places where it’s mentioned in the books so you can read about it. Maybe you can be our hypnotist.”

  Daussie grinned, “Maybe you can cure Tarc of his Lizeth habit?”

  Tarc felt himself blushing but hoped it wouldn’t show in the dim light. “Maybe you can cure Daussie of being such a jerk?”

  Daum ruffled Tarc’s hair, but spoke to Daussie, “Don’t give your brother too much grief. His kissing friend’s really dangerous. He might sic her on you.”

  Tarc felt like his head was about to explode. How does Dad know we’ve been kissing? Suddenly thinking of a way to distract his family from thinking about him kissing Lizeth, he said, “I think Lizeth might have an ability.”

  Daum laughed, “Yes she does. She has the ability to use that sword to make people sorry they picked on her boyfriend.”

  “Dad!” Tarc began, then made an effort not to sound whiny. “I’m talking about the kind of ability we have. Not teleportation or telekinesis… Or even having a ghost to feel things out, but something. Some ability… that’s the reason she’s so quick.”

  “Oh,” Daum said, his tone suggesting more than a sudden realization Tarc was serious. “I… I thought she might have a ghost of her own back when…” After a brief pause, he described the episode where she’d turned to face the dogs that were coming around the corner of the inn—before they’d become visible. “She’d even started calming her horse. I wondered if she’d been able to feel them with a ghost like I had.” He shrugged, “But then I decided she probably just had really good hearing and picked up the scrabbling of their claws.”

  Eva said, “Could you hear them?”

  Daum shrugged, “No. But you know young people hear better than old people.”

  Eva gently punched his shoulder, “Do not go calling yourself old. If you’re old, I’m old, and we know that’s not the case, right?”

  Daum leaned away from her, hands up, acting frightened, “No! No, I must be young.”

  Eva grinned at him, “Glad we’ve got that settled.” She turned to look at Tarc, “But maybe she does have a ghost. Could that explain whatever you saw her doing?”

  Tarc reached in his pocket and pulled out the nail he’d tested Lizeth with. “I’ve got something for you guys to try. Lizeth can do it every time. But I’ll bet none of you can do it even once.”

  It took a moment or two to explain, then each of them took turns trying to catch the nail when Tarc dropped it.

  Kazy caught it once—which excited her no end. She thought maybe she and Lizeth had the same ability. But Tarc thought it was probably just that she got lucky and jumped the gun. Despite trying twenty or thirty more times she never caught it again. As he predicted, no one else caught the nail at all.

  Daum shrugged and said, “It just sounds like she’s really fast. I don’t think that’s any kind of special ability… I mean, it’s pretty cool, and I certainly wish I was that fast. But still, we all know some people are faster than others. She’s just faster than most.”

  Tarc shook his head, “I don’t think so. She could catch it, even when I put my hand so it blocked her from being able to see me drop it.” He demonstrated how he’d placed his hand.

  Daum scratched his head, “Do that again?”

  Tarc did.

  Daum said, “My ghost can see the hand with the nail behind the one you’re using to hide it… But, I can’t see how that’d let me be any faster about reacting.” He looked around at the others, “Do any of you think you can see it faster with your ghost than you can see it with your eyes?”

  They had Tarc do it again. No one thought they could sense it any more rapidly. And, when they tried catching the nail—using their ghost to detect the drop—none of them caught it that way either. Daum shook his head, “I don’t think she does it with her ghost.”

  “Who does what with her what?” Lizeth asked, walking into the lamplight.

  Tarc thought everyone—probably including himself—looked guilty. He waited a couple of beats for someone else to come up with a reasonable explanation for what Daum said, then he held up the nail, “I’ve been telling them about how amazing it is that you can catch the nail when it falls. None of us can do it.” He hoped she hadn’t heard anything but Daum’s last sentence and that she hadn’t focused in on the word “ghost.”

  Lizeth looked around at all the Hyllises, Tarc expecting her to accuse them of hiding something. Then she said, “Really? None of you can catch it? I just thought Tarc was really slow.”

  Glad that Lizeth wasn�
�t focused in on what it was Daum thought she did, nonetheless Tarc felt hurt and came to his own defense, “Come on Lizeth. Sam wouldn’t have been betting silvers if he’d thought there was any chance he’d lose. You’ve got to be one in a thousand.”

  She gave him a stunning smile and arched one elegant eyebrow. “You better believe it.” She turned her attention to everyone else, “Norton’s asked me to go around and let everyone know we’re staying two more days. Then we’ll be heading on to Murchison’s.”

  After a little more chit chat, Lizeth left and the Hyllises turned to getting bedded down for the night. Tarc was left with a vaguely unsatisfied feeling that no one had believed him about Lizeth having a talent. Well, at least not a talent for anything but speed.

  Chapter Four

  In the morning, Tarc and Farlin set out on the road to the wood seller. They were to get enough for cooking the next two days so they took a couple of mules to pack it back. Daum had gone off to try to sell their newly acquired horses. Daussie and Kazy were running the booth and Eva, Nylin and Grace were cooking.

  He’d heard Daum complaining about how they couldn’t take care of their three rescuees indefinitely. Eva’d hotly responded that they weren’t going to cut them loose while Farlin’s arm was broken.

  Tarc thought Farlin was doing a pretty good job of making himself useful with just one arm. However, sending him along on Tarc’s trip to the wood seller bordered on silly. Tarc had Farlin leading one mule while Tarc led the other, but there wasn’t any reason Tarc couldn’t have led both mules himself. Farlin certainly wouldn’t be any help loading the wood onto the animals.

  Once they were well away, Farlin said quietly, “Thank you for rescuing my sister that night.”

  Tarc shrugged, “I did it for her, not for you. After all, remember, you’d been holding my sister at knifepoint.”

  “Only on pain of my own death!”

  Tarc waved that off. “So, how’d your family come to get caught by those bastards in the first place?”

  Gloomily, Farlin said, “We were taking Nylin to Murchison’s to be married. I told my dad we should have gone with a caravan or hired some guards.”

  Tarc frowned, surprised because travel between towns truly was unusual for someone outside of a caravan. “How did she meet someone in Murchison’s?”

  “She didn’t. My father did business with a man up there who had a son the right age. Dad didn’t want her marrying any of the men in our town.”

  “And she was okay with that?”

  “No.” Farlin snorted, “She had a boyfriend. He was one of the men in our town that father especially didn’t want her to marry.”

  “In your town parents tell their children who to marry?” Tarc asked, appalled.

  Farlin nodded gloomily. He turned to Tarc, “Do you think… Would your family be willing to keep what happened to her a secret?”

  “What part of what happened to her?” Tarc asked suspiciously.

  “You know, that she was captured, and… that…”

  For a few moments, Tarc considered making Farlin spell it out despite the difficulty he was having talking about it. He relented and said, “You’re worried people will think less of her if they know she was held by a gang of men?”

  “Well, yes, of course. Especially her… betrothed.”

  Tarc fumed with anger: that people in general would blame Nylin for what someone else had done to her; that her brother cared what such small minded people thought; that what those people thought mattered to anyone; and that the Ragas had done something like that to her in the first place. The Ragas were people who truly deserved to die, he thought, trying not to wonder whether any more of them had been conscripted into their ill deeds as Farlin had been.

  Eventually, he asked, “Isn’t her… betrothed and his family going to be wondering why she didn’t get there a long time ago?”

  “Yeah,” Farlin said with a long sigh. “I haven’t figured out what we’ll tell them, but there’s probably no point in working out a story if you guys are just going to tell them what really happened anyway.”

  “Nylin still wants to marry this guy?”

  “She didn’t want to marry him in the first place. But now, with… with my parents gone, I don’t know how we’re going to get by if she doesn’t.”

  “Didn’t you inherit your father’s business?”

  Farlin shrugged with his uninjured shoulder, “Probably. But I’m not sure how well it’d been doing. I was afraid that he was having money troubles and that’s why he wanted Nylin to marry into a rich family in Murchison’s.”

  Tarc said, “It almost sounds like your dad was selling her.”

  Farlin’s lips pressed into a thin unhappy as he gave a tiny shrug.

  “Surely you’re not going to carry through on that plan?!”

  Sounding desperate, Farlin said, “What am I supposed to do? We don’t have any money!”

  Tarc thought about the money that Nylin dug up back at the Ragas’ camp. He didn’t know how much it was, or whether Farlin already knew about it. But he resolved it should be Nylin’s secret.

  They arrived at the wood seller, and Tarc busied himself strapping bundles of wood onto either side of their two mules. He didn’t want to think about Farlin and Nylin’s problems, but couldn’t keep his mind from circling back to them.

  They started back, barely talking, each plodding along deep in their own thoughts. They were most of the way back to Clancy Vail when the road they’d been following made a right angle turn. This almost always meant that a road was following one of the ancients’ streets. Tarc was pondering the ancients’ proclivity for turning streets on right angles when he became aware of a number of frenetic people up ahead of them.

  Arriving at the scene of the excitement, Tarc asked a bystander, “What’s going on?”

  The man pointed to a weeping woman and a frantic looking man near the road. “Their little girl disappeared. The mother says she was picking berries over there,” the man waved toward her. “Her little toddler was no more than three meters from her when the girl simply vanished.”

  “Wolves?” Tarc asked.

  The man shrugged, “We don’t see them around here and you’d think the child would’ve made some noise if a wolf grabbed her. Unfortunately, there’s no better explanation.”

  Tarc watched all the people randomly moving about for a couple of minutes, thinking that someone should get them organized. He wanted to help but knew upset people could be suspicious of strangers.

  But his ghost’s ability to sense something warm like a child might make all the difference in the world.

  Finally, he turned to Farlin and said, “Watch the horses.” He walked out to a man who seemed to be telling some of the people what to do. “Do you mind if a stranger helps you look?”

  The man shook his head abruptly, then turned to tell someone else what to do. It seemed to Tarc that he didn’t object to Tarc helping, but also didn’t think he’d be useful.

  Tarc wended his way out near the mother. She’d stopped crying and begun calling what Tarc presumed was the girl's name. “Tina, Tina, come to Mama.” She repeated this over and over, though her tone seemed hopeless.

  Tarc was fairly near the mother, so he asked, “Where’d you last see her?”

  She pointed to some low bushes, “Over there. Tina, Tina. Where’d you go?”

  Tarc walked over near the low bushes then pushed his ghost out as far as he could, slowly turning around in order to correlate the warm spots his ghost could feel with the people his eyes could see. He’d felt fairly certain of his chances when he first started, but as he slowly turned around, sensing nothing but the people he could easily see, disappointment set in. It must have been a wolf, he thought. Something that carried the girl away. Then, bleakly, Most likely a human wolf.

  He turned about once again, starting to tell himself that the child wasn’t really his problem and that sooner or later someone would start thinking about human wolves and loo
king for a stranger to blame. I’d better get out of here, he thought.

  He glanced up, wondering about the possibility of some large bird of prey. He didn’t think they were strong enough to carry away a toddler, but he didn’t really know. In any case, the skies were empty, just as you’d expect if a bird of prey had carried the child away. Surely it’d be long gone by now.