Free Cyador’s Heirs by L. E. Modesitt Jr. Page B

almost patronizing tone. “If you keep working you might even be their commander when Lephi is ruler of Cigoerne.”
    Lerial keeps a pleasant smile on his face. I hope that’s a long time coming. “You didn’t tell me why there are no healers—”
    “Men aren’t supposed to be healers, except maybe if they’re officers, and they can do a little healing for wounded men. Healers feel too much to be effective fighters…” Kiedron shakes his head. “Feeling pain and suffering is necessary to be a good healer, but all that feeling would keep a Lancer from being effective in battle.”
    From beside her brother, where Kiedron is not looking, Emerya gives Lerial the smallest of headshakes. Lerial represses a smile.
    “Besides,” adds Lephi, “people think healers aren’t strong, and it wouldn’t be good for us if the barbarians think our officers are weak.”
    “There’s strength, and there’s strength,” Emerya says calmly. “It takes a certain kind of strength to face wounds and fluxes and blood all over everything and to do the best you can do … and know that it might not be enough. I’ve seen Lancers able to cut down barbarians with ease pale and almost faint when they see a woman or a child who’s been badly hurt and bleeding all over everything.”
    Surprisingly, at least to Lerial, his mother nods at Emerya’s words.
    Kiedron almost frowns, Lerial thinks.
    Instead, his father declares firmly, “We need both kinds of strength.” Then he turns to Xeranya. “What might we be having for dinner?”
    Even as he understands that his father has ended any further discussion of healers, Lancers, and strength, Lerial wonders why his father has done so.

 
    VII
    Lerial wakes early on eightday, but does not rise immediately. Instead, he lies on top of the covers, trying to cool off, because even before dawn on the third level of the palace the air is so still and hot that it might well be an oven, but the sheet gets damper with each moment, and he sits up. He does not cool down, not when there is no breeze coming through the windows, but at least when he sits up, he gets no hotter and his sweat doesn’t soak the sheet.
    As he sits there looking toward the window, and the heat-silvered green-blue sky beyond, he cannot help but worry. Since his father had stopped Emerya’s comments about healers, Kiedron had not said a single word to Lerial, either in the courtyard or at dinner … or after. Lerial cannot remember that ever happening. Ever.
    Finally, he stands, then walks slowly to his dressing chamber, where he washes and dresses, wearing the lightest cotton undertunic and tunic that he has. Then he slips from his rooms and makes his way to the back stairs, moving as quietly as he can down to the family breakfast room. He hears nothing, suggesting that no one else is up yet, but when he steps into it, he stops short, for his father is sitting alone at the end of the table.
    Kiedron gestures, pointing to the chair beside him.
    Lerial swallows, then walks to the chair and seats himself.
    “It’s time we had a talk, Lerial.”
    “Yes, ser.”
    Kiedron turns in his chair to face his son directly. “Your mother and I think that you need to spend some time away from Cigoerne.”
    “Ser? To Afrit?”
    Kiedron shakes his head. “I wouldn’t send you that far now. I mean outside the city.”
    Lerial understands the reasons why his father has never called the lands he holds anything other than Cigoerne, particularly given the uneasy relations between Cigoerne and Afrit, although, properly speaking, only the small city on the Swarth River is Cigoerne. That ambiguity can be confusing at times, but his father has declared that it is something they will have to live with for a time yet.
    “You need to see how life is away from here.”
    Lerial is still thinking about what his father has said—that he wouldn’t send Lerial that far now . That suggests he might in the future.
    “Lerial…”
    “I’m sorry, ser.