The King's Second Heart

Healer Wenna

"Eyes open, child. I have not got all day."

The voice was old and brisk and slightly impatient and perfectly kind, and it was not the voice of Ysolde.

Elowen's eyes opened.

The light in the chamber had changed. The soft golden afternoon light through the tall windows had moved up the painted vaulted ceiling and was now slanting in a long pale line across the deep blue and gold rug at the foot of the bed. She had slept the entire morning and most of the afternoon. The fire in the unseen hearth had been built up. The chamber was warm.

A small elderly woman in pale grey robes was sitting on a wooden stool that had been pulled up to the side of the bed.

She had a long careful face and white hair pinned in a neat coil at the nape of her neck. Her hands were in her lap and her hands were the hands of a healer — the small thin clean hands of a woman who had been washing them in cold water and clean cloth between patients for fifty years. She wore no jewellery. She wore no ornament. She wore a single small grey-and-silver pin at the throat of her robes that Elowen, who had been raised in a careful house, recognized as the small private mark of the royal healer of the house of Velmoria.

A tray on a low folding table beside the stool held a row of small glass jars and a small silver knife and a clean folded cloth and a small wooden bowl of warm water from which the steam was still rising in a thin pale ribbon.

Ysolde was at the window with her mending. She did not look up.

"My name is Wenna," the old woman said. She did not soften her voice. She spoke to Elowen the way you speak to an adult woman who has been treated like a sick child for too long and needs, very urgently, to be treated like an adult woman again. "Royal healer to the house of Velmoria for thirty-one years. I am going to examine you, and I am going to ask you a great many questions, and you are going to answer them honestly because I am the only person in this palace who can help you and I do not have time for shyness. Is that understood?"

Elowen nodded.

There was something about the old healer's brisk plain manner that made her feel, for the first time since she had opened her eyes in this gilded chamber, like she was in the presence of a competent adult who was not going to lie to her about anything. The bowing servants and the careful Lycan attendants and the kind young Ysolde at the window had all been gentle and good, but they had also been careful with her, in the small soft way one is careful with a frightened animal, and the carefulness had been kind and exhausting at the same time. Wenna was not being careful. Wenna was being useful, and being useful was a different small thing entirely.

"Good. Then let us begin. I am going to listen to your heart first. I am going to put my ear against the front of your shift on the left side, here. Is this acceptable?"

"Yes."

Wenna leaned forward with the small slow practiced movement of a healer who had bent over many bedsides, and she pressed her ear against the front of Elowen's shift on the left side of her chest, and she held very still.

She listened.

She listened for a long time. Longer than any healer had ever listened to Elowen's heart in her life. Elowen could feel the small warm shape of the old woman's ear through the linen of the shift, and she could feel the small careful breath of the old woman against her collarbone, and she did not move and did not speak because she could feel — even without being a healer — that Wenna was hearing the second heartbeat under her own.

Wenna sat back up.

Her face had not changed. The face of a fifty-year healer was a hard face to read. But her eyes had gone slightly sharper.

"How long have you had two heartbeats, child?"

Elowen blinked.

She had not been expecting the question. She had been expecting Wenna, the way she had expected every healer in her life, to listen to her chest and tell her that everything was fine and that she was being a fevered fool. She had not been expecting Wenna to ask her, in the brisk plain voice of a competent adult, the small impossible question Elowen had not yet been able to ask anyone aloud about her own body.

"I — I do not know."

"You do not know."

"I — there has been a small extra pulse in my chest for as long as I can remember. Since I was a child. It would come and go. It would come for a few days and then it would go for a few months. It was very small. It was a flutter. I — I told the healers about it once or twice when I was a girl and they told me it was a fever-shadow and that I imagined it. I stopped saying it. It has been very quiet for a long time. It became — it became louder, perhaps two months ago. It became loud enough to count, perhaps four nights ago. I — I do not know what it is. I have not — there has been no one to ask."

Wenna's face did the small careful thing it had done a moment ago, and then it set itself back into the calm useful working face of a healer.

"Hmm. Continue. Hold up your right hand."

Elowen held up her right hand.

Wenna took the wrist between her own two cool fingers and pressed her thumb into the soft place under the bone and counted, in the small silent way healers count, the beats of the small wrist-pulse for a long minute. Then she released the wrist and took the other one and did the same. She looked into Elowen's eyes, one at a time, by tilting Elowen's chin up with two fingers and looking very directly into the back of each eye in turn. She asked Elowen to open her mouth and looked at her gums and her tongue and the back of her throat. She pressed two careful fingers into the small hollow at the base of Elowen's throat and felt the bone there. She moved down to the wrists again and turned them over and pressed her thumbs into the small place above the heel of the hand where the small bone of the wrist met the bone of the arm.

She did all of it without a word. She did all of it in the small slow steady silence of a fifty-year healer working through the long careful checking she had done on hundreds of women in her career.

Then she said: "I am going to look at your bruises now. May I lift the shift?"

"Yes."

Wenna lifted the soft linen shift very gently. She did not pull it up over Elowen's head. She loosened the small ties at the throat and slid the shoulder of the shift down Elowen's left arm to bare the upper arm and the side of the ribcage. She did the same to the right side. She moved the linen down to bare the line of Elowen's collarbones and the soft place at the centre of her chest above the swell of her breasts. She moved the linen back to bare the long line of Elowen's hips.

The bruises were everywhere.