The King's Second Heart

Ysolde

"Drink a little more water first."

Ysolde did not answer the question.

She lifted the silver cup again and held it to Elowen's mouth, and she did not say because you deserve kindness and she did not say because you have been hurt and she did not say any of the small careful things a kind young woman might have said to a sicker and more frightened young woman in a strange bed, and Elowen, who had been bracing for any of those words, was grateful that Ysolde said none of them.

She drank three more small sips.

Ysolde set the cup down. Then she did the small careful thing she had clearly decided to do instead of answering the question. She slid her arm under Elowen's shoulders again, and she lifted her — slowly, slowly, with the small steady patience of a sister moving an older sister — and she eased her up against the soft pillows so that Elowen was sitting almost upright in the bed.

The change in angle nearly undid Elowen.

The world tilted. The painted vaulted ceiling slid sideways and her vision went grey at the edges and for one bad second she thought she was going to fall back against the pillow with the small wet helpless sound of a woman who could not even sit up on her own. Ysolde's hand was already on her shoulder. The hand was warm. The hand stayed there until the grey at the edges of Elowen's sight had cleared and her breath had settled.

"There. Slowly. Slowly, my lady."

"I am sorry."

"You will not say that to me again, my lady. Not in this room. There is nothing to be sorry for."

Ysolde said it the way you say a thing you have decided is going to be a small steady rule, and Elowen, who had been about to apologize for the apology, closed her mouth instead.

Ysolde reached up to the small table beside the bed and picked up a comb of pale carved bone. It was a simple comb. The kind of comb a careful woman of the lower city would own. Ysolde sat down on the edge of the bed beside her again and lifted the comb in one hand and looked at Elowen with the small careful asking face of a young woman who knew that she should not put her hands in another woman's hair without permission.

"May I, my lady?"

Elowen nodded.

Ysolde began, very gently, to comb the dark tangles out of Elowen's hair. Her fingers worked with the small quick patient skill of a young woman who had been doing this work for other women in this palace for a long time. She did not pull. She held the small section of hair above the snag with one hand and worked the comb through it with the other in the small soft careful way Elowen's own mother had combed her hair when she had been seven years old, in the small chamber at Vayne Hold, before Elowen's mother had become too sick to lift her own hands to her daughter's head.

Elowen had not had her hair combed by another woman in fourteen years.

She closed her eyes.

Her hand went, of its own slow weak accord, to the centre of her chest, and the second heartbeat under her ribs was boom boom boom in the same calm patient rhythm it had been beating in since she had opened her eyes, and the small warm thing happening under Ysolde's fingers in her hair was the kindest small physical thing that had happened to her body in years.

"I have been told to look after you for as long as you are in these chambers," Ysolde said, very softly. She did not stop combing. "I have been told that you are to have whatever you wish to eat. I have been told that nobody is to enter these rooms without my asking you first. I have been told that the household is to treat you as if you were the queen herself. Those are my orders, my lady. They came from the king."

Elowen opened her eyes.

"The king."

She said the word very carefully. Like a word in a foreign tongue.

"Yes, my lady."

"The — King Vaelor."

"Yes."

"He gave the orders himself?"

"He gave them to my own mistress in the king's wing the morning before you arrived. She came down to the kitchens and gave them to me herself."

Elowen tried to put the small careful sentences together with the small careful blur of memory that was the only thing she had from the past three days, and the sentences would not fit together. There had been a man on a great black horse in the courtyard at Ironbough. There had been the cold dirt under her cheek. There had been a face above her, looking down at her, with eyes the colour of rain on slate. There had been an arm sliding under her shoulders. There had been the small impossible feeling of being lifted off the ground.

There had been the smell of a man's coat against her face for what had felt like a very long time after that.

The man had not put her down.

She remembered, very faintly, the sound of a fire and the cold of an autumn night and the small careful taste of warm broth being touched to her lips by a woman she could not see. She remembered, very faintly, lying on a cold ground with stars over her face and a man sitting against a tree two paces away, looking at her, and her own mouth opening to scream at him, and then nothing.

Nothing had lasted, apparently, three days.

"How — how did I come here?"

Ysolde's hands paused for one half-second on her hair. Then they kept combing.

"The king carried you, my lady."

"From the courtyard?"

"From the gates of Ironbough Pack to the gates of this palace, three days west on the king's road. He did not put you down. The kitchen woman has been talking about it for three days. The king's own riders came in last night and I have heard the story from one of them. The king carried you the entire road. He did not let any other man's hand on you. When the column reached the western gate of the palace at the third hour after dawn yesterday morning he carried you up the long stair of the king's wing to these chambers and laid you in this bed himself, and he stood at the foot of the bed for a long moment looking at you, and then he left the room without saying a word, and he has not come back to this chamber since. He gave the orders to my mistress and to Healer Wenna, and then he went to his own chambers, and he has not come out of them except for the council sessions this morning."

Elowen said nothing.

She could not think of anything to say.