The King's Second Heart

Healer Wenna (2)

Elowen had not looked at her own body in the cold honest light of any room since the morning she had counted them on her fingers and got to seven. They were no longer seven. There were perhaps fifteen of them now. There were small round ones on her upper arms in the shape of the grip of a man's hand. There was a long flat one along the inside of her left forearm. There were two on her ribs in the shape of fists. There was one on her hip in the shape of a knee. There was a long curving one along the line of her collarbone in the shape of nothing at all, the kind of bruise a body produces when the body has begun to wear out from the inside.

None of them had been put there by any hand that had touched her.

Wenna looked at all of them.

She did not recoil. She did not gasp. She did not say oh, you poor child. She looked at the bruises with the steady working face of a healer who was reading them the way a scribe reads a long letter, and after a long quiet moment she lifted her eyes back to Elowen's face.

"Have you ever seen any of these put there?"

"No."

"You have never been struck by your husband?"

"No. He has — he has never lifted his hand to me. Not once, in four years. He has spoken cruelly. He has been cold. He has — he has neglected me. But he has never touched me in anger. I have wondered, often, whether it would have been easier if he had. If he had hit me, perhaps I could have written to my father. As it was, I had nothing to point to."

"Hmm."

Wenna pulled the soft linen shift back into place over Elowen's shoulders and re-tied the small ties at the throat with her small clean fingers.

"How long since you last had a normal monthly course?"

"A year. Perhaps fourteen months."

"Have your dreams been ordinary, child?"

Elowen hesitated.

"No."

"What have they been?"

"Men. Dying. In ways I have never seen. In places I have never been. I — I taste iron in my mouth when the dreams come. Sometimes my nose bleeds. I have had them for — two years, perhaps. Three. They have been worse in the past month."

Wenna's small careful face did the careful thing again.

"And the second heartbeat. The flutter you have had since you were a child. When did it start to come louder? You said two months ago. What was happening in your house two months ago?"

Elowen closed her eyes.

"That was when — that was when she came. The woman from Silverbrook. The first time. She came to Ironbough on a small visit. I did not meet her on that visit. I only — I only heard from one of the kitchen girls that there had been a guest. I did not understand at the time that she was the — that she was the woman my husband had been—"

"I understand, child. Go on."

"The flutter became louder the night after she left."

"And it has continued to grow louder since then?"

"Yes."

"And four days ago, when your husband spoke the binding word of pack-rejection in front of his pack, did anything happen in your chest?"

Elowen opened her eyes.

She had not told this part to anyone yet. She had not had time to tell it to anyone. She was not sure she had words for it. But Wenna was looking at her with the small steady working face that did not allow for any small careful evasions, and Elowen, who had spent four years carefully evading every honest question anyone had asked her about her own body, found that she did not want to evade Wenna.

"Two things broke," she said.

"Two things."

"The first thing was the marriage cord. I — I did not know there was a marriage cord. I had never felt it. But when he spoke the binding word, I felt it break. It snapped inside my chest like a thread cut by a knife. It did not hurt. It was the opposite of hurting. It was — relief. Like having a long thin needle pulled out of a wound I had not known I had."

"And the second thing?"

"The second thing was — much deeper. Much older. I do not have a name for the second thing. It was something that had been with me — riding me, almost — for the four years of my marriage. I had not known it was there. When the marriage cord broke, the second thing — let go. It went out of me. It went out of me very fast. I felt it — I felt it leave the way you feel a weight lift off your shoulders that you have been carrying so long you had stopped noticing the weight."

"And then?"

"And then — then the second heartbeat under my ribs roared. Not loud. I cannot explain it. It was loud the way a thing inside your own chest is loud. It was the loudest the second heartbeat had ever been. It — it was as if something inside me had been sleeping for a long time, and now it had opened its eyes."

"And then you fell."

"Yes."

"And then a man you did not know carried you out of the courtyard."

"Yes."

Wenna sat very still on the small wooden stool beside the bed for a long moment.

She did not speak.

When she finally moved, it was to take Elowen's right hand from where it was lying on the soft coverlet, and she took it in both of her own small clean cool fifty-year-old hands, and she held it the way Ysolde had held it that morning, but with the small added authority of a woman who was old enough to be Elowen's grandmother, and Elowen felt the small private warmth of being held by a competent adult who had decided to be on her side go through her like the warm milk Ysolde had fed her at breakfast.

"Listen to me, child."

"Yes."

"I do not know yet what was done to you. I have a small careful guess. I am not going to tell you the small careful guess this afternoon, because I am not going to tell anyone the small careful guess until I have done a great deal more careful work on the body of the woman the small careful guess was done to. But I know that something was done to you, and I know that whoever did it is going to answer for it before the year is out, and I know that for now your only job in the world is to eat the food the kitchens send up, and to sleep when you are tired, and to drink the small tonics I am going to send up to this chamber every morning and every evening, and to not be afraid in this house. Nobody in this palace is going to hurt you, child. Nobody. I have served the house of Velmoria for thirty-one years and I am telling you that as a small private promise from me to you. Do you understand?"

Elowen's eyes were full of tears again.

"Yes."

"Good."

Wenna squeezed her hand once, hard, in the small fierce way an old woman squeezes the hand of a younger woman she has just decided to look after for the rest of her own career. Then she released the hand and gathered her instruments back onto the tray and rose from the small wooden stool and turned to leave.

At the door of the chamber, with her hand on the latch, she paused.

She looked back at Elowen on the bed.

Her face did the small careful thing it had been doing all afternoon, and this time the small careful thing was almost a question. Wenna's mouth opened. She drew in a small breath. She looked as if she had been about to ask Elowen something important.

Then she visibly decided not to.

She closed her mouth. She nodded once at Elowen, the small brisk nod of a healer signing off her afternoon's work, and she opened the chamber door, and she let herself out into the corridor beyond, and she pulled the door very softly shut behind her.

In the corridor outside the blue chambers, alone for the first time in two hours, Healer Wenna of the house of Velmoria leaned her own back against the cold stone wall, and she pressed one small clean cool fifty-year-old hand flat against the centre of her own chest, and she whispered, in a voice nobody but herself could hear, the small private healer's prayer she had not used in twenty years.

It was the prayer she had whispered the morning they had brought Crown Prince Castien home dead from the western road.

She had not had any reason to whisper it again until this afternoon.

Wenna stood in the empty corridor outside the blue chambers and whispered the small old prayer with her hand pressed to her chest and her eyes closed, and after she had whispered it she opened her eyes, and she walked very steadily down the long corridor of the king's wing of the palace, and she went directly to the small private door at the far end of the corridor that led into the king's own chambers, and she knocked.