The Healer and Her God

Eria pinched the stem of a starflower and breathed in its winter-sweet. Frost clung to the pale petals like sleep still caught in eyelashes. Her basket was already heavy with dried roots, resin, and the battered brass mortar that had outlived its third handle. Behind her, the river muttered under a crust of ice, the sound like teeth chattering. Bells carried on the cold. Not temple bells—iron ones, struck hard and fast. Palace bells. She straightened at the treeline. On the road below, a lacquered coach shouldered through the drifted snow, flanked by six riders in indigo cloaks. The horses steamed in the air. The riders did not slow when they saw her; they peeled off the road and took the gully straight up the hill to the scrub where she stood. Eria had time to tuck a stray curl back beneath her scarf and press a palm to her racing heart before a Warden swung down and bowed with a stiffness that meant the bow was for the law, not for her. “Eria of the river quarter,” he said, breath fogging, “by order of the Crown you are summoned to the Citadel.” She did not pretend not to hear. She only clicked her tongue at the basket for courage. “What’s broken?” “Men,” the Warden said. “And whatever broke them.” They did not let her ride inside the coach. She shared a saddle with a second Warden and held her basket like a baby. The city rose around them—rooflines dusted white, winter laundry frozen on lines like prayer flags. At the crest of the hill, the Citadel took the sky. Even snow could not make that much stone soft. Seven towers ringed a central keep, each a fist closed around something no one wanted to drop. As the coach gates clanged shut behind them, Eria’s pulse skipped. Her mother had once said the palace was a living thing, and you could tell its mood if you were quiet. Today it felt watchful, muscle knotted along bone. She kept her head down. There were men in armor lining the inner court, rank upon rank, metal dull with cold. Beneath the iron, Eria could smell bruised rosemary, lamp oil… and something fouled, like a well gone stagnant. They took her into the eastern infirmary—the one used for soldiers, not for nobles. Heat hit her like a hand; braziers burned, and copper kettles hissed. Cots filled the long room, and the men in them were too still. Eria’s heel slipped. She caught herself on the end of a bed and sucked in air that tasted of iron. Blackened veins marbled the throat of the man closest to her. Not ink. Not bruising. Something that moved of its own will when she looked at it. “What did they fight?” she asked, voice small against the crackle of fire. The Warden shook his head. “They trained on the south field. No blades. No bruises. Then one by one, they fell.” Eria knelt. The soldier’s breath was a ragged stitch. She fished in her basket and set out tools with the calm of habit—mortar, pestle, knife, copper bowl, the tiny jar of honey that always stuck shut. As she ground leaf to paste, she watched the black in his veins creep like smoke pulled through glass. It seeped from his wrists toward his heart, a thing with direction. “Hold him,” she said. Two Wardens braced the man’s shoulders. Eria pricked the center of his palm. Blood beaded, red under the stain. She mixed it with pulverized starflower and a scraping of bitter resin. Her power thrummed low in her wrists, an ache under the skin. She pressed the paste to his heart, above bone, and coaxed. Healing was not light that poured. It was a conversation. Eria asked and waited. The body answered when it could. Heat rose under her palm. The blackness shivered, then—like a nest of hair in bathwater—unclumped and drew back toward the prick in his hand. It bled out in a thin thread, oil-dark and slick as grief. The man coughed. The blackness gathered in the copper bowl, a snail’s trail of tar. The room exhaled. Someone swore softly. Eria didn’t look away from the bowl. Whatever this was, it did not belong to the world. It smelled wrong, like iron left in rain too long. “Again,” the Warden said. She did what she could. Two men woke under her hands, shivering like dogs hauled from a river. One vomited; another cried and would not say for what. Three did not wake at all. The blackness came, less in them, but there. With each healing, the ache in Eria’s muscles climbed to her shoulders. Her vision blurred at the edges. She steadied herself on the thought of tea she hadn’t brewed yet and a loaf of yesterday’s bread. When the High Chamberlain at last swept into the infirmary, he brought a dry wind with him—the sort of man whose presence seemed to pull heat from a room. He was all narrowness: narrow jaw, narrow eyes, narrow patience. “She’ll be retained,” he said to no one in particular, as if his mind had already leapt to the next thing. “Until this… matter… is resolved.” Eria straightened. “Retained?” He looked at her like at a tool he had not expected to find in the shed—useful but not respected. “The Crown requires your service, Healer.” “I have patients in the river quarter.” “Now you have patients in the Citadel.” He moved on, trailing scribes like minnows. Eria scraped the last rope of black into the bowl and felt the hair on her arms stir. It was not the Chamberlain. It was not the brazier. The sensation came from the floor itself, a hum under stone—as if something old had turned its head. Below the Citadel—below the barracks and kitchens and vaults—there was a place that did not appear on maps. Kaelen had stopped counting days after the first half-century. Iron had a taste, and it was always at the back of his throat—the cuffs at his wrists and throat and ankles, the rings sunk into stone that drank sound and power both. The chains were not meant to hold a man. They were meant to hold a storm. He lay still, because movement woke the admiration of the chains, and they tightened when admired. The first time he felt her, he thought it was memory: the old comfort of wildflowers crushed under a heel. Then the sensation came again, pushing like spring through the grate of a well—warmth, patience, a refusal to stop. He did not breathe for a long, human moment. Light, said something in him that had not spoken in a century. Light that knows how to mend bone. The chains thrilled, sensing what he sensed. They strained toward it. He smiled, slow. Gods did not pray. But there were things even gods could do with patience. He turned his head to the side, cheek on cold stone, and listened to the healings above him like rain. They housed Eria in a little chamber behind the infirmary to keep her close “at all times.” The ceiling sloped and the bed sagged and the water pitcher had a chip shaped like a crescent bitten from its lip. She washed tar from her hands until the skin went red and still the smell clung. Honey and thyme could not mask it. When she finally stepped back into the corridor, the Citadel had shifted from watchful to drowsy. Torches burned low. Boots scuffed. Somewhere a woman laughed and then, more softly, laughed again. Eria carried the copper bowl under her shawl, wrapped and tied so no one could see. She should have taken it to the apothecary fires to burn the residue down to ash. Instead she walked the quieter path—the one that led toward the old chapel, disused since the last king built himself a new one lined with jade. The old door had swollen in its jamb. It did not want to let her in. Eria set the bowl on the stones and put her shoulder to the wood. The door sighed, old and offended. Cold air breathed out. The chapel smelled of chalk and old prayers. The murals were peeling—saints who had once stood firm now shrugged, as if baffled the world still needed them. But it was not the room that had drawn her like a thread draws a needle. It was the feeling. The hum under stone had deepened. Here, the floor felt like a drum, skin stretched tight. Eria knelt and set the bowl on the flagstones. The blackness within had settled, viscous and patient. She should burn it. She should run. Instead she spread her palm beside the bowl. Heat shivered up from the stone and into her bones. Not heat like fire. Heat like someone had pressed his mouth to her pulse and exhaled. “Who’s there?” she whispered, feeling ridiculous for talking to rock and older rock. The answer came without sound, as a thought that was not hers. Healer. Eria’s head snapped up. The chapel was empty. The only movement was smoke from guttering candles. The word had been in her mind and… under her, through the stone, wrapped around her name. She wet her lips. “I don’t know you.” You will. The certainty behind the words made something low in her abdomen tighten. Eria had spent her life with sick men and crying women and feverish children, with herbs and tinctures and the slow miracle of bodies deciding to live. She did not spook easy. But this felt like standing at the edge of a river you had crossed a thousand times and finding it swollen to the banks, cold and quick. She got to her feet. The bowl sloshed; a syrupy wave licked the rim. “If you are the cause of what’s in this—” she began. I am not a sickness. A pause. I am what sickness fears. “That’s what sickness always says.” She meant it as a joke. The laugh that answered was not. Eria backed toward the door. She should inform the Chamberlain. She should tell the Wardens to post a watch on the chapel. She should do any number of sensible things. She placed her palm on the door instead, testing the swollen edge. Eria, the voice said. Her name, in her own language, spoken as if by a patient who had spent weeks practicing the shape of it with a numb tongue. Not asked. Known. She froze. “We are not familiar.” We were. Once. Warmth rippled under the stone, not a burn but a benediction. I have slept too long. You woke me. “I healed soldiers,” she said, breath fogging. “If I woke anything, it was a debt the palace owes me.” Come back, the voice murmured, almost indulgent. Tomorrow. Bring what hurts you. I will take it. The door gave. Eria stumbled into the corridor, bowl clutched stupidly to her chest. She did not look back. She could not. Walking away felt wrong in the way walking away from your own bed when fever hides under the sheets feels wrong—like leaving yourself unattended. In her chamber, she barred the door and watched the latch. Nothing moved. She set the bowl in the hearth and touched flint to tinder, hands shaking for the first time all day. Flames licked the copper, then wrapped it. When the blackness bubbled, it made no smoke. It made a sound like breath held too long, finally let go. Eria did not sleep. She lay on her side and watched her own breath puff white. The voice had known her name. Her real one, not the soft nickname the river quarter used. She had not spoken it since her mother died. Below the Citadel, a god lay awake, smiling in the dark, and counted her breaths like beads on a cord. Mine, he thought, not cruelly. Mine to heal. Mine to keep. A hair-thin crack spread along the nearest link of chain and sang—too soft for human ears, just loud enough to be mistaken for wind in a chimney.