The Healer and Her God

Chapter 8 The Taste of Vows

Moonlight rinsed the palace roofs in tin-blue, the courtyards breathing white with winter mist. Eria had barely finished sorting salves when a runner skidded to her doorway, breath smoking in the cold.

“The king requests you—now,” he panted, eyes wide, as if the summons itself burned.

She gathered her satchel and followed at a quick clip, sandals whispering along lacquered floors. The air tasted strange—metallic, like a storm bitten through iron. In the royal infirmary, three lanterns burned low around a single pallet. A boy lay there—one of the younger pages—skin damp, pulse fluttering like a trapped moth.

Kaelen stood at his bedside, sleeves pushed to his forearms. He didn’t look like a god or a king in that moment, only a man whose jaw had locked from holding too still. “He collapsed after the evening bell,” he said quietly when Eria stopped beside him. “No fever at first. Then this.”

Eria sank to her knees and set fingers to the boy’s throat. Hot. And beneath the heat—something wrong, a slick coil she felt in her own blood as if whatever worked through him were pressing its face to the glass of her.

“Open the shutters,” she murmured without looking up.

Kaelen moved at once. Winter air folded into the room and the lantern smoke thinned. The boy coughed, a short wet sound. A dark stain bloomed against his tongue and vanished.

“Poison,” she said. “But braided with…prayer. Not temple prayer.” She opened her satchel and placed a shallow cup on the floor, a narrow blade, a twist of white cloth. “Hold him still.”

Kaelen crouched opposite her. “Tell me what you need; I’ll be your hands.”

She met his eyes, steadying on their dark calm. “Match my breathing. If I slow, you slow. If I tell you to let go, you let go.”

His mouth tilted. “You command me, healer?”

“In here,” she said, cutting a glance at the lamplight and the boy’s small, frantic chest, “no one outranks the breath.”

He didn’t argue. His fingers went to the boy’s shoulders, gentle, sure.

Eria uncorked a tiny flask and wet the cloth with bitter tincture. “This will call the poison. It will not be kind.”

The boy jerked when the cloth touched his tongue. His back arched. Kaelen held him without pinning him, muscles flexing under lamplight. Eria slid the blade and pricked the boy’s thumb. A bead of blood welled, black-red. The wrongness in the room curled and hissed against the open night.

“Breathe,” she whispered, more to the boy than to the king. Then to Kaelen, low: “With me.”

They breathed. The rhythm steadied Eria’s own pulse enough that she could open the thin gate inside her—just a crack. Heat shivered into her hands. Not the blazing flood she used when tearing illness out by its roots; a thread, bright and fine, she stitched through blood and breath and poison. Her thumb brushed the boy’s wrist, and where her skin touched his, faint light pulsed once, like a firefly under water.

Kaelen saw it. She felt the shift in him, the inhale he didn’t take. He didn’t speak.

The boy gagged hard, then vomited into the cup. It wasn’t much, but what came up stank of old pennies and temple ash.

“Again,” she said. “Easy. It’s leaving.”

When it was done, the page went soft, breath deep, fever breaking like thaw. Eria rinsed his mouth and wiped his brow. The slick coil in the room—gone, but its smear clung to her tongue. She swallowed and capped the flask with steady hands.

Kaelen laid the boy’s hand back on the pallet as if setting down something sacred. He stood only when Eria pushed to her feet. Up close he smelled like cold air and cedar smoke, and something underneath—salt, as if he had been keeping the sea inside his lungs.

“Someone wanted to make a point,” he said. Not anger, not yet. The stillness that precedes it.

Eria nodded. “This wasn’t a kitchen spice gone wrong. Whoever mixed it knew exactly which prayers sour in the blood.”

“The priesthood,” Kaelen said.

“Or those who would hide behind it.” She glanced at the doorway. “Do you trust the guards outside?”

“Enough to keep their mouths shut until dawn.” His gaze returned to her face. A question there, unsaid, hovering between worry and a vow. “You’re pale.”

“I bit the storm,” she said lightly, rolling her shoulders once to settle the shiver there. “It bit back.”

“Come.” That single syllable softened when he spoke it to her; it was a thing that belonged to no one else. “There’s a place for breathing in the north wing.”

He took her satchel and didn’t offer to carry her—he had learned the shape of her pride well enough. They walked through sleeping corridors, through a door that guards rose to unlatch without looking at her. The room beyond was small and high, three walls hung with silk paintings of rivers and one wall open to the night. On the floor: a low table, a teapot, two cups. No throne. No altar. Only a place a man could use to remember he had ribs and a spine and a heart.

“I come here when the crown is too loud,” he said, setting the satchel on the table. The moon pressed silver into the line of his cheek. “Stay until your hands stop shaking.”

Eria looked down. They were shaking. She hadn’t noticed.

He poured tea and didn’t ask if she wanted honey or milk; there were none. He handed her a cup and took his own, and for several breaths they did nothing but listen to the winter insects clicking beyond the open wall. The quiet laid a cool palm to her fevered mind.

“You’ve been careful,” he said then, eyes on the steam. “Careful with me. With what you are.”

Eria set the cup down. The steam braided against the cold like ghost-script. “Careful is how a body keeps its skin,” she said, half-smiling to turn the words.

“Elliara called you a temptation,” he said mildly. “Jaron called you a threat. I prefer ‘answer.’” He glanced up. “I don’t want to use you, Eria.”

“Then don’t,” she said, too quick. His mouth softened further, and she exhaled, gentling her tone. “I know the difference between being needed and being hungered for, Kaelen. The court would have me be one. You would make me both.”

He didn’t deny it. “How else should a man worship what saves him?”

“That word,” she murmured. “Worship.”

He reached across the table, slow enough that she could take her hand away. She didn’t. His thumb found the place at her wrist where the skin was thin and the blood ran bright. He held nothing but her pulse. The look on his face, for once, was not kingly. It was simple. It was ruin.

“I didn’t know a heartbeat could quiet a palace,” he said.

Her chest ached, the sweet kind and the dangerous. “And I didn’t know a crown could learn to listen.”

They sat like that for a time—long enough that the edges of her vision ceased their swim, long enough that the bite of the poison-thrum eased from her bones. She let her hand turn so their fingers met and wove. The contact was nothing and it was everything, a vow made of skin.

A footstep murmured at the threshold. Kaelen let go at once but didn’t move away, and something in Eria’s own spine uncoiled at that small proof: he would not drop her hand like a guilt.

Captain Jae knelt in the doorway, eyes on the floor. “Forgive the hour, Your Majesty. Lord Jaron requests audience. He heard of a…disturbance.”

“Of course he did,” Kaelen said under his breath, then louder: “Tell him I’ll see him at first light.”

Jae hesitated a heartbeat too long. “He waits in the Moon Hall, sire.”

Kaelen’s jaw went quiet. He looked at Eria, a question again. Not permission—never that—but a check of weather before stepping into it.

“I’ll go with you,” she said.

“Wolves will be circling the scent you carry,” he said softly.

“I’ll keep my teeth in my mouth,” she said back.

They went. The Moon Hall gathered echoes—of silk, of old arguments, of the many ways a man might regret what he had said and could not unsay. Lord Jaron stood beneath the hanging bronze moon, robed too richly for a midnight hour, rings bright as fish eyes. Elliara hovered to his left, prayer cords trembling between her fingers.

Jaron’s gaze flicked from Kaelen to Eria and back, measuring. “Your Majesty,” he purred. “Word reached me of a poisoning. Imagine my surprise to learn the healer was allowed to…experiment in the royal infirmary.”

Eria felt the old urge—lift the lip, show the tooth. She didn’t. Kaelen felt it too; she knew he did by the way his stance angled half an inch toward her.

“She saved a life,” he said evenly. “You may kneel in gratitude now, or later, or not at all. The boy will breathe either way.”

Elliara’s eyes had not left Eria’s wrist. “There was light,” she said, voice soft with fear and fascination. “Several servants saw it.”

“I lit a lantern,” Eria said calmly. “It’s a thing with matches. Sparks.” She offered a bland smile. “You’re welcome to stop by the apothecary. I’ll show you how.”

Jaron’s smile went thin. “A palace is safest when it is predictable. The page was poisoned inside these walls. Someone’s hand reached far. Even farther, perhaps, with…foreign arts.”

Kaelen stepped once, short and decisive. The bronze moon overhead caught in his hair; for an instant, all the old stories of god-kings weren’t stories. “The next time you say ‘foreign’ when you mean ‘useful,’ I will mistake your mouth for treason,” he said pleasantly. “Don’t make me the villain in your little morality play, Jaron. I can play it too well.”

Silence opened like a pit and then closed over the words. Jaron inclined his head, not quite a bow, rage tidy and put away behind his teeth. “As you wish, sire.”

When they left the Moon Hall, Eria’s shoulders felt both heavier and freer. She walked beside Kaelen to the north wing again, and this time neither of them reached for tea. He paused at her door instead.

“Rest,” he said. He didn’t touch her, didn’t try the door. “If this was a warning shot, there will be more arrows.”

She leaned against the frame, the wood cold through her robe. “You can chain me in the apothecary,” she said dryly. “I’ll still slip the lock.”

A line cut through his cheek when he smiled. “I know.”

He had gone two steps when soft leather hissed against stone behind them. A folded scrap slid along the floor, pushed by a night draft—or hand—neither of them saw. Eria stooped and lifted it. There was no seal. Only three words, inked in a careful temple hand.

Pearls belong to us.

Kaelen didn’t ask to see it. He read her face and the paper and the air and said, with the quiet that always preceded his fiercest oaths, “Then they will find their hands empty.”

Eria folded the scrap and tucked it beneath the cuff at her wrist, where he had held her pulse. “Sleep,” she said, because she had to say something, because if she didn’t she would say too much.

He stood one breath longer than he needed to, and then he bowed—not the bow of a king to a subject, but of a man to the thing that will save him and end him in equal measure.

When the door clicked softly behind her, Eria slid down it to the floor and put her forehead to her knees. She could still feel his thumb at her wrist, could still hear the thin sound poison made when it lost its hold on a body. Dawn was hours away. She closed her eyes anyway.

If obsession was a god, she thought, it would wear a crown. If salvation was a sin, it would wear a healer’s hands.