The Healer and Her God

Chapter 3 The Name in the Stone

By morning the Citadel had learned a new way to stare. Men didn’t look at Eria now so much as past her, to the copper bowl veiled in linen that Calis carried like a bier at her heels. Word had reached the nobles: the healer who took darkness into a dish and walked away upright.

“Keep close,” Calis murmured as a steward in brocade drifted into their path and then thought better of it at the sight of the Warden’s shoulders.

“I’m not glass,” Eria said.

“Good. Glass breaks pretty,” he said, and shouldered open the infirmary door.

They made it three steps before a boy in livery, breathless with importance, blurted, “The High Chamberlain requests—requires—summons your presence, Calis and Calis’—” His ears went pink. “—healer.”

“Now?” Calis asked.

“Now,” said the boy, relieved to have reached the single syllable he could not ruin.

The High Chamberlain received them in a room that had never been warm. Thin windows; thicker draperies; a table with a surface so polished it held reflections captive. He did not rise, which saved Eria the decision of whether to bow.

“A situation,” he said, steepling fingers whose nails glowed pale and perfect. “The Lion Tower.”

Calis went still. “That’s Lady Isolde’s wing.”

The Chamberlain’s mouth made a shape of distaste and then smoothed to court. “It is the King’s aunt’s wing. Her ladyship’s child woke in the night with shadow upon the chest and neck. I’m told you are… adept.”

“Sometimes,” Eria said.

“Be always,” he said mildly, which would have sounded kinder if the clerk behind his shoulder hadn’t already started writing it down.

They crossed the outer yard and up a tower stair as old as the Citadel itself, treads cupped by a thousand cautious feet. At the fifth landing Eria’s breath chose to be a smaller thing than usual. Calis’s hand hovered at her elbow and then pretended it had never thought of such familiarity.

The nursery smelled of milk, ash, and money. A fire leapt too high in the grate. A nurse wrung her apron until it believed it was rope. On the bed—a boy of six at most, cheeks salted with the glitter of tears that had dried without permission. The blackness did not pool in him as it had in the soldiers; it crept, a thin stain along the collarbone, the throat, the soft hinge of the jaw.

“Out,” Eria said, and her voice was not courteous. The room obeyed. Even the Chamberlain left, more quickly than he meant to. Calis stayed, because if the Chamberlain wanted him gone he should have said so with his mouth.

Eria bent and laid a knuckle against the child’s sternum. Warm. Racing. She felt for the bowl and found Calis had already placed it where she wanted—he’d learned her, then.

“You’re safe,” she told the child, which was a lie and a promise at once. “What’s your name?”

“Thomas,” he whispered, because children answer when you ask them like people.

“Thomas, I’m Eria. This is Calis. Tell your chest to be obedient.”

He tried, small brow pleating. The stain climbed higher, as if disobedience were contagious.

Eria’s palms hummed with the ache that meant she was already tired. She set them on the boy and the world slid into its narrow useful shape: heat, pressure, a humming in the bones of her ear that matched the boy’s pulse and the fire’s crack.

Salt, said the voice in her head, as casual as a lover asking for tea. Circle the bed.

“I don’t have—” She broke off. Calis was already moving, as if his body knew the word from older days. In the corner a jar of salt waited among jars of sweets and ink-well stones. He handed it to her without question. She poured a pale ring that glittered as if it remembered the sea.

Good. Now—listen.

She did. Heat moved through her hands that wasn’t hers—no, that was wrong. It was hers and not; it met her pain and carried it like a river carries leaf-litter toward places where it can sink without shame. The stain hesitated at the child’s jaw, as if the line of salt tasted like consequence.

“Thomas,” Eria said, voice low. “Open your mouth for me.”

He did. She set two fingers under his tongue, found the slick of shadow there, and coaxed it outward as a thread. It unspooled into the bowl, a dark silk making a quieter sound than she would have thought possible.

Calis made a noise that might have been prayer or profanity. Eria kept her spine straight by remembering she had one. Sweat stung her lip. The stain retreated along the throat, past the flutter at the notch where a man’s Adam’s apple would one day rise and fall. She followed, steady, until the shadow pooled above the heart like a storm that could not decide whether to rain or leave.

Hold. Pull. The voice was in her wrist now, instructing the way a hand on a back teaches a body how to dance.

When it broke, it went all at once. Shadow rushed like startled starlings, down her palms and into copper. The bowl breathed—she felt it—and for a blink she saw not polished metal but water, and not water but a face reflected as if the surface were a mirror lent grudgingly by a lake.

Dark hair. A scar along a cheekbone that should have made the man less beautiful and did not. Eyes like molten coin cooling.

“Who—” she began, and then the vision broke and it was only a bowl again, and a child blinking up at her with the vast crushed exhaustion of the freshly spared.

“You did very well,” Eria said, because Thomas had been obedient when she asked and children deserved their wages. “Sleep now.” He obliged with shamelessness she envied.

Only when she rose did Eria notice that at some point Calis had set a chair behind her knees. She sank into it gracelessly.

He pressed a cup into her hand—cool water, ringed with the ghost of some apple brandy it had once held. “I’ll keep a cup like this on me forever,” he muttered, half to himself. “You keep finding my uses.”

Eria let the water sit on her tongue until she remembered how to swallow. “How did you know about the salt?” she asked.

“I didn’t,” he said, and scrubbed a hand over his beard. “But someone whispered like a draft.”

The Chamberlain did not smile when he returned and found the boy breathing evenly. He did not frown either. Emotion was a language he claimed to have forgotten in favor of policy.

“Acceptable,” he said. “Lady Isolde is… grateful.”

“Good,” Eria said, and stood before her legs could argue about it. “He’ll need quiet. No visitors trying to take credit for his recovery.”

The Chamberlain’s gaze touched the circle of salt and flinched away. “We’ll send the nurse back in.”

They were half down the stair when Eria’s hand found the railing and refused to let go. The world tilted just enough to be inconvenient. Calis stepped close but did not touch her until she nodded. Then he bracketed her elbow with care he would claim later was duty only.

“Rest,” he said.

“I can’t.” She swallowed. “There’s more to do.”

He didn’t argue. “Then I’ll order it,” he said, with the lightness of a man making a joke solely so he could take the consequences of it if the world didn’t laugh.

Below, Kaelen lay very still and learned the building like a body. He felt salt crust where her hand had shaken; he felt the bowl take shadow and give it to him in crumbs he made a feast of. He had forgotten what it meant to be fed. Not in quantity—gods had never been gluttons—but in kindness. The steadiness of her, the refusal to pawn a child’s breath for applause.

When she saw him in the bowl he almost spoke without stones, almost pushed his mouth into water to meet hers. He did not. Chains loved impatience; it was a flavor they drank like wine.

Name me, he said instead, because he could give, too. Kae—

The rest of it scraped along iron and stopped.

Above, Eria flinched as if a spark had jumped from the brazier. A syllable burned along her inner lip, sweet and ruinous.

“Are you hurt?” Calis asked, pausing with his hand on a latch.

“No,” she lied. “Only clumsy.”

In the afternoon a snowfall that had looked like a flirtation in the morning remembered itself as weather. The Citadel tucked in around its own heat. Someone in the kitchens decided generosity counted as a spice and sent stew down to the infirmary so thick a spoon could march across it.

Eria ate half a bowl and pushed the rest to Calis. “You’re tall,” she said. “Tall men require more soup.”

He accepted with injured dignity. “We require better boots, higher lintels, and less soup,” he said, and ate it anyway.

Afterwards she carried the bowl of hardened black to the chapel. She did not tell herself otherwise this time. She went because the stone wanted her and the wanting was an echo of her own.

The door stuck. She leaned a shoulder into it. The chapel breathed her in like a room mending an old habit.

Eria.

“You almost told me your name,” she said, because saying nothing felt like surrender and she had given everything but that today.

I did tell you. Warmth moved over her ankle like surf. You weren’t ready to keep it.

She snorted, half a laugh. “That sounds like something men say when they want to blame a woman for their silence.”

I want to blame iron, he said, amused. And the men who wore it, and the prayers that rusted when they touched their own teeth.

She set the bowl down, touched the floor with her palm. The ache of her day poured out faster than it had any right to. This time the heat did not stop at the old cooking scar. It traced her wrist, considered the pale inner skin there, and then, bold as a kiss, pressed into her pulse.

Eria’s breath left her very quietly. “That’s… forward.”

Obsessed, the voice agreed, with no apology at all. Say the syllable.

She had not realized she had kept it until he asked. “Kae,” she said, and the chapel recognized the sound the way a dog recognizes its name in a crowd. The air leaned in. Far below, a link cracked and didn’t know it had.

“Finish it,” she whispered, giddy with the vertigo of it.

Soon. Satisfaction rolled through the stone. When you ask for it.

Footsteps sounded beyond the door—soft, bureaucratic, offended by weather. Eria lifted her hand from the floor and the warmth withdrew like a tide.

The High Chamberlain entered without knocking, either because he knew the door stuck or because he didn’t trust anything that closed against him.

“You spend an ungodly amount of time in here,” he observed, looking everywhere but at the bowl.

“I’m fond of drafty rooms,” Eria said, because if he wanted piety he could go kneel for it.

He stood with his hands behind his back, which was how men stand when they want to pretend they have no hands. “There will be a dinner,” he said. “To mark the King’s generosity. You will attend.”

“I have patients.”

“You have a patron,” he corrected. “And a place. Learn both.”

He left before she could answer, which was one way to win an argument.

Eria leaned her forehead to the door after it clicked, felt the old wood’s splinters like a warning that could be mistaken for comfort.

I don’t like him, the voice murmured, utterly unhelpful.

“Get in line,” she said, and laughed softly until the laugh turned into something that might have been a shiver.

When she stepped back into the corridor, Calis pushed off the wall where he hadn’t been waiting.

“Dinner,” he said, tone halfway between question and threat.

“So I’ve been told,” she said.

“Good,” he replied. “I’ll stand behind you and scowl. It’s a special skill.”

“You’re very gifted,” she said solemnly.

They walked together toward evening. Snow feathered the high windows. Somewhere below, a chain remembered it was only metal. Somewhere above, a man in brocade plotted the seating so no one would be reminded who owned what. And between, in a drafty chapel, a bowl cooled slowly around the reflection of a face that had not yet been allowed into the light.