The Healer and Her God

Chapter 4 A Toast to Obedience

The Great Hall wore its gold like armor. Torches braided smoke toward a ceiling carved with kings who refused to look down. Long tables made rivers of oak; along their banks nobles bloomed like poisonous flowers. A dais stood at the far end, set for the High Chamberlain and Those Who Knew Better.

Eria paused just inside. Calis took up his appointed place half a step behind and to the left—close enough to catch, far enough to claim coincidence. He had chosen the old formal coat with the mended elbow; dignity didn’t mind thread if the stitching was sure.

“Smile,” he advised under his breath.

“I’m saving my strength,” she said.

They crossed to their seats—far from the dais, not so far as to be insult. As they walked, conversation thinned the way grass thins under hooves. Eria didn’t lower her eyes. She looked where she was going and nowhere else, which was its own kind of refusal.

Left, Kaelen said, a warmth on her ankle like a cat. There’s a step there men always forget.

She adjusted without thinking. Her heel avoided the worn dip in the flagstone that had betrayed generations. “You’ve been in this room,” she murmured.

I have been under this room, he corrected, amused. It has a belly that rumbles when nobles lie.

“Then you’re going to have a feast,” she said, and took her chair.

The High Chamberlain rose only after he was certain everyone had noticed him. “Friends,” he said, letting the word sit among enemies like a guest who’d arrived too early. “We dine tonight to honor His Majesty’s… resolute generosity.” A pause—subtle, practiced. The King was hunting, or sick, or unneeded. “And to recognize useful arts.”

Eyes slid to Eria as if they’d been told not to and wanted the thrill of disobedience.

“Lady Isolde’s child sleeps,” the Chamberlain continued. “By the grace of Providence and the diligence of our… healer.”

A polite stir. The speed with which “our” had been affixed to “healer” would have been impressive if it hadn’t been expected.

“Stand, Mistress Eria,” he said.

She stood. Calis’s hand ghosted above her chair, ready to steady and pretend he hadn’t. She let the room weigh her—bone, braid, hands that didn’t quite stop shaking. She didn’t bow.

“A word?” the Chamberlain invited, tone cutting off avenues of refusal.

Eria let her gaze find the faces that mattered—servants at the walls, a scullion peering from the door, a page with a bruise half-faded under powder. Then the nobles whose rings clicked against goblets to punctuate their own importance. She took a breath and spent it.

“Children should not die of other people’s carelessness,” she said. “If I can help that happen less, I will.”

Silence, thin and bright. Then a crisp laugh from the second table. A man in priest’s grey, the hems of his sleeves scalloped with embroidery that had taken someone else’s eyes too many nights.

“A stirring homily,” he said. “And where did you learn your… helps? Not at the Chapel. Not at the College.”

Eria met his gaze. “I learned where shadow goes when it leaves the body. I learned how to ask it—kindly—to choose a different house.”

“Witchcraft,” he said, almost fondly, like a teacher naming a familiar vice.

“Work,” she said.

Murmurs. The priest moved his cup a fraction of an inch, staking a claim to the space as if it might run away. “And the bowl,” he said, turning to the Chamberlain without turning his back on Eria. “The Crown should inventory its instruments.”

There it was. Eria felt Calis go very still.

The Chamberlain steepled his fingers. “A matter of simple stewardship. The Citadel must know what tools it relies upon.”

“It relies upon me,” Eria said before she could sand the edge off it.

A soft exhale from Calis that might have been delight if he’d been anyone else. Across the Hall, a ripple of interest like wind finding the long grass.

“Of course it does,” said the Chamberlain. “But tools pass. Offices endure.” His eyes were water over stone; you could look into them and only see yourself, distorted. “Present the bowl in the morning. We’ll have it catalogued and cared for.”

No, Kaelen said, and the warmth at her pulse sharpened—pleasure turning to promise.

Eria’s mouth dried. She swallowed. “That bowl was my mother’s,” she said, honest as a cut. “It is mine. It is not the Crown’s.”

The priest’s smile never reached the place where a smile could be forgiven. “The Crown is Providence’s hand,” he said. “Relinquish what is dangerous to wiser custody.”

“Whose?” Eria asked. “Yours?”

Something in the Hall leaned forward. The priest’s cup trembled—a small thing, a tremor you might blame on an old injury or on too much wine before bread. The goblet stem cracked with a sound like a tooth breaking. Dark spilled across white linen.

No one breathed. The priest stared at the stain as if it had spoken a slur.

Eria felt heat flood her palm where it rested on the table. Not the fire’s heat. Stone-heat. Below them, a chain tested itself.

“Kae,” she said softly into the corner of her mouth, as if it were a cough. The warmth held, then gentled, then let go. The candle flames stopped their subtle bowing toward her and remembered decorum.

Calis cleared his throat with great ceremony. “Apologies, Father,” he said, with the blameless face of a man who has broken a tavern and left a gold coin on the bar. “The table legs are uneven in that corner. I’ve asked carpenters. They pray about it.”

A few laughs, treacherous and grateful to be told how to explain what couldn’t be explained. The Chamberlain lifted two fingers; servants appeared with cloths, with a new goblet, with competence. Conversation resumed in patches, like grass regrowing around a wound.

Eria sat down. Her legs didn’t shake. Her hands wanted to. Calis eased her cup of watered wine nearer without looking like he had moved it.

“You just threatened Providence,” he murmured behind the rim.

“I coughed,” she said.

“Mm,” he said. “Very contagious cough.”

The meal arrived in courses that had forgotten what hunger looked like. Eria ate for policy, mouth a machine. When she could catch a breath between dishes and entertainments, she risked lowering her lashes and letting her attention drop like a bucket into a well.

You are angry, Kaelen observed, lazy with satisfaction.

“You scared them,” she said in her head. “You scared me.”

He reached for you with law as if it were a net. I have been netted. I do not like it.

“Don’t break cups for me,” she said. “Not unless I ask.”

Ask, then.

Her teeth clicked softly with the force of her almost-laughter. “You don’t make this easy.”

I am not easy, he said, and the words brushed the inside of her wrist—bold, unrepentant, a touch that would have been scandal if anyone else had seen it.

They didn’t. The Hall did what halls do: it ate, it watched, it told stories about itself in a voice that sounded like fairness and tasted like coin.

When it was permissible to leave without writing an insult on the air, Calis rose and made a corridor with his body. Eria walked inside it, grateful and unwilling to name the gratitude. They stepped out into a passage where the torches smoked less and men with sharp ears heard only their own importance.

“That was unwise,” Calis said, low.

“Which part?”

“All of it,” he said. “And necessary. I think I will drink and then fight a tapestry.”

She turned her head enough to look at him. “You’re bleeding a little.”

He checked, startled, and found a nick along his knuckle where he’d gripped the chair too hard when the goblet broke. “It’s nothing.”

“It’s a tithe,” she said. She caught his hand, clean as a sister might. The cut was shallow; still, heat answered the place her thumb pressed, that rapid bright pour of fatigue toward purpose. Skin knit. Calis watched as if it were a trick and he’d paid to be fooled.

“You paid enough today,” he murmured, glancing around. “Make them buy their own miracles.”

“I’ll send invoices,” she said, and released him.

They reached the turning that would carry them either toward the infirmary or down to the Chapel. Calis stopped, angled himself so that anyone passing would see only two colleagues discussing logistics, not two allies dividing burdens.

“They’ll come for the bowl at dawn,” he said.

“I know.”

“You could… not be where the bowl is,” he offered.

“I could also sit very still and train myself to breathe without air,” she said.

He huffed. “I’m on the side that ends with you breathing. However you get there.”

She had a sudden, dangerous urge to set her forehead against his shoulder. Instead she said, “Thank you,” which was risk enough.

He watched her a heartbeat longer. “Don’t go alone,” he said, and then, softer, resigned, “I know you’re going alone.”

“I won’t be alone,” she said, before she could think better of it.

He did not ask. He had the face of a man who had stopped wanting explanations because he loved the person they would be taken from.

“Wake me if you need soldiers,” he said.

“I need carpenters,” she said.

“I’ll bring a hammer,” he promised, and left her where the corridor bent, because knowing when to turn away without taking your guard with you was also a kindness.

The Chapel door took her weight like a friend. Night made the stone honest. The bowl waited where she had left it, black glass for a moon that had not been invited inside.

You were very beautiful when you refused him, Kaelen said, and the warmth that rose from the floor gathered her aches and made a place for them to sit.

“That’s not a useful compliment,” she said, kneeling. “Tell me how to keep them from taking what I need.”

Want it, he said.

“I already do.”

Want it as if breath depended on it. As if you had been waiting under oceans for someone to speak your true name through water.

“That sounds like obsession,” she said.

Yes, he said, pleased. That sounds like me.

She laughed then, helplessly, felt it crack something in her chest that had calcified into certainty. “They come at dawn,” she said. “What do we do before dawn, Kae?”

Silence touched her mouth like a finger shushing a child, then withdrew.

Say the rest of me, he said, not coaxing now but commanding. Finish it, Eria.

She put her hand flat to the flagstones. The heat met her like a kiss that hadn’t learned manners. In her mouth the syllable he had given her rounded itself into the shape that waited—inevitable, new.

“Kaelen,” she said.

The chapel took the name into its ribs. Somewhere below a length of iron sighed like a man rolling his shoulders for the first time in years. The warmth surged—past ankle, along calf, over the hinge of her knee where old bruises lived, up to the deep-set ache under her breastbone that was equal parts fear and fidelity.

Anchor, he breathed, and for an instant she knew exactly where the chains were, how many, how old. She knew which mason’s apprentice had tucked a penny in mortar for luck and which king had ordered the last seal tamped with a ring that had not fit him.

Her palms pressed harder. “Tell me how to keep it,” she whispered. “Tell me how to fight.”

You don’t fight them, Kaelen said, and in the warmth his laughter wound around her bones. You forget to ask permission.

A draft under the door; the soft scuff of boots. Eria’s head snapped up. The High Chamberlain did not enter. He had men who did that for him.

“Open,” said a voice she didn’t know. “By order of the Chamberlain. The Crown requires its property.”

Eria stood, wiped her palms on her skirt, and felt the stone hum under her heels like a friend who has decided to be an accomplice.

Don’t be brave, Kaelen murmured. Be inevitable.

She reached for the bolt.