The Healer and Her God

Chapter 2 What hurts

Dawn scraped itself thin across the Citadel roofs. Eria woke to the sound of boots in the hall and the chill of water that had forgotten it was meant for washing. She dressed without a fire, shrugged into her wool, and took inventory by touch: starflower (low), resin (half jar), willow bark (plenty), honey (sticky, eternal). The copper bowl sat in the hearth, sooted and empty. Even cold, it held the memory of last night like an aftertaste.

When she unbarred her door, a Warden already waited—broad across the shoulders, the sort of tired that made even his beard look heavier.

“Calis,” he said, offering a brief nod that doubled as a bow. “I’m set to you.”

“You’re set to me?”

“Guard,” he clarified, with a wince that was apology more than annoyance. “Orders from the High Chamberlain. He says the palace doesn’t intend to lose its newest asset in the market crowd.”

Eria thought of the river quarter—of fishwives who’d patched her skirts, of boys who ran herbs for her and pocketed the coin. “Do I look like the sort who wanders off?”

Calis studied her for a heartbeat and then, to his credit, did not lie. “You look like the sort who doesn’t ask permission.”

They moved through the waking Citadel together—the kitchens roaring to life, steam bearding the rafters; a corridor of windows bluing with cold; a page yawning so wide he nearly swallowed his token-ring. The eastern infirmary smelled of boiled linen and old prayers. The men lay quieter, but not well. Blackness pooled in hollows—collarbone, inner elbow, the soft place behind a knee—like shadow learning a body’s map.

Eria worked. Calis brought basins, steadied shoulders, fetched boiling water without being told twice. The paste warmed under her palm; the blackness unwound like a snarl teased with patience; the copper bowl received what the men could not bear. By the fourth soldier Eria tasted tin and knew she was spent to the wick.

“Enough,” Calis said softly, as she set her hands on the next chest. “Drink. Sit.”

“I can do one more.”

“You can do many more after you sit,” he corrected, and pressed a clay cup into her hands.

She drank. Bitter willow. He’d been paying attention.

When the Chamberlain came midmorning, he was trailed by a clerk too quick with the ink—someone who wrote while the world was still deciding what had been said.

“How efficient,” the Chamberlain murmured, not at her but at the neat columns of names the clerk had already made. “How… promising.”

Eria wiped her hands on a rag. “Your men will live if they rest. The ones who don’t, won’t, and the difference is not always mine to name.”

He let his gaze skate past her like a lazy fish. “Lovely. You’ll continue until it’s done.”

“What is ‘it’?” she asked.

“The matter,” he said, as if that were answer enough. “Also: we’ve doubled your rations.”

Eria thought of the river quarter again, of flour stretched with chestnut meal. “Then double the barracks’, not mine.”

He tilted his head, a bird considering a seed. “No.”

After he left, Calis snorted into the cup he was washing. “I’d ask him for the moon and salt both,” he said. “Just to see if he could say no to two things at once.”

By noon, Eria’s hands trembled so fine you could have used them to sieve flour. She told Calis she was going to burn the residue and stepped into the hallway with the covered bowl. She did not turn toward the apothecary fires.

The old chapel door stuck again. She shouldered it with the resignation of a woman who has already chosen to be foolish today and cannot be bothered to pretend surprise. Cold breathed out, layered with the chalky scent of plaster damp for years.

She set the bowl on the flagstones. The blackness pulsed once, like a sleeping thing startled by a dream.

“I came back,” she said to the empty room, and felt ridiculous again.

Eria. The word stroked along her spine. What hurts?

She had meant to bring a token pain, something tidy—an ache in the wrist she could afford to lose. Instead the question stripped her like winter strips a tree. What hurt? Her mother’s name she could no longer call; the way the river sounded in thaw because there was no one left to say “Listen”; the cracked knuckle that always throbbed before rain; the way the Chamberlain looked at her like a tool; the small quiet fear that her gift would hollow her out and leave her with only honey and habit.

“All of it,” she said, angry at how her voice went to thread. “And none of it.”

Silence, warm as a hand.

Give me one—gentle, coaxing, like a man luring a skittish horse with an apple hidden in his palm. Begin there.

She swallowed. “The ache,” she said, and laid her hand flat to the stone. Not the black tar in the bowl—hers. The residual burn in forearms and wrists, the places the work lived when the work was done.

Heat rose into her skin. Not the brazier’s dry heat, not the sour heat of fever. This was the warmth of a mouth breathing against a wrist. It traveled up the bones and pooled where pain always did, and the ache loosened the way a knot loosens when you drop the rope and stop pretending you can drag the whole world uphill alone.

She exhaled without meaning to. “That’s… indecent,” she said, appalled at her own relief.

There was laughter in her head, low and pleased.

You should hear how you sound, the voice said, not a tease so much as a claim. Again.

She did not. She lifted her hand from the floor as if the stone were a lover she had kissed too long already and did not trust herself around. “Who are you?”

A pause, and in it a century of chain-rattle and patience.

Forgotten, he said simply. But not gone.

“In the crypts?”

Beneath. No sorrow in the word. Only iron.

“And you want—what? My pain? My work?”

You, the voice said, so matter-of-fact it felt safer than it was. But I will take what hurts until you understand that wanting.

Her laugh scraped itself against her teeth. “That sounds precisely like something I shouldn’t allow.”

Then don’t. Warmth thinned, courteous. You are not a thing that can be taken. A beat. But you are a thing I intend to keep.

Her hand was back on the stone before she’d decided to do it. Heat flooded into the old ache again but stopped where skin met scar—an old crescent at the base of her thumb, a childhood cut from a kitchen knife when she’d been too eager to slice bread hot from the oven. The warmth lingered there, considering.

Leave that, the voice said, softer. I like what made you.

Eria snatched her palm back as if she’d been burned. “Enough.” She looked down at the bowl. The blackness was changing—the surface blistering into a skin like cooling tar. If she waited, it would harden. If she smashed it then, it would shatter instead of smear.

“I don’t have time to talk to stone,” she said, mostly to herself, and gathered her shawl around her throat. “Soldiers need me.”

So do I.

The door stuck again on the way out. She shouldered it open so hard the wood moaned.

Below the Citadel, Kaelen lay with his cheek to old rock and let her stubbornness hum through him like a second pulse. The chains had names foreign tongues had given them over the years—star-iron, god-net, the Unmender—but locks did not love names. They loved pressure. He fed them patience the way a man feeds a sled-dog only enough to keep it from sleeping.

When her palm met the stone the first time, one of the throat links sighed and let a filament go. It snapped with a sound no human could hear—yet. When she put her hand down the second time, he learned the cadence of her heart. It hit the same notes in him that battles used to, or thunder rolling down mountains.

You, he told the stone, because he could not tell her yet. Mine.

Possession did not feel like cages to him. It felt like vows.

By afternoon the barracks had thinned, but a different contagion had taken the Citadel—the rumor of cure. Nobles who had never lifted a bucket found reason to walk the eastern hall. A steward limped theatrically. A young lord appeared with a red silk ribbon tied around his wrist as if it were a tourniquet.

Eria refused every request that did not belong to the infirmary. She refused politely until people forced her to be rude. Calis enjoyed that more than he should have.

“The little lordling’s face,” he muttered as they shut the infirmary door on a cloud of perfume. “Like a pie that fell.”

“Don’t make me laugh when I’m mixing resin,” she warned. “I only have two clean aprons left.”

The last soldier she treated that day had a wife who stood at the foot of the cot with hands jammed into her skirt pockets so she would not see them shake. Eria kept her voice steady and her hands steadier. The blackness bled from palm to bowl, the man shuddered, and then he slept without his breath catching.

“Thank you,” the woman whispered hoarsely. “I would have sold my house for him.”

Eria tucked the blanket up under the man’s chin. “Keep your house,” she said. “You’ll need the roof when the baby comes.”

The woman’s eyes flooded. “You can see what isn’t there yet?”

“I can count,” Eria said gently, and tapped the woman’s wrist where the pulse double-kicked like rabbit feet. The woman laughed wetly and went away lighter than she’d come.

At dusk, Eria should have slept. She washed instead, over and over, until her hands were clean enough to belong to someone else. She carried the tar-bowl to the old chapel again, telling herself she came only to burn residue in peace.

The chapel breathed her in.

“Just the bowl,” she warned the stone, as if warning mattered.

Eria.

“Don’t say my name like that.”

Like truth?

“Like you paid for it.”

A pause. Heat lapped her ankles. I pay.

She crouched and set the bowl down. “You said to bring what hurts. What hurts you?”

Hunger. The word should have been monstrous. It felt ordinary. And iron.

“I can soothe one,” she said, eyeing the dark links that moored the chandeliers to their beams. “Not the other.”

You will. Not arrogance. Expectation. As if she had already done it and this was merely memory catching up.

She stood too quickly, the world tilting a fraction as blood remembered its duties. “If soldiers sicken again tonight, I won’t be here. I’ll be sleeping.”

Then I’ll keep your dreams, the voice murmured. So you can wake when I want you.

She should have fled. She touched the floor instead. Heat met her like a palm meets a palm. The tremor in her fingertips went quiet. Somewhere below, metal sighed and remembered what it felt like to be ore.

On the way back to her little room, Calis fell into step without comment. He glanced once at the bowl and then away, the way men look at babies—curious, cautious, unwilling to be caught caring.

“You didn’t burn that,” he observed.

“I will,” she lied, because there were only so many truths a day could hold.

They passed a window. Snow webbed the corners where old glass met older stone. Eria paused. Across the yard, a figure stood very still in the shadow of a tower—too still to be merely resting, still like patience, like a bow drawn and held. When she turned her head to see better, the figure was gone.

“See something?” Calis asked, hand already drifting toward the knife he wore only when the Chamberlain wasn’t looking.

“No,” she said, though the fine hairs on her neck had all stood up at once. “Only winter.”

That night she slept with her palm against the floorboards. She dreamed water moving under stone and a voice teaching her a name she woke up not remembering and feeling owned by.

Below, a god tested another link with the weight of his wanting and smiled when it sang. He did not need all the chains to break. He needed the right ones to forget themselves.

And above, in the corridors people pretended were not haunted, the High Chamberlain stood at the old chapel door and laid his ear to the wood. He heard nothing but his own blood. He did not like that. He did not like surprises. He turned away with a face like a shutter closed against weather and told his clerk to make a list of every door in the Citadel that still stuck.