The Healer and Her God

Chapter 5 The Stewardship of Fire

Dawn came as a rumor: a paler black at the high windows, the torches deciding whether dignity meant dying or sputtering on. Eria’s hand was on the bolt when the rapping came again—flat-knuckled, official.

“Open by order of the High Chamberlain,” a voice called. “The Crown requires its property.”

Breathe, Kaelen said, warmth skating her palm. And remember: you are not a door to be opened.

Eria slid the bolt anyway. She wasn’t hiding. The Chapel door groaned back to show three men in the Chamberlain’s livery—blue so dark it bullied morning into looking shabby. A fourth lingered behind, ink-stained and keen: a clerk with a conscience on a chain.

“Good morning,” Eria said. “You’re early.”

“Early is lawful,” said the one with the barbed moustache. He held out a parchment. Wax sagged red—already cracked from too much pride. “By Writ of Inventory and Safe Custody. Present the bowl.”

Eria let the parchment hang between them and did not take it. “You may read to me,” she said.

The clerk brightened, then blanched when Moustache shot him a look. “We have no need—” the guard began.

“We have every need,” the clerk said, surprising himself. “Ahem. ‘All instruments of uncommon art or potency shall, for the preservation of the realm, be entered into the Citadel’s care—’”

“Care,” Eria echoed softly, and felt the floor warm like a hand agreeing.

“—their holders compensated at fair rate, their use to be petitioned through—’”

“Through men who have never held a feverish child,” Eria said. She stepped back into the nave. “If you come in, you will take your shoes off.”

The guards looked at one another, then down. Thick-soled boots, iron hobnails, the comfort of being taller than what you do not understand. Moustache barked a laugh.

“This isn’t a cottage,” he said. “It’s a room.”

“It’s a place I ask for mercy,” Eria said. “Shoes off.”

The clerk obeyed first. He unlaced with awkward reverence, stockinged toes curling against chilly stone. The others hesitated. The moment stretched—thin gold beaten to the edge of tearing.

Anchor, Kaelen murmured, pleased. Even laws need floors to stand on.

“I will fetch it,” Eria said, when they did not move. She crossed to the altar—the simple table she had scrubbed herself after Isolde’s night was over—and set the bowl at its center. Even empty, it hunched the air around it into attention.

The nearest guard puffed himself broader and stepped forward. “We’ll take it from here.”

“You’ll try,” Eria said, no heat in it. She placed her palm against the stone of the table, not the glass. A whisper rose through her bones—iron talking in its sleep.

“By order—” Moustache began again.

Eria didn’t look away from the bowl. “Kaelen,” she said—only the name, only once, the way a bell tells you the hour rather than asking your permission to know it.

The Chapel remembered thunder. It was only a breath—a low note underfoot, a pressure that pushed the men’s knees into honesty. Dust sifted from a rib of stone. The bowl trembled as if a heart under it had shifted onto a different side.

“What was that?” the clerk whispered.

“Settling,” Eria said. “Foundations do that when you wake them.”

Moustache swore. “Enough.” He shouldered past the barefoot clerk and grabbed for the bowl with both hands.

Stone heat went white.

He didn’t scream, exactly. The sound he made was a word that had never learned manners. His fingers didn’t burn—they refused. Muscles forgot how to close. He jerked back, cradling air, lips peeled from his teeth. The bowl hadn’t moved a hair.

“Don’t touch what isn’t yours,” Eria said, and the words went out along the flagstones like a command the Chapel had been aching to receive.

That was kind, Kaelen purred. I would have taken a thumb.

“No maiming if a scolding will do,” she thought back, even as her knees loosened. It wasn’t show. It cost.

The clerk swallowed hard, voice finding its courage by bumping into it. “Mistress Eria—there may be a… negotiated custody. A seal you hold, a copy for the Citadel—”

“There may,” Eria said. “After sunrise. After breakfast. After your master learns to say please.”

Moustache recovered enough to scowl. “We will return. With more men.”

“Wear softer shoes,” Eria suggested.

They backed away not as men from a fight they had lost but as boys from a hearth they had leaned too close to. The door fell to; the bolt thudded home.

Silence. Then her hands began to shake, very politely, at the wrists where no one could see.

Sit, Kaelen ordered, warmth gathering under her like cushions arriving one by one. Now. Before your pride talks your knees into arguing.

“I thought you liked pride,” she said, obeying.

I like yours whole.

She let her head tip back against the cool of the pillar. The bowl was black as deep water. In its skin a ghost of her face hovered—tired, mouth composed because she’d decided it would be.

“Thank you,” she whispered—to the stone, to the god, to her own stubbornness for not arriving late.

“Is that legal?” said a voice from the doorway.

Calis leaned there as if doors had been invented so he would have something to decorate. He carried a satchel, a ledger, and—absurdly—a carpenter’s hammer tucked through his belt.

“You’re late,” Eria said, and then, before he could turn it into a joke, “Perfectly.”

“I had to stop for this.” He touched the hammer, chagrin and delight giving him the look of a boy who has stolen a pie from his own kitchen. “You said carpenters.”

“I said carpenters,” she corrected, “and look at Providence: a carpenter.”

He crossed to her, scanning her face the way a good commander scans weather. “What did he try?”

“Stewardship,” she said. “Inventory.” She gestured to the bowl. “And then he tried his hands.”

Calis glanced at the altar and then at the black half-moon of reddened skin around the guard’s cuticles still ghosting the rim. “How is it that I both wish I’d seen it and am grateful I didn’t?”

“You’re useful when you arrive after the flames,” she said. “You bring buckets and paperwork.”

He sighed, lifted the satchel, and laid out a small armory of ink and law. “As it happens—‘Writ of Inventory’ requires either the King’s presence, which we are tragically without, or the signatures of two sworn stewards of equal rank—and the Chapel’s keeper, which would be Father What’s-His-Smug. He is still abed, nursing a goblet wound.”

Eria’s mouth twitched. “The law says equal rank?”

“It does this morning,” Calis said. He tapped a line with the back of his fingernail, victorious as a cat that has swatted the exact moth it meant to. “The Chamberlain will try again with more wax and louder men. So we will simply… be here, being inconvenient.”

He set the hammer on the altar, then thought better and set it on the step. “And if they bring a dozen, I will fix something. Possibly them.”

“Don’t break the Chapel,” she said, dry.

“Only their confidence,” he promised, and sobered. “How badly did it cost you?”

She considered honesty and decided to pay it. “Enough to feel smart,” she said. “Not enough to feel righteous.”

“Good,” he said, quick and fierce. “Righteousness is terrible for the joints.”

They worked the first hour of morning like smugglers—Calis drafting a counter-writ in a hand so steady it made other hands self-conscious; Eria walking the nave slowly, touching pillar and wall as if taking attendance. When she reached the step again, Kaelen’s heat rose to meet her—eager, barely bridled.

Say me again, he asked, suddenly urgent under her skin. There. Where the mortar has forgotten how to be stone.

She knelt; Calis angled himself to block the view from the slit of the door. She pressed both palms flat to the step.

“Kaelen,” she said, the way you say a name over a grave to remind the ground who it holds.

Below, something gave. It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t even a crack; more a sigh from a thing that had been clenched too long. Air moved up from under the altar—cool, smelling faintly of iron and old rain. A thin line, hair-fine, traced itself across the gray of the step like a seam remembering it had once been two.

Calis felt it through his boots. He went very still. “Is the Chapel… going to fall down?”

“No,” Eria said, eyes wide, not with fear. “It’s going to stand up.”

The warmth rolled up her arms, greedy and joyful. I am not all chain, Kaelen breathed. There are knuckles. You found one.

“Don’t push,” she told him, though her mouth wanted to grin. “You’ll bruise me.”

A promise, he said, and subsided to a purr that made the candleflames lean toward her as if trying to eavesdrop.

Boots in the passage. Moustache’s voice—hoarse with injury and indignation. Others. More than three.

Calis slid the new parchment into his satchel, reached for the hammer as if it were a quill, and went to the door. “Yes?” he asked it, as if it were a friend come early to help with rugs.

“Open,” Moustache snarled. “By order—”

“Of equal stewards?” Calis said mildly. “Splendid. I have one half. Have you brought Father Smug? And—ah—your equal?”

A pause. The clerk’s voice, low, apologetic, honest to his own detriment: “We… have not located Father Matthes.”

“Sleeping in,” Calis sympathized. He set the hammer’s wooden handle across the latch. “Come back when your paperwork wakes up.”

“Stand aside or we’ll break the door,” a new man barked.

“By all means,” Calis said cheerfully. “Then you can explain to the King why your zeal snapped a hinge older than the dynasty. I’ll loan you my carpenter.” He patted the hammer.

Eria stood from the step. She lifted the bowl—both hands, reverent—and set it back down with the kind of care that tells rooms what they are. The hairline seam in the stone pulsed once and went still, like a heartbeat decided upon.

The door rattled in its frame. Calis didn’t flinch. He had the look he wore when a storm came in sideways across a range and he decided to ride into it: a mixture of arithmetic and stubborn joy.

“Last chance,” Moustache growled. “You cannot keep the Crown from what it owns.”

Eria rested her fingertips on the altar, and the Chapel’s heat came up through her bones and into her voice. “The Crown owns mouths,” she said. “It borrows hands. It begs for breath. The bowl isn’t yours.”

Silence. Then the clerk again, miserably valiant: “We… will return at second bell. With Father Matthes.”

Calis leaned his shoulder to the wood. “Bring him breakfast,” he advised.

Their footsteps ebbed down the passage. The Chapel, relieved, let a grain of dust fall exactly where the light would make it gleam.

Calis exhaled, long. He set the hammer down like a chalice. “I like your ‘not asking permission’ voice,” he said.

“It’s new,” she admitted. She looked at the fine crack in the step. “So is that.”

He followed her gaze. “Is it… bad?”

“It’s a knuckle,” she said, half laughing because she was too tired to do anything else brave. “And I’m going to pretend I didn’t say that out loud.”

He didn’t ask. He had the grace that comes from having once asked the wrong thing and kept the scar as a lesson. “Second bell,” he said instead. “Eat something. Drink. If you faint I’ll have to invent a law against it.”

She took the cup he offered. It was only water. It tasted like not being alone. “Thank you for bringing your hammer.”

Calis’s mouth tipped. “I’ll keep it close. It may come to negotiations.”

“Do you think they’ll try again?” she asked.

“Oh, certainly,” he said. “Men like that don’t own much, so they love paper. It’s the only thing that obeys them.”

Eria let herself sit on the step. It didn’t feel like surrender. It felt like choosing where to plant a flag. The bowl, patient as a moon, kept her company.

Equal stewards, Kaelen mused, smug. Fortunate you have two.

“Two?” she thought, baffled.

My chains know me, he said, warm as coals under ash. And I am learning to know you.

She should have been afraid of what that meant. Instead she set her palm to the seam and felt the most dangerous mercy: a god content to wait because obsession had found something worthy to circle.

Outside, bells began to count the city awake. Inside, Calis rolled his shoulders as if he could carry the next hour in them. Eria breathed, and for the first time since the Chamberlain had said present the bowl, she believed in later.