The Healer's Secret

What are you?

I looked at the king of Valmoor, sitting up on a heap of dyer's sacking with four fresh scars across his ribs, and I did the only thing I could think of.

I asked a question of my own.

"How do you feel?"

His eyebrows lowered. "That is not an answer."

"It is a reasonable question. You were dying last night."

"I was bleeding."

"From iron wounds. They do not close on their own." I folded my hands behind my back, where the last silver light on my fingertips was finally fading. "You were healed. That is what matters."

"It matters," Kael said slowly, "who did it."

"Does it?"

"Elena."

"I am a clerk's daughter. I grew up in a village full of wolves, and I learned a few old remedies from the women there." It was a lie built on a scrap of truth, and I told it as smoothly as I could. "Moss, honey, a little pressure. I was lucky."

"Moss does not glow."

"It does in the dark."

"Elena."

He pushed himself up onto his knees, one palm pressed against his ribs, and I saw him take in the dim loft, the blood-stiff sacking, the shawl balled up under his head. I saw him realise that I had not left. That I had sat beside him all night. Something complicated passed across his face, and the hardness in his eyes wavered.

"You stayed," he said.

"You told me to run if you said so."

"I did not say so."

"No. You were unconscious." I lifted my chin. "I did not think it was the right moment."

He stared at me for a long, strange moment. Then, abruptly, he let out a rough sound that was almost a laugh and dragged a hand down his face.

"You will be the death of me."

"The mark says we share a thread. I would try not to."

Below us, the front door of the dye-works crashed open.

"Majesty!"

It was Dorian's voice, hoarse and frantic, followed by the clatter of many boots. Kael was on his feet in a heartbeat, swaying slightly, but upright. He caught the ladder rail and looked down.

"Here."

Dorian came pelting up the rungs two at a time. Behind him came Captain Rhys with a naked sword in each hand, and Mara, red-eyed and rumpled, clutching a leather satchel to her chest. Her gaze flew over her king, then settled on me, and she let out a sob of relief that she swallowed at once.

"You are alive."

"Barely," said Kael. "Thanks to my wife."

I held my breath.

"Thanks to her... what?" said Mara.

"She stopped the bleeding." Kael looked at me. He did not look away. "I would like to know how. But that is a conversation for a quieter place."

I had never been so grateful for a delay.

Mara dropped to her knees beside him and ran her hands over the scars. Her fingers paused. Her brows drew together. She looked at the neat, closed wounds, the pink healing flesh, and I saw her go very still.

"This is not a normal recovery," she said softly.

"No," said Kael.

"This is..." She stopped herself. Her eyes lifted to meet mine. There was something there that I could not read, wonder and fear and an enormous, aching sadness. "This is unusual."

"Mara," said Dorian, "can you move him?"

"I can try." She rummaged in her satchel. "He needs rest. Warm food. And no more heroics. Do you hear me, Majesty?"

"I hear."

"I do not believe you."

"Excellent instinct," said Kael dryly. "Dorian. Help me stand."

We went back through the lower town in a tight knot, all of us in plain clothes, Kael in the middle with his coat buttoned to his throat and a hand pressed discreetly to his side. Nobody could have guessed that the man shuffling between two guards had been gutted by an Ironfang wolf eight hours earlier. By the time we reached the secret gate in the citadel's south wall, he was walking by himself.

He did not say another word to me. But when we parted at the foot of the east stair, he looked back over his shoulder, once, with an expression I could not read.

This is not finished.

I knew that look. I had worn it myself.

Mara came to my rooms that evening.

I had spent the afternoon in a hot bath and a long, dreamless sleep, and I felt almost human. A maid had brought me soup. Another had changed the sheets. The citadel had settled into its strange, watchful quiet, the quiet of a place where everyone knew something had happened and nobody knew what.

There was a soft knock at my door.

"It is only me," Mara whispered. "May I come in?"

I let her in, and she closed the door and turned the key. Then she stood with her back against it for a long moment, her small shoulders hunched, as though she were bracing herself against a wind.

"I need to ask you something," she said. "And I need you to be honest, because I will know if you are not."

"All right."

"You used the threadmending on him."

My heart gave a single slow thump.

"I do not know what that is."

"Elena." Her voice was gentle and very tired. "I have seen the old Veyra scars. I know what the healing looks like. The threads come together like a net being sewn. There is a kind of order to it, a pattern, like lace. I have seen that pattern exactly once before in my life, on a wolf who was dying in a barn in the village of Thornwick."

I sat down on the edge of the bed, because my knees had stopped working.

"Who did it?" I whispered.

"A woman named Rhiannon." Mara's green eyes were bright with tears. "She was thirty-one. She had dark hair and a crooked smile and a little girl who followed her around the village with a silver ribbon in her braid."

My throat closed.

"I delivered that little girl," said Mara. "Her mother had a hard labour. I was seventeen, a healer's apprentice, and I was so frightened I forgot half of what I had been taught. But she was born alive, and screaming, and perfect. And I held her in my arms for nearly an hour before they would let her mother see her."

I could not speak. I could barely breathe.

"Her mother named her Elena," said Mara. "It was a Veyra name. It meant light that remembers."

A tear slid down my face before I knew I was crying.

I do not know how long we sat there.

Mara took my hands in hers, and I let her. She told me what she had never dared to tell anyone: that she had been a Veyra healer's apprentice in the village below the great house. That she had been away at the market the day of the fire. That she had come home to a valley full of smoke and the smell of burned bread and burned hair, and that she had stood among the ashes with her basket in her arms until a stranger on horseback took her by the elbow and put her on a cart.

"I changed my name," she said. "I came to the citadel with a false letter and a good hand for herbs. I thought if I could not save them, at least I could watch the people who had killed them." She wiped her cheeks with the heel of her hand. "I have been watching for sixteen years."

"Why did you never—"

"Because I did not know you were alive." Her voice broke. "I looked for you. For years. I asked every wandering trader and every pedlar. The records said the entire house had died. I had no way to know."

"Brenna hid me," I said. "She took me over the mountains."

"Brenna Hale?" Mara went very still. "The Warden's sworn guard?"

"You knew her?"

"I knew of her. She disappeared the night of the fire. They said she died." A faint line appeared between Mara's brows. "I am glad she did not."

I almost told her everything. About the vow I had made. About the Loom, and the Anchor, and Nyra. About the man in the east wing whose father had given the order.

But there were things I could not yet say, even to her.

"You gave me the silverleaf," I said instead. "How did you know I would need it?"

"Because I saw the way Ezekiel looked at the girls they brought to court." She released my hands and sat back. "Every year or two, the council sends a clerk's daughter or a farmer's orphan. Quiet. Wolfless. Unconnected. And every year, Ezekiel examines them himself. He sniffs them like a hound. Then they are sent away. I used to wonder what he was searching for."

"The mark."

"Yes." Her face was pale. "Now I think I understand. He has been waiting. For someone to arrive wearing the Veyra scent."

The room seemed suddenly very cold.

"Elena," said Mara. She reached into the pocket of her apron and drew out a small, flat parcel wrapped in oilcloth. "Your mother gave me this the night before the fire. She told me that if she did not come back, I was to keep it. That one day a girl with her eyes would find me, and I would know."

I stared at it.

"I did not know it was you," said Mara. "I did not know until the bell rang and I saw your face in the council hall. You have her mouth. You have her way of tilting your head." She pressed the parcel into my hands. "I should have given it to you at once. I was afraid."

"Of what?"

"That if I put it in your hands, I would have to admit that you were really here."

My fingers shook so badly that I could not undo the string. Mara reached over and did it for me, and the oilcloth fell open.

Inside lay a small, flat key of tarnished silver, with a crescent moon stamped on the bow.

And beneath it, a folded square of paper, sealed with a drop of wax.

"Do not open it here," Mara said softly. "Not tonight. Walls have ears in this place." She stood and smoothed her apron, and her tired, plain face was calm again, as if a door had closed. "Come to my rooms at midnight. I will make us a pot of chamomile and we will read it together. I have waited long enough."

"Mara—"

"Midnight," she said, and kissed my forehead, quick and fierce as a mother. Then she unlocked the door and was gone.

I arrived at ten to twelve.

The infirmary corridor was empty and dark. A single lamp burned at the far end, throwing long shadows across the stone. Mara's rooms were behind a low door beyond the herb store, and I could smell lavender and woodsmoke as I approached.

The door stood open.

"Mara?"

No answer. A candle guttered on the table, nearly burned down to the stub. A kettle sat on the hearth, steaming faintly, as if it had just been taken off the flame. Two cups waited on the table. One of them was overturned.

And the window, the small leaded window above her bed, had been smashed inward. Glass lay across the blanket in glittering shards. A cold wind sighed through the broken frame and stirred the curtains.

On the sill, a handprint. A smear of dark red, wet and fresh.

"Mara," I whispered.

The room was empty. The healer was gone.