Sweating and dusty, Yrene burst into Hafiza’s office nearly an hour later, the trek from the palace through the clogged, narrow streets, then the endless steps up here, taking an eternity.
She’d been late—that had been her first truly unprofessional moment. She’d never been late to an appointment. Yet right at ten, she’d found herself in an alcove of the hallway outside his bedroom, hands over her face, struggling to breathe.
He hadn’t been the brute she’d expected.
He’d spoken well, more lord than soldier. Though his body had most certainly belonged to the latter. She had patched up and healed enough of the khagan’s favored warriors to know the feel of muscle beneath her fingers. The scars covering Lord Westfall’s tan skin spoke volumes about how the muscles had been earned the hard way. And now aided him in maneuvering through the world with the chair.
And the injury to his spine …
As Yrene halted at the threshold of the Healer on High’s office, Hafiza looked up from where she sat beside a sniffling acolyte.
“I need a word,” Yrene said tightly, one hand gripping the doorjamb.
“You shall have one when we are done,” Hafiza simply replied, handing a handkerchief to the weepy girl.
Some male healers existed, but the majority of those who received Silba’s gift were female. And this girl, likely no more than fourteen … Yrene had been laboring on her cousin’s farm at that age. Dreaming of being here. Certainly not crying to anyone about her sorry lot in life.
But Yrene walked out, shutting the door behind her, and waited against the wall on the narrow landing.
There were two other doors up here: one locked that led into Hafiza’s personal workshop, and a door that led into the Healer on High’s bedroom; the former carved with an owl taking flight, the latter with an owl at rest. Silba’s symbol. It was everywhere in the tower—owls carved and embossed in the stone and wood, sometimes in unexpected places and with silly little expressions, as if some long-ago acolyte had etched them as a secret joke. But the owl on the Healer on High’s private workshop …
Even though it perched atop a gnarled branch of iron that flowed across the door itself, wings flared wide as it prepared to leap into the skies, it seemed … alert. Aware of all who passed that door, who perhaps gazed too long in the direction of the workshop. None but Hafiza possessed the key to it, handed down by her predecessor. Ancient, half-forgotten knowledge and devices lay within, the acolytes whispered—unnatural things that were better locked up than set loose in the world.
Yrene always laughed at their hushed words, but didn’t tell them she and a few select others had been granted the pleasure of joining Hafiza in that workshop, which, save for the sheer age of some of the tools and furniture, held nothing worth gossiping about. But the mystery of the Healer on High’s workshop persisted, as it had likely done for centuries—yet another well-loved myth of the Torre, passed on from acolyte to acolyte.
Yrene fanned her face, still out of breath from the climb and the heat. She leaned her head back against the cool stone, and again felt for the scrap of paper in her pocket. She wondered if the lord had noticed how often she’d grabbed that stranger’s note. If he’d thought she was reaching for a weapon. He’d seen everything, been aware of her every breath.
A man trained for it. He had to be, if he’d served the dead king. Just as Nesryn Faliq, a child of this continent, now served the king of a territory that had not treated outsiders very well at all.
Yrene could not make sense of it. There was some romantic bond, she knew from both the tension and comfort between them. But to what degree … It didn’t matter. Save for the emotional healing the lord would need as well. A man not used to voicing his feelings, his fears and hopes and hurts—that much was obvious.
The door to Hafiza’s office opened at last, and the acolyte emerged, smiling apologetically at Yrene, red-nosed and glassy-eyed.
Yrene sighed through her nose and offered a smile back. She was not the person who had just barged into the office. No, even busy as she was, Yrene had always taken time for the acolytes, the homesick ones especially.
No one had sat beside her in the mess hall below during those initial days.
Yrene still remembered those lonely meals. Remembered that she’d broken after two days and began taking her food to the vast healers’ library belowground, hiding from the stiff-backed librarians who forbade such things, with only the occasional mercurial Baast Cat and carved owl for company.
Yrene had returned to the mess hall once her lessons had garnered enough acquaintances to make the prospect of finding a place to sit less daunting, spotting familiar and smiling faces giving her enough courage to leave the library and its enigmatic cats behind for anything but research.
Yrene touched the acolyte on the shoulder and whispered, “Cook made almond cookies this morning. I smelled them on the way out. Tell her I want six, but take four of those for yourself.” She winked at the girl. “Leave the other two for me at my room.”
The girl beamed, nodding. Cook was perhaps Yrene’s first friend in the Torre. She’d spied Yrene eating alone and began sneaking extra treats onto her tray. Leaving them in her room. Even in her favorite secret spot in the library. Yrene had repaid Cook last year by saving her granddaughter from an insidious lung sickness that had crept up on her. Cook still got weepy whenever they ran into each other, and Yrene had made it a point to stop by the girl’s house once a month to check on her.
When she left, she’d have to ask someone to look after the girl. Cleaving herself from this life she’d built … It would be no easy task. And come with no small amount of guilt.
Yrene watched the still-sniffling acolyte hop down the wide spiral stairs, then took a deep breath and strode into Hafiza’s office.
“Will the young lord walk again?” Hafiza asked by way of greeting, white brows high on her forehead.
Yrene slid into her usual chair, the seat still warm from the girl who’d just vacated it.
“He will. The injury is nearly twin to the one I healed last winter. But it will be tricky.”
“In regard to the healing, or you?”
Yrene blushed. “I behaved … poorly.”
“That was to be expected.”
Yrene wiped the sweat from her brow. “I’m embarrassed to tell you how badly.”
“Then don’t. Do better the next time, and we’ll consider this another lesson.”
Yrene sagged in her chair, stretching her aching legs on the worn carpet. No matter how Hafiza’s servants begged, she refused to change the red-and-green rug. It had been good enough for the last five of her predecessors, and it was good enough for her.
Yrene leaned her head against the soft back of the chair, staring at the cloudless day beyond the open windows. “I think I can heal him,” she said, more to herself than Hafiza. “If he cooperates, I could get him walking again.”
“And will he cooperate?”
“I was not the only one who behaved poorly,” she said. “Though he’s from Adarlan—it could be his nature.”
Hafiza huffed a laugh. “When do you return to him?”
Yrene hesitated.
“You will return, won’t you?” Hafiza pushed.
Yrene picked at the sun-blanched threads of the chair’s arm. “It was hard—hard to look at him, hear his accent, and …” She stilled her hand. “But you are right. I shall … try. If only so Adarlan may never hold it against me.”
“Do you expect them to?”
“He has powerful friends who might remember. His companion is the new Captain of the Guard. Her family hails from here, yet she serves them.”