Nesryn gave Chaol an impressed, wary glance. A healer dismissing a princess of the most powerful empire in the world.
Hasar leaned forward to ruffle Yrene’s gold-brown hair. “If you weren’t gods-blessed, I’d carve out your tongue myself.” The words were honeyed venom. Yrene only offered a faint, bemused smile before Hasar hopped off the desk and gave him a mocking incline of the head. “Don’t worry, Lord Westfall. Yrene has healed injuries similar and far worse than your own. She’ll have you back on your feet and able to do your master’s bidding again in no time.” With that lovely parting shot, which left Nesryn cold-eyed, the princess vanished.
They waited a good few moments to make sure they heard the outer door shut.
“Yrene Towers,” was all Chaol said.
“What of it.”
Gone was the faint amusement. Fine.
“The lack of feeling and movement begins at my hips.”
Yrene’s eyes shot right to them, dancing over him. “Are you capable of using your manhood?”
He tried not to flinch. Even Nesryn blinked at the frank question.
“Yes,” he said tightly, fighting the heat rising in his cheeks.
She looked between them, assessing. “Have you used it to completion?”
He clenched his jaw. “How is that relevant?” And how had she gleaned what was between them?
Yrene only wrote something down.
“What are you writing?” he demanded, cursing the damned chair for keeping him from storming to rip the paper out of her hands.
“I’m writing a giant no.”
Which she then underlined.
He growled, “I suppose you’ll ask about my bathroom habits now?”
“It was next on my list.”
“They are unchanged,” he bit out. “Unless you need Nesryn to confirm.”
Yrene merely turned to Nesryn, unruffled. “Have you seen him struggle with it?”
“Do not answer that,” he snarled at Nesryn.
Nesryn had the good wits to sink into a chair and remain quiet.
Yrene rose, setting down the pen, and came around the desk. The morning sunlight caught in her hair, bouncing off her head in a corona.
She knelt at his feet. “Shall you remove your boots or shall I?”
“I’ll do it.”
She sat back on her heels and watched him move. Another test. To discern how mobile and agile he was. The weight of his legs, having to constantly adjust their position … Chaol gritted his teeth as he gripped his knee, lifting his foot off the wooden slat, and bent to remove his boot in a few sharp tugs. When he finished with the other one, he asked, “Pants, too?”
Chaol knew he should be kind, should beseech her to help him, and yet—
“After a drink or two, I think,” Yrene only said. Then looked over her shoulder to a bemused Nesryn. “Sorry,” she added—and sounded only slightly less sharp-tongued.
“Why are you apologizing to her?”
“I assume she has the misfortune of sharing your bed these days.”
It took his self-restraint to keep from going for her shoulders and shaking her soundly. “Have I done something to you?”
That seemed to give her pause. Yrene only yanked off his socks, throwing them atop where he’d discarded his boots. “No.”
A lie. He scented and tasted it.
But it focused her, and Chaol watched as Yrene picked up his foot in her slim hands. Watched, since he didn’t feel it—beyond the shift in his abdominal muscles. He couldn’t tell if she was squeezing or holding lightly, if her nails were digging in; not without looking. So he did.
A ring adorned her fourth finger—a wedding band. “Is your husband from here?” Or wife, he supposed.
“I’m not—” She blinked, frowning at the ring. She didn’t finish the sentence.
Not married, then. The silver ring was simple, the garnet no more than a droplet. Likely worn to keep men from bothering her, as he’d seen many women do in the streets of Rifthold.
“Can you feel this?” Yrene asked. She was touching each toe.
“No.”
She did it on the other foot. “And this?”
“No.”
He’d been through such examinations before—at the castle, and with Rowan.
“His initial injury,” Nesryn cut in, as if remembering the prince as well, “was to the entire spine. A friend had some knowledge of healing and patched him up as best he could. He regained movement in his upper body, but not below the hips.”
“How was it attained—the injury?”
Her hands were moving over his foot and ankle, tapping and testing. As if she’d indeed done this before, as Princess Hasar had claimed.
Chaol didn’t immediately reply, sorting through those moments of terror and pain and rage.
Nesryn opened her mouth, but he cut her off. “Fighting. I received a blow to my back while fighting. A magical one.”
Yrene’s fingers were inching up his legs, patting and squeezing. He felt none of it. Her brows bunched in concentration. “Your friend must have been a gifted healer if you regained so much motion.”
“He did what he could. Then told me to come here.”
Her hands pushed and pressed on his thighs, and he watched with no small amount of growing horror as she slid them higher and higher. He was about to demand if she planned to ascertain for herself about the life in his manhood, but Yrene lifted her head and met his stare.
This close, her eyes were a golden flame. Not like the cold metal of Manon Blackbeak’s, not laced with a century of violence and predator’s instincts, but … like a long-burning flame on a winter’s night. “I need to see your back,” was all Yrene said. Then she peeled away. “Lie down on the nearest bed.”
Before Chaol could remind her that it wasn’t quite so easy to do that, Nesryn was instantly in motion, wheeling him into his room. Kadja had already made his bed, and left a bouquet of orange lilies on the table beside it. Yrene sniffed at the scent—as if it was unpleasant. He refrained from asking.
He waved off Nesryn when she tried to help him onto the bed. It was low enough that he could manage.
Yrene lingered in the doorway, observing while he braced one hand on the mattress, one on the arm of the chair, and in a powerful push, heaved himself into a sitting position on the bed. He unbuckled each of those newly polished buttons on his jacket, then peeled it off. Along with the white shirt beneath.
“Facedown, I assume?”
Yrene gave him a curt nod.
Gripping his knees, abdomen clenching, he pulled his legs onto the mattress as he lay flat on his back.
For a few heartbeats, spasms shook his legs. Not real, controlled motion, he’d realized after the first time it had happened weeks ago. He could still feel that crushing weight in his chest after he’d understood it was some effect of the injury—that it usually happened if he moved himself about a great deal.
“Spasms in the legs are common with such an injury,” Yrene supplied, observing them fade away into stillness once again. “These may calm with time.” She waved a hand to him in silent reminder to turn over onto his belly.
Chaol said nothing as he sat up to fold one ankle over the other, lay down again on his back, and then twisted over, his legs following suit.
Whether she was impressed that he’d picked up on the maneuverings so quickly, she didn’t let on. Didn’t even lift a brow.
Folding his hands under his chin, he peered over his shoulder and watched her approach, watched her motion Nesryn to sit when the woman began pacing again.
He scanned Yrene for any sort of flickering magic. What it’d look like, he had not the faintest inkling. Dorian’s had been ice and wind and flashing light; Aelin’s had been raging, singing flame, but healing magic … Was it something external, something tangible? Or something only his bones and blood might witness?
He’d once balked at those sorts of questions—might once have even balked at the idea of letting magic t
ouch him. But the man who had done those things, feared those things … He was glad to leave him in the shattered ruin of the glass castle.
Yrene stood over him for a moment, surveying his back.
Her hands were as warm as the morning sun when she laid them palm-down on the skin between his shoulder blades. “You were hit here,” she observed quietly.
There was a mark. A faint, splattering paleness to his skin where the king’s blow had hit. Dorian had shown him using a trick with two hand-mirrors before he’d left.
“Yes.”
Her hands trailed along the groove of his spine. “It rippled down here, shredding and severing.” The words were not for him—but as if she were speaking to herself, lost in some trance.
He fought against the memory of that pain, the numbness and oblivion it summoned.
“You can—tell that?” Nesryn asked.
“My gift tells me.” Yrene’s hand stalled along the middle of his back, pushing and prodding. “It was terrible power—what struck you.”
“Yes,” was all he said.
Her hands went lower, lower, until they shoved down the waist of his pants a few inches. He hissed through his teeth and glared over his bare shoulder. “A little warning.”
Yrene ignored him and touched the lowest part of his back. He did not feel it.
She spider-walked her fingers up his spine as if counting the vertebrae. “Here?”
“I can feel you.”
She backtracked one step. “Here?”
“Nothing.”
Her face bunched, as if making a mental note of the location. She began on the outer edges of his back, creeping up, asking where he stopped feeling it. She took his neck and head in her hands, turning it this way and that, testing and assessing.
Finally, she ordered him to move. Not to rise, but to turn over again.
Chaol stared up at the arched, painted ceiling as Yrene poked and prodded his pectorals, the muscles of his abdomen, those along his ribs. She reached the vee of muscles leading beneath his pants, kept moving lower, and he demanded, “Really?”
Yrene shot him an incredulous look. “Is there something you’re particularly embarrassed for me to see?”
Oh, she certainly had some fight in her, this Yrene Towers from Fenharrow. Chaol held her stare, the challenge in it.
Yrene only snorted. “I had forgotten that men from the northern continent are so proper and guarded.”
“And here they are not?”
“No. Bodies are celebrated, not shamed into hiding. Men and women both.”
That would explain the servant who had no qualms about such things.
“They seemed plenty dressed at dinner.”
“Wait until the parties,” Yrene countered coolly. But she lifted her hands from the already-low waist of his pants. “If you have not noticed any problems externally or internally with your manhood, then I don’t need to look.”
He shoved against the feeling that he was again thirteen years old and trying to talk to a pretty girl for the first time and ground out, “Fine.”
Yrene withdrew a step and handed him his shirt. He sat up, arms and abdominal muscles straining, and slid it on.
“Well?” Nesryn asked, stalking close.
Yrene toyed with a heavy, loose curl. “I need to think. Talk to my superior.”
“I thought you were the best,” Nesryn said carefully.
“I am one of many who are skilled,” Yrene admitted. “But the Healer on High assigned me to this. I should like to speak to her first.”
“Is it bad?” Nesryn demanded. He was grateful she did—he didn’t have the nerve to.
Yrene only looked to him, her gaze frank and unafraid. “You know it is bad.”
“But can you help him?” Nesryn pushed, sharper this time.
“I have healed such injuries before. But this … it remains to be seen,” Yrene said, meeting her gaze now.
“When—when will you know?”
“When I have had time to think.”
To decide, Chaol realized. She wanted to decide whether to help him.
He held Yrene’s stare again, letting her see that he, at least, understood. He was glad Nesryn had not entertained the idea. He had a feeling Yrene would be face-first against the wall if she did.
But for Nesryn … the healers were beyond reproach. Holy as one of the gods here. Their ethic unquestionable.
“When will you return?” Nesryn asked.
Never, he almost answered.
Yrene slid her hands into her pockets. “I’ll send word,” was all she said, and left.
Nesryn stared after her, then rubbed her face.
Chaol said nothing.
But Nesryn straightened, then dashed out—to the sitting room. Rustling paper, and then—
Nesryn halted in the doorway to his room, brows crossed, Yrene’s paper in her hands.
She handed it to him. “What does this even mean?”
There were four names written on the paper, her handwriting messy.
Olgnia.
Marte.
Rosana.
Josefin.
It was the final name that had been written down several times.
The final name that had been underlined, over and over.
Josefin. Josefin. Josefin.
“Perhaps they’re other healers in the Torre who could help,” he lied. “Perhaps she feared spies overhearing her suggest someone else.”
Nesryn’s mouth quirked to the side. “Let’s see what she says—when she returns. At least we know Hasar can track her down if need be.” Or Kashin, whose very name had set the healer on edge. Not that he’d force Yrene to work on him, but … it was useful information.
Chaol studied the paper again. The fervent underlining of that final name.
As if Yrene had needed to remind herself while here. In his presence. As if she needed whoever they were to know that she remembered them.
He had met another talented young healer from Fenharrow. His king had loved her enough to consider fleeing with her, to seek a better life for them. Chaol knew what had gone on in Fenharrow during their youth. Knew what Sorscha had endured there—and what she’d endured in Rifthold.
He’d ridden through Fenharrow’s scarred grasslands over the years. Had seen the burned or abandoned stone cottages, their thatched roofs long since gone. Owners either enslaved, dead, or fled elsewhere. Far, far away.
No, Chaol realized as he held that piece of paper, Yrene Towers would not be returning.
CHAPTER
6
She’d known his age, but Yrene had still not expected the former captain to look so … young.
She hadn’t done the math until she’d walked into that room and seen his handsome face, a mix of caution and hope written across the hardened, broad features.
It was that hope that had made her see red. Had made her ache to give him a matching scar to the slender one slicing across his cheek.
She’d been unprofessional in the most horrific sense. Never—never had she been so rude and unkind toward any of her patients.
Mercifully, Hasar had arrived, cooling her head slightly. But touching the man, thinking of ways to help him …
She had not meant to write the list of the last four generations of Towers women. Had not meant to write her mother’s name over and over while pretending to record his information. It had not helped with the overwhelming roaring in her head.
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 mo
st 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.
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