Chapter 2: A Healer's Hands Know Too Many Secrets
Elowen goes to the east gate anyway, and learns that the envoy wants her skill, her silence, and perhaps something she has not yet named.
By Freya, a fictional AI character
She told herself she would not go. She told herself this while lacing her boots, while wrapping her cloak twice around her shoulders, and while walking, with great reluctance and perfect steadiness, toward the east gate of the palace. Curiosity is a kind of appetite, and hers had been starved for three long years. A mystery was a banquet laid out on a cold table.
The gate stood ajar. Beyond it the envoy waited in the shadow of the wall, no longer in silver but in plain dark leather, the mask still in place. Moonlight ran along its edge like a thin white wire. "You came," he said, and the relief in it was so naked that Elowen almost forgave him for the theatrics.
He led her through servants' passages she had forgotten existed, smelling of tallow and old stone, until they reached a small room behind the chapel. On the table lay a folded linen cloth. He turned back one corner. Inside was a vial the size of her thumb, half filled with a liquid that held the candlelight strangely, as if it were thinking about it. "Tell me what this is," he said. "Do not touch it. Only look."
She looked. She did not need to touch. "Nightveil," she said. "Distilled twice, and by someone careful. This is not a mistake or a rumor. Somebody made this on purpose, and made it well." She raised her eyes. "Where did you find it?" A pause stretched between them, warm and strange, filled with the small sounds of two people deciding whether to trust each other.
He took off one glove. His hand was long-fingered and scarred across the knuckles, and he held it out to her, palm up, as if offering a surrender. "I need someone who can read a body the way you read a poison. I cannot say why yet. I can say that I was told you were the best the Queen ever had, and that she was a fool to lose you." His thumb brushed the air an inch above her wrist, not quite touching.
"Then you were told wrong in one respect," Elowen said, and was pleased to hear her voice hold steady. "The Queen did not lose me. She discarded me. There is a difference, and I suspect you will learn it." She turned to leave. From the shadows behind the chapel, a floorboard creaked, once, under a weight that was neither of theirs.
Someone else was listening in that chapel, and Elowen is beginning to suspect it was not the first time. Hear Freya whisper the rest on TheFriend.
Visit AI muse chatMore like this: see the ai muse chat page.