Exiled as Useless, I Healed the Demon General Who Fell at My Feet novel · Chapter 18 of 24
Chapter 18: The Leash
Kanae woke on her back on a cold floor, looking at a canvas roof.
Her wrists would not move.
She turned her head, slowly, and saw that she was lying in the middle of a circle of gold ink about twelve feet across.
Symbols ran around the edge of it, small and sharp and crawling with light.
Her arms and legs were pinned to the ground by threads of the same light, thin as spider silk and strong as steel.
The ring on her left wrist burned.
"There," said a gentle voice. "She wakes. Good."
An old man in white robes stood at the edge of the circle with his hands folded.
He was thin and bald, with a long white beard and kind pale eyes, and he looked exactly like somebody's grandfather.
"Do not struggle, my dear," the Archpriest said. "It only tires you."
"Let me go."
"I fear I cannot."
Beside him a second man sat on a campaign stool, hunched, in a plain grey cloak.
He was sixty years old.
He had a lined, tired, sallow face and a crown so small and plain that Kanae had taken it for a circlet.
She had seen that face at the back of the Great Temple in her first month in Aoba.
She had never heard it speak.
"Your Majesty," she said.
"Lady Kanae," said the King of Aoba. He did not look at her. "I regret this."
"Do you."
"I do."
"You called me a healer."
"It was the kindest word."
"It was a lie."
"It was a mercy." His voice was dull. "Would you have come, if we had said it plainly? Would any soul in your world have knelt in a circle and agreed to be poured out for a stranger's war?"
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of Exiled as Useless, I Healed the Demon General Who Fell at My Feet are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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