The Saint Who Healed Everyone and the Knight She Couldn't novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Five Days

On the fifth morning the boy held out his right hand in the infirmary and said, "Look."

Yui looked.

The skin on the back of it was pale and ordinary, a little pink, with a farmer's freckles.

There was no mark at all.

For five days she had done nothing to him but the slow work.

Warm water at dawn and dusk, clean linen, broth, a bed, and her hand on his forehead while he slept.

She had not once let the light rise.

"Does it hurt?" she asked.

"No, Lady. It stopped hurting yesterday." He turned the hand over and over. "Nobody has it now. It isn't on the Commander?"

"It's gone," Yui said. "It's just gone."

She put her fingers on her mouth, and for a moment could not speak.

Down the row of beds lay eleven more men who had asked to carry theirs.

A grey-haired sergeant with half an ear had put them there himself, and stood at the door each night to see that no guard of the Marshal's came in.

Nobody had come.

Stahl's men were afraid of the Shield now, and the Shield no longer pretended otherwise.

"Five days," Yui said aloud, writing it in the notebook. Her pencil shook. "A curse takes five days, if somebody stays."

She ran to the east cell, taking the nineteen steps two at a time.

Greta's rider had left the night of the mess tent, with a letter to the Queen in her own hand.

Nobody knew if it had arrived.

The Shield guard on the cell door was a woman who had followed Brunhild for six years.

She looked at Yui's face, stepped aside, and said nothing.

Yui went in and shut the door.

Brunhild was standing in the middle of the cell, in her shirt, with her hands behind her back.

She had been walking.

She turned, and Yui crossed the room, took her hand, and pushed up the sleeve.

"Look," Yui said, and she was laughing and crying together. "He's clean. Brunhild, he's clean, and you've got nothing new. I checked your arm every night, and there's nothing new."

"The boy."

"The boy! Five days, nursed the slow way, and the mark just goes. It doesn't go anywhere. It goes."

Brunhild stared at her.

Then something broke open in her face.

She laughed, a short, cracked sound, and it turned in the middle into something else, and she put her hand over her mouth.

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