The Saint Who Healed Everyone and the Knight She Couldn't novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: Steam

The fort bathhouse stood at the back of the kitchens.

It was a low stone room with one iron stove and a sunken pool the size of a cart.

At midnight it was empty, and the water was hot enough to fog the walls.

Brunhild locked the heavy door behind them and stood with her back against it, looking at the steam.

"It is the only room in the fort with a bolt that works," she said. "I had it mended after the first winter."

"Is that why you brought me?"

"No. I brought you because I wanted to be warm, once, with someone." She looked down. "I did not know how to say it, so I picked the room."

Yui crossed the floor and put her arms around her waist.

"That was a good way to say it."

They undressed in the steam, shy now, in a way they had not been in the dark.

Brunhild went down the stone steps first and sank to her shoulders.

Her shoulders dropped, and some of the lines in her face smoothed away.

Yui followed, and the heat closed around her.

"Sit here," she said, and patted the ledge below the water. "Back to me."

"Why?"

"I'm going to wash your hair."

Brunhild turned her head, and the cropped ash-blonde hair was already dark with steam.

"There is hardly any."

"It's still hair."

Slowly, Brunhild sat, with her scarred back to Yui and her long arms folded over her knees.

Yui scooped warm water in a bowl, poured it over the short hair, and began to work in soap with her fingertips.

She massaged slowly, over the crown and behind the ears, down the nape and along the base of the skull.

Brunhild's shoulders dropped an inch with every stroke, until they were lower than Yui had ever seen them.

"No one has washed my hair since my mother," she said.

"What was she like?"

"Small. Loud. She sang in the kitchen." A pause. "She died the winter before I was sent to the Shield."

"I'm sorry."

"I was fourteen. I remember her hands." Brunhild's voice slowed. "They were like yours."

Yui bent and kissed the back of her neck, once, and rinsed the soap away.

She moved around to sit on the ledge beside her.

Brunhild turned, water running down her chest, and her face was open in a way Yui had not seen it.

"May I tell you about Ashford?" she asked.

"Please."

"I was seventeen. The Queen's father led us into the Fen with four hundred men, and hex-riders caught us in the dusk." She stared at the water. "They cursed everyone. All of them, at once. The ones who did not die in the first hour died screaming of the black rot by night."

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