They Broke the Duke's Bastard, Now She Is His Only Heir novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Warden's Infirmary

Doran takes her to the Warden fort where her gift saves a dying warden, and he tells her the Saint of Hands has been doing the same in the square for two years.

I woke in a bed with a clean sheet over me.

It was the first sheet in three years, and I lay still, feeling the neat stitches in its hem.

A lamp burned on a table.

Beyond the window I could see a river with torches along its bank, and a great iron gate with a star over it.

"The Warden fort at the river gate," Doran said from the chair by the wall. "You slept all afternoon."

He had taken off his coat.

His shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbow, and his left forearm had a long pale scar, well healed, that ran from the wrist to the crook.

I looked away from it.

"Eat first," he said.

A warden set a tray on my knees and left.

It held mutton stew, a heel of white bread and a cup of milk.

I stared at it.

Then I ate it all in under a minute, with my hands, with my head down, because three years of the camp do not leave you.

Doran did not say a word about it.

When the bowl was empty he took it away and filled it again.

I ate that too.

The door opened, and a gray-haired physician came in with a leather case.

He knelt at the foot of the bed, folded back the sheet and pressed his thumbs around my knees.

I clenched the blanket.

"Both kneecaps were split and healed crooked," he said. "The joints were never set. Whoever did this knew exactly what to break."

"Can it be mended?" Doran asked.

"By a master bonesetter, yes. It means breaking the bone again and setting it properly, and then months in a brace before she bears weight."

"How many months?"

"Six at the least. And it needs a real bonesetter, Marshal, which the river lands have two of."

"Find me both."

The physician bowed and went out.

I looked at the ceiling.

"Why are you doing this?" I said.

Doran sat back down.

"The King has ordered an inquiry into the camps," he said. "Greywater has had forty deaths in three years, and the Duke's seal is on every ledger. The inquiry needs a witness who walked out alive."

"So I'm a witness."

"You're the only one."

It was so plain and honest that I almost liked him for it.

A door banged somewhere down the corridor, and a boy's voice shouted for the physician.

Doran was on his feet before I had finished turning my head.

Two wardens carried a young man past the doorway on a plank, and the plank left a thick red trail on the stone.

His belly was wrapped in rags that were black and soaked through.

"Knifed by smugglers on the south road, three days ago," I heard someone say. "The wound has gone bad. He won't live till dawn."

I swung my legs over the side of the bed.

"Don't," Doran said.

"Where is he?"

"Liora, you can't walk."

"Then carry me."

He looked at me for one moment longer.

Then he picked me up, carefully, one arm under my knees and one at my back, and carried me down the corridor into a room full of cots.

He set me down on the floor beside the plank.

The young man's face was the color of candle wax.

I put both hands flat on his belly and pushed the rags aside.

The wound was swollen, hot, and stinking.

I shut my eyes.

I thought of the dance hall, of lanterns on the river, of being warm.

The gift came up, stronger than it had been on the road, because I had eaten for the first time in a long while.

It rushed down my arms and into his body.

I felt the poison in his blood and drew it out, pulled the torn flesh together and sealed the bleeding closed.

When I opened my eyes the wound was a pink seam.

The young man gasped and sat up.

Every warden in the room had gone silent.

"That's the Hands," one of them breathed. "Just like the Saint."

I dropped my own hands in my lap and felt the room tilt.

"Who is the Saint?" I said.

Doran crouched down beside me.

On the wall behind him a yellow poster was pinned between the lists of watch shifts.

It showed a woman in a white gown with a lantern in her hands, and gold curls, and round blue eyes.

*SAINT ODETTE OF THE HANDS. SHE HEALS THE SICK IN LANTERN SQUARE EVERY SEVENTH DAY.*

"Lady Odette has been healing the poor of the city for two years now," Doran said, and watched my face as he said it. "The King's fever last winter. A hundred others. The city calls her a miracle."

I stared at the poster.

Odette had never had a gift in her life.

I knew it as surely as I knew my own name, because I had held her hands in the dance hall every day for ten years.

Then I remembered the camp physician who came once a month to draw a small vial of my blood.

*For your health,* Moxon had told me, *by the Duke's kindness.*

My hands began to shake.

"She isn't healing anyone," I said. "She's using me."

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