The Dismissed Saint Became the Beast King's Healer novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Wolf at the Door
She opens her door to the great grey wolf, whose head in her lap cools the burn, and she wakes beside a man whose bare back carries the same silver seal.
Shiori crawled to the window and pulled herself up on the stone sill.
The courtyard below was empty.
Every door was shut and every shutter was barred.
The guards on the walls stood with their backs to the yard.
In the middle of it, a wolf as big as a draft horse was walking in a tight circle.
Its fur was silver-grey.
Its tail dragged.
Every few steps it stopped, lifted its head toward the south, and howled.
The sound went straight through her shoulder.
The burn flared, and she slid down the wall and sat on the floor with her teeth clenched.
Someone knocked on her door.
"Healer Hanazono?" It was Nerei, and the voice was low and quick. "Are you in there?"
"Yes."
"Slide the bolt and don't open it for anyone, not for me, not for a crying child."
"Why?"
"It's dusk. It's over by midnight."
"What's out there?"
A short silence.
"Weather," said Nerei. "Bolt the door."
Her steps went away down the stair.
Shiori reached up and slid the bolt, and then she leaned her forehead on the wood and breathed.
Her tunic was stuck to her back.
She tried to think like a nurse.
Fever, localized heat, a wound that was closed and still burning.
There was nothing in her training for a wound a priest had made with a disc.
The howling went on, and it was a terrible sound to hear alone.
It was not the howl of something hungry.
It was the howl of something that hurt and could not say so.
Her own shoulder was throbbing in the same rhythm.
She counted the hours by the stove.
At ten, the wolf stopped circling and climbed the tower.
She heard claws on stone, slow and heavy, up the stair outside her room.
They stopped at her door.
Something large pressed against the wood from the other side, and the boards creaked.
Then it was quiet, except for breathing.
It was a long, rough breath, and she knew it.
It was the breath of a patient trying not to make a noise.
Shiori stood up.
Her knees shook.
Every sensible thing she knew told her not to open the door, and she had spent seven months as the Temple's sensible girl.
She slid back the bolt.
The wolf did not push in.
It stood in the corridor, so big its back touched the ceiling arch, and its head hung low.
Its eyes were dark brown.
They were not the animal gold of the soldiers on the bridge.
They were wet, tired, human eyes, and they looked at her.
"It hurts you too," she said.
The wolf shut its eyes.
"Come in. I'm not afraid of you."
That was not completely true.
She stepped back, and the wolf came into the room very slowly.
It lay down on the floor beside her bed with a heavy sigh.
Shiori sat down next to it on the stone and, before she could be sensible again, put both palms on the side of its neck.
The fur was thick and hot.
Under it she could feel a pulse running far too fast.
She let the light come.
Pale white spilled out of her hands and into the fur, and the wolf let out a long shuddering breath.
The burn in her shoulder dropped.
She gasped.
It was gone, or nearly gone, a warm ache where there had been a coal.
The wolf lifted its great head and set it in her lap.
She stroked the fur behind its ears and, because she was tired and it was past midnight, she began to talk.
She told it about the elevator in Sendai.
She told it about the ward and the soldiers and the High Priest's disc.
She told it she was twenty-two.
She told it that her mother in Sendai had a cat and no idea where she was.
The wolf didn't answer.
It only shifted a little closer, until her whole lap was warm.
At some point she lay down on the floor beside it and slept with her cheek on its fur.
She woke in grey light with her neck stiff and a blanket over her.
She was lying on her side on the floor.
Something warm and heavy was curled behind her, and an arm lay over her waist.
It was a man's arm.
It was bare to the shoulder, strong and scarred along the forearm, and she knew the scar.
Shiori held very still.
She felt his breath on the back of her neck.
He was breathing slow and deep.
The blanket was the only thing between his body and the morning, and it lay mostly on her.
She turned her head carefully.
The king of the Wolf Court was asleep on her floor, silver hair across his face, and one grey ear twitched in his dream.
She slid out from under his arm without waking him and sat up.
He turned on his stomach in his sleep.
The blanket slipped from his back.
Shiori stopped breathing.
Between his shoulder blades, on the left side, sat a silver mark the size of her whole palm.
It had a ring and a sun in it, and a sealed line through the center.
It was the same mark the High Priest had burned into her.
Only his was bigger, and the silver had gone dull and old.
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