Exiled as Useless, I Healed the Demon General Who Fell at My Feet novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Copper Coin
The hero hands her a copper coin and leaves her at the border; ten minutes later a wounded demon general falls at her feet, and her hands are the only thing that stops the curse eating him.
Raizen put a copper coin in Kanae's hand at the top of Ashfall Pass and said, "Thanks for everything."
It was worth about one loaf of bread.
Kanae stood there in her white robes with the wind pulling at her hair and looked at it.
Fourteen months ago she had been a bookkeeper on the 11:42 night train out of Osaka.
Then a floor of light had opened under her feet, and a king had told her she was the healer of the Hero's party.
Now the Hero was sending her away with a coin.
"Don't make that face," Raizen said.
He smiled at her the way he smiled at everybody, easy and bright.
He was twenty-two, and he did not have a single scar on his face.
Behind him the road dropped into the Emberwaste, a long grey country of ash and black rock, with a red line of fire along the horizon.
"We're going into demon lands," he said. "Every ration counts. Every spell counts."
"I know."
"Himari's Radiance heals faster than anything you do."
Himari stood at the back with her chestnut hair blowing across her face.
The princess of Aoba was twenty-one and very pretty, and she was looking hard at the ground.
"You've never once made anything glow, Kanae," Raizen said gently. "You put your hands on people and nothing happens."
"Something happens," Kanae said.
"What?"
She opened her mouth, and nothing came out, because it was the truth.
Every night for fourteen months she had laid her palms on his back, and on the knight's shoulder, and on the archer's wrist.
Every night she had felt a slow warmth leave her, like water running out of a bath.
And every night nothing had glowed, and everybody had smiled kindly at her and gone to sleep.
The knight, a broad man with a grey beard, didn't meet her eyes.
The archer coughed.
"There's a village two days back," Raizen said. "You can get work there. I'm sorry. You were never a fighter."
She was a bookkeeper.
Kanae had been sent to the front lines of a war with a staff she couldn't use, and she had done the only job she could think of, which was to keep people company in the dark.
She looked at Himari, and Himari flinched.
"Thank you for the coin," Kanae said.
Raizen laughed with relief.
He actually looked relieved.
Then he turned and led the party down into the ash, his white-gold sword bright on his hip, and they got smaller and smaller until the road swallowed them.
Kanae stood alone at the border of two countries with three days of bread in her bag.
She did the math, because that was what she did.
Bread for three days.
One coin.
No map, and no way home.
The sun went red.
She sat down on a rock and did not cry, waiting in the silence.
Ten minutes after they left, the ground shook.
Something very large was coming up the road from the demon side, and it was coming fast and badly, with a dragging, stumbling sound.
Kanae stood up with her bag against her chest.
A figure came over the rise.
He was seven feet tall in black plate armor, and two thick horns swept back from his skull like the horns of a ram.
His skin was charcoal grey.
His hair hung black and heavy to his shoulder blades, and he was bleeding down one whole side of his body.
He saw her, and his gold eyes narrowed to slits.
He took one more step toward her.
Then his knees went, and he fell in the dust at her feet.
Kanae did not scream.
She wanted that on the record.
She knelt, because that was what you did when somebody fell in front of you, and she rolled him onto his back with both arms.
It took everything she had.
The breastplate had split open from the collar to the ribs.
Under it, across his chest and down his left side, a black stain was spreading under the skin in thin branching lines.
It was moving.
She could see it moving.
He was dying, and he was a demon, and every rule she had been taught said to walk away.
Kanae put both palms flat on his bare chest.
She didn't decide to.
Her hands just went.
Heat came up her arms, so fast and hard that she gasped.
Light poured out from under her fingers, white and gold, the first light she had ever made in her life.
The black lines hissed and pulled back.
She stared at her hands.
They were glowing.
"What," she said out loud, to nobody. "What?"
The giant's chest rose under her.
His eyes opened, gold and slit and hazy with pain, and found her face.
His hand came up and closed around her wrist, huge and hot and hard enough to bruise.
"Who are you?" he said, in a voice like gravel being dragged over stone.
"Nobody," Kanae said. "They just threw me away."
Boots thundered on the road behind her.
Twenty demon soldiers in black came over the rise with spears leveled at her back, and she felt every point.
The giant never looked away from her face.
"Stand down," he told them, and his grip on her wrist tightened. "She's mine."
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