The Saint Who Healed Everyone and the Knight She Couldn't novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Old Way
Yui heals forty soldiers and the last, Dame Brunhild, cannot be healed, so she changes her bandages by lamplight and learns the black line is two fingers from the commander's heart.
By noon on her first day at the front, Yui Morimoto had healed forty men, and her hands had not stopped shaking since the thirtieth.
The last man on her list was a farrier with a black rot mark the size of a palm on his left forearm.
"Hold still," Yui said, and laid two fingers on the mark.
White light ran down her arm and into his.
The black threads pulled back, and under them the skin was pink and clean.
The farrier stared at his arm and began to cry.
"That's the forty-first mark gone this week," said Sergeant Greta Moll, who stood beside the cot with a clipboard and a stiff left leg.
"Forty," Yui said. "I count forty."
Yui wiped her hands on her apron.
She had been a surgical nurse in Saitama three weeks ago, and nobody in the Kingdom of Eldmark had asked her whether she wanted to be a saint.
They had simply put a white cloak on her and pointed at the sick.
"Who's left?" she asked.
Greta's face went careful.
"Only the Commander, Lady Yui. But she won't come to the tent."
"Then I'll go to her."
"She says it won't work."
Yui shrugged. "Everyone says that until it does."
Greta gave her a long look, and then, to Yui's surprise, a small grateful smile.
"Barracks tower, top floor," she said. "Knock twice, then wait. She doesn't like a door opening on her."
At dusk Yui climbed the cold stone stairs of the barracks tower, knocked twice and waited.
"Enter," said a low voice.
The room was small and bare, with a stone floor, a narrow cot, a table and a single oil lamp.
A woman sat on the cot with her back very straight, a long sword leaning against the wall beside her, within reach.
Dame Brunhild Kast, Commander of the Royal Shield, was taller than any woman Yui had ever met.
She had cropped ash-blonde hair and grey eyes that took in Yui's whole body in one flat glance.
She wore a white shirt open at the throat, and her left sleeve was rolled to the elbow over a dirty bandage.
"You're the new saint," Brunhild said.
"I'm Yui. I'm a nurse."
"I was told it would work on everyone."
"It works on everyone I've tried."
"Then I'm sorry to be the exception." Brunhild held out her bandaged arm without looking at it. "Go on. It's easier if you see for yourself."
Yui knelt on the stone and put her fingers on the wrist.
She called up the light.
It rose in her chest, warm and easy, the same as forty times that day.
When it touched Brunhild's skin, it slid off.
A thin white spark crackled, and the light was gone.
Yui tried again with more force, and the light slid off again.
"It never works on me," Brunhild said, without any bitterness at all.
Yui sat back on her heels.
Then she did what she had done at three in the morning on a hundred nights in Saitama.
She stood up, found the basin on the table, and asked, "Is there warm water?"
"There's a kettle on the stove downstairs."
"Then I'll fetch it. And clean cloth. And you'll let me change that bandage, because it's filthy."
Brunhild raised one pale eyebrow.
"It's not your job."
"It's the only job I've ever been good at," Yui said.
By lamplight the work was slow and plain.
Yui soaked the old bandage loose with warm water, lifted it, and rinsed the arm with a clean cloth.
She saw the scars first, and there were a great many.
Fine black lines ran over the forearm, thin as thread and old.
Then she saw the fresh one.
It sat on the inside of the left forearm, wet and new, a black mark the size of a palm with threads reaching out from its edge.
Yui stopped with the cloth in her hand.
It was the shape of the farrier's mark, curl for curl, even the little hook at the lower left.
She had lifted that mark off a man's arm at noon, and she had watched it vanish.
"It's the old curse," Brunhild said, watching her face. "It spreads at night. It does that."
"It's very new."
"It's new every night."
She dried it gently and wrapped it in a clean strip, and her thumb passed over the inside of the wrist.
The pulse there jumped once under her thumb.
Brunhild looked away fast.
"Nobody has done that in a long time," she said quietly.
"Washed an arm?"
"Touched it for no reason."
Yui did not know what to say, so she tied off the bandage.
When she looked up, Brunhild had unbuttoned the shirt another notch.
The black lines did not stop at the arm.
They ran up from the shoulder, across the collarbone and down the chest, and one thread, thicker than the others, ended in a point just above her heart.
Yui measured it with her eyes without meaning to, the way she measured everything.
It stopped two fingers from the heart.
"The army surgeon gave me a number once," Brunhild said, and buttoned the shirt up again. "He said when that line reaches the heart, I'll be gone."
"When?"
"The Thaw, he thought. Three weeks."
She said it the way a person reads a weather report.
Yui sat on the stone floor with the wet cloth in her hand, and she knew exactly what she was going to do.
"Then I'll be back tomorrow night," she said. "With more water."
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