The Saint Who Healed Everyone and the Knight She Couldn't novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Knife

A nightmare puts a dagger at Yui's throat, and Brunhild asks her to count her heartbeat.

On the third night Brunhild opened the door before Yui could knock.

"You're late," she said.

"I healed twenty-eight men. Two had fevers."

"Sit."

Yui sat in the one wooden chair, and Brunhild sat on the edge of the cot with her sleeves rolled, offering both forearms, palms up.

It looked like surrender, and Yui knew it was nothing of the kind.

It was practice.

"Tell me what a nurse does when the saint can't heal," Brunhild said.

"She does the slow things."

"Show me."

Yui soaked the old bandage free and washed each arm in warm water.

She dried them with a clean cloth and rubbed a salve of beeswax and willow bark into the skin where it was raw.

Her hands moved in the old patterns, and Brunhild watched them.

Fresh marks lay across both forearms, three of them, thin as hairs.

Yui drew them in the notebook without a word.

Then Brunhild asked, quite casually, "What did you do before the summons?"

"Night shift on a surgical ward."

"What is a surgical ward?"

So Yui told her.

She told her about the long white corridor and the machines that sang when a heart went wrong, and the old men who grabbed her sleeve at three in the morning and asked her to stay until it got light.

She told her she had always stayed.

Somewhere in the middle of it Brunhild lay back on the cot.

She did it slowly, and she turned her head on the pillow to watch Yui's mouth.

"Go on," she said.

"There was a man who thought I was his daughter."

"Go on."

Yui talked until the lamp burned low and the grey eyes closed, and the deep even breath came again.

She did not leave.

She turned the lamp down, wrapped her brown cloak around her, and settled into the chair, because someone who sleeps for the first time in nine years should not wake alone.

Some hours later Yui woke to a hand around her throat.

It was dark, with only the red glow of the stove, and the cold edge of a dagger pressed under her jaw.

Brunhild stood over her with her eyes wide open and not seeing, her lips pulled back, her whole body shaking.

"Don't," she whispered, in a voice Yui had not heard before. "Don't take him. Don't take him down there."

"Brunhild."

"I won't let you. He's mine, he's mine to carry."

"Brunhild," Yui said again, very quietly, the way she spoke to patients coming out of surgery. "It's Yui. You're at Fort Gallowmere. You're in your room."

The dagger trembled against her skin.

Yui did not move.

She had been grabbed by frightened men in recovery before, and the rule was the same every time: stay still, stay soft, say your name.

"It's Yui," she said. "You're safe."

The eyes cleared all at once.

Brunhild looked at the blade in her own hand and at the pale throat under it.

She dropped the dagger so hard it rang across the stone, and stumbled backward until the wall stopped her.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I am so sorry."

"It's all right."

"It is not all right." She slid down the wall until she sat on the floor, with her arms wrapped around her knees. "I could have killed you."

"You didn't."

"Leave. Please. Go now, and tell Greta to post a guard."

Yui got up from the chair, crossed the cold floor, and knelt in front of her.

"No," she said.

"Yui."

"I'm staying. You can order the guard to take me out, and I'll walk back in."

Brunhild laughed, a cracked wet sound, and put her face against her knees.

Yui waited.

After a while she took one of the big shaking hands and held it.

"It was Ashford?" she asked.

"The Fen. I was seventeen." A long silence. "I was carrying a man out."

"What happened to him?"

"I don't remember the end. I only remember that I was holding his curse, and it was heavy, and I would not let it go."

Her fingers tightened on Yui's.

Then, with a slowness that made Yui's heart ache, Brunhild lifted Yui's hand and pressed it flat against her own chest, through the thin white shirt, just left of the long black line.

"Count it," she said.

Yui felt the heart under her palm, slamming too fast.

She counted out loud, softly, the way she counted for every patient.

"One. Two. Three. Four."

The beats slowed as she counted.

By the sixtieth they were long and even, and Brunhild's head had tipped back against the wall.

"You smell like soap," Brunhild murmured.

"You smell like willow bark."

"Don't stop counting."

"I won't."

Yui sat on the cold floor with a commander's heartbeat under her hand and the first grey light creeping through the shutters.

She wanted, very badly, to lean in and kiss the corner of that tired mouth.

She did not, because tonight it would have been taking something.

Down in the courtyard, wheels rattled on stone.

A man's voice shouted for the gate, and horses stamped in the dawn cold.

Brunhild's heartbeat jumped under Yui's palm.

"That's the Court Mage's carriage," she said. "He wasn't due for two weeks."

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