Chapter 9: The Saintess

"Sit down before you fall down," the Saintess said. "You're bleeding through that sleeve."

Yeon-hwa looked.

The cut from the assassin had opened again in the duel.

"It's nothing."

"Everyone says that to me. Then I sew them up. Sit."

Yeon-hwa sat on the bed.

The Saintess took a roll of silk and a clay pot out of her cloak.

She unwound the bandage quick and rough and completely sure.

In the book, Mo Ye-rin cried when she saw blood.

She fainted twice in the first twenty chapters.

This one smeared green paste on Yeon-hwa's arm and wiped her fingers on the blanket.

"How do you know about his father?" Yeon-hwa said.

"I've been his physician for a year. My father sent me to Azure Cloud to be looked at."

"Looked at?"

"By the son. Like a horse." She tied the bandage off. "The Valley needs the Alliance's patronage. So I get the Young Sect Master."

"Do you want him?"

Ye-rin looked at her.

"Miss Seol. I'd rather drink lye."

Yeon-hwa laughed before she could help it.

Ye-rin didn't smile, but something at the corner of her mouth twitched.

"Tell me about his father," Yeon-hwa said.

Ye-rin sat down on the floor with her back against the bed.

"His pulse runs wrong. Hot and backward, like a flood going uphill. And there are red threads in the whites of his eyes."

"I've seen those."

"They're in the veins of his wrists too. He hates anyone looking."

"What does that mean?"

"His qi is tearing his meridians apart from the inside. Slowly. It's called deviation."

"From what?"

"From practising an art his body has no foundation for."

Ye-rin tilted her head back against the bed frame.

"No righteous art does that to a man. I've treated a hundred sword masters. This is something else."

"You mean demonic."

"I mean I'm a physician and I'm not allowed to say that word about the next Alliance Leader. But yes."

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