The Saint Who Healed Everyone and the Knight She Couldn't novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Counting

Brunhild orders her out, Yui refuses and washes her back, and Yui starts a chart of every new mark.

On the second day Yui healed thirty-one men, and she wrote every one of them down.

She kept a small notebook in her apron pocket, with a pencil tied to it by a string.

Name, ward, kind of mark, where on the body.

It was a habit from the hospital, and she could not have stopped if she tried.

The last man, a boy with a black mark across his shoulder blade, thanked her four times.

"Please stop," Yui said. "I haven't done anything but touch you."

"It's gone, my lady," the boy said. "It's all gone."

Yui looked at the clean pink skin and felt her stomach turn over for no reason she could name.

She wrote the shape of his mark in her notebook: a long curve, a split at the end.

Then she filled the basin in the kitchen, took a stack of clean cloth, and climbed the barracks tower again.

Greta waited on the landing, her good leg braced against the wall.

"She's been in a mood all day," Greta whispered. "She told me twice to have you posted to the east wall."

"Does she want me posted?"

"No. She's afraid you'll come back."

Yui knocked twice and waited.

"I said no," came the voice from inside.

"You said no to a guard," Yui said through the door. "I'm a nurse. I'm coming in."

There was a long silence.

"Enter."

Brunhild sat at the table with her back to the door, in her shirt, writing a report with a steady hand.

The lamp turned her cropped hair to pale gold.

"I told Sergeant Moll to tell you not to trouble yourself," she said, without turning around.

"She told me. I'm troubling myself anyway."

"Lady Yui."

"Just Yui."

"Yui." The name sounded careful in her mouth. "You have healed seventy-one men in two days. You should be sleeping."

"So should you."

"I don't."

"I know," Yui said. "That's the problem."

She set the basin down on the table, beside the report.

Brunhild put her pen down and finally looked at her.

Her grey eyes were tired, and there was a hard set to her jaw that Yui had seen on stubborn patients all her life.

"I give orders to three thousand people," Brunhild said. "I am ordering you to go."

"You can order me to fight a war," Yui said. "You can't order me out of a sickroom."

"This is not a sickroom."

"It is as long as I'm in it."

Brunhild breathed out through her nose, almost a laugh.

Then she looked at the basin, and the clean cloths, and Yui's small stubborn hands, and some of the iron went out of her shoulders.

"What do you want?" she asked.

"Your shirt off. Back first."

For a moment Brunhild did not move.

Then she stood, turned her back, unbuttoned the shirt one button at a time, and let it fall to her waist.

Yui forgot to breathe.

The broad pale back was as scarred as the arms, a net of fine black lines from the nape to the belt.

In the middle, between the shoulder blades, was a round pattern the size of a plate.

It looked old, and it was darker than the rest.

"What's that?" Yui asked.

"I was told it was a ward." Brunhild kept her eyes on the wall. "From the war. It keeps me standing."

Yui wet the cloth in the warm water and began at the nape.

She worked slowly, in small circles, and the dirt came away grey and the skin underneath was warm.

A muscle jumped in the back under her hand.

"Too hard?" she asked.

"No." A pause. "I'm not used to it."

"Used to what?"

"Being washed."

Yui kept her voice light.

"Everyone is washed. It's most of what nurses do."

"Not me."

Yui worked down along the spine.

At the left hip she found a long raised scar, white and old, and her thumb ran along it without her telling it to.

Brunhild tensed, short and sharp.

Yui froze. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be." Brunhild's voice had gone low and rough. "Do it again."

Yui's thumb traced the scar from end to end.

She felt the skin under it ripple and the whole long back go still.

Heat climbed up Yui's neck and into her face.

She stopped, because she did not trust herself not to go on.

She rinsed the cloth, dried the skin, and took her notebook from her pocket to cover her hands.

Fresh black threads showed at the base of Brunhild's neck, new since yesterday.

Yui drew them, a short curve, a fork at the end.

It was the boy's mark.

She stared at the drawing and then at the skin.

Then she put the notebook away, slowly, and told herself again that it was nothing.

"Goodnight, Commander," she said.

"Brunhild." The back did not turn. "When no one is listening."

"Goodnight, Brunhild."

She left the basin and went out onto the landing, where Greta was waiting with a lantern and a worried face.

"She never lets anyone in," Greta said. "How is she?"

Yui opened her mouth to answer.

Then both of them heard it through the door: a long, deep, even breath.

Greta put her hand over her mouth.

"She's asleep," she whispered. "I can hear it. Listen."

"Is that rare?"

Tears stood in Greta's eyes.

"She hasn't slept with another person awake in the building in nine years, Lady Yui. Not once. Not since Ashford."

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