Read Chapter 7: The Healer's Name

The healer arrived before the midday bells, and she was not what Anya had expected.

No wizened crone draped in shawls. No ancient scholar weighed down by tomes of medicine. The woman who strode into the solar was perhaps thirty, with sharp cheekbones and hair the color of river stones pulled back so tightly it seemed to stretch the skin of her brow. Her robes were practical—deep blue, unadorned—and she carried no satchel, no instruments, no obvious tools of her trade. She carried only herself, and the confidence of someone who had never once been doubted.

Anya straightened in her chair, the torn map segment pressed between her palm and the armrest. "You must be the healer my father summoned."

The woman inclined her head. "I am called Sera." She did not curtsy. "His Majesty has asked me to examine you."

"I am not ill."

"So I am told." Sera's gaze swept the room once, assessing—the windows, the door, the guard who stood beside it. "And yet here I am."

Kael shifted his weight, hand resting on the pommel of his sword. "The Princess has refused the King's physicians for weeks. You will forgive her skepticism."

Sera's mouth curved into something that was not quite a smile. "I am not a physician. I am something else entirely."

"What, exactly?"

But Sera was already moving toward Anya, and she did not answer.

Her hands were cool and dry as she took Anya's chin, tilting her head toward the light from the window. She studied Anya's eyes, her cheeks, the pallor of her skin. Her touch was clinical, impersonal, and yet Anya felt a strange prickle at the base of her skull, as though the woman's fingers were reading something written just beneath her skin.

"Your memory," Sera said. "It fades at midnight, correct?"

Anya's pulse quickened. "You know of my affliction."

"I know of many things." Sera released her chin and stepped back, producing a small glass vial from within her sleeve—dark liquid, almost black. "This will help me understand. A single drop on your tongue. It will not harm you."

"You'll forgive me if I do not drink unknown substances from strangers."

"Then we are at an impasse." Sera's voice was flat, unhurried. "Your father has commanded it. But I am not in the habit of forcing medicine down the throats of princesses." She paused. "However, I will tell you this: the longer we wait, the harder it becomes."

"Waiting is what I do best," Anya said. "I have forgotten every day of my life for years. A few more will make little difference."

Sera's gaze flickered—just for a moment—toward something Anya could not discern. Then she tucked the vial away and inclined her head. "As you wish. I will return tomorrow."

She left without another word, and the door clicked shut behind her.

Anya exhaled slowly. "I do not trust her."

"Neither do I," Kael said. He was already moving toward the door, hand on the latch. "Which is why I intend to learn everything I can about her before she returns."

---

The records room sat beneath the east wing, a cramped warren of shelves and dust that smelled of old paper and older secrets. Kael had been there before—every captain of the guard eventually memorized the layout, the way the ledgers were organized, the particular creak of the third floorboard that announced your presence to anyone waiting below. But tonight he moved quickly, by lamplight, scanning the spines of leather-bound volumes until he found what he sought.

Court records. Healer records. The names of those who had served the crown in capacity of medicine and mercy.

He pulled down the oldest volume first—a massive thing bound in cracked oxhide—and began to leaf through it. The pages were brittle, the ink faded to brown, but the names were there. Generation after generation of healers, each entry carefully inscribed by the hand of a scribe who had long since turned to dust.

Sera was not among them.

He checked again, running his finger down each page. No Sera. No healer of that name, no one of her description, no recent appointment that might explain her sudden arrival at court. She was not in the records at all.

But another name caught his eye, halfway down a page from sixteen years prior. The ink was darker there, as though the scribe had pressed harder, as though the words themselves carried weight.

*Elara Vance, sworn healer to the royal household.*

And beneath her name, in a different hand—hurried, almost desperate—a single line: *Removed from service. Disappeared.*

Kael traced the words with his finger. Sixteen years ago. The same year Anya's mother died. The same year the curse began, if what he had been told was true.

He tore the page free, folded it carefully, and tucked it into his breast pocket.

---

Anya was standing at the window when Kael returned, watching the last light bleed from the sky. She did not turn at his footsteps, but she spoke before he could.

"She asked about Elara."

Kael stopped. "What?"

"I overheard her." Anya's voice was low, tight. "When she left my chambers, she stopped in the corridor. There was a servant there—one of Marius's boys, I think. I heard her ask him if he knew what had happened to the missing Elara." She turned, and her face was pale. "I thought she meant a servant. A lost thing, misplaced. But the way she said it—the weight, the silence afterward—"

"I found her." Kael drew the page from his pocket and held it out. "Elara Vance. Sworn healer to the royal household. She disappeared sixteen years ago."

Anya took the page, her eyes scanning the text. "Sixteen years. That's when my mother died. That's when the curse—"

"I know."

She looked up at him, and something shifted in her expression—the careful composure cracking, just slightly, to reveal something rawer beneath. "My father summoned a healer who asks after a woman who vanished at the same time my life began to unravel. That is not a coincidence."

"No," Kael agreed. "It is not."

"Voss knew her." Anya was pacing now, her hands clasped tight before her. "The healer—Sera—she handed Voss a letter. From my father. A sealed royal letter. I saw it delivered. Whatever they are planning, it involves him."

"And the Deep Well."

She stopped. Her hand went instinctively to where the torn map section was hidden in her bodice, and she saw Kael notice the gesture—saw his eyes narrow slightly, but he said nothing.

"I need to see it," she said. "The well. I need to understand what is beneath this palace, what my father has been hiding, what Elara had to do with any of it."

"And if it is guarded?"

"Then I will deal with guards." She met his eyes. "You said yourself the runes on that door match the ones on Voss's sword. Whatever is down there, it is connected to all of this. To the curse. To my mother's death. To the woman who disappeared."

Kael was silent for a long moment. Then he crossed to the table where the map lay open beneath a candlestick, and he studied it—the full map, or what Anya had allowed him to see.

"The well is in the lower catacombs," he said slowly. "That much is certain. But it is sealed. Whatever path leads there, it has been deliberately concealed."

"Everything has been deliberately concealed," Anya said. "My memories. My past. My own mother's fate." She stepped closer to him, close enough that she could see the steady pulse at his throat, close enough to smell the leather of his harness and the iron of his blade. "You are the only one who has ever shown me the truth. Do not stop now."

Kael's jaw tightened. "I will not."

But as he said it, his gaze dropped to her bodice—to the slight bulge of the hidden map, the piece she had kept from him—and she saw something flicker in his eyes. Not doubt, exactly. But awareness.

He knew she was keeping something from him.

And he had not yet asked what it was.

---

The healer's name was not in the records. But Elara's was.

And somewhere in the dark beneath the palace, Anya was certain, the answers were waiting—if only she could reach them before midnight.