Read Chapter 16: The Healer's Secret

The chapel door groaned open on iron hinges that wept rust. Maeve slipped through the gap Ciarán held, her breath shallow in the sudden cold. The air smelled of old stone and older promises—dust so thick it felt like walking through cobwebs made of years.

But the altar stood empty.

No stone slab. No carved covenant. Just a bare pedestal of pale marble, scrubbed clean, with a single white candle burning at its center. The flame didn't flicker when the door closed behind them.

"It's gone," Maeve whispered. Her voice echoed off the vaulted ceiling, swallowed by shadows that seemed to lean in and listen.

Ciarán moved past her, his boots silent on the flagstones. He circled the pedestal once, twice, then stopped. His hand hovered over the marble surface, not quite touching.

"She knew," he said quietly. "She knew you'd come here."

Maeve's fists clenched at her sides. The rowan berry in her pocket pulsed with heat, a dull, insistent throb against her thigh. "Then why let us get this far? Why not stop us at the gate?"

"Because she wants us to see it." Ciarán's voice was barely audible. "She wants us to understand that there's nowhere we can go that she hasn't already been."

The candle guttered. For a moment, the flame bent toward the chapel's eastern wall, and Maeve caught a glimpse of something beneath the frescoes—a hairline crack running through the plaster. A seam where the wall had been repaired.

She moved before she thought. Her fingers found the edge of the crack, dug in, pulled. A panel of plaster came away in her hands, revealing a hollow space behind it.

Inside was a scroll, yellowed with age, tied with a thread of red silk.

"It's still here," she breathed. "She didn't find everything."

Ciarán was at her shoulder in an instant. "Careful. It could be trapped."

"Everything in this place is trapped. That's rather the point." Maeve untied the silk with shaking fingers, unrolled the scroll. The ink was faded but legible—an elegant hand that slanted right, the letters formed with a grace that suggested the writer had known exactly what they were doing.

*"...and this covenant shall be binding unto seven years, at which time the debt shall be considered settled and the child returned, or the terms renegotiated before the crown of the Seelie and the witness of the earth."*

Maeve read it twice. Then a third time. The words didn't change.

"Seven years," she said slowly. "The contract is for seven years. Not forever."

"Your family's debt was for a child," Ciarán said. "And the child—"

"Was taken a century ago." Maeve looked up at him. "The missing boy. The one Niamh was supposed to guard over. He was taken a century ago, and I've been hunting for a bargain that expires in seven years. Seven *fairy* years."

The words hung in the air between them. The candle flame stood perfectly still, as if the chapel itself was holding its breath.

"If fairy years pass differently in the Otherworld..." Ciarán began.

"They might not have expired yet," Maeve finished. "The child could still be alive. The debt could still be open. And if the terms say the child must be returned when the contract ends—"

"Then the queen isn't holding the boy because she wants a hostage. She's holding him because she wants to win the wager before the deadline."

Maeve rolled the scroll back up, tucked it into her bodice. "Who wrote this? Who inscribed the original covenant?"

"I don't know," Ciarán said. "The records were sealed before my time."

"Then we need someone older than you." Maeve turned toward the door, thoughts already racing. "Someone who remembers the treaty was written. Someone who's been here long enough to have seen the altar stone moved."

"Hundreds of years in fairy service," a new voice said from the shadows. "That would be me."

Maeve spun. A figure emerged from the darkness between two pillars—an old woman, stooped and thin, with hair the color of ash and eyes like river stones. She wore robes of undyed wool, stained with herbs, and smelled of thyme and something sharper. Wormwood, perhaps.

"A healer," Ciarán said. His tone was wary. "In the chapel? That's unusual. Healers serve at the border, where the wounded wash in."

"I serve where I'm needed," the old woman said. Her gaze settled on Maeve with an intensity that made the rowan berry pulse again. "And I've been needed here for quite some time, child. Watching. Waiting. Making sure the stone stayed hidden from those who would destroy it."

"You knew about the covenant?" Maeve asked. "You knew it was under the altar?"

The healer smiled, revealing teeth gone yellow with age. "I knew it was *supposed* to be under the altar. The queen had it moved three days ago. The plague among the Unseelie had reached the border, and she wanted the chapel purified. Seemed a convenient excuse to clear the space."

"You're telling me I risked my life to find something that was already gone?"

"I'm telling you that the queen is not the only one who can see the threads of fate." The healer shuffled closer, her robes whispering against the stone. "I've been watching you, Maeve O'Connell. Ever since you arrived in the Seelie court. I've seen the rowan berry you carry, and the trouble it draws. I've seen the bonds that tie you—the old one, and the new one, the one that binds you to him."

She gestured at Ciarán with a gnarled hand.

"The whistle bond," Maeve said. "You can see it?"

"I can see many things. And I can help you with all of them." The healer stopped an arm's length away. The candlelight caught her face, deepening the lines around her mouth. "I know how to dissolve a contract without blood, child. Without sacrifice. I know how to cut a bond so cleanly that neither party loses what they love."

Maeve's heart hammered. "How?"

"Knowledge is not given freely." The healer's eyes glittered. "I want payment. A piece of the whistle that bound you to him. A sliver—no more than the length of my smallest finger. Enough for me to work with, thread my own magic through the bone and silver."

The heat in Maeve's pocket flared so sharply she gasped. The rowan berry was burning her now, searing through the fabric of her dress.

"The whistle belongs to Ciarán's people," she said. "It's not mine to give."

"It's the bond's key," the healer countered. "Not its owner. You carry it now. You breathe life into it every day you wear it. By every law of this court, it is yours to bargain with."

She's right, Maeve thought. But the thought tasted like ash in her mouth. The whistle had saved her life. It had called Ciarán to her side when the Unseelie soldiers had surrounded her, when all hope had seemed lost.

And granting a piece of it would be like wrenching a finger from the hand that had reached for her.

"How do I know you're telling the truth?" Maeve asked. "How do I know you can actually do what you claim?"

The healer laughed, a dry sound like stones scraping together "You don't, child. That's what trust is. But I can tell you this much for free, to show you I'm not lying." She leaned closer, and suddenly her eyes were not old at all. They were ancient, as deep as the sea, and Maeve saw something vast and terrible looking out from behind them.

"The contract doesn't expire for seven fairy years. But fairy years are measured differently in the mortal world. Time runs quick there, doesn't it, Maeve? Your brother Conor is growing older every day you linger here. If the contract settles at the year's end in the mortal calculus, your brother will have aged seven years by the time you return to claim him."

Seven years. Seven mortal years of Conor's life, eaten by the courts.

"But if I dissolve the contract first," Maeve said slowly, "before the year turns in the mortal world, he won't age. Time won't reach him."

"Clever girl." The healer smiled again. "Now you understand the urgency. The stone may be gone, but the covenant's terms live on in the queen's mind, and they run on mortal clocks. You have until the turning of the year to break what binds you. After that—" She spread her hands. "Well. Your brother will be seven years older, and the grief will settle on him like frost."

The candle guttered and went out.

In the darkness, Maeve heard the healer's voice one last time, soft and bitter as winter herbs: "Bring me a sliver, Maeve O'Connell, and I will free you from every bond that holds you. Or wait, and watch Conor grow into a stranger while you're still trying to save him."

Footsteps retreated into the shadows. Then silence, heavy and absolute.

Maeve stood in the dark chapel, one hand pressed over the scroll at her breast, the other over the rowan berry burning against her thigh. Her fingers found the whistle at her belt—warm, familiar, humming with Ciarán's presence.

She didn't pull it out.

She didn't know if she could.