The ember-lamps along the lower infirmary’s eastern colonnade had not yet dimmed from their night-setting when Aerion Willowisp pushed aside her blanket and sat up on the narrow cot. The stone floor met her bare feet with the particular cold of hour-before-dawn, when the hearth had burned low and the mountain wind found every gap in the mortar. She dressed in the grey half-light, pulling a tunic of undyed wool over her shoulders and lacing it at the sides with fingers that knew the work well enough to do it without looking.
Her bed was in the alcove near the supply room door, a space Orin had set up for her years before so that she could be near the herbs should she need to go to them in the night to help someone with seizures. Her bed was also the closest to the cistern drip of all the beds in the lower infirmary and the sound had worked its way into her dreams. Reliable the drip was, the citadel above them not so much.
The treatment bay was long and Aerion walked along it, her bare feet on the stone floor. She stepped around the two occupied beds, both of which were on the right side of the bay. The first was that of a servant woman whose broken wrist Aerion had set the night before. The splint was straight and the linen wrapped around it was still clean. The second bed was that of an elderly courier from the middle terraces. His breathing was shallow but even and his wound was closing cleanly. Aerion stopped beside him and pressed two fingers to his throat to take his pulse. It was steady. She stepped away from him and continued on down the bay.
The embers in the hearth had gone grey. She knelt down and began to feed them with the splinters of kindling that Orin kept in the basket next to the hearth. As they began to take she sat back on her heels. The treatment bay, which had been in darkness a moment before, was now revealed in the flickering light of the fire. There were six beds in two rows of three. At the far end of the bay was the long worktable with the mortars and linen for bandages piled high. Against the wall at the end of the bay was the heavy, ceramic cistern, its lid raised, resting on its stone plinth near the garden door. Everything was in its place. Except for the question that had been with her all night and which she had hoped would have disappeared with the dawn. The question of whether the ember beneath her ribs had dimmed further in the night and whether she wanted it to.
Aerion didn’t check on the ember in her ribs. Instead she started on the first task of her long day. She filled the kettle from the cistern and placed it on the hearth to heat up. In the time it took to boil, she took down the empty beds and folded up the blankets, her hands working almost on their own. The rough linen of the blankets felt comforting to her as she worked.
The garden door scraped open behind her.
“You’re up early.”
Orin Thistlewick, healer of the lower infirmary, looked as though he had been disturbed from his thoughts. He carried a bundle of fresh rosemary in one hand, and a large clay jar in the other. His tunic, front only, was covered in a pale powder, whether it was the willowbark he often used to treat pain, or merely ash from the hearth, Aerion could not tell. His thinning brown hair stood on end on one side. He looked as though he had been disturbed in the midst of some thought and was trying to recall where he had been.
“Your lamps are still on night-setting. Do you want them brightened up?”
“Leave them. Saves fuel.” Orin set the jar on the worktable and began stripping rosemary leaves from the stems with quick, practiced twists of his fingers. “The courier?”
“Breathing steady. No fever.”
“Good. I’ll look at the stitching after breakfast.” He worked in silence for a moment, then added, without looking up, “There’s talk in the upper terraces again.”
Aerion’s hands stilled on the blanket she was folding. “ What kind of talk?”
“The kind of talk that turns a healer into a claim,” Orin continued, sweeping the stripped rosemary into a mortar. He began to grind the herb, the pestle making a low, gritty sound against the stone. “One of the noble houses has a daughter with a wasting sickness. They’ve been told that the lower infirmary has a healer who hears things that others can’t. Now they’re wondering if that healer is bound by oath to serve the protected houses of the citadel or if she’s free to choose her patients.”
“I’m not oathbound to any house.”
“And that’s why you’re claimable. Because you’re not oathbound to any house, and you’re not protected by any bloodline, the arbiter would look at you and see a vacancy. He’d rule that a rankless healer such as yourself has no right to refuse the petition of a noble house.” Orin looked at her with exhausted eyes. “Don’t borrow the trouble before it lands, Aerion. I’m telling you so you aren’t surprised when someone in silk comes down the terrace steps.”
Aerion knew this. She had known it since the day Orin had found her collapsed on the terrace steps, the ritual’s aftermath still burning silver beneath her skin. He had never asked her anything, had simply put a blanket around her shoulders and said, “You can stay if you work.”
“They can petition,” she said. “ I can refuse.”
“They can petition. And then the arbiter rules on whether a rankless healer has the right to refuse a noble house’s petition.” Orin shook his head. “Don’t borrow the trouble before it lands. I’m telling you so you aren’t surprised when someone in silk comes down the terrace steps.”
The tea kettle began to hiss and Aerion picked it up and poured the boiling water into two of the clay mugs that were sitting on the mantle. She added some dried mint to each mug and handed one to Orin and took the other for herself. She wrapped her hands around the warm mug and took a sip.
“That’s the trouble with gifts nobody asks for.” Orin took a long drink of his tea, then set the cup down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “They come with a price someone else already paid.”
“The trouble with gifts nobody asks for is that they come with a price someone else already paid,” Orin said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
The morning went by as it always did. First the courier woke up and Aerion had to change the dressing on his wound. After that the servant woman’s wrist was looked at and it was healing well. Then, as the terrace bells rang the mid-morning hour, two more people came to the lower infirmary for treatment. A young kitchen boy with a burn on his forearm and an older woman with swollen joints, so swollen that she could no longer use her spindle. Aerion treated the burn with a paste of comfrey and honey, while Orin mixed up a tincture for the older woman’s hands.
The storm was upon them suddenly. It came as a wall of rain that swept across the terrace and down upon the roof. Aerion hurried to shut the garden door and bolt it. Through the small, high window of the infirmary, she watched the sky turn the color of old iron. The ember-lamps flickered once and then burned steadily.
“It’ll pass by noon,” said Orin, gazing out the window as if to confirm his prediction, his jaw tightening.
An hour later, someone pounded on the terrace door.
The sound of pounding on the terrace door was loud enough to be heard above the noise of the rain, like a stone being thrown through a window. Aerion had been measuring out dried yarrow into linen sachets to make more, while Orin was nearer the door and was already moving before the second round of pounding had finished. He unbolted the door and the wind forced it open, bringing with it a gust of cold rain. Two people stumbled into the room, one supporting the other.
The man speaking was a guard from the middle terraces. He was covered from head to toe in his sodden cloak and appeared to be exhausted. “Found him on the switchback below the gate,” he said, struggling to carry the other man forward. “I don’t know who he is. He doesn’t have any house tokens on him. He’s been cut.”
The second man was in his mid-years. His clothing was tattered and soaked through. His skin was the color of a dead person’s, pale and cold. His head was lolling on the guard’s shoulder. Aerion saw the wound on the man’s left side. It was a deep gash, already turning black at the edges.
“No way to know. The storm washed out the blood trail,” the guard said, stepping back from the two healers. “I’ll send word if anyone comes asking.”
He was gone before Aerion could thank him, the door slamming shut behind him and cutting off the rain’s roar. She crossed to the bed and took her place opposite Orin, her palms already tingling with the awareness that came before the deeper hearing, the sense of a life fraying at its edges.
“Beyond stitching,” Orin said quietly. “The cut is deep and it’s been open for too long. He’s bleeding inside the chest wall.”
Aerion nodded. She knew how wounds like this worked. The man’s breathing was shallow and wrong. Each inhale was a wet rasp. His lips were blue. His hands lay limp on his sides, the palms calloused from work with rope or rigging.
“I can hear him,” she said.
Orin looked at her sharply. “ Already?”
“No,” Aerion said. “It’s like listening through a door.” She put her hands on the stranger’s chest, on either side of the wound, and closed her eyes. The hearing came, as it always did, as a pressure behind her clouded eye, as if she were trying to see through a fog. The words of the dying were not like the living. They were fragmented. They were images. They were the silent spaces between words that the living used.
This man’s silence was different. It had a shape.
She pressed deeper, and the ember beneath her ribs answered.
The sensation was unmistakable. A sudden pull inward, as if some part of her had reached up from within her and drawn a single, warm thread of heat from the space behind her sternum. The ember had lain quiet for weeks, a dormant heat that she had largely forgotten about, like the ache in her clouded eye. Now it stirred, and the tremor of it ran through her hands on the stranger’s skin.
“Aerion.” Orin’s voice came from somewhere to her left. “ What are you doing?”
She could not answer him. The stranger’s voice had risen from beneath the threshold of hearing, and it was speaking words she understood.
The ember.
Not her thought. His. The words arrived in her mind with the weight of a dying man’s last coherence, clear and deliberate.
You carry the Star-Mother’s ember. It’s still burning.
Aerion’s eyes flew open. The stranger had not moved. His lips had not parted. But his eyes were fixed on her. They were brown, with red burst vessels in the whites. They looked into her with an accuracy that seemed impossible for a man near death.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
He did not answer with his voice. What came instead was another fragment, pushed toward her through whatever channel the dying used when their bodies had already begun to fail.
The courts will fight over the prophecy. They’ll tear it apart and each one will keep the piece that serves them. Don’t let them. The ember knows the whole of it.
The ember flared. Not a metaphor, not a sensation she could dismiss as imagination. The scar beneath her ribs, the place where the ritual had sealed the dying star’s fragment into her body, lit with a visible pulse of silver light. It shone through her tunic, through the skin that had been grey with old scarring for years, and the light was bright enough that Orin swore and stepped back.
“What in the citadel’s name…”
The stranger’s knees gave way and Aerion caught herself on the bed frame, her fingers digging into the cold iron of the rail. The heat of the ember was not the heat of fire but the heat of something being consumed. It was being drawn out of her and into the stranger. Aerion felt her strength leave her as if she were a cracked vessel being drained of water. Her arms felt weak, her spine felt shaky.
The silver-threaded veins beneath her skin brightened. She could see them on the backs of her hands, lines of light tracing the paths of her own blood, and she knew without looking that they were visible on her throat and face as well.
“Stop it,” Orin said. “ Aerion, stop. You’re draining yourself.”
She tried to pull her hands back. They would not move. The ember had locked her in place, and the stranger’s voice was still speaking, still pushing words into the space behind her eye.
The Star-Mother’s ember chose you. The prophecy chose you. The courts will try to make you their instrument, but the ember belongs to itself, and so do you.
“What prophecy?” Aerion said. Her voice sounded thin, far away. “I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”
The stranger’s eyes closed again and his shallow, ragged breathing slowed down. The ember’s light faded slightly and Aerion felt her hands pull away from the man’s chest.
Aerion’s hands were pulled away from the dying stranger’s chest as she stumbled backwards, Orin catching her before she could fall to the ground. He caught her by the elbow and pressed her down onto the stool, her hands still trembling from the loss of energy.
“Sit,” he said. “Before you collapse and I have two dying patients instead of one.”
Orin led her to the stool near the worktable and pressed her down upon it. Aerion’s head was down and she was shaking, her limbs weak from the exertion. The ember had faded, as it always did, but the scar on her side felt raw and painful, as though it had been scrubbed with salt. She could still feel the words of the stranger in her side, like foreign objects that would not dissolve.
“The bleeding’s slowed,” Orin said after a moment, surprise in his voice. “Whatever you did, it bought him some time. Not much, but some.”
“I didn’t do anything. The ember did.”
“Same thing, in your case.” Orin threaded a curved needle with gut and began closing the deepest layer of the wound. He sewed with small, even stitches. “Did you know him?”
“No.”
“He knew you. Or knew what you’re carrying.” Orin tied off the suture and cut the thread with a small knife from his belt. “That’s not a coincidence, Aerion. Men don’t stumble down the switchback in a storm and start talking about Star-Mother embers unless they came looking for the person who has one.”
Aerion looked around her treatment bay. The silence that had descended on the room was as heavy as the storm outside. The kitchen boy with the badly burned arm sat up on his bed, his eyes wide as he stared at her. The woman with the grossly swollen joints sat up, her blanket pulled up to her chin. The courier was still asleep. The servant woman who had been tending to her was staring at the place on Aerion’s chest where the silver light had shown through her tunic.
“He said the courts will fight over a prophecy,” Aerion said. She was trying to sound confident but the words still felt strange in her mouth. “He said they’ll tear it apart and each keep the piece that serves them.”
Orin’s hands paused over the stranger’s chest. “A prophecy.”
“A celestial prophecy. He didn’t say what it foretold. Only that the ember knows the whole of it, and that the courts will try to make me their instrument.”
“Their instrument.” Orin repeated the words as if tasting something sour. He resumed his work, his needle dipping and rising with mechanical regularity. “That’s noble-speak for property. I’ve heard it before. Every healer who ever caught a lord’s attention heard some version of it. Your gift belongs to the citadel. Your service is an honour. Your body is a vessel for powers greater than yourself.” He bit off the thread with more force than necessary. “It’s all the same claim dressed in different words.”
“I’m not anyone’s property.”
“No,” he said, “You’re not. But the ember is, or will be, once the courts figure out what it is and where it’s lodged. That man on the bed knew about it. If he knew, others know. And if others know, they’ll come.”
Aerion looked past him to the other patients. The servant woman’s eyes had fallen to her lap as she feigned interest in her splint. The kitchen boy had turned on his side, his burned arm cradled against his body. The woman with the swollen joints stared at her with an unreadable expression.
“I need to finish treating him,” Aerion said.
“You need to rest. You just poured half your body’s warmth into a dying man.”
“You can’t leave him like this,” Aerion insisted, her voice tight with exhaustion and worry. “The ember may have slowed the dying but the wound is still open and he has fluid in his chest that needs to be drained. I need to finish treating him.”
Orin’s mouth tightened. He looked at her for a long moment, then stepped aside and gestured toward the stranger. “Fine. But if you collapse, I’m leaving you on the floor until I’m done with him.”
“That’s fair.”
She placed her hands on the man’s chest again, this time more gently. The ember stirred but did not flare; it was a banked coal now, no longer an open flame. She focused on the wound, on the torn muscle and the fluid that seeped from it. Her hearing sank down into the man’s body, past the wound, past the chest, and into the space behind it. His voice was there, but it was so faint she could barely make it out. It was no longer a string of words, but rather fragments of images, of feelings, of memories that were fading fast.
Aerion caught a brief glimpse of a chamber she had never seen before. Stone walls glowed with an unknown light. A circular table stood in the center of the room with three figures seated about it, their faces hidden in shadow or from afar. One of the figures held a scroll. Another was speaking and although Aerion could not hear the words she felt the weight of them. They were making a declaration, setting a course.
Aerion saw the image dissolve before her eyes. The dying man’s breathing caught once more and Aerion felt the ember give a small, reflexive pulse. Not enough to drain her, but enough to remind her that it was there, waiting.
“He’s not going to wake,” she said. “ Not soon. Maybe not at all.”
“Then we keep him comfortable and wait.” Orin was back at the worktable, pouring out a cup of powdered goldenseal. “If he dies, we’ll know what we know. If he lives, we can ask him the rest of it.”
“Then we’d better hope he talks to us first.”
“Then we’d better hope he talks to us first.”
Aerion finished draining the fluid from the stranger’s chest. This was a slow process which required her full attention. By the time she had finished the rain had stopped and the first pale wash of afternoon light was entering through the high window. She bound the wound with clean linen and pulled the blanket up over the stranger’s still form. His color had improved slightly; his lips were no longer blue and his breathing, though shallow, was no longer wet.
As she was washing her hands in the basin the stranger spoke for the first time.
The voice was a thread, thin and barely audible, but Aerion could make out the words.
“The Star-Mother’s ember.”
Aerion turned. The man’s eyes were open again, fixed on the ceiling, and his lips moved without sound for a moment before he spoke again.
“It’s still burning. After everything. It’s still…”
His voice trailed away. His eyes closed. His breathing continued but it had changed. It was no longer the shallow, ragged breaths of a dying man. It was slow and deep, the breath of a man in deep, unconscious sleep.
Aerion was still, her wet hands dripping onto the floor as she stared at the man’s blanket-covered chest. The ember-scar beneath her left ribs was aching with a dull heat. It was a heat that promised to get worse before it got better.
Orin finished his work at the table and came to stand beside her. He looked down at the stranger and then at Aerion, his eyes dropping to the faint silvery lines that showed through her forearms.
“Do you know what he meant?” he asked.
Aerion released her tunic from her belt, lifting it to expose her scar. It was a starburst of silvered tissue below her left ribs, never fading, never softening, always looking like a fresh wound. In the center of the scar was a tiny light that pulsed in time with her heartbeat.
“No,” she said. “But I think I’m going to have to find out.”
She let the tunic fall back into place. The light beneath the fabric had gone out but the heat from it remained, a constant, low-grade throb between her ribs like a second heart. She had carried this thing for years and never had a clue as to what it was. Now a dying stranger had named it for her and with the naming of it things had changed. There was a line now drawn between the life she had been living and whatever was to come next.
The ember pulsed once, gently, and Aerion felt the answering flutter of her own pulse in her throat.
Outside the high window, the storm clouds were breaking apart, and the first true light of morning was beginning to touch the terrace stones.