Page 78 of Healer to the Ash King
“You’re so selfish,” I whisper.
“I know.” His palm strokes my thigh.
“I hate that about you.”
A long, shuddering inhale, then he says, “I hate how you despise me, when you don’t know me at all.”
“So tell me,” I breathe against his ear. “Help me know you.”
“No. This is just sex.”
“Of course. It’s sex and secrets.”
He chuckles, runs a hand over my hair. Then he eases out of me and we separate.
“We dripped on the floor,” I whisper, scandalized.
“Get your snack,” he says. “I’ll clean it up and come to you. Don’t wander off before I get there.”
Holding my ruined dress together, I carry some cheese, crackers and wine back to my room. My insides have that warm, tender glow I always get after thorough lovemaking. Quickly I put on a nightdress and shove the ruined gown under my bed. Maybe I can have my maid smuggle it to the refuse bin tomorrow.
The Ash King comes to my room in his velvety robe, with his snowy hair pouring over one shoulder. He sits on my bed, and I pass him a bit of cheese on a cracker.
“What secrets do you crave, Healer?” he says, inspecting the food rather than looking at me.
“Whatever you need to tell.”
But what I really want is for him to tell me the one secret he has told no one else.
He pops the cracker into his mouth and chews thoughtfully while I take two mugs from the washstand and pour wine into them.
“They say you never get drunk.” I hand him a mug.
“I do. But not outside the walls of the palace. I don’t want liquor to make me slow and stupid around any of these cutthroat nobles.” He swirls the wine, wincing. “Wine from a mug, Healer? Seems wrong. I have glasses in my room.”
I quirk an eyebrow at him and drink from my own mug, a clear challenge. He smiles a little and sips. “I lost my mother a few years before the Cheimhold Invasion.”
It’s such an abrupt beginning that I nearly choke on my swallow of wine. But I manage to get it down, and to nod compassionately. “How did it happen?”
“Riding accident. The horse threw her, and she broke her neck. No healer around at the time. Once the consciousness slips from the body, it’s too late, as I’m sure you know.”
I nod, picturing glassy eyes and sagging mouths, skin pocked with plague boils. People I didn’t reach in time.
I take another swallow of wine.
“After her death, my aunt was like a mother to me,” the King says. “She and her two sons, my cousins—they lived here in the palace with my father and I. I don’t remember my uncle—he died long ago.”
So much death. He’s felt so much grief, and it hurts me.
“I cannot describe the invasion, Cailin,” he says, and my heart jumps at my name, my actualname, falling so easily from his mouth. It’s one of a few precious times he has said it, rather than calling me “Healer.”
“It was the worst time of my life,” he muses, still avoiding my eyes. “To see people with whom I’d trained, caroused, and laughed—to see them falling, one after another, and I couldn’t save them—to watch the Triune Arch be broken. To witness my father being corroded, rotted by the foulest of dark magic—” He sets his mug down on the tray and rises from the bed, stalking the room. His fingertips flicker with fire.
The idea of that wielder, that Rotter, makes him so angry. What would he think of me, if he knew what I can do?
I draw water from the washstand, inwardly blessing my maid for always keeping the pitchers full—and I create a glimmering liquid hand, which I guide toward him. The watery fingers lace with his, quenching the flame without causing the burning, hissing steam that scorched us both before.
So my intent does matter, then. If I’m defending myself, repulsing an attack, that strength of purpose infuses the water, changes its quality somehow. And when my intent is to calm, to soothe, the water does exactly that, and no more.
