Dark Elf's Human Healer

Chapter 1

Serah Brynne

The boy is dying and there is nothing left in my satchel that will stop it.

I know this the way I know most terrible things. Quietly, and too late to change it. Petyr is eight years old and the son of a tanner who cannot afford to lose him. He has been in my infirmary. The blackened veins crawling up his throat have spread past his jaw overnight, and the crystal growths pressing against the thin skin of his forearm have multiplied while I slept for two hours on a stool beside his cot. I ground the feverwillow myself. I prepared the compress with marsh-root and silver-cap fungus the way Edrisa taught me before my hands were steady enough to be trusted with anything sharper than a spoon. None of it has touched whatever is eating him from the inside.

I press the back of my hand to his forehead and feel the unnatural cold that has replaced the fever. That is the worst sign. The fever means the body is still fighting. The cold means it has stopped arguing.

"Serah." Noma, my one remaining assistant, appears at the curtain dividing the ward. She is seventeen and trying very hard not to cry, which means she has already understood what I have not yet said aloud. "There are two more from the Delwick settlement. The cart just came through the gate."

"Put them in the back room. Keep them separate from the others." I pull the blanket up to Petyr's chin and do not let myself linger. Lingering helps no one. "And find his father. He should be here."

The infirmary is a single long room carved into the base of a hillside, the stone walls packed with dried herbs and the smell of smoke and tallow. It serves the seven small settlements clustered around the Veth Valley, all of them human, all of them existing in the narrow space between the dark elf mining territories to the north and the trade roads the noble houses use to move silver and crystal ore south. We are useful to them in the same way a hammer is useful. Not worth caring for. Not worth replacing until we break.

I am washing my hands in a basin when the door opens and lets in a blade of frozen air.

The dark elf who steps inside is not from any of the settlements. His robes are deep charcoal trimmed in silver thread, the kind of formal wear that announces house affiliation to anyone who knows the caste markings. His skin is pale ash-gray, his ears sharp, and his expression carries the particular variety of boredom that dark elves wear when they are forced to enter human spaces. A faint ward-glow pulses at his collar. A personal air-purifying charm. He is breathing filtered air in my infirmary. I stare at it for exactly one second before I decide not to say anything.

"Serah Brynne." It is not a question.

"That depends on what you need her for."

His eyes move across the ward with the mild distaste of someone cataloguing damage. "You are the senior healer of the Veth Valley settlements."

"I'm the only healer of the Veth Valley settlements." I dry my hands. "What do the noble houses want?"

He produces a rolled document sealed with dark wax pressed into the shape of a fortress tower. I recognize the sigil from old records Edrisa keeps in her chest beneath the window. Frostgrave. My stomach does something slow and unpleasant.

"You are summoned to Frostgrave Fortress under the authority of Lord Credric Draith," the envoy says. "You will serve as healer and assistant in the investigation of the crystal plague spreading through the northern caverns. Your cooperation ensures the continued goodwill of the noble houses toward the Veth Valley settlements."

The ward goes very quiet. Noma has appeared at the curtain again. Old Fenn, who came in with a crystal growth on his wrist and has been pretending to sleep ever since, has stopped pretending.

The Widowmaker. People in the valley say the name the way they say words like avalanche and collapse. Not as a name at all, but as a category of disaster. He murdered his wife during a fit of magical madness. He feeds trespassers to the beasts that live beneath his mountain. His fortress is haunted by screaming spirits and the doors are carved from the bones of his enemies, which is almost certainly not true but has never stopped anyone from repeating it.

I take the document.

Edrisa finds me an hour later behind the infirmary, sitting on an overturned crate in the cold with the seal broken and the document read three times through. She is sixty-eight years old and built like a winter root vegetable. Small, dense, and nearly impossible to dislodge once she has decided on a position.

"No," she says, before I have opened my mouth.

"The plague is spreading past the Delwick settlement. It hit two more families in the Croft yesterday and there are reports from the upper cavern roads that entire mining camps have gone dark." I fold the document. "Whatever this is, it started up near Frostgrave. If there is something in those northern caverns that can tell me how to stop it—"

"They are sending you up there to die quietly where no one will ask questions." Edrisa's voice is flat and certain. "You are collateral, Serah. You are a body they are placing inside that fortress so the human settlements cooperate with whatever Credric Draith decides to do. If you fail, they lose nothing. If you disappear, they lose nothing."

"I know that."

"Then why are you holding that document like you're going to keep it?"

I look at my hands. The document is still there. "Because Petyr died twenty minutes ago and I could not stop it. And there are two more from Delwick in the back room and I cannot stop that either. Not with what I have here." I stand up from the crate. "If there is any knowledge in that fortress, Lysara Draith was a scholar of ancient magic. Edrisa, her research notes alone could—"

"Lysara Draith is dead." Edrisa says it without cruelty, which is somehow worse. "Her husband saw to that."

"The rumors saw to that. There is a difference."

She goes inside. I think the argument is over and I have won it, which almost never happens, and I am still standing in the cold trying to decide how I feel about that when she comes back out with something in her hands. A bundle of loose pages, old and water-stained, tied with a cord that has been retied so many times the knot is more cord than structure.

"A traveling merchant came through six years ago," she says. "He had these tucked into a saddlebag with a broken clasp. Said he found them in a supply cart abandoned on the northern road. I bought them for two coppers because I recognized the handwriting style. Formal scholar notation, dark elf academic tradition." She holds them out. "I could not read most of it. The magical notation is beyond me. But the name on the inside cover is Lysara Draith."

I take them carefully. The pages are dense with close, precise handwriting, diagrams I do not yet understand, and marginal notes added in a different hand. Darker ink, sharper strokes, as if someone else was reading and responding.

"You were saving these," I say.

"I was saving them for someone who could use them." She pulls her shawl tighter. "Come back alive, girl. I have not spent fifteen years teaching you to be fed to a mountain."

I leave before dawn the next morning with my satchel, my warmest cloak, a week's worth of dried provisions, and Lysara Draith's journal pages wrapped in oilcloth and pressed against my ribs beneath my coat. The valley disappears behind me as the road climbs north into the dark. The mountains ahead are vast and pale against the sky, and somewhere inside them is a fortress that everyone who knows its name is afraid of.

I tell myself the fear sitting low in my stomach is practical. Reasonable. The appropriate response to walking willingly into the unknown.

I tell myself that. But there is something else underneath it, something I cannot name and am not sure I want to, that feels less like dread and more like the particular pull of a question you have been waiting your whole life to ask.

I keep walking.