Page 8 of A Healer's Wrath
“You have been apprenticed in the Medica for a decade. You have studied diligently and served your Master with distinction. In this, you have served the Crown and our Kingdom, as well.” It felt as though the Throne Room breathed beneath those words. Siena’s shoulders relaxed, and Master Rist broke into a wide smile. The light of the braziers was spotty where he stood, but I caught a hint of moisture in his eyes, too.
“By order of His Majesty, from this day forth, you are apprentice no longer.”
A page appeared beside the Queen and handed her a bundle. She unfurled a beautiful blue smock with the royal crest stitched on the upper left.
“Rise, Physiker Siena Clera, and take on the mantle of a healer of the realm.”
For the first time in the years I’d known her, Siena’s hands shook, and I saw something other than loathing cross her face. If I hadn’t known her so well, I would’ve thought the girl felt joy—or whatever came closest to that emotion in her dim heart.
The Queen helped Siena remove her white smock and don her Blues.
Rist lost his battle with the moisture.
Finn muttered, “Well, bugger me.”
And, despite the gulf that forever widened between Siena and me each time we stepped into the same room, pride swelled in my chest. She might have been cold as the stones beneath our feet, but Siena was one of us—and she was the first to graduate to the level of physiker in many years.
I turned sixteen in my fourth year.
I worked eleven hours by Master Rist’s side, seeing one patient after the next. Spring might bring flowers and renew life, but it also brought a wave of seasonal illness that kept every physiker west of the Spires running at a hectic pace.
The Master instructed me to clear down our work area before he raced a few blocks away to make one last call. We had yet to take on any younger apprentices, so the task of resetting exam rooms still fell to me.
I pulled stretchy gloves up to my elbows and began pouring the pungent cleaning liquid onto a rag. After so many years working in the infirmary, I thought I might be used to the smell, but my nose still wrinkled every time I opened the brown bottle.
I startled as thunder clapped in the distance and the shudders rattled. Cleaner splashed onto the floor. I looked up to see a deluge of rain battering the window’s panes, blowing sideways on the angry wind. I clucked my tongue at my own skittishness, calmed myself, and returned to scrubbing.
A few moments later, a voice screamed above the storm’s wrath.
“Help! Somebody, come quick! It’s Master Rist. Spirits, help me, please!”
The Master?
My mind tore free from the day’s mundane tasks as white-hot fear shot up my spine.
I tossed the rag onto the exam table, tore off my gloves, and raced down the hallway as fast as I could run. When I burst into the receiving room, I could barely process what I saw. Master Rist lay sprawled on the floor, his light blue smock now a quilt of crimson, blue, and black splayed around his body. Blood seeped from a gash on his forehead, and a sea of the stuff pooled on the cold stone beneath.
A piece of jagged wood jutted out of his torso.
“What happened?” I barked, biting back the panic that strummed within, desperate for the physiker’s calm to claim me.
A water-logged Constable spoke in rapid, clipped words that pricked my skin like briars in a wood. “We were headed back from his last call. The storm grew bad. Several wagons blew into each other on the road nearby, and that wood broke free. The Master was crossing the street when it all happened.” The man gaped in wide-eyed wonder as he pointed to the wood jutting out of Rist’s chest. “What do we do with that?”
I threw myself to the ground, my knees cracking painfully against the tile, and pointed down the hallway. “Go get my bag from the last exam room on the right. We need cloth and cleaning liquids for his head. And call for Siena and Finn.”
The other apprentices had left after the last patient, intent on enjoying a pint or three before the sun slept. Hoping either might hear the Constable’s cries was foolish, but I had little else with which to work than desperate hope.
The Constable stood frozen. “But that wood—”
“Go!” I shouted, mustering the command I’d heard so often in my father’s voice.
The man’s storm-soaked shoes squished down the hall as I turned back to Rist. Gripping scissors in my shaking hand, I cut away his precious smock, tossing the fabric aside to better see the spear jutting out of his flesh. The wood was about the width of my wrist. The jagged shard rising from his chest had splintered, and I worried how many fragments now lodged inside my Master and what parts they might have pierced.
I reached under him, probing his back, but couldn’t feel an exit wound.
Rist groaned as I removed my hand.
“Master, can you hear me?”