Serali’s body had gone strange and untrustworthy: the old wounds throbbed in time with her pulse, but the rest of her was static, as if the aftermath of the last encounter had pressed her flat, made her two-dimensional. Sleep and waking ran together. Sometimes she believed she had died and was merely replaying memory, a lazy, drifting ghost with no anchor to the present.
She was not dreaming now. The pain in her wrists was urgent, exact. Something moved at the edge of sensation, a pressure on the raw skin. She tried to flex her hands and found them held gently, the cool roughness of unfamiliar fingers working at the bandages, not to bind but to unbind. She startled, jerked herself upright, and nearly cracked heads with the woman crouched at her side.
The maid stood behind her, carrying fresh cloths and a basin that steamed faintly.
The woman made no sound. She simply sat back on her heels, hands lifted, palms open in a peace gesture. Her face was deeply lined, the skin a map of every winter spent in this hole, but her eyes were sharp and colorless as unpolished bone. She wore a robe the color of dirty snow, and the only ornament was a single thread of blue-black beads at her throat, common, not courtly.
Serali, newly uncertain whether she was dreaming or not, blinked at her.
They stared at each other for a full minute, the silence layered with the fine silt of confusion and humiliation. At length the woman said, “You’re not supposed to be awake. The last dose should have put you under for another hour.”
Serali found her tongue thick and unreliable. “It didn’t.” She tried to drag her arms away but the woman’s grip, while gentle, was unwavering. She was cleaning the half-dried blood from Serali’s wrists, and the touch, though practiced, was more intimate than any she had known in years.
“You’re building a tolerance,” said the woman. “Impressive, but inconvenient.”
Serali said, “Are you going to call for the Queen?”
The woman made a sound that was not quite a laugh. “The Queen is busy. I’m just the clean-up.” She bent her head and resumed work on the bandages, peeling away the old linen and dabbing at the weeping gash with something that stung worse than fire.
Serali flinched despite herself. “Who are you?”
“I am Lia,” said the woman. She did not look up. “I keep things alive until they’re useful or until they’re not. Today, you’re useful.” She finished with one wrist, then moved to the next, hands steady as a mason’s.
Serali repeated the name in her head, convinced it was a test or a trick. She tried again. “Are you supposed to tell me that?”
Lia shrugged, never breaking pace. “You were supposed to be asleep. ‘Supposed to’ means little, in my experience.”
She unbuckled the leather cuff from Serali’s right wrist, leaving the silk cord looped through the ring on the bedpost but freeing the hand enough to lift it. The bandage beneath had shifted, stained with medicine and a little blood. Lia unwound it with the patience of a person unpicking knots from thread.
The air hit raw skin.
Serali’s fingers curled.
“Do not make a fist,” Lia said.
Serali’s fingers curled harder.
Lia sighed. “Naturally.”
Lia cleaned the wound with something green and sharp. Pain sparked up Serali’s arm, less violent than the iron had been, but more intimate. Her hand jerked despite herself.
The attendant reached as if to steady her, then stopped.
Good.
Do not touch.
Lia did not stop. She cleaned, inspected, muttered something unflattering about iron, and dabbed more salve over the reddened bands.
“Will I keep the hand?” Serali asked.
Lia looked up.
Serali smiled faintly. “It seems polite to ask. I have so few.”
The maid inhaled in a way that might have been horror.
Lia’s expression remained level. “You will keep both hands if everyone in this palace learns to obey me.”
“Ambitious.”
“I am very old. Ambition is all I have left.”
Serali stared at her.
Then, against her will and better judgment, she almost laughed.
Almost.
Lia wrapped the wrist again, clean linen over medicine, snug enough to hold and loose enough not to bite. When she finished, she did not immediately replace the cuff.
Serali noticed.
Lia noticed her noticing.
“The cuff goes back on,” Lia said. “But not until I have finished both wrists.”
“Do I get to vote?”
“No.”
“Then why mention it?”
“So you do not spend the next three minutes hoping I forgot.”
Serali’s mouth closed.
That was almost cruel.
It was also, unfortunately, merciful.
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Lia moved to the left wrist.
This one was worse. Serali knew it before the bandage came away by the way Lia’s fingers paused at the edge of the linen. The skin beneath was swollen and ugly, raw half-moons pressed into the flesh where metal had ground deeper during the escape and the vault.
Lia’s face changed.
Barely.
But Serali had become very good at reading tiny changes in rooms where people pretended they were not affected by what they saw.
The maid looked away.
Serali looked at the ceiling.
“There are prettier things to stare at,” she said.
The maid’s gaze snapped back, guilty.
Lia said, “There are. Unfortunately, I am working.”
“I meant her.”
“I know.”
The maid flushed.
Good.
Let her be embarrassed by having pity with nowhere useful to put it.
Lia cleaned the second wrist more slowly. Serali breathed through her teeth and did not make a sound, which was apparently not the victory it once had been, because Lia looked displeased rather than impressed.
“Pain is information,” the healer said.
“Then I am very educated.”
“Do not be clever at your own expense.”
“That leaves so few targets.”
Lia’s mouth twitched.
Just once.
Serali felt an absurd flicker of satisfaction and crushed it immediately.
When both wrists were rewrapped, Lia turned to the attendant. “Help me lift her.”
Serali went cold.
“No.”
Both women looked at her.
The word had come out too fast. Too sharp.
Lia’s voice gentled by a degree. “I need to check your back.”
“You already saw it.”
“Yes.”
“So did half your palace, apparently.”
“Not half. And not again, if I can help it.” Lia’s gaze stayed steady. “The wounds reopened in the vault. They were cleaned while you slept. They need checking.”
Serali’s hands flexed uselessly against air.
The cuffs were not yet back on, but her body still remembered them.
“Face down?” she asked.
“No,” Lia said at once. “On your side. Slowly. The attendant will support your shoulder. I will support your hip and knee. No one is putting you face down unless there is no other choice.”
No one is putting you face down.
A stupid sentence.
A small one.
It struck something so deep that Serali had to look away before her face did anything unforgivable.
“Fine,” she said.
Lia waited half a beat.
Then nodded.
The movement hurt exactly as much as Serali expected and in several places she had not invited. The maid slid an arm behind her shoulders, careful not to grip. Lia guided the injured knee, jaw tight as Serali’s breath caught.
By the time they had her on her side, Serali was sweating.
She kept her eyes on the blue glass lamp by the mantle.
Not a crack in the wall.
Not the ceiling.
The lamp.
The light trembled slightly inside the glass, steady enough to watch and small enough not to ask anything of her.
Fabric shifted at her back as Lia unbuttoned the sleeping shift only as far as needed. Cool air touched skin. Serali’s body tried to leave again.
She held it there by force.
Not the crack.
Not now.
The healer’s fingers did not touch at first. She looked. Serali could feel the looking almost more clearly than she would have felt hands.
The maid was very quiet.
Serali hated that.
“You may breathe,” Lia said.
“I was saving it.”
“For what?”
“An emergency.”
“This qualifies.”
Serali drew in air.
It scraped all the way down.
Lia’s fingers touched near her shoulder blade, above one of the reopened lash marks. Gentle. Professional. Not a blow.
Serali knew the difference.
Her body did not.
She flinched hard enough that pain flashed white.
The attendant’s hand tightened in the sheets beside her, not on Serali.
The cleaning seemed to last forever. It probably lasted minutes. Time had become unreliable since the vault.
When Lia finally rebuttoned the shift and helped her onto her back again, Serali’s vision had gone gray at the edges.
The maid lifted the cup. “Water?”
Serali wanted to refuse.
She wanted that so much it almost counted as prayer.
Her throat hurt.
Her body was a treacherous animal.
“Yes,” she said.
The attendant held the cup while Serali drank.
It was less humiliating every time she did it.
That made it more humiliating.
Lia checked the knee last. She folded back the blanket, unwrapped the dressing, and inspected the angry swollen skin around the poultice.
Serali did not look.
She felt the iron anklet like a curse.
“Do not touch the anklet,” Lia said, without looking up.
Serali’s eyes narrowed. “I wasn’t.”
“You were thinking loudly.”
“Is that a medical condition?”
“In this palace, yes.”
The maid made a small sound that might have been a swallowed laugh.
Serali glared at her.
The maid looked down at the basin.
Lia removed the old packing from the cut in Serali’s knee. This time Serali did make a sound, low and involuntary, before she could bite it back.
Lia paused. “There?”
“No, I make that noise for atmosphere.”
“Useful. The room lacked it.”
Serali breathed once.
Twice.
The healer drained the wound, then washed it and packed it with new poultice. Her hands were sure, almost unbearably so. Not kind in the way people performed kindness. Competent. Exact. A wall that held.
“There,” Lia said at last. “Done.”
“Am I cured?”
“No.”
“Tragic.”
“You are less likely to die of infection today than you were yesterday.”
“Your standards are low.”
“My standards are realistic. I find it makes people dislike me more honestly.”
Lia rewrapped the knee, then looked at the attendant. “Broth.”
Serali closed her eyes. “No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
Lia’s voice sharpened. “Do you want to vomit?”
Serali opened one eye. “Not particularly.”
“Then broth before tea. Water alone will not keep you upright, and you are not strong enough to starve yourself impressively.”
“I am not trying to be impressive.”
“That is fortunate.”
Serali hated her.
A little.
Possibly.
The attendant lifted the bowl.
Serali looked at the ceiling.
“No sedative?”
“Not in the broth,” Lia said.
“In the tea?”
“Yes.”
“Am I expected to be grateful for the honesty?”
“No. Just informed.”
That was unfairly difficult to argue with.
Serali let the attendant hold the spoon.
The first mouthful was warm, salty, and humiliatingly good.
Her stomach cramped around it. For a moment she thought she might be sick. Lia watched with irritating focus, one hand already reaching for a basin. Serali swallowed and kept it down.
The attendant offered another spoonful.
Serali took it.
Then another.
After the fourth, she said, “Enough.”
Lia looked like she might argue, then did not. “Enough for now.”
The attendant set the bowl aside.
Serali tried not to miss it immediately.
Lia packed her case with brisk little snaps. “I will return in a few hours.”
“Promises, promises.”
“You are not to pull the bandages. You are not to touch the anklet. You are not to attempt to stand.”
“I am tied to the bed.”
“I have learned not to underestimate spite.”
Serali looked at her.
This time she did smile.
Small. Reluctant. Unwise.
Lia’s expression softened for half a breath before returning to its usual dry severity then she stood, joints creaking, then took a moment to balance herself before turning toward the door.
Serali wanted to say something, wanted to beg the woman to stay, to ask if she knew what would happen next. She almost said, “Will I die here?” but the words caught, sharp and useless, at the base of her tongue.
Lia must have sensed the tension, because she turned back, her shadow long against the wall. “Don’t waste your strength on dread,” she said. “There’s always one more day, until there isn’t.”
Serali nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
Lia left, her steps soft as memory, the maid following behind her, and the door closed with a finality that needed no lock to make it real.
Serali sat for a long time, breathing in the bitter, medicinal haze left by the woman’s visit. She studied her bandaged wrists, marveled at the dull throb where the infection had been, and wondered if this was what passed for mercy here: to be left alive, to be kept in pain just enough to remind you that living and dying were two different games, and you had not yet lost the first.
Eventually, she lay down, tucking her hands beneath her chin so she wouldn’t see them. She tried to remember her own mother’s voice, and could not. She tried to remember the touch of snow on her skin, and could not. She tried, in vain, to picture herself walking out of this place, whole and unbroken.
When sleep came, it was without dreams. The room was silent, and the pain was her own, and for a little while, that was enough.