Delia Prance's Arc

Chapter 13 of 59

The list from last night lay finished on the cottage table. Delia set it aside and moved to her cedar desk. The wedding was three days off. She had promised the court a garden, not a hall, and now she had to fill it with medicine before the eyes of the whole kingdom arrived. She reached for her mortar and began grinding dried leaves into powder. Her hands worked without her watching them. The rhythm let her mind wander back. She remembered standing before the king in his cold hall, the day he told Nick a prince could not wed a woman with no title. She had no coin then, no land, only a small cottage by the river. Now she owned a field. Now she healed thirty people a day under open sky. Now the rose gold ring sat on her finger. She smiled at a jar of crushed root. Nick had given her all of it, in a way. Not the skill in her hands, but the room to use it. The land. The chance. She thought of how he saw her healing gift before she named it herself, three years back on a swing. The door opened. Nick stepped in, still in his dark palace coat. He carried a rolled paper under one arm. "You're smiling at a jar," he said. "I was thinking about the hall," she said. "When your father said I wasn't a princess. When I had nothing." He set the paper on the desk. "You had your hands." "You saw them before anyone did." She wiped powder from her fingers. "I keep waiting for this to fall apart. The wedding. The field. All of it." Nick unrolled the paper. It was the seating plan for the court. "My father signed off. They come in two days. Nobles on the east side. Your patients keep the shade under the swing tree." Delia looked at the plan. The court and the sick, sharing one field. Her whole idea, made real on a page. "Then it's happening," she said quietly. "It's happening." He looked at her steady. "You did this. Not me. I gave you dirt. You made it worth defending." She put down the mortar. The doubt she had carried for weeks loosened in her chest. She had spent so long fighting to keep the land that she had forgotten to believe it was hers. "I'm ready," she said. And she meant it. Nick nodded once. Then he frowned at the plan. "There's one thing. My father wants the ledger present. The book of every plant you grow. He wants it shown to the court, to prove the field serves the kingdom." Delia went still. Her ledger named the poisons too. The wolfsbane. The nightshade. Every dangerous plant, listed in her own hand, laid open before nobles who already doubted her. "Then I'll show them all of it," she said. But her fingers had gone cold around the jar.