Delia Prance's Arc

Chapter 34 of 59

The court lessons began the next week, and they ate Delia's mornings whole. The steward came at dawn with a bundle of scrolls—seating charts, house names, the order of bows. By the time she was free, the sun stood high. Patients had waited hours in the field. Some had gone home worse than they came. Delia knew she could not be in two places. If the crown owned her mornings, then her workers had to own her craft. So she changed the shape of her day. Each morning before the steward arrived, she gathered her six workers on the porch of the flower-draped healing house. She taught fast and plain. She showed them how to measure a fever draught, how to bind a wound, how to spot the pale skin of blood loss. She could not show them the locked office upstairs, or how the jars filled themselves. But everything below that door, she gave them. Nick stayed close through every lesson. He leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed and watched the field beyond. He was not there to learn draughts. He was there because his father's steward walked their land now, and Nick did not trust the man an inch. His jaw set every time the crown's servant passed the window. "He counts our beds," Nick said, low. "Same as he counts my father's coin." "Let him count," Delia said. "The beds stay full." She pulled a worn green book from the shelf, its cover thick with painted roots and flowers. It was her new reference, built page by page since she lost her first one. She set it in the oldest worker's hands. "When I am at the palace, this answers what I cannot. Every plant. Every dose. Every danger. You read it before you pour." The woman held it like something breakable. The others crowded near. For the first time, Delia saw them stop looking to her for each small thing. They looked to the book, and to each other. The test came the fourth morning. A boy arrived with a gashed leg while the steward's scroll pinned Delia to a chair inside. She could not rise. She watched through the window. Her workers laid the boy down, opened the book, cleaned the wound, and bound it tight. The bleeding stopped. The boy walked out on his own feet. Delia had not touched him. That evening the porch was quiet. All six workers could run the house without her hands. The lessons had cost her the mornings, but they had bought her something larger. Her healing no longer lived in one pair of hands. It lived in six, and in a book anyone could open. Nick found her on the step at dusk. "You made it bigger," he said. "Not smaller." "I had to," Delia said. Then she frowned. The steward's cart still sat in the field. He had not left. He was writing something down. She turned to Nick and smiled. The more people who can heal means more that are healed.