Delia Prance's Arc

Chapter 38 of 59

A week passed. Delia searched for the truth of her gift every night. She read her family record until the candle burned low. She pressed her palm to the office floor and grew plant after plant. Nothing new came. The book said the gift grew stronger with use, but it told her no more than that. She learned nothing about her elf blood she did not already know. But the days downstairs were full. Her flower-draped house filled from dawn to dusk. She carried her flower-stitched herb satchel from bed to bed, mixing draughts and setting bones. And her patients had begun to say a strange thing. A farmer with a burned arm said it first. "You should be our queen," he told her. "You and the prince both. He'd make a fine king." Delia smiled and wrapped his arm and said nothing. But the next patient said it too. And the next. A mother with a coughing girl. An old man with a bad hip. All of them, over the week, said the same words. She would make a great queen. Nick would make a great king. At dusk she locked the door and sat on the porch steps. Nick found her there. He set down a cup of tea and sat beside her. "They keep saying it," she told him. "Every one of them. That I should be queen. That you should be king." Nick was quiet a moment. "My brother has no such following," he said. "The nobles argue in the hall. But the people already chose." "I don't want a crown," Delia said. "I want the beds full and the door open." "I know." He looked out at the dark field. "But this is worth more than the archive books you've been reading. You wanted to understand your gift. Here's what it's done. It hasn't just healed them. It's turned every road into a friend." Delia turned the cup in her hands. She had spent a week chasing what her blood could grow. She had missed what it had already grown around her. Not plants. People. A whole countryside that would speak for her. "The crown fights over which prince fathers an heir," she said. "But if the people want us, that's a claim the nobles can't buy." "It is," Nick said. She set the cup down. The search inside her locked office was finished for now. Her blood held no new secret this week. But the answer had been coming through her door all along, one grateful patient at a time. Her sanctuary would not stand on magic she couldn't explain. It would stand on the loyalty of everyone she had healed for free. "Then we let them keep saying it," Delia said. "And we build where they can find us."