Page 4 of A Touch of Royalty
But it had only been a dream and Emryn shook it off and rose from her bed. Where she’d collapsed two days ago after healing the prince.
She’d said she would return, but was that truly wise? After all, he was healed and would likely want nothing further to do with her. If he needed something, the palace healers would see to him.
Emryn washed, dressed, and headed down to eat. She was famished, and there was always food in the dining hall for patients as well as the healers that attended them.
After quieting the hunger that had been trying to consume her, she went to find the head and be given her assignments for the day.
Sinking into healing, into the strength of it, into the vow she’d given to the Goddess and to the temples. There was safetyin that, as long as she was working for the good of the people, the Moon Mother would keep her eyes on Emryn.
And three days passed in that manner. Healing, eating, talking to her fellows. It was a good life, the only one she knew and the only one that she wanted.
But there was a fluttering worry at the back of her head.The sickness that she’d taken from the prince had been oddly stubborn, almost alive in an unexpected way.
It had been like nothing she’d ever experienced, and that worried her. If there was a new illness about to hit the capital, she needed to ensure that the healers were equipped to take care of it.
Which led her to the head healer, looking at the older man and trying to find the words to articulate the worry that was plaguing her. She hadn’t slept for three days at this point, the dreams of that figure trapped in the dark shooting her out of sleep over and over again.
And she looked it by now, facing the head who was giving her a concerned look. “Are you ill, Emryn?”
“No,” Emryn shook her head. “I haven’t been resting, that’s all.”
”I will get you a tonic,” the head healer replied. “Is there something else?”
Emryn paused, trying to figure out how to phrase it. “The prince’s illness concerns me.” She finally said. “I do not like the thought of it affecting the wider population and would like permission to prep the seniors to handle it if it rears its head.”
”Granted,” the head nodded without hesitation. “Begin with the seniors immediately, Emryn. I will reassign your patients and free you to begin.”
“Thank you.” Emryn gave the head healer a shallow bow and left him there in the hallway.
It didn’t take terribly long for the first cohort of seniors to find her. Looking to her for an explanation of the situation. There were several classes of illness that could be called alive.Mindless, certainly, but they did exhibit a form of consciousness that made them deathly difficult to combat. They were stranglers, tying themselves around an organ and feeding on it until it failed. The illness that had affected the prince had presented itself very much in the same vein, though the affected part had been his entire system.
But the transmission vector hadn’t been clear. And the fact that it had been the prince as patient zero didn’t make sense either. Illnesses usually came up through the common people and it was her job to stop them before they made it to the nobility.
But that puzzle would wait until she made certain that the senior cohorts were able to take the illness on. Which meant that she had to translate what she’d done into something that a true healer could do.
Emryn took the cohort to the training room and demonstrated the way that the illness had been strangling the prince’s system. Inlaying the illness into the patterns of the training dummy and stepped back to allow the cohort to examine the illness.
It wasn’t a simple matter, and the theory that only Emryn could actually eradicate the illness seemed to be proven as the seniors struggled to remove the parts that were strangling the organs. It was the lungs that seemed to be the most difficult, and Emryn’s experience bore that out.
The small sacs of the lungs were utterly inundated, making the oxygen processing nearly impossible. The seniors struggled as Emryn watched,only barely able to stabilize the patient, but not able to garner enough free space to eradicate the illness.
Which meant that, if the illness spread, it would be down to Emryn to come in and dispel it. The seniors could keep the patients alive though, and that was all to the good.
“Enough.” Emryn dispelled the illness from the dummy and watched the cohort slump, panting and exhausted. “Go and rest, tell the second and third cohorts that I will see them after luncheon.”
The lead of that cohort nodded and left the room. Emryn sat in the chair on the far side of the room and tried to plan. If the illness did rear its head in the wider population, she would need to shepherd herself very carefully so that she had the energy to be the final line of defense.
She needed to go back to the palace. Chances were high that the illness had begun in the servants and she needed to ensure that she understood the transmission vector. Prince Cas could not be patient zero. That didn’t make the sort of sense that it needed to.Somewhere in the palace was a very sick person and she would find them and fix it before it spread.
And if there was a tiny flutter in the back of her mind over seeing the prince again- well if she didn’t admit to it, then it didn’t exist.
4
PALACE
She was coming back, and Cas didn’t understand why that thrilled him so much. It shouldn’t. She was a healer and a common one at that, and to add to that, she wasn’t even coming back to see him. No, she was coming to see the servants that attended to him.
something about a transmission vector and patient zero and several other things that had been in the letter that his mother had showed him. The one that had come from her. Asking permission to interview the palace servants, specifically any that attended on Cas.
