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SUMMONS

E mryn knew she wasn’t quite right. She never had been and was nearly at peace with it by now. Nearly. The back of her mind still wondered why she wasn’t and what she could do about it.

But she knew. She was a healer, the city’s finest, honored by the queen herself, and there was nothing that could be done for the ways she wasn’t right.

The head healer had told her it was possible because she had been a foundling. Left in the snow at the base of the steps to the temple, half wanting someone to find her and half wanting her to have died by the time she was found.

That still hurt; the pain obscure and deep enough that she didn’t feel it most days. The theory remained that laying in the snow as a young child might have resulted in some things simply not developing correctly.

Emryn knew it was deeper than that, though she was careful to keep it hidden. She had things you weren’t supposed to have. Healing magic was supposed to be a cool blue. Safe, controlled, expected plan, expected results.

It wasn’t supposed to be white fire.

But Emryn’s was. As she’d aged, she’d learned control, but nothing could disguise the form that her healing took.

And there were other things too. She could sense illness before it manifested. Like a scent, but at the back of her brain. No other healer could do that, not to her knowledge.

But the fundamental difference, the thing she would do anything to keep hidden. That was; Emryn wasn’t a healer at all.

At least, not in the traditional sense.

Certainly the people in her care recovered. Even the ones that were nearly dead. If they could open their eyes, Emryn could heal them.

But she wasn’t a healer, and that was the lie that she lived with.

Emryn wasn’t healing them. She was taking the sickness out of their bodies and into herself. The first thing that is trained out of a true healer.

Which made her no true healer.

But she could still do good. Even with no memories to speak of, white fire, and a lie that burned in her bones, she could still help the people of the realm.

And perhaps if she helped enough people, the Lady of the Moon would let her have her memories back.

Unless she didn’t want them back.

All of her childhood was a blank. Before she’d been found at the base of the temple steps, tied to the railing and near dead from the cold.

The head healer had told her that she was found when she was around seven. Or at least that was his best guess. But the fact of the matter was that her life before she’d entered the temple was a black hole in her mind.

After that, after she’d been tested and found to be able to remain for training, her memories started to stick. But only in vague black and white until she’d advanced to live patients.

After that, life had been in bright color and full sound. Too much, too fast, and all at once. She had a very coherent memory of the exact moment that it had happened. It had left her a destroyed pile of fabric on the floor of one of the healing rooms.

Shivering, crying, begging for it to stop as the entire world crowded into a body and mind far too small to hold it. She still wasn’t entirely certain that she’d lived through it, but she was still here, which meant something.

Emryn wasn’t certain what, only that it was something.

The Lady of the Moon wasn’t finished with her yet.

“Healer,” the voice broke through her mental haze and she blinked hard to see the head healer standing in front of her with one of the queen’s pages at his back.”

“Yes?” Emryn shook her head again, trying to get things to settle. “What can I help with?”

The head healer stepped to the side and gestured. The page stepped up and offered Emryn a beribboned, sealed envelope. The golden seal on that envelope meant it could only be from one person, and Emryn took the envelope in timid fingers and stared down at it.

It was the royal seal, and the scarlet ribbon embedded in the golden wax had the queen’s name woven into it.

And on the front of the envelope was her name.

“The queen summons you.” The page couldn’t have been more than ten. “The matter is urgent, Healer. You are bidden to the palace straight away.”

“I will come immediately.” Emryn nodded to the head healer, who smiled at her.

There was a carriage waiting for them at the bottom of the steps to the temple and it was the work of a moment for her and the page to bundle themselves into it.

Emryn had only been in this carriage once before. When the queen had honored her work and skill during the last plague. She had been better dressed then. This time she was going to the palace in her plain grey robes.

But, she assumed, that the queen had summoned her for an illness, not a vanity recognition.

And the closer that the carriage got to the palace, the more Emryn could sense it in the air.

It was wrong, deeply and truly wrong in the same places that she was wrong, and that was strange in the extreme.

The carriage pulled to a halt and Emryn was the first one down, utterly ignoring the footman’s hand as he offered her help. The feeling was a miasma in the air, and Emryn picked up the hem of her drab grey robe and dashed toward the palace.

She ignored the guards stationed at the entrance and they either remembered her, or they were too shocked by her headlong dash to stop her.

She ran headfirst into the queen’s secretary, almost knocking the man off his feet. The older man gripped her arm and used it to steady himself. But Emryn wasn’t going to wait for the platitudes, or the ceremony. She had a patient to see to.