Page 11 of The Shattered King

Pounding on my door woke me in the middle of the night, lodging my heart between my ribs. I scrambled from the bed, tripped over my bag, and rushed to the door. For a moment, I thought my theft of ink and paper had been discovered, and that the crime was far graver an offense than I’d realized.

But when I opened the door, Sten stood there. He’d had the decency not to barge into my room.

“His Highness needs you” was all he said, then he took off at a sprint down the corridor.

Picking up my skirt, I ran after him, barefooted. I had no night clothes, only three dresses, and today I wore the one Lonnie had gifted me, patches and all. My mind barely had time to catch up with my body as I chased Sten to the prince’s quarters.

When I came to his bedroom, Physician Whitestone was already attending him, holding a pan as the prince vomited into it.

The room smelled like bile and blood.

“What happened?” I asked, coming around to the other side of the bed. Surely his walk couldn’t have triggered this .

“It’s not uncommon,” Sten whispered, body stiff as steel.

Gods help him, Prince Renn was so sick .

His bed was overlarge, forcing me to climb atop it to reach him without getting in Whitestone’s way. The physician scowled at me as I approached but was too occupied with his own efforts to put up a fight. He handed the vomit-filled bowl to an attendant. I noticed blood lacing the bile.

Prince Renn did not sleep, but his eyes were squeezed shut. His skin had blanched, the pallor the most extreme I’d seen it. Speckles of blood littered his blankets. His entire body shook, as though in the throes of a seizure.

I put my hands on his head; I was so nervous it took me two tries to fall into his lumis.

It hadn’t notably changed, though the death lines had darkened and .

.. smoked? Almost like they blurred. Odd, but I certainly wasn’t going to experiment with them.

None attached to the baubles of his legs.

Even so, no man could withstand so much damage for long.

The first thought I’d had upon coming here resurfaced in my mind: I did not know how this man was alive.

Before I could act, the prince shifted, breaking our physical contact and shoving me out of the lumis. The disorientation of it lasted a few seconds. “Hold him down!” I shouted.

“He needs movement!” Whitestone barked back.

But, thankfully, Sten climbed onto the mattress and grabbed Renn’s bony shoulders in his thick hands, and I dowsed again.

“You’re okay,” I said aloud as I sped around the mess of him, eyes darting between the pieces.

There was no rhyme or reason to their injury.

I had to guess, avoiding the dark threads warning of death as best I could.

I dropped to my knees at a pile and started picking through the pieces.

“You need to relax, Renn. You need to breathe for me.”

The non-walls of the lumis quivered.

Cursing, I began picking up larger pieces of the baubles—they were half the size of my palm at best—and began building those little webs around them, thinking that perhaps I could somehow staunch whatever was ailing him. I moved through a few, then picked up—

Had I not spent so many hours, so many days, inside this man’s lumis, I never would have recognized the shape of the shard’s polygonal edge. But I did. I’d seen its mirror before.

“I know you,” I whispered, and rose to my feet, searching the hysteria of colors. I’d seen it before. Picked it up at least twice, only to set it aside. When was that?

The lumis shuddered. After a minute, I remembered the general location and rushed to it, picking through with my right hand while holding the broken bauble with my left—

There.

The colors did not match, but the edges aligned. I pressed them carefully together, then called on my magic to make them whole, sipping on that extra, hidden portion to speed the process along.

The seam glossed over, as though I’d glazed it in glue and let it dry. The crack remained, but the glue held.

I set it aside and sifted through more of the glass, adding more webbing and strings where I thought it might help, when a memory came to mind.

“ It’s gone!” Pren cried, rubbing her knuckles into her eyes. “I can’t find it anywhere. ”

“ I told you not to play out in the barn.” Drying my hands on a towel, I stormed out of the house toward our tiny, pathetic barn, where two-year-old hay bales had broken on the ground. “Where were you playing? ”

Tears fell down Pren’s cheeks. “Everywhere! And then I stood up and it was gone!” She clutched the leather cord of her necklace, upon which had hung a polished stone of quartz that her friend had gifted her.

Hands on my hips, I stared at the trial before me, wondering how I would recover such a small pendant in such a heap of straw.

An idea came to me, and I snapped my fingers. “Grab the pitchfork. We’ll sift through it.”

My little sister blinked. “What?”

“ The pendant is heavier than the straw,” I explained. “If we shake things up, it will fall to the floor. If we’re lucky, we might even hear it when it does. ”

I waded into the center of the largest pile of glass, skimming my feet across the lumis’s floor so I wouldn’t step on anything fragile. Then I began moving handfuls of glass behind me, softly digging to the base—

And sure enough, larger baubles lay beneath. Still broken, but more whole than many of the rest.

I coaxed them up, hung them in the air, noticed two of them snapping into place by sheer luck alone. I tied strings around their most broken parts, even found a shard inside one of them that belonged to the same bauble and glued it in place as I had the previous.

My neck hurt from my position on the prince’s bed, and my arms soon grew heavy from the work, added to lack of sleep. Closing my eyes, I shifted out of the lumis, if only to see how the prince fared.

He had stopped shaking. Whitestone wiped blood from his mouth. He was not awake, but his breathing had calmed, his color was a little warmer.

Seeing me mentally present, Whitestone threw down the bloodied towel and wheeled on Sten. “You should not have brought her! She’s likely the one hurting him!”

He could have called me a cow and a gutter-licker, and I’d be less offended. “Do not be obtuse. I’m a healer. I heal .”

The physician scoffed. “What could I know of craftlock? You could be lying.”

“My point precisely,” I hissed. “What could you know of it?”

The doctor practically growled, “I will inform the queen,” and he stormed away, his attendant leaving with him.

I sighed, sagging onto the bed, keeping myself upright, barely. “What time is it?”

Ard, from the doorway, answered, “About two.”

I’d had three, four hours of sleep at best. Yet I felt strongly that I needed to stay with the prince.

To help him, and to protect him from anything Whitestone might do in attempts to prove his work more competent than my own.

So I slid from the mattress and took up the chair.

Propped an elbow on the side table and laid my head on it.

It was not the most comfortable, and I floated in and out of sleep.

Near dawn, the prince convulsed again.

I grabbed his hand, holding it tightly in both of mine so he couldn’t move. Sten, well trained, snatched a handkerchief and wedged it into the prince’s mouth so he wouldn’t bite his tongue, monitoring it closely in case the prince coughed or vomited; he’d drown if he was gagged.

I dowsed again, working what I could, even if that dwindled down to sweeping the smaller piles into larger ones to mimic some kind of wholeness. When I slipped out of his lumis to check on him, he was awake, his hand crushing mine, his eyes wide and his breathing quick.

“He’s gotten worse!” Sten cried.

I gritted my teeth against the pain in my fingers, studying the prince’s pained face. Saw the overlay of Ursa there; she’d been prone to something similar. “No, he’s panicking.” I leaned in close to him. “Breathe, Renn. I need you present with us. This will pass.”

Fear delayed his reaction, but after a moment he shook his head, still hyperventilating. “I’m supposed to be better,” he wheezed. “You’re supposed to cure me. If you can’t heal me, who can?”

I stood up and wrenched my hand from his, the knuckles throbbing. “You will make yourself worse if you can’t calm down . Your lungs work well enough. Breathe!”

He did not listen.

Palm on his forehead, I dowsed again, stringing and gluing and trying my best with the shattered pieces of him. Returning to reality, I barked at him, “Renn, breathe , dammit.”

He shut his eyes and sucked in one long, shuddering breath.

“Good. Again. Keep breathing. These are healing breaths. Heal yourself.”

He sucked in air, let it out. In, out. In, out.

I dowsed one more time before my exhaustion forced me back into my body. The prince had managed to calm down, though a dribble of blood ran from his right nostril down to his ear.

“Is he all right?” the queen asked. I hadn’t even noticed her presence. Had she just arrived, or come in while I was dozing?

I did not answer fast enough; she crossed the room to him. Before she could knock me from my chair, I saw in the prince’s red-rimmed eyes the deep shadows of shame, like he was embarrassed.

So I stood, planting my heels to make myself as immovable as possible. “Yes, he is past the worst of it. What he needs now is rest.”

He shifted his gaze away as the queen pressed into me, as though I were merely a piece of furniture in her way. “Are you sure?”