Chapter 69: The Healer’s Hands
The Ashward Infirmary annex of Greenmarch Hall was quiet. It lacked the shouting and the grinding wheels of the open courtyard, smelling instead of drying yarrow, cold stone, and clean linen.
Callis Vale leaned his weight against the heavy timber doorframe, pulling shallow, jagged breaths into his lungs. The cold of the Weeping Gorge was finally thawing from his bones, leaving behind a sharp, localized agony. He had backed out of the kill-box, holding his nerve against the Stalker hive, but a stray, frantic swipe from a blinded straggler had caught his left shoulder on the climb out. The claws had sliced through the runic leather and bitten deep into the muscle.
Blood dripped from his fingertips, leaving dark, round coins on the pale flagstones.
Sister Elowen Thrice-Blessed stood at the far end of the ward, sorting a row of ceramic jars. She wore her pale grey dress, her gold-brown hair tied back without ornament. The town treated her like a living shrine, a monument to a dead Vanguard husband, granting her a wide, reverent berth.
She turned at the sound of his boots. Her grey-green eyes dropped instantly to his soaked sleeve.
"Callis." The ceramic jar hit the wooden shelf with a sharp clatter.
She crossed the room quickly, sliding her clean shoulder under his uninjured right arm to take his weight. She guided him past the empty public triage cots into a private isolation room in the back, easing him down onto a heavy, scarred bone-setting bench.
"I told you the Gorge was a graveyard," Elowen murmured. She reached for a pair of iron shears, her fingers brushing the slick, ruined fabric of his tunic. She cut the linen away, exposing the deep, jagged laceration.
"It was," Callis grunted, his jaw locking as the cold air hit the open wound. "I didn't draw my sword. I broke their sensory loop with burning meat and backed out. I out-thought them, Elowen."
Elowen paused. She lowered the shears, looking at his pale, exhausted face. Men returning to her infirmary usually compensated for their terror with loud boasts or defensive silence. Callis offered neither. He gave her the blunt, unvarnished mechanics of his survival.
She turned away, filling a ceramic basin with rune-heated water and soaking a clean cloth.
She worked by muscle memory. She cleaned the cut down to the meat, ignoring his sharp intake of breath. She packed the wound with a bitter-smelling green paste and pressed two fingers to the rune-stone sewn into the clean linen bandage. Heat crawled across Callis’s shoulder. The bleeding slowed. Not healed. Not safe. Enough.
As she leaned over him to wipe the remaining blood from his collarbone, Callis watched her. He noticed the faint, rapid pulse beating against the high collar of her grey dress, and the way her lips parted slightly as she focused on the damage. He didn't look away, and he didn't look at her with the polite pity the rest of the town offered the tragic widow.
"You shouldn't be out there," Elowen whispered, her hands shaking slightly as she pulled the bloody cloth away. "You are going to let the March chew you up."
"I am still here," Callis said.
He lifted his right hand. He didn't grab her wrist. He laid his warm, calloused palm flat against the curve of her waist, resting it gently against the ash-grey wool.
Elowen went perfectly still.
The wet cloth hovered over his shoulder. For three years, since Joric died in the Elderforest, she had lived inside a frozen, untouchable bubble of grief. She was expected to be composed, spiritual, and empty of earthly hunger.
Callis’s thumb stroked a slow, deliberate circle against her hip.
"You spend all your time patching up dead men's ghosts, Elowen," Callis murmured, his voice dropping into a low, grounding register. "You are allowed to touch something that is still alive."
A ragged, choking sound tore out of her throat.
She dropped the bloody cloth into the basin. Her hands flew up, trembling as they tangled into his dirt-stiffened hair, and she crashed her mouth down onto his.
It was a clumsy, desperate collision. Elowen kissed him with years of starved, shaky hunger. She forced his lips apart, her tongue sliding into his mouth, tasting of mint and overwhelming need. Callis let out a hoarse groan, his large hands gripping her hips to haul her forward, pulling her flush against his battered chest.
She broke the kiss, gasping for air, and stepped back just enough to tear frantically at the fastenings of her grey robes. She shed the modest garments, letting them pool on the stone floor.
Beneath the wool, Elowen was pale and soft. As she shoved her linen undergarments down her thighs, the reality of her long isolation was laid bare.
Her sex was entirely unkempt. A thick, untamed nest of dark blonde curls sprawled outward, creeping down her inner thighs and inching up toward her belly. It was the wild, overgrown state of a woman who had stopped expecting to be seen.
Her body had not forgotten marriage. It had not forgotten being wanted. Under the healer’s robes was not a saint, not a relic, not Ser Joric’s preserved memory, but a woman whose life had been interrupted and left waiting.
Callis pulled her forward, burying his face directly into the thick, musky hair.
Elowen let out a high, fractured cry. Her hands gripped his bare shoulders as her knees buckled.
He used his thumbs to part the overgrowth, exposing the hidden anatomy beneath. He opened his mouth and pressed his tongue directly against her swollen clitoris.
Elowen shrieked, a sound completely stripped of spiritual grace. Her fingers dug agonizingly into his uninjured shoulder. Callis licked and swirled his tongue over the sensitive nerve, dragging his mouth down the length of her inner lips. He worked the neglected flesh with a starving, deliberate devotion.
She was dry at first from three years of celibacy, but within seconds, the drought ended. A heavy, viscous slick of arousal spilled from her core, matting the wild hair and coating his chin. She tasted sharp and mature—a deep, musky flavor that made his vision blur.
"Please," Elowen sobbed, her hips bucking blindly against his mouth, frightened by the sheer force of her own returning desire. "Callis, please. I need you inside me."
Callis pulled back, his face slick with her juices. He stood up from the bench, ignoring the burning pull in his wounded shoulder, and shoved his rough wool trousers down his hips.
His erection sprang free, thick, vein-corded, and hard.
Elowen looked at him, her grey-green eyes blown wide. She climbed backward onto the wooden bone-setting bench, lying flat against the hard timber. She reached down, grabbing her own pale thighs, and spread her legs as wide as they would go, offering her wild, dripping heat to him in total surrender.
Callis stepped between her knees. He gripped her hips, positioned the blunt head of his cock at her slick entrance, and drove his hips forward.
Elowen cried out.
Her passage had been asleep for three years, causing her internal muscles to seize. She stretched tightly around his girth, her thick, velvety walls fighting the intrusion before finally yielding with a loud, wet squelch.
He buried himself to the hilt, pressing his lean pelvis deeply against her overgrown mound.
"You are so tight," Callis growled, feeling her internal heat clamp around him like a warm glove.
Elowen wrapped her long legs around his waist, locking her ankles behind his back, and dragged him impossibly deeper.
Callis established a deep, grounding rhythm. He pulled almost completely out, the friction dragging a whining gasp from her lips, and slammed his hips forward again. The loud, wet slap of his skin hitting hers echoed off the stone walls.
He pounded into her, using the bone-setting bench as an anvil. Every downward thrust drove the breath from her lungs, forcing her soft breasts to bounce and sway in the dim light. Elowen met his rhythm with desperate upward arches. She wept against his mouth, tears cutting through the sweat on her temples.
"Yes!" Elowen wailed. "Make me feel it! Remind me I'm alive!"
Callis leaned forward, bearing his weight on his uninjured arm, and kissed her fiercely. He swallowed her cries, his tongue sliding against hers as he ground his pubic bone against her swollen clitoris.
Her thick internal walls began to flutter frantically, milking his shaft with hot, desperate contractions.
"Callis!" Elowen screamed against his lips, her entire body locking rigid against the wood.
Her climax rippled through her with a heavy, aching force. Her passage crushed his length in a sequence of long, agonizing spasms that dragged the control right out of his spine.
Callis let out a hoarse roar, driving his hips upward one final, bone-jarring time. He pumped thick, scalding ropes of his seed deep into her womb, filling her to the brim as his body shuddered helplessly.
He collapsed forward, his sweat-slicked chest resting against hers as they both gasped for air in the quiet, herb-scented room. Elowen wrapped her arms tightly around his neck, burying her face in his shoulder and crying softly—not from grief, but from the overwhelming, crushing weight of finally being touched.
Callis held her, pressing a soft kiss to her damp temple. Hartsgate’s spiritual conscience had crossed the line from mourning into hunger, and Callis knew, with his mouth against her damp skin, that he had just tied himself to one of the deepest roots in town.