To heal a Rogue

LYSANDER

I handed the letter to Bradley when I finished.

He read it without a word, his eyes moving steadily from one line to the next. When he reached the end, he folded the paper along its existing crease and gave a short, humorless laugh.

"So we have traitors within," he murmured. "How wonderfully convenient for us."

"I want to see the body."

The sentinel turned and led us down the corridor. I followed, then glanced back at another sentinel trailing behind us. The bodies of the men killed in the hall were still being gathered.

"Treat them with respect," I called. "They fought for the crown. They don’t deserve to be handled like evidence or dead meat."

The sentinel straightened and inclined his head.

"Yes, sir."

We moved on.

The quarters were tucked into a narrow section of the estate, several small rooms crowded together beneath the same aging space. Her door stood open on the left.

I slowed.

The room was small and painfully ordinary. A narrow bed. A washbasin. A wooden chest pushed against the wall.

And her.

A length of rope disappeared around an old ceiling beam, the other end knotted tightly around her neck. Her body hung several feet above the floor, turning almost imperceptibly in the stale air. Her bare feet were still.

I looked away.

"That is what rogue scum deserves." Bradley’s voice held none of the hesitation I felt.

"She wasn’t a rogue." I retorted and I was sure if it too.

His gaze remained fixed on the body.

"We just read her letter."

"Exactly." I kept my eyes on the floorboards. "Look at what we’re being given, Bradley. Sentinels slaughtered in the hall, their heads blown apart. A killer who walks straight out before anyone can find them even when you were sure you had them cornered. Now we find one of our own hanging in her room with a letter conveniently confessing to everything."

Bradley’s expression tightened.

"The wounds in that hall weren’t made by an ordinary rogue."

"No."

I finally looked toward the body again, but only for a moment.

"Whoever did this wanted us to find it. They wanted us frightened enough to stop asking questions and start going rabid."

Bradley folded his arms. "And what are you suggesting?"

"That we’re being led."

His eyes narrowed at that.

"What was used in that side of the infirmary was magic and the kind of magic used in that hall wasn’t brute force. It was precise.... controlled. Whoever killed those sentinels knew exactly what they were doing."

I nodded toward thenow dead healer without looking directly at her.

"She’d been here for years. Worked among us. Healed our soldiers. Ate at our tables. If she could use magic like that, someone would have noticed. And I am certain there isn’t a single record of her being a magic user in the system."

Bradley’s jaw shifted.

I continued before he could answer.

"Someone took a fear and the minor hate we’ve already been taught to have, wrapped it around a dead woman, and left her where we’d be certain to find her. Now all they have to do is wait for us to start tearing through our own walls looking for ’inside’ rogues."

Silence settled between us.

Bradley stared at the body for several seconds. His fingers flexed once at his side.

"Fuck... You’re right and it was already working on me."

The admission came reluctantly and with that seemed fo came his theories.

"A magic user could wear anyone’s face."

He looked toward me then, something colder entering his expression.

"That opens rather a lot of doors we hadn’t considered."

"These bastards."

His hand dragged over his jaw.

"You’d think," I said, "given how thoroughly this estate is supposed to be warded, that someone walking around in a stolen face and agenda would trigger something."

Bradley gave a faint, weary shake of his head.

"That’s not quite how the wards work."

He stepped farther into the room, his eyes moving over the walls as though he might find the answer hidden in the stone.

"Most of the wards we have don’t judge appearances. They judge intent, presence, power. And you know with witches, theor magic is usually built around a hierarchy of authority."

I frowned.

"So a disguise wouldn’t matter?"

"Not necessarily."

He tapped two fingers against his arm.

"If someone walked through those gates wearing another person’s face, it wouldn’t give two shits. It could sense intent of course but I have learned even that can be skewed. If someone genuinely believed they belonged here, the wards might recognize the belief more than they recognized the deception. They are old too. The witches of this age do not have as much control and knowledge about warding runes like the old ones."

I stared at him.

"That might be the issue. The allergy to change with most of our institutions. Magic is hierarchical. What if they’re powerful enough to trump those wards?"

"Then we’d have an even bigger problem."

His gaze returned to the doorway and I let out a slow breath. "That’s comforting."

Bradley glanced at me. "I never claimed it would be."

I looked back toward the body once more, forcing myself this time.

"This Omega shouldn’t be made into a villain, Bradley," I said. "Even if the elders decide it’s cleaner to explain it away that way, to protect the royal family’s reputation, to protect the standing of this house. She served this royal house faithfully for years. She died a horrible, senseless death tonight, used as a puppet by whoever’s actually behind all of this. She deserves to be buried without rumors trailing after her name, and after her family’s name."

"That’s a generous position, Your Majesty."

"It’s the correct one."

A sentinel approached and bowed low. "The Delicate has arrived, High Beta."

"Bring her in," Bradley said. "Let’s see what she can tell us."

The sentinel left, and Bradley turned back to me.

"I’ll keep your word on this," he said. "About the healer’s reputation. That matters more than anything else right now, given everything else currently unraveling around us."

"Thank you."

The Delicate entered a moment later.

I recognized the shape of her presentation immediately, though the details had changed since the last one I’d encountered as a boy. She was covered from throat to ankle in dark fabric, gloves sealed tightly at the wrists, every inch of skin concealed except for the narrow strip visible around her eyes.

There was no handler.

That caught my attention.

"Where is your handler?"

She raised both hands to the covering around her head and slowly unwound it. Pale skin emerged first, almost translucent beneath the lamplight, followed by a face that was sharper and more severe than I’d expected. Her eyes were the strangest part. They were so dark they appeared almost entirely black, the iris barely distinguishable from the pupil.

"I work alone, Your Majesty."

She didn’t offer an explanation, and something about the certainty in her voice told me she didn’t intend to.

I gestured toward the adjoining room, where the healer’s body still hung from the ceiling beam.

"We have two tasks for you. This is the first. We believe this woman was pushed toward taking her own life. We need to know exactly what happened here."

The Delicate’s gaze shifted toward the doorway.

She studied the room for a moment before giving a single nod.

"Of course."

She stepped inside.

The change in her was subtle. Whatever she had been before crossing that threshold seemed to fall away. Her shoulders settled, her breathing slowed, and her attention narrowed until there was nothing left of her but observation.

She peeled one glove from her hand and flexed her bare fingers.

Then she began to touch the room.

Her fingertips skimmed the doorframe first, lingering against the wood. She moved to the wall, tracing a slow line across its surface before brushing the edge of the nearby table. She didn’t appear to be searching for anything in particular.

Or perhaps she was searching for something I couldn’t see.

She stopped beside the bed.

Her fingers hovered above the blanket without quite touching it.

"Have you found anything?" I asked.

She didn’t answer immediately.

Her dark eyes remained fixed on the room, and when she finally spoke, her voice had dropped almost to a whisper.

"I am tasting the fragments of what she left behind."

I glanced at Bradley.

He was watching her just as carefully as I was.

The Delicate crouched beside the bed and pressed her palm against the floorboards.

For several seconds, nothing happened.

Then her fingers tightened.

Her expression changed. Only slightly. But I saw it.

She had found something.

"She was very hardworking," the Delicate said, her voice distant, half somewhere else entirely. "She loved what she did. She was hoping to transcend her junior standing soon enough. She’d been saving for it. Extra shifts. Cozying to the big guns at the infirmary."

She paused, her hand stilling in the air, and looked up at the hanging body properly for the first time.

She whispered something too quiet for me to catch, a prayer, maybe, in some old dialect I didn’t recognize, and then reached out and pressed her bare palm against the dead woman’s leg.