1
Elena
The sight of blood before breakfast was never a pleasant start to the day.
“Hold still you damned ingrate,” I hissed under my breath. When the farmer rolled away from the needle and thread I was using to stitch up his wound, I ordered the attending novices to take his shoulders and legs to keep him from moving. It was nearing sunrise, and blood soaked from neck to ankle in a crimson wash. I had seconds, maybe less, before the life under my hands slipped through it.
“Don’t let him move,” I warned them, as I bent over the battered body in front of me.
“Curse ye’, stupid bleedin’ wench,” the farmer muttered through gritted teeth. He was on the edge of death, but had strength enough to make scathing remarks.
I paid the novices shocked reactions as much mind as I did the farmer’s vulgar cursing, which was none. The moment I’d received the call of an injured tenant, I’d slipped out of bed and into the black robes provided by the priests, as I’d done every morning since I arrived at the temple under the cover of night. The sky was dreary when I found them in the bowels of the surgery with the bleeding human farmer moaning and ashen on the table before me.
As I threaded the needle, peace stole over me, steadying my hands and clearing my mind of intrusive thoughts. I gave my assistants one last stern look to remind them to keep him as still as possible, then I went to work. With the bit of mangled flesh pinched between my forefingers, I began the long, arduous work of joining the ragged edges of the wound with care and precision. It was an intricate, tedious task, but as it often did, it soothed my riotous thoughts. Save for a whine here and a jerk there, the farmer contained his responses to the pain as I repaired the damage.
By the time I tended the wound to my exacting satisfaction, he’d given into the pain and surrendered to unconsciousness. His slack face and bone white complexion made him look like a corpse. It gave me a jolt to see his ashen face slack when it was full with such life and rage moments ago. The fragility of human life stole my breath. How easy a life was to lose—and how powerful to restore it.
“Just resting, milady,” said one of the novices under her breath.
I shook my head as a chilled calm steadied my voice and resolve. “He’ll need it,” I replied, taking the proffered towels damp with an astringent cleaning solution for my bloodied hands. The farmer’s waiting family stepped forward from where they’d been waiting in an alcove. To them, I said, “He will be just fine. He must rest here for a few more days so we can check him for fever. Once he’s cleared, you’ll be able to take him home.”
A woman, his wife I assumed, stepped forward and laid a hand on my shoulder. “I can’t thank you enough for your kindness, your highness. Acasia is blessed to have you,” she said.
A shock reverberated throughout me. It had been a long time since anyone had addressed me by my royal title. Even longer since I’d thought of it. An icy apprehension crept over me, numbing my previously nimble fingers which werechilled from the still-drying solution. A shiver threatened at the base of my spine, but I refused to let it come to fruition and instead straightened it in defiance. The woman, clueless to my internal struggle, squeezed my shoulder, and I remembered to smile and thank her.
After she left, I dried my hands on a clean towel and turned to my assistants. “You may move him to the recovery beds to rest. Please inform me if he shows any symptoms of fever.”
“Yes, my lady,” they said in unison. One of them signaled for a waiting male who strode in, head bowed, and scooped up the patient to take him to the attached surgery. The novices filed out after them, leaving me alone and surrounded by a bloody mess.
Idleness had never been one of my strong suits, and although I wasn’t required to clean up after each patient, I couldn’t sit still long enough to let the mess go untouched. If a novice found me, I’d no doubt be berated for doing chores unbefitting of my station. A princess, they’d gasp, should not be cleaning, as though it were an atrocity. There were males for that chore. I snorted as I tossed the soiled towels into a bin and began wipingthe stone table with a clean one. A princess shouldn’t be hiding in a temple, either.
A princess should rule, my brother often reminded me in his letters.
I pushed the thought of him to the back of my mind and focused on the task at hand. My growling stomach that drew me away from cleaning, and to the kitchens, in search of breakfast before my regular daily visits from the ailingbegan.
The temple in the morning, before its inhabitants woke, was my favorite part of the day. Cook and his helpers were the only ones awake, and the halls were quiet and smelled of fresh baked bread with a dash of cinnamon. Until patients started arriving and the other novices woke to tend to their duties, I’d be blessedly alone with only my food for company.
After retrieving a tray of bread and fruit rations from the cook, I excused myself to the gardens where I no one would disturb me. The surgery had been my domain since the day I arrived at the temple.The healer at the time didn’t want an apprentice, especially a disgraced princess. Unlike life at the castle, they required every person at the temple to pull their own weight. I was used to giving orders, not taking them. It took her death last spring and the subsequent overwhelming responsibilities of the lives in my hands for me to realize why she’d been so strict. The first time I lost a life, I’d gone to her grave and wept.
If the nobility could see me now, they wouldn’t recognize me. I wore a plain wool gown, ate tasteless meals, and worked for my keep. Men’s work, they’d say with a sniff and an upturned nose. I used to think the same, until they banished me to the temple, though they wouldn’t call it that. A respite, the advisors had said, until they figured out what to do with me.
As I stuffed myself with raisin bread drizzled with honey, I wondered if it would be possible for me to never return. I could live my life out in peace here at the temple. No more political machinations or backhandedness. Saving lives was tough work, but unlike being a princess it was honest, fulfilling work.
When I cleaned my plate, I gave it to a servant waiting in the hall to do my rounds in the garden. Besides tending to the sick and the injured, Imaintained the temple’s store of herbs and medicines in the attached courtyards. I checked the seedlings I planted recently, pruned those with overgrowth, and gathered any supplies I was running low on in the baskets stacked in a corner. By the time I finished, the sun had risen over the tops of the stone enclosure. I warmed myself for a moment in the radiant heat, my face upturned, before beginning the busiest part of my day.
I opened my eyes, blinded at first by the brilliant light, and found I wasn’t alone as I’d assumed.
“Sister,” the figure said, and for a moment I thought I was imagining the image of my brother.
But it couldn’t be.
He looked wholly unlike the older brother I’d left behind those years ago. Even if it was just a dream, I drank in the sight of him, hope fluttering in my chest like a baby bird ready to take wing for the first time. I’d missed him so much. He was the only family I had left in this world.
As he drew closer, I studied how much he’d changed. There was a harshness about his face that wasn’t there the last time I’d seen him,more than three years before. Silver threaded through the gilt color of his hair, and deep grooves carved into the corners of his mouth and along his brow. It was as though he’d aged a dozen years in the time since I’d seen him, and I ached at the lost time, the reunion bittersweet.
“Brother,” I managed, my voice faint, before he tugged me forward and into his arms.
He wasn’t a figment of my imaginaton.
