The Assassin and the Healer (Throne of Glass 0.2)(7)

“Believe me, I’ve been through worse.”

“I do,” Yrene said. “Believe you, I mean.” Those scars and her mangled face spoke volumes. And explained the hood. But was it vanity or self-preservation that made her wear it? “What’s your name?”

“It’s none of your concern, and it doesn’t matter.”

Yrene bit her tongue. Of course it was none of her business. The girl hadn’t given a name to Nolan, either. So she was traveling on some secret business, then. “My name is Yrene,” she offered. “Yrene Towers.”

A distant nod. Of course, the girl didn’t care, either.

Then the stranger said, “What’s the daughter of a healer doing in this piece of shit town?”

No kindness, no pity. Just blunt, if not almost bored, curiosity.

“I was on my way to Antica to join their healers’ academy and ran out of money.” She dipped the rag into the water, wrung it out, and resumed cleaning the shallow wound. “I got work here to pay for the passage over the ocean, and … Well, I never left. I guess staying here became … easier. Simpler.”

A snort. “This place? It’s certainly simple, but easy? I think I’d rather starve in the streets of Antica than live here.”

Yrene’s face warmed. “It—I …” She didn’t have an excuse.

The girl’s eyes flashed to hers. They were ringed with gold—stunning. Even with the bruises, the girl was alluring. Like wildfire, or a summer storm swept in off the Gulf of Oro.

“Let me give you a bit of advice,” the girl said bitterly, “from one working girl to another: Life isn’t easy, no matter where you are. You’ll make choices you think are right, and then suffer for them.” Those remarkable eyes flickered. “So if you’re going to be miserable, you might as well go to Antica and be miserable in the shadow of the Torre Cesme.”

Educated and possibly extremely well-traveled, then, if the girl knew the healers’ academy by name—and she pronounced it perfectly.

Yrene shrugged, not daring to voice her dozens of questions. Instead, she said, “I don’t have the money to go now, anyway.”

It came out sharper than she intended—sharper than was smart, considering how lethal this girl was. Yrene didn’t try to guess what manner of working girl she might be—mercenary was about as dark as she’d let herself imagine.

“Then steal the money and go. Your boss deserves to have his purse lightened.”

Yrene pulled back. “I’m no thief.”

A roguish grin. “If you want something, then go take it.”

This girl wasn’t like wildfire—she was wildfire. Deadly and uncontrollable. And slightly out of her wits.

“More than enough people believe that these days,” Yrene ventured to say. Like Adarlan. Like those mercenaries. “I don’t need to be one of them.”

The girl’s grin faded. “So you’d rather rot away here with a clean conscience?”

Yrene didn’t have a reply, so she didn’t say anything as she set down the rag and bowl and pulled out a small tin of salve. She kept it for herself, for the nicks and scrapes she got while working, but this cut was small enough that she could spare a bit. As gently as she could, she smeared it onto the wound. The girl didn’t flinch this time.

After a moment, the girl asked, “When did you lose your mother?”

“Over eight years ago.” Yrene kept her focus on the wound.

“That was a hard time to be a gifted healer on this continent, especially in Fenharrow. The King of Adarlan didn’t leave much of its people—or royal family—alive.”

Yrene looked up. The wildfire in the girl’s eyes had turned into a scorching blue flame. Such rage, she thought with a shiver. Such simmering rage. What had she been through to make her look like that?

She didn’t ask, of course. And she didn’t ask how the young woman knew where she was from. Yrene understood that her golden skin and brown hair were probably enough to mark her as being from Fenharrow, if her slight accent didn’t give her away.

“If you managed to attend the Torre Cesme,” the girl said, her anger shifting as if she had shoved it down deep inside her, “what would you do afterward?”

Yrene picked up one of the fresh bandages and began wrapping it around the girl’s arm. She’d dreamed about it for years, contemplated a thousand different futures while she washed dirty mugs and swept the floors. “I’d come back. Not to here, I mean, but to the continent. Go back to Fenharrow. There are a … a lot of people who need good healers these days.”

She said the last part quietly. For all she knew, the girl might support the King of Adarlan—might report her to the small town guard for just speaking ill of the king. Yrene had seen it happen before, far too many times.

But the girl looked toward the door with its makeshift bolt that Yrene had constructed, at the closet that she called her bedroom, at the threadbare cloak draped over the half-rotted chair against the opposite wall, then finally back at her. It gave Yrene a chance to study her face. Seeing how easily she’d trounced those mercenaries, whoever had harmed her must be fearsome indeed.

“You’d really come back to this continent—to the empire?”

There was such quiet surprise in her voice that Yrene met her eyes.