#picture feira as like. mid-fifties lady; round glasses; fully gray ponytail

[thewhumperinwhite]

WKW: The Healer's Shame

Story Masterpost Here // Continued directly from here

@whump-cravings @whumpitywhumpwhump @just-a-whumping-racoon-with-wifi also please dm me if you wanna be on the taglist, since i take so long between updates idk who's still active

TW for: broken bones (incl. ribs and spine) (and its gross); punctured lung and difficulty breathing; guilt and self-hatred; past parental abuse; implied/mentioned alcoholism; pretty sure Thorne is having a full panic attack at the end there also.

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Feira has been the Healer at Colomur Castle for nearly 30 winters now, not including the two years she spent under the apprenticeship of her predecessor, back when she had lived through barely twenty winters and still considered the position one of great honor. She was here when Audoine became the Lion, after his third or fourth great victory on the battlefield; she mixed the ointment the old man rubbed into his battle-scars until the very week of his death. She put the old man’s shoulder back in its place when the third boar he insisted on tilting with nearly tore it from its socket; she kept the old man’s limp at bay for nearly ten years before she finally told him to swallow his pride and walk with a cane. And, of course, she delivered the old man’s children, both; placed two healthy babes into the Queen’s arms and sent a servant each time to congratulate the King on the birth of a son.

And when they brought one of those sons to her, brave and beautiful and barely fifteen, after his father had rent the flesh of his back to the bone, after the Lady had tangled her aura up with his and moved his body and spoken with his mouth, after he was no longer dead but lay on her table as still as a corpse and nearly as cold from all the blood he had spilled on the dirt of the castle courtyard, Feira—stayed. She did not hand in her Patronage and look for other work. She let the guards bring in the body of the babe she had delivered, and she bound it back together with cloth and tree sap and the scant bit of magic her predecessor’s Patron allowed her. In the same mortar where she mixed soothing ointments for an old warlord’s aches and pains, she mixed new ones that might allow his son to lift his arms without tearing his slowly-scarring back wide open again, someday. And when he could walk again, she let him—let him walk back into the halls of the man who had killed him; let him eat across the table from his murderer; let him kneel at his killer’s feet and swear fealty again as the Lady’s bearer.

There was a time—this was after Audoine broke the prince’s wrist when he was ten but before he knocked out half the prince’s hearing with a thrown stone paperweight—when Feira successfully convinced herself that she was—mitigating harm. That there might still be kindness in remaining; that she might hold the princes together better than whoever they would get to replace her if she left. She may even—this is embarrassing to think of, now—have believed for a few years that perhaps if she healed a cracked rib or a bruised collarbone well enough, the Lion of Colomur might not break it a second time.

Feira is too old to believe any of that now, of course. She knows herself too well. She knows that she possesses just the wrong amount of kindness, and of bravery, and of honor. Too much to ignore the princes’ bruises; too little to stand before the King and demand that he no longer beat his sons; too little to storm out of her cushy little salon and declare that if all the rest of the staff wish to turn a blind eye they may find another Healer. Just enough to sit here, to watch the Summer Prince grow, survive his father, stand straighter and prouder and braver every summer, and end all her days in town drinking enough bad whiskey to fall asleep without worrying about what the Lion will do when he realizes that his son is outshining him.

As Fourshield House is falling, Feira holes herself up in her salon, glad she keeps an extra whiskey bottle under her desk. Perhaps, she thinks, the Lion will be victorious; certainly no one has succeeded in killing him thus far, and many better men have tried. If the White Crane triumphs, she thinks, he may well wish to employ a Healer. The devil Feira knows is bad enough; there is only so much worse the devil she has not yet met can be.

When they bring Prince Andry back to her, his lungs are filling up with blood, and he is dying.

----

When Thorne stumbles through the door of the Healer’s room, for the second time in as many days, the old woman is sitting at her desk, and snaps her head up to glare at him, looking tired and immediately disgusted.

Then she sees the stretcher he and Heron are carrying, and she leaps to her feet.

“What have you done?” she wails, in her own language; in Andry’s. She is not angry, this time. Her immediate, horrified grief is even worse.

“Well go on, put him down already,” Crow snaps from behind him, unnecessarily. Thorne is shuffling the stretcher through the doorway as fast as he can, nearly dragging Heron, who is watching the tortured arch of Andry’s back with too much interest to carry his weight. Crow steps into the Healer’s room after them and closes the door, primly.

Andry is still breathing. The sound is worse, now; there is a bubble at the end of every breath that is making Thorne taste vomit in the back of his throat. But Andry isn’t dead.

(“Thank you,” was what Andry said to him. After Thorne had left him alone with three guards, because he was too much of a child to think that might be a bad idea; but before he immediately left him alone again. Thorne—thought he had locked the door to his rooms, before he left Andry asleep in there. Like he was learning to think, and not to be so bloody stupid all the time. “Thank you,” Andry said, before Thorne left him alone again.)

(But he isn’t dead. He isn’t dead.)

“You’re a Magician, too, aren’t you?” Crow says to the Healer, as calm and arch as ever, as if he wasn’t speaking over the sound of Andry dragging air through his bruised and swollen throat and into his flooding and bubbly lungs. “Orders from the White Crane are to save him, if you can.”

They have set the stretcher on the Healer’s table. The Healer has been looking at Andry, her face white behind her thick spectacles; she snaps around to look at Crow, now, and for a second there is hatred in her face like Thorne has never seen; not on Raven, or the Lion, or on all the children who threw stones at him when he was small; like if she could tear Crow’s heart out with her hands she would do it. Then she sets her face—Thorne thinks she might literally bite her tongue, hard—and turns back to the table where Andry is dying.

“His back is broken,” Heron tells her cheerfully, “look here.” And he puts his hand on Andry’s hip, and pushes down. Andry’s hip rolls easily, with no resistance at all; something grinds audibly with a stomach-churning crunch.

The Healer drops the bandages she has been reaching for and slaps Heron so hard that he stumbles backward, his mask sliding back over his hair to reveal his wrinkled, plain, utterly gobsmacked face.

Crow laughs once, too loud. There is a long moment of silence; Thorne’s heart has dropped into his stomach, and Heron and the Healer are staring at each other in what seems to be mutual surprise and alarm.

Andry’s next breath turns into a violent gagging cough at the end, and that snaps the Healer out of it.

“Get them the fuck out of here, Dog,” she snarls at Thorne, in Craetan. Thorne’s heart stutters in his chest; the idea of even trying to tell Crow and Heron to do anything—

The Healer bends over Andry to put her ear against his breathbone; he makes a horrible sound, an awful choking wail.

Thorne has grabbed the back of Heron’s cloak before he even realizes he is moving. “We’ve got to go,” he says, and Heron is still startled enough to let himself be bundled out of the room. Crow follows, and he is laughing again.

When they are in the hallway, and the door has closed on the sound of Andry’s terrible gasping breaths, Thorne feels for a moment as though the floor is slipping away from under his feet, his knees weak with relief and horror. Crow and Heron are both looking at him curiously, and that is enough of an emergency for Thorne to blink his vision halfway clear again. He tells them a lie he won’t remember later, about where they are needed now instead of here. Heron’s face is unreadable behind his readjusted mask; Crow’s is visible and full of doubt, but they do leave him. Thank all gods.

When he has sunk to the floor beside the door to the Healer’s room, and is sitting there in silence with his hands over his face, the hallway is silent enough that Thorne can just barely hear the sounds from inside—Andry’s harsh breathing, sometimes punctuated by a thin whine or a sobbing cry or, once, a throat-scraping shriek that makes Thorne tremble down to his toes; and, under that, the Healer’s voice, repeating something over and over. It’s too low for Thorne to be sure, but he thinks it might be: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”