The Shattered King

A brother marches to war; a healer is summoned to court

Nym Tallowax watches her brother Brien—closest to her in age, half the family's income—disappear down the road toward the war camps, conscripted to fight Sesta's border skirmishes.

A brother marches to war; a healer is summoned to court

Nym Tallowax watches her brother Brien—closest to her in age, half the family's income—disappear down the road toward the war camps, conscripted to fight Sesta's border skirmishes. She holds herself together for six younger siblings who barely understand what war means. That same afternoon, the letter carrier hands her a second summons: her own. Not for the army, but for the royal healing program. Queen Winvrin demands every craftlock healer in Cansere attempt to cure her perpetually ailing son, Prince Renn, sick since infancy. Nym crumples the letter and nearly burns it. Dan, her fifteen-year-old brother, talks her down—refusing will bring punishment on them all. She tells Lissel, her seventeen-year-old sister now running the household, she'll be gone a month at most. She plans to fail the test deliberately and walk straight home.

One pity-repair accomplishes more than twenty years of healers

After ten days of travel by foot, wagon, and ship, Nym enters Rove Castle and is led to Prince Renn's chambers. He lies draped on a sofa, coughing blood into a handkerchief, his legs visibly malformed beneath a blanket. When Nym touches his jaw and enters his lumis—the magical inner space representing a person's health—she finds devastation beyond anything she's encountered. It looks as if a master-crafted chandelier crashed from its chain, millions of glass shards strewn across the floor. She tells the queen honestly that she cannot heal him. But moved by pity, she mends one tiny bauble using a technique from childhood. The prince gasps—he can feel his toe. The queen's eyes fill with tears, then harden to ice. Nym is forbidden to leave. She is now the prince's exclusive healer.

No wages, no bath, no letters—only a broken prince to mend Nym's room is a stone closet barely wider than its bed. She receives no pay, no clothing, no writing materials—cannot even send word to Lissel that she's been detained. Dawn to dusk, she sorts through the infinite debris of Renn's lumis while the queen monitors every minute like a hawk circling prey. When Nym dares to ask for basic hygiene, Queen Winvrin sends her to the dungeon. The next morning, stable hands scrub her down with horse soap and cold water. Her sole ally is Lonnie, a kitchen maid whose damaged eye Nym heals in seconds. Lonnie sneaks her into communal baths, shares pilfered pastries, and eventually posts a clandestine letter to Fount. In this…