He reached out then, his hand hovering over my injured ribs, and I felt warmth spread through me—not the heat of his touch, but something deeper. Healing. It was like sunlight pouring into my bones, chasing out the cold ache that had taken up residence there. I felt the cracked rib knit itself together, felt the swollen tissue ease, felt the bruises fade from purple-black to yellow to nothing. The pain receded like a tide pulling back from shore, leaving only the memory of where it had been.
But his hand did not stop there.
Slowly, almost hesitantly, it moved downward—over my stomach, my hip, coming to rest just above my leg. The leg that had never quite bent right since I was ten. The leg I had learned to favour, to hide, to pretend didn't ache with every step I took up this mountain.
Something in his expression shifted. The banked fury flickered, but beneath it, something else emerged—a sorrow so deep it looked ancient, worn smooth as river stones by millennia of existence. His jaw worked silently, and when he finally spoke, his voice was rough.
"This," he said, his palm pressing gently against my crooked leg. "This is old. Very old."
I couldn't meet his eyes. "It was a long time ago."
"How?"
The word was a command, not a question. I had never heard him speak to me like that before—like the king he was, expecting answers.
I told him. The words came out halting, broken, as fragmented as the bone had been. I told him about the day I was ten, about the frenzy in my mother's eyes, about the crack that had echoed through the hovel and the agony that followed. I told him about the two months of lying on that dirt floor, fevered and delirious, while my leg healed crooked because no healer came. I told him about learning to walk again, about the limp that never quite faded, about the way the village children mocked my gait and the adults looked away.
When I finished, the silence was absolute.
He did not speak. But his hand on my leg grew warmer, and I felt that same sunlight-pour of healing, but deeper now—reaching into places that had been wrong for so long I had forgotten what right felt like. Bone shifted, realigned, remembered what it was meant to be. Tendons stretched and settled. The constant, low-grade ache that had been my companion since childhood—the one I had stopped noticing because it was always there—simply... ceased.
I gasped. The sensation was so foreign, so unexpected, that tears sprang to my eyes unbidden.