Chapter 115: Do You Take This Healer as Your Curse? (1)

Kanary didn’t answer right away. She stared out the carriage window with the expression of someone holding two decisions at once and finding neither of them right, while the dirt road outside the city rolled by slowly and trees began to replace the walls and rooftops of Sapphire Port.

The carriage stopped in front of a small, discreet house, nothing about it drawing attention from the road, with a modest garden and windows covered by thick cloth that revealed nothing from the outside.

Kanary stepped down first without saying anything else about Ebony’s proposal, carrying herself like someone who had made a decision but preferred not to announce it yet. The other three followed behind her and headed for the entrance without pressing her, because the tone of the last part of the ride had made it clear that pushing her wouldn’t produce anything useful.

Inside, a woman was waiting for them. Older, with calloused hands from decades of practical magic and the simple clothes of someone who didn’t need to prove anything through what she wore. She was a Healer, and the first thing she did when she saw them enter was assess all four of them with the quick, clinical gaze of someone counting wounds.

“Sit.” It wasn’t a suggestion.

On a bed at the back of the main room lay Veronica. She was still unconscious, her white hair spread across the pillow and her breathing steadier than the last time Ebony had seen her, but the veins in her neck and hands were still marked with that dark color the infection had left behind as a trace of its passage through her body.

Ebony moved to the bed before sitting anywhere, placed her hand on her friend’s arm, and activated her Healer ability with her focus fixed on what she could feel from within. The infection had receded, the purification work in the cave had done more than she expected, but Veronica’s body was exhausted in a way that had no quick solution. She needed time, rest, and someone to keep working on it carefully.

“She’ll live.” The Healer appeared at her side without making a sound. “But not in a day. She needs at least a week of continuous treatment for her lungs to be completely clean.”

“A week.” Ebony repeated the number with the tone of someone processing it in the context of everything else happening at the same time.

“At least.”

Ebony looked at Veronica for another moment, then stepped aside to let the Healer work. She sat in a chair by the table where Lucian and Daniel were already settled, looking like two people who had gone too many hours without sleeping in a real bed and were feeling it in every muscle.

The Healer started treating them one by one with an efficiency that didn’t ask permission or give unnecessary explanations. The acid burns on Lucian’s legs, Daniel’s cuts, the multiple small wounds Ebony had accumulated during the night that her self-healing had patched but not fully resolved.

Kanary watched them for a while, then quietly said she had things to take care of before nightfall, and before anyone could ask what exactly, she was already out the door with the same silent determination she had carried since the carriage.

The three of them watched her leave.

“Are we just letting her go?” Daniel asked.

“We can’t hold her.” Lucian looked at the closed door. “She’s not our prisoner.”

“No, but she’s our responsibility right now.” Ebony rested her elbows on the table. “And she just went off to do exactly what I told her not to do.”

“Can we stop her?”

“No.” A pause. “But we can be ready for when it goes wrong.”

The discussion that followed lasted longer than any of them had the energy for, but they pushed through it anyway, because it wasn’t something they could leave unresolved and sleep on without it weighing on them.

“Taking her with us is a terrible idea.” Lucian started with the blunt honesty he used when he was too tired to circle around things. “She’s the legitimate heir of one of the most important families in Sapphire Port. If she disappears with us, we’re kidnappers on top of everything else.”

“If she stays, she’s dead in a month.” Ebony looked at him. “Her mother already tried to kill her once. She won’t be more careful the second time.”

“We don’t know that for sure.”

“I do.” Ebony tapped her own chest. “That woman has something wrong with her energy. I don’t know exactly what, but it’s nothing good, and someone with parasites or spells like that in their body doesn’t get them by accident. She’s involved in something bigger than just a convenient second marriage.”

Daniel had been listening with his head resting on his hand. “What if we take her and she doesn’t want to come?”

“Then we don’t take her.” Ebony leaned back in her chair. “But at least she makes the decision knowing everything she knows, not halfway.”

Lucian considered that for a moment. “If she comes with us voluntarily and something happens to her on the way, the responsibility is still ours. Politically, we’re already a walking disaster, and adding a missing heir to that doesn’t improve things.”

“We’re already guilty of murdering her according to the Sapphire Port Council.” Ebony spread her hands on the table. “At what exact point does that get worse?”

Lucian didn’t answer immediately, because the logic was annoyingly solid.

“In the end, it’s her decision,” Daniel said. “We tell her everything we know, give her the choice, and whatever she chooses is what we do.”

The other two looked at him.

“Sometimes you say sensible things,” Ebony said.

“Sometimes.” Daniel closed his eyes. “Can I sleep now?”

The night passed with the forced calm of a place that was safe for the moment but had no guarantee of staying that way. The Healer worked on Veronica for hours, and the dark color in her veins slowly receded, unhurried, with the pace of a process that couldn’t be rushed without risk. The three companions slept in short shifts, ate what the Healer left on the table without announcing it, and by dawn they were ready without needing to discuss it.

The wedding day arrived under a clear sky and morning light that had no interest in the drama about to unfold beneath it.

The ceremony was private, with few guests, held in a room of the temporary residence Regulus had occupied since arriving in Sapphire Port. It wasn’t the kind of wedding a family like the Melians would have organized under normal circumstances, without the weight of the city watching, without full protocol, with the discretion of something that needed to happen before anyone had time to object.

Kanary’s mother entered wearing a dark blue dress, not the white that would have suited a first wedding, because this was her second marriage and at least that concession to protocol she had made. Her hair was perfectly arranged, her jewelry precise, her posture that of someone who had spent weeks waiting for exactly this moment and had reached it without anyone stopping her.

Regulus stood beside the priest in clothing that showed he understood the occasion required a certain level of formality and had respected it without excess. He was older than Kanary’s mother, with the presence of someone used to occupying important spaces, and the expression on his face when he saw her enter was that of a man genuinely satisfied with how things had turned out.

“Shame,” Regulus said quietly as she approached, in the tone of someone thinking out loud more than addressing anyone in particular. “I liked the girl.”

The priest heard him. His expression didn’t change, but his eyes shifted a fraction toward Regulus before returning to the center of the room, and that fraction was enough for anyone watching him to know he had registered exactly what was said.

The priest’s speech was brief and formal, structured like someone who knew the ritual and carried it out without unnecessary embellishment. The few guests listened in proper silence, and Kanary’s mother kept her eyes forward with the focus of someone moments away from finishing something that had cost too much to lose focus now.

“If anyone has reason why this union should not—”

The side doors opened.

Kanary walked in dressed in white.

Not the ceremonial bridal white her mother wore in blue, but something more direct, more functional, clothing built to move in if necessary. Her blue hair was loose, and her eyes carried that cold clarity Ebony had first seen in her mother, but in Kanary it felt completely different, not calculated but resolved.

Behind her came several guards in Melian family armor, not the city’s royal guards but their own, those loyal to the bloodline rather than the Council.

“I claim my right of succession.” Kanary’s voice filled the room effortlessly, with the clarity of someone who had practiced the words, not because she needed to remember them but because she wanted them to come out exactly like this. “And my right to be the one who marries Regulus, as originally arranged.”

The silence that followed lasted exactly as long as it took everyone to process what they had just seen and heard.

Kanary’s mother was the first to react. Her expression wasn’t surprise, but something closer to restrained anger at seeing something she considered settled suddenly threatened. “She’s an impostor,” she said with firm authority. “A dangerous impostor come to disrupt a legal act.” She looked to her royal guards. “Arrest her.”

The royal guards drew their weapons. The Melian guards responded instantly, positioning themselves between Kanary and the blades with shields raised and weapons ready. The entire room split into two blocks of metal and tension separated by a few meters of stone floor no one wanted to cross first.

Regulus watched the scene without moving from his place beside the priest, arms at his sides, his expression something Ebony would have recognized as someone seeing something he genuinely didn’t expect and recalculating in real time.

Then the first three hooded figures entered.

Through a side window, silent and fast, dressed in black with faces completely covered, people with no interest in being identified. They moved straight toward Kanary with the precision of those who had come with a specific objective and weren’t here to improvise.

The Melian guards turned to intercept them, and the balance between the two groups shattered instantly, the entire room beginning to move in every direction at once.

Then three more hooded figures entered.

Also in black, also masked, but from the opposite door and with a completely different energy, as if they had reached the same conclusion about the situation from a different starting point and with a purpose that wasn’t necessarily the same.

The guests began moving toward the walls. The priest stepped back without focusing on anything in particular. Regulus still hadn’t moved, but now his expression had shifted from recalculation to something closer to genuine bewilderment, like someone who had spent weeks planning one thing and suddenly found himself in the middle of five completely different ones no one had mentioned.

The main doors burst open.

Ebony walked in.

She wore a new dress, dark blue with light armor integrated into the shoulders and torso with the practicality of someone who had chosen her outfit expecting she might need to fight in it. Her hair was tied up more carefully than usual, a small shield on her left arm, and the expression of someone entering a place knowing exactly what she came to do.

“I’m here for the bride!” she announced with practiced confidence. “I’m her true love!”

The momentum of the line carried her three steps into the room before her eyes fully processed what was in front of her. The two groups of guards facing off. The six hooded figures spread across the room. Kanary in white at the center of it all. Her mother in dark blue at the back. Regulus standing off to the side like he had walked into the wrong wedding.

The confident smile she had brought in from the doorway faded slowly, replaced by the very specific expression of someone who had just realized the situation was far more complicated than the available information had suggested.

“I think I walked into the wrong wedding,” she said with an awkward smile, her voice quieter than before. “Please, continue…”

No one continued anything.

What they did was start fighting.

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