The Healer's Bargain

The gate at Larkspur Asylum had a sound. Ten years of mornings had taught Amara every note of it: the shriek of iron on iron, the heavy clang, the bolt sliding home behind someone else. She had never once heard it open in the other direction.

It opened now, and it was quieter than she'd imagined. Almost polite.

"Chamomile, yarrow, and enough willow bark to see you through a bad week." Sister Agnes pressed a knotted cloth bundle into her hands. It smelled of dried lavender and the cellar where they'd hung it to cure. "You'll need it more than they'll ever deserve."

"I don't want their gratitude." Amara tucked the bundle beside her satchel, the worn leather case that held a decade of her life: mortar and pestle, glass vials, a hand-copied book of remedies whose margins were crowded with her own cramped notes. Comfrey for bone. Arnica for bruising. Nettle for the blood. "I want my mother's ring. The rest I can build."

"They didn't send for you out of love, child."

"No." The warden had told her three days ago, in the tone of a man reading a delivery slip. Your family has petitioned for your release. Not asked. Not apologized. Petitioned, as if she were a debt that had finally come due. "Whatever they want, it's going to cost them."

She stepped through the gate and did not look back, exactly as she'd promised herself every night since she was eleven years old. Seventeen, she corrected. She had been seventeen. Ten years inside had a way of blurring the arithmetic.

The wind carried woodsmoke and wet leaves and the sharp mineral smell of the road. Autumn. She had missed autumn most of all, the sheer unlocked size of it.

The car was waiting on the mud track, black and gleaming and obscene against the sodden hedgerows. Three people stood beside it, and it took Amara a moment to understand why they looked so strange. It was because she had spent a decade picturing them exactly as they'd been at the funeral, and time had gone on without her.

Her father had gone gray. Not distinguished gray but the tired, sunken kind, and he kept his eyes on his shoes as though the mud had something to tell him. Selene had not aged at all, or rather she had aged the way expensive women do, into something smoother and more finished, pearls at her throat and a smile arranged like a place setting. And Della, once a giggling thirteen-year-old with a stolen lipstick, stood a half step behind her mother with her arms wrapped around herself. She was beautiful. She was also, Amara realized with mild surprise, terrified.

"Amara, darling." Selene came forward with her arms open. Amara stepped back, and the arms lowered without a flicker of embarrassment. "Ten years. Look at you."

"I'd rather not." Amara's voice came out level, a little rough from disuse. "You buried my mother in the morning and had me committed by supper. I remember the order of events. It was very efficient."

"You were hysterical, sweetheart. You needed rest."

"I needed my mother." She let that sit until her father flinched. "Why am you here, Selene? You didn't drive two hours over a bad road to reminisce."

For a moment the smile held. Then something underneath it slipped, and what showed was not guilt but need, plain and ugly.

"Della is engaged," Selene said. "A significant match. The Cross family."

Everyone knew the name. It had reached even Larkspur, carried in on the gossip of new patients and the whispering of night nurses. Draven Cross owned half the docks on the eastern seaboard and, if the rumors were right, several of the men who worked them. But what Amara remembered best wasn't the money or the menace. It was the other story, the one that traveled faster: four wives, one after another, and not one of them still standing. Dead, gone, or locked away in a place not unlike the one she had just left.

"And you'd like me," Amara said slowly, "to take her place."

Della made a small, strangled sound.

"The wedding is in six days." Selene's voice had turned brisk, all business. "Della can't go through with it. She was never suited to a house like that. You, on the other hand, survived ten years in a place built to break people. I'd say you're better qualified than any of us."

"Is that meant as a compliment?"

"You're close enough in age. The right coloring. The Crosses have never met either of you. The match was arranged through intermediaries, and no one will question it."

Amara looked at the three of them in the thin gray light. She thought of Larkspur's cold corridors and its cold porridge and the night she had lain awake counting the bars on the window, six of them, until counting was all she was. She thought of her mother's ring, a thin gold band with a chip of garnet that Selene had never once been seen without on her own hand since the funeral.

Then she laughed. It was not a kind sound.

"The family who locked me away for a decade wants a favor. And the favor is marrying a man who's buried or broken four wives already." She shook her head. "You're not asking. You're shopping."

"We'll make it worth your while."

"Yes. You will." Amara raised one finger. "First, my mother's inheritance. Every account, every deed, every piece of jewelry you took the week I was committed. In writing, through a solicitor I choose. That includes the ring on your left hand."

Selene's fingers closed reflexively over the garnet.

"Second." A second finger. "When the wedding is done, I am no longer your daughter, your stepdaughter, or your obligation. You will not write to me. You will not call. If any of you appears at my door, I'll assume you've come to have me committed again, and I'll respond accordingly."

The silence stretched long enough that she thought Selene might refuse. She almost wanted her to.

"Done," Selene said, and the speed of it told Amara everything. They weren't bargaining. They were drowning.

Her father opened his mouth, closed it, and looked at his shoes again. Amara felt nothing where grief should have been, only a smooth, cool absence, like a room that had been emptied and locked.

She climbed into the back of the car. As Della leaned in to close the door, her stepsister's hand caught the frame and held on, and for one second her carefully powdered face was close enough that Amara could see the tremor in her lip.

"Nobody gets out of that house clean," Della whispered. "Nobody."

Then the door shut, the engine turned over, and Larkspur shrank in the rear window until it was only a gray smudge against the trees.

Amara faced forward. Selene had already made it clear that the car would take her as far as the Cross gates and not one inch farther. Her family had no intention of watching what they'd sold.

Whatever was waiting for her at the Cross estate, she had survived worse than a rumor.

She was almost sure of it.