Corren wore Kael Richards's own tired, familiar face for the crossing through the city gates, some deliberate instinct choosing his true original name over any invented alias, a small private rebellion against three months of Order aliases that had never once felt entirely his own.
"You're certain about this plan," Voss said, low, as they moved through streets thick with midday traffic. "Healing beggars publicly, in view of enough witnesses to guarantee arrest. There are considerably less theatrical ways to arrange an audience with a King."
"Less theatrical, and slower," Corren said. "I don't have slower to spend. Every day we're out here as fugitives is a day Maravent's soldiers might find the lakehouse before we've finished securing a pardon for the people inside it."
They found the gathering beneath the western bridge exactly where rumor promised the city's poorest and most desperate collected, a scatter of blind men and amputees and the simply hungry huddled against the bridge's cold stone supports, and Corren crossed to them without ceremony, kneeling first beside an old blind man whose clouded eyes reminded him, with an ache he didn't examine too closely, of Nyla's own before Voss had ever agreed to teach him the true binding chant.
The healing chant took, warm gold light spilling from his palms into eyes that hadn't held color in a decade, and the old man's wordless, disbelieving sob drew every other face beneath that bridge toward Corren within seconds, hope arriving faster than caution ever could in people who had nothing left to lose by hoping openly. He worked through the gathered crowd for the better part of an hour, mending a crushed hand, restoring a withered leg, closing a wound gone septic past any ordinary healer's ability to touch, the drain of each successive working sinking deeper into his chest than the last, an honest toll paid in full view of witnesses who would, within days, ensure every soldier in the city heard rumor of a miracle healer working beneath the western bridge.
The soldiers arrived on the third day, exactly as intended, and Corren offered no resistance at all as they bound his wrists in iron and marched him through streets that had, by then, already started shouting his invented name in his defense, a strange, uncomfortable echo of a crowd chanting a different name months earlier in a very different arena.
The palace swallowed him whole, marble and gold and mirrors throwing back a thousand small reflections of a man wearing a face he'd worn thirty-one years in a life that had ended, and King Ignacius received him from a throne of gilded wood with Queen Solara seated beside him, her expression carrying a cold, appraising boredom that softened not one degree at the spectacle of a captive being dragged before her.
"State your name, criminal," the King said, his voice carrying more genuine curiosity than the harshness of the demand strictly required.
"Kael," Corren said, and felt the old name settle over him with a strange, hollow ease, less like a lie than like slipping back into a coat he'd nearly forgotten still fit.
An amputee was brought forward, a soldier missing his right leg below the knee, and the King's challenge arrived with a note of genuine skepticism underneath its formality, prove yourself capable or face whatever consequence a criminal's failed miracle warranted. Kael knelt beside the man without hesitation, murmured the corrected triple-chant combination he'd built over months of practice, and watched the room's collective gasp answer the sight of new flesh knitting itself into place, bone and muscle regrowing in a slow, visible crawl that left the soldier weeping and testing his own weight on a leg that had been gone for years.
King Ignacius's stern composure broke entirely at that, joy and relief flooding a face built, Kael suspected, for considerably more warmth than the throne usually allowed it to show. "Please," the King said, voice thick with an emotion he made no effort to disguise in front of his own court, "I implore you. My son's arm. Taken from him in a duel he still hasn't forgiven himself for losing. Heal him, and name whatever price you wish for it."
Queen Solara's voice cut across the moment with a sneer that carried real, practiced cruelty in it. "Begging a commoner, husband? How unbecoming."
"Take me to him," Kael said, before the King could answer the jab himself, some old instinct refusing to let the moment's genuine hope curdle into a marital argument he had no stake in.
Prince Aldous lay in a room too dark for the hour, curtains drawn against a light he'd apparently decided he no longer deserved to enjoy, and the bitterness in his voice when the King announced Kael's purpose carried none of the theatrical self-pity Kael had half expected from a pampered royal son.
"Another healer come to profit off my misfortune," Aldous said, not looking away from the ceiling he'd clearly spent considerable time studying in silence. "I've had three already, all of them liars, all of them charging my father a fortune for false promises. Forgive me if I've stopped expecting a fourth to be any different."
"I haven't asked your father for a single coin," Kael said, crossing the room without waiting for permission, "and I don't intend to start now. I'd like to look at the arm regardless of whether you believe I can do anything with it. You're allowed to keep doubting me the whole time I try."
Something in that particular indifference seemed to catch Aldous off guard more than open sympathy would have. He turned his head, finally, studying Kael with a wariness that had clearly cost every previous healer's false promise to build. "It was arrogance," he said, quieter now. "The duel. I thought I couldn't lose, and I lost the one thing I actually needed to keep. My father says it's the gods punishing my pride. I've mostly stopped arguing with him about it, because arguing requires believing I deserve better than I got, and some days I genuinely don't."