The Alchemist's Debt

They called her the Grey Lady, though grey was the least of what her trade had cost her. Lysandra sold miracles by the vial, and every miracle was paid for in the only currency her art recognised: years pared from the seller's own life. A fever quenched here, a barren womb quickened there — each cure drew its warmth from the guttering candle of her lifespan. She was nine-and-thirty by the parish register and eighty by the mirror, which was why she kept no mirrors. Vanity, like credit, was a luxury she could no longer afford. So when the King's outriders came hammering through the sleet with a summons sealed in black wax, she was not afraid, only tired, and a little curious. The realm's physicians had bled and blistered and prayed over their sovereign, and still the grey wasting ate him from the inside like rust through a blade. Cure the King, the summons said, and name your price; fail him, and answer to the headsman. It was the sort of bargain that only ever runs one way, and Lysandra had learned long ago to read the small print in such offers. She packed her satchel by candlelight: the crucible, the salts, the little brass scales that weighed things no merchant would recognise. And, from the bottom of a locked drawer, a ledger — cracked, water-stained, kept in a hand that had once been young. Every debt she had ever paid was written there; and, on the last page, in ink gone brown as dried blood, a single debt still owed to her. Twenty-two years it had waited, patient as a spider, gathering its interest in the dark. She did not go to the palace to heal the King, whatever the physicians assumed. She went to settle an account, and she meant to be paid in full. The carriage climbed toward the citadel through streets that flinched from her shadow, and she watched the torchlit windows slide past like so many small, doomed suns. At the great doors they took her cloak, her name, and — had they only known to ask — her mercy. They led her up the winding stair to the sickroom, drew back the curtain, and let the candlelight fall upon the dying King's face. Lysandra went very still, for she knew that face; she had bought it once, whole and screaming and new, with ten years of her own life.