The mother of healers

THE HEALER ON HIGH

Half a continent's most gifted healers answer to one ancient woman.

Hafiza sits at the top of the Torre Cesme, the tower-academy in Antica where the Southern Continent trains its healers — a place that stands for knowledge and hope, and the highest authority among the Silba-blessed. She is ancient, dark-skinned, white-haired, deeply wrinkled, and carries herself like a gentle grandmother with something strict and watchful underneath. Her gift, like every true Torre healer's, comes from the goddess Silba and carries the rare power to unravel and destroy Valg darkness. She does not frustrate easily. She reads a patient and a threat with the same precise, unhurried discernment — the woman who decides who is ready, and for what.

THE MOTHER YRENE FOUND

She took in a broken girl and made her the most important healer in Erilea.

Hafiza's real story is Yrene Towers. When Yrene arrived at the tower around nineteen — strong, gifted, and quietly breaking under grief for the mother Adarlan's soldiers had killed — Hafiza held her while she wept and took her under her wing. She raised her, trained her, named her Heir Apparent, and became as close to a mother as Yrene had found since she was eleven. It matters enormously later: Yrene's gift is one of the few things in the world that can burn a Valg demon out of a living body, and she becomes the hand that ends Erawan. All of it grows out of an old woman deciding a weeping stranger was worth keeping.

HEAL WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Her final test is a man Yrene has every reason to hate.

Before Yrene can leave to fight in the north, Hafiza hands her one last task: heal the khagan's special guest — Lord Chaol Westfall, the new Hand of the King of Adarlan, and once Captain of the Guard of the empire that took her family. Hafiza knows exactly what she is doing. A healer heals without prejudice, and she means to make Yrene mend her own oldest wound by mending a man she would rather not touch. When Yrene comes back rude and shaken, having felt the rotted Valg-dark tangled in his spine, Hafiza does not reassign him. She tells her to do better, and lets the hard lesson do the work.

WHAT WAS UNDER THE TOWER

The order of healers was always, secretly, a weapon against the Valg.

After Valg agents ransack Yrene's room to destroy her research, Hafiza pales — and then tells the deep secret: the healers were established in the earliest days precisely to fight the Valg, and Silba's gift can destroy them. She unlocks an iron cabinet of forbidden Wyrdmark texts her own predecessor warned 'weren't for human eyes.' It nearly ends her. The possessed princess Duva abducts and binds her in the catacombs beneath the library for a sacrifice — and it is the frail, fragile Hafiza toppling her own seat into the demon that helps Yrene break its hold. Then she coordinates the human chain of healers that saves Chaol and binds his life to Yrene's forever.