The Healers' Purpose: A Slice of Life Fantasy Novel, page 16
Near the end of his shift, he reported to Dr. Rushu’s office to find his mentor writing at her desk. He allowed himself a rush of relief when she motioned to the chair in front of her desk. As she finished her page, he kept himself upright. Not thinking was no longer a problem.
“So,” Dr. Rushu said, blotting the page. “I’m finishing up my recommendation that the senior apprentices be allowed a wider range of duties. Given the circumstances.”
No sound came out of his mouth at first. “I... see,” he managed at last. “What sorts of duties?”
“That remains to be seen, and I suspect it will vary from ward to ward. Writing charts, prescribing medicines. Patient interviews, in most of the wards. Things you’ve seen us do a thousand times, and that you’ll be doing on your own soon enough. We’ll need to spread the workload around if we mean to cover everything properly, now.”
Because of the priests. Keifon exhaled slowly. Having more hands to help with those duties would make it easier on everyone. Still... the line between apprentice and professional existed for a reason. The hospital couldn’t put people’s lives in his hands. He didn’t deserve it.
He shook his head, clearing these thoughts. “I trust your judgment, ma’am.”
The doctor smiled wryly. “The question is when you’ll trust your own. Anyone can read it on your face, clear as day.”
Sloppy. Keifon rubbed his face; his hands felt boneless. “I’m sorry, ma’am. Preoccupied, I suppose.”
“Ah, yes.” Her voice softened. “Go on home, then. Give Agna my best.”
He said thank you and goodbye, and left the office. As the pages called the shift change, Keifon hurried to the break room by the cafeteria, where he’d left his street clothes in his cubby, and changed in the little curtained cubicle.
As he approached home, Keth waved through the shop windows in the gallery. Keifon waved back and let himself in. No harm in stopping for a chat.
“Evening, Kei. Here’s the morning mail. And I had something for you.” She reached under the counter to pull out a picnic basket.
Keifon lifted the hinged lid. Skeins of yarn stuffed the basket in a riot of colors. The spine of a book emerged along one edge, alongside a set of knitting needles. “Oh, Keth, it’s so much. Are you sure?”
“I have a wardrobe full of supplies at home. And a dozen books. Please, take it.” She picked up her own needles, strung with the turquoise scarf. “Stop by and show me what you make.”
“I will.” He balanced the heavy basket against his hip, with the mail stacked on top. “Thank you so much.”
“No need. It’s nice to have somebody to talk to about it.”
Keifon remembered practicing the nanbur with the farmhand who had taught him, sitting side by side on a dry-stacked wall. He hadn’t met another nanbur player in years.
“Oh, and I wanted to ask you,” she said. “Is Agna home today? I heard someone walking around upstairs, but she hasn’t stopped by.”
“Ah.” Wary of what Agna would want to share, he considered what to say. “She’s been working a lot lately, and took a day to rest.”
“That’s good,” Keth said. “She has been working way too much. Well, give her my best. I’m about to close up for the day.”
He thanked her again for the knitting supplies, and left by the back door to return home. A constructive distraction was welcome tonight. He wondered if he could knit and study at the same time, once he learned. Keth seemed able to carry on a conversation while she worked.
Considering what he might be able to make eventually, he climbed the stairs to the apartment. The warmth of the kitchen enfolded him like stepping into a hot bath, despite the open windows. The top of the stove was clear except for a kettle, but the counter was crowded with towel-draped plates and bowls. He smelled garlic and freshly baked bread.
“Kei?” Agna’s voice came from close by, and she emerged from the living room as Keifon set the mail and the basket on the kitchen table. “Welcome home. What do you have there?”
“Knitting supplies from Keth. I asked her about it a little while ago, and she gave me a bunch of yarn and instruction books and such. I’ll have to write her a thank-you note.”
“How nice. Yeah, she’d do that.” Agna reached for the mail. “How was your day?”
Drawn by curiosity, he crossed to the counter. “Fine. Dr. Rushu says she’s going to recommend that the older apprentices take on more responsibilities.” A peek under one of the towels revealed a stack of Nessinian flatbread. Agna had made it once or twice before.
“I’m sure that will help,” Agna remarked. When he turned around, she was chewing her lip, rereading the envelopes.
“How about you?”
“Oh. Did some cleaning. Unpacked some things from home. Made dinner.” She nodded toward the counter. “Hope you don’t mind. Just had a craving for Nessinian food.”
“Sounds lovely.” Crossing his arms, he studied her face. “Did you rest at all?”
“Well, I wasn’t at work,” she retorted. “And I read a while. Half the afternoon.” She lifted one of the letters and took a step toward the living room. “This is from Tima. I really should read it.”
He flipped his hands. Go.
As she hurried off, he returned to the routine, putting water on for tea and feeding the cats. By the time the water boiled, Lulu and Shadow had moved on to chasing one another down the hall. Keifon poured a cup and poked through the basket of yarn as the leaves steeped. Finally he shut the basket’s lid and carried it and the mug into the next room. Agna sat at her writing table, drawing the blade of her quill meditatively across her lips.
“Everything all right?”
“Yeah.” She didn’t elaborate, except to write a couple of words.
He wouldn’t interrupt, then. Setting the basket on the floor by the couch, he pulled out the knitting instruction book and flipped through it as his mug steeped on the end table. Amid the unfamiliar terms, the headings stood out. He’d forgotten about sweaters. Something to work his way toward, with practice.
As he reached for his tea, he noticed a couple of books stacked next to it. On top was the Kaveran translation of the Book of Lundra he’d bought a while ago. He’d been meaning to read it after he reread his original. “Have you... been reading this?”
When Agna looked up, he gestured to the book. She flushed a little. “Oh. Uh... yeah. This afternoon. Do you mind?”
“Of course I don’t mind.” A thousand questions crowded his head. “Sorry, I’ll let you get back to your mail.”
“It’s all right. I don’t know what to say anyway.” She set her quill down and pushed back from the table. “Not to Tima, that’s easy. She says I should come in when I’m ready, so on and so forth. But I got a letter from my sister, too.”
“Oh? I hope she’s well.”
Agna grimaced a little. “Not... well, she’s all right. Everyone’s all right. So far. But things are getting... complicated back home. The king still hasn’t named an heir, and people are starting to wonder if he’s even alive. Factions are starting to form. Mostly in the capital, but Lina says there have been clashes in Murio.”
“Dear gods. I’m sorry.” He swallowed dryly. “Is there anything we can do? Could they come here?”
“I don’t know. I’ll look into it.” She got up to pace across the writing nook. “I’ll write to the Nessinian embassy in Vertal and ask. See if I can vouch for them, or — I don’t know. I’ll see what they recommend.”
He remembered that it might be all right now to offer her some comfort. And so, standing, he met her in her path and offered a hug. She accepted, sighing heavily against his chest.
“I’ll pray for them,” he said.
Her arms tightened around him. “Thank you, Kei.” As she pulled back, she tucked her hair behind her ear. “Speaking of which.” She waved toward the book by the couch. “I was reading something else at first, a play I’d read a hundred times before. But I wanted something new. Some different... angle, some new ideas. I hope it isn’t disrespectful to read it that way. Even though I don’t believe in your gods. Just to get a new perspective.”
“I don’t think it’s disrespectful.” He might not have thought so when they’d met. Of course, they wouldn’t have had this conversation at all. Remembering his tea, he took his seat again and sipped before it steeped too long. “What do you think, so far?”
Agna screwed up her face, thinking. “It’s a lot to think about,” she said. “Even though it’s mostly poetry at the beginning. Prayers, I guess, and songs. But even that expresses their philosophies.” She held onto her elbows, her balance off-center, hip shifted to one side. “They say you need to be honest with yourself before you can be honest with others. Which... is the hard part for me, I think.”
“It is hard,” he said. “But it’s important. To build from there.”
“Build,” she repeated softly. One hand rested on her breastbone. “I feel like I want to tell Lina about us. To ask her to tell Marco about us, too. Since I can’t write him about it directly. But I don’t know what to say.”
“It doesn’t fit your words,” he said. Did that sound bitter? She’d said she was willing to figure it out, to venture beyond the definitions she knew.
“I guess. Not that we’re likely to have a conversation about the meanings of amane and alaste.” A pensive look crossed her face. “I’ll write her back after dinner. She won’t expect me to have exactly the right words. The situation in Nessiny is more important, anyway. This is just... bouncing around my head, that I should say something.”
“I’m sure she’ll understand,” he said, and blew over the surface of his tea.
“Yeah.” Her fingers worried the rings under the fabric of her dress. “I’m sure I’m just thinking about this because it’s less scary than what’s happening there.” She laughed, short and dry. “How’s that for being honest with yourself?”
“Well,” he said. “You can worry about both. I know you can worry about everything in the world at once.”
Agna replied with a sound that was part groan, part laugh. “True.”
As Keifon sipped his tea, he watched her lift the fine chain from around her neck. The rings twisted slowly at the end of the chain as she studied them. And then she set the necklace down on the table with a tiny tink, letting the chain pool over the rings.
The tea didn’t help the sudden dryness in his throat. If he were to ask what she meant by the gesture, he knew she wouldn’t have an answer to give him.
“It wasn’t helping,” she said at last, choosing her words slowly. “I don’t like what I did, and I don’t like that I was presented with the choice in the first place. But...” She shrugged. “I’ll see how this feels. Letting the mistake stand, and moving on.”
Perhaps it was too much to say I’m proud of you. So he only got up again and gestured another offer, and she took it with a mock-sigh and an eyeroll.
“Making up for lost time, are we?” she muttered against his shoulder.
“Of course.”
Agna: Matter and Energy
Sometimes the only choice was to work with what you had. Agna reminded herself of this as she slipped into the laboratory. For now she was relegated to desk work, so she would make the best of it. So far none of the other healers had fallen... ill, but it didn’t feel right to call a meeting and bring attention to her condition. She could work in the lab and fill the rest of her time with paperwork, avoiding too much contact with the others. Just in case.
She had hoped to use the microscopes she’d brought back from Nessiny to find some new discovery. In the last few days, she had amassed page after page of sketches, globs and bubbles and strange corkscrewing forms. As she entered, her unintended research partner looked up from the table in the center of the room, surrounded by her drawings and a selection of pamphlets and books from Nessiny. Gaspare was sidelined, too, recovering from whatever had landed him in Infectious Disease. Peering through the microscopes gave him unbearable headaches, though, so he combed through the reference material for commonalities between their samples and what others had found. All the squiggles in the world wouldn’t help if they couldn’t make sense of them.
Agna set down her bag. “How’s it going?”
“I think I’ve found matches for all of your last set of drawings. Alme stopped by before their shift to do some, too.”
She climbed onto a stool to study the other healer’s work. Alme had labeled all of their drawings exactly as Agna had, and their linework was precise and sure. It would help immensely to have another capable artist working on this little side project.
Leaving Alme’s sketches aside, Agna crossed the laboratory. Though any of the hospital staff could have used it, and occasionally some did, the healers were still its most frequent visitors. Between their regular shifts, Fulvia and Rubina brought back study samples from around town: food from markets, water from wells and streams. A few of the healers had drawn blood samples from themselves or each other to examine under the microscopes.
Meanwhile, Ettore and Alme had set up an array of experimental flasks, each labeled with dates and sources, on a set of shelves above one lab bench. Some caught the light coming through the high basement window; some were shielded in wood boxes, some in metal. Some simmered over alcohol lamps. These, at least, were common sights in a laboratory; normally one would perform a test on such a sample, dropping in a material known to change color in the presence of a certain kind of energy. Here, though, they were part of a larger set of experiments.
On a slate near the flasks, two columns of notes had been chalked up: Energy: Driven out by Fire/Heat, Add Air — Returns. Air + Fire opposed? The other column read, Animalcules: Killed by fire/heat, alcohol, bleach. Revived by air. Under that side, someone else had drawn a sad face and written don’t breathe, air is full of monsters.
The most popular theories in Nessiny were echoed by Alme’s and Ettore’s notes. Either the blobs and squiggles in the microscopic view were energy particles, made visible by this new apparatus; or they were some living creature heretofore invisible to the human eye.
Agna sighed, looking down at the strange metallic lines of their new playthings. Maybe she was drawing imperfections in the glass, as a third faction in Nessiny surmised. It seemed unlikely, since that theory didn’t explain the moving shapes or the differences between samples, but the self-defeating nature of the idea crept into her head.
Gaspare’s health had improved by leaps and bounds since he’d returned, and soon she’d have to do the cross-referencing herself. Well, until then, she’d keep drawing. Agna laid out a series of slides on the work surface, readied a notebook and pen, and selected a pipette from a drying rack. Maybe Ettore and Alme’s myriad of experimental samples would have something to say.
She tried not to think too hard as she drew what she saw. That was the challenge: including just enough detail, without interpretation or embellishment. She didn’t know what she was seeing, and had to capture it all the same.
“I’ve been thinking,” Gaspare said from the table.
“Hmm?” Agna didn’t look up from the microscope, shifting the slide minutely to see more of the field.
“I’ve read about the changes Yanwei has been making to its laws, to allow for more trade. And the Benevolent Union has had bases there for years, if I’m not mistaken.”
Not at all what Agna had expected. She straightened in her seat and turned. “Go on?”
“Do you think they might be amenable to sending us some help? Doctors, at least. I suppose they don’t have healers.”
“No, I suppose they don’t. Only priests.” And the priests stood against them. Still... a doctor from Ceien would get here months before a healer from Murio. She chewed her lip. “I’ll bring it up with Tima and Shora. The skill set wouldn’t be the same, but it would help to ease the load.”
Gaspare nodded. “Their main priority is the hospital and its patients. Well. Tima’s is.”
It was hard not to smirk. “Shora wants to take over the world, of course.”
“At least.” His voice lightened as he joined the joke.
“Hm. Thanks for the suggestion, Gaspare.” She turned back to the samples and drawings, dipping her pen. Gaspare had a solid point, and he seemed to have a clear idea of how Shora and Tima would react. The old fear-excuse swam back up in her mind: They should have made him team leader.
She dotted the paper to lay down stippling. Gaspare didn’t seem to have any intention of taking over. Neither did Giada; she was equally capable, and a year older. The team would benefit from having a number of skilled senior members. Assuming, of course, that both of them intended to stay around.
She dipped her pen again and drew the boundary of the view, enclosing it in a circle. It was rude to ask. Unprofessional. Though it would help to know her team’s long-term plans, wouldn’t it?
Agna labeled the drawing, then set down her pen. “If you don’t mind me asking…” She cleared her throat. “I wondered if you’d decided to stay in town beyond this year.”
Gaspare laid a sheet of notes in a book to mark his place and closed it. He drummed his fingers on the cover. “I have. Yes.”
“You don’t sound too excited.”
He scuffed out a laugh. “It’s a strange thing to face. I’d had plans laid out for so many years, and yet I hadn’t accounted for my personal life.” His voice took on a trace of irony.
Promotion aside, she felt too awkward to ask for details. She was still a little intimidated by the older healers, perhaps Gaspare most of all. He seemed patient and thoughtful, and considering her promotion, she really shouldn’t be thinking about how pretty his eyes were.
