1. Chapter 1 The Clinic #2
She took the chair by the washstand and turned it so she could sit with her back to the wall, her legs crossed, her arms draped over the armrests. She looked comfortable, settled in like she planned to stay. Her eyes tracked my hands and then my face.
The deer-kin man whom Liv brought in had a dislocated finger. I set it with [Mend] in about thirty seconds. He dropped a copper into the jar and left without looking back.
"That's the fourth species this morning," Liv said after he'd gone. "Badger, goat, the woman with the hip was owl-kin, and now deer."
"You're counting."
"It’s interesting," Sif said, uncrossing her legs and leaning forward, elbows on her knees.
"The quarter is warming up to you specifically.
You, not Bjorna's party. You. The Healer who came to the market when the wagon blew.
The Healer who treats their kids and their grandmothers and doesn't take coin unless they want to give it. "
"I take the coin. It goes in the jar."
"You know what I mean." Sif held my eyes. "But the quarter is also tighter than it was before the bombing. Warmer toward you, more guarded toward everyone else. Gratitude and wariness living in the same house. They're glad you're here."
"I’m healing them. It makes sense."
"It does. I'm just making sure you see the big picture. You see the patients one at a time. I see the conversations in the market and the looks the beastkin traders give the human ones at the gate."
I poured water from the pitcher into the basin and washed my hands. The water was cool and the towel by the stand was the same thin linen Rowena stocked for the rooms upstairs.
"You think it's going to be a problem?"
"Not for you. For the quarter, maybe. Gratitude makes people visible, and the beastkin here have spent a long time being invisible on purpose. You're making them visible whether they want it or not."
Sif delivered analysis like a weather report. No performance. No hand-wringing. She read a situation and she said what she saw.
The towel came off the stand and I dried my hands. "I don't know how to fix prejudice."
"You don't fix it. You keep doing what you're doing. The quarter figures out the rest. They're not stupid and they're not children," Sif said.
"You’re grumpy this morning,” I said casually. “I didn't say they were."
"I know. I'm saying it so you don't start thinking you need to save them from the consequences of you saving them."
The grin was gone. What was left was the woman who'd grown up in a capital house, who'd been reading rooms like her life depended on it since she was fifteen.
"All right, your keen observation is noted," I said.
"Good." The grin came back. "Now. Who's next?"
Liv appeared in the doorway with a small hawk-kin boy holding his mother's hand. He cradled his left wrist against his chest, and from the angle it looked like a sprain.
"Come on in. What seems to be the problem?" I asked.
Sif stayed in her chair while I knelt to the boy's height and took his small wrist in both hands.
Gold light bloomed under my palms. The hawk-kin feather-patterning ran down his forearms in fine brown lines, lighter than Nott's, almost invisible unless the light caught them right.
The mother stood behind him with her hand on his shoulder.
She didn't look nervous. She looked like a woman who knew enough about the clinic to trust it.
The heal took ten seconds. The boy flexed his wrist, grinned, and pulled his mother toward the door.
His mother dropped a coin in the jar. Her eyes met mine as she passed and her expression shifted to a relieved one.
Sif was quiet for a moment after they left. She sat in her chair with her hands folded and her legs crossed at the ankle.
"You're good at this," she said. She wasn't grinning and she wasn't performing.
"I’m a high-level Healer, so being good at it is kind of a fact."
"You’ve got a snarky response to everything, don’t you?" She rolled her eyes and stood up, pushing the chair back to the washstand. "I need to go find Bjorna. She wanted me to check on the portal scroll pricing at Mildred's before the Cold Hollow run."
She paused at the door and turned back.
"You're going to have a full line this afternoon if what I'm hearing is right. There's a woman on the east end of the quarter with a son who hasn't been able to close his left hand since a forge accident. She's been asking around about the clinic all morning."
"What’s she waiting for? Send her over."
Sif's mouth curved. She tapped the doorframe twice with her knuckles and walked out. Her boots sounded on the hallway floor for three steps and then the street door opened and she was gone.
Liv's voice carried from the hallway, easy and bright, the patient-management tone she'd developed without anyone teaching her. She was good at it. She made people feel welcome.
***
The woman who came in the early afternoon was different from the others.
She was a badger-kin woman, middle-aged, with the same coarse, dark, bristle-fur as the man I'd healed that morning.
She came through the door with a limp that had nothing hurried or dramatic about it.
She'd been walking like that for years. She walked with it like a shoe that didn't fit right, compensating on every step, the weight shifting off the bad hip before it could settle.
She sat on the padded edge with the practiced care of a woman who had been sitting carefully for years. One hand went to the edge to steady herself. The other went to her right hip, pressing there, the gesture automatic.
"What brings you in?"
"My hip." She said it without embellishment. "It's been bad for a long time. Years. It got worse this past winter and now I can barely make the walk to the market without stopping."
"You’re my second bad hip patient recently. Has anyone looked at it before?"
She gave me a look that answered the question.
"Right," I said. "Let's see what we're dealing with."
I put my right hand on her hip, over the joint, through the fabric of her trousers. My left hand went to her lower back, stabilizing.
[Mend.]
The gold came up. And then it went somewhere new.
Trauma healing was fast. Breaks and cuts and infections had clear edges. The gold found the damage, repaired it, and moved on.
The gold sank into the joint and found cartilage that had worn thin over years, tissue inflamed so long the inflammation was the baseline, tendons that had shortened and tightened to compensate for the pain, muscles along her back and down her leg that had been holding her crooked for so long they'd forgotten any other shape.
It worked through the layers slowly, nothing like the quick bright surge of a broken bone setting.
More like water through packed soil, finding the paths, filling them, changing what it touched.
Under my hand the joint shifted, the cartilage rebuilding itself in a slow tide, the tendons lengthening.
She went still and closed her eyes for a moment. Her hand on the table edge tightened and then slowly relaxed. Her breathing changed, deepening as things inside her that had been clenched for years began to let go.
The healing magic sat in the joint for a long time. Longer than any I'd done in the clinic that morning. I didn't push it. I let it run.
I sat back.
"Stand up for me."
She looked at me. Then she put both hands on the edge of the table and pushed herself up. She stood.
The weight didn't shift.
She took a step. One step, with her right leg, the bad side, and the limp wasn't there. The hip held. The leg came forward and the knee tracked straight and the foot landed without the compensating twist that had been part of every step she'd taken for years.
She took another step. Her face changed. Not tears, not a speech. Her mouth opened and closed and her hand went to her hip where the pain had been and pressed there, the same gesture she'd made a hundred thousand times, and the pain wasn't there anymore.
Liv stood at the door. She hadn't made a sound. Her arms hung at her sides, her face still, her eyes tracking the badger-kin woman as she walked across the room in a straight line for the first time in a long time.
The woman turned and walked back. She stopped in front of me.