2. Chapter 2 The Errand #3
We turned onto the avenue. The market stalls were up now, and the morning traffic had thickened. People moved around us without looking, carts and baskets and the steady murmur of a town that was working through the first half of its day.
The conversation shifted somewhere on the last stretch before the smithy. Nott had been telling me about the books she'd read at the academies, the Outworlder accounts she'd mentioned back on the road to Cold Hollow, and then she went quiet.
This wasn't her usual quiet. There was weight behind it. "Can I ask you something?" she said.
"Sure. Do I need to get ready to duck?"
"No, you always have some kind of corny comeback."
"Yeah, I'm not the most socially adept person. I'm sorry I interrupted. What was your question?"
"Why do you care so much about beastkin? Why do you heal them when others will not?"
I turned to her. She was watching the cobblestones ahead of us, her pace unchanged.
"You're a human Healer," she said. "You could set up in any town in Astenmark and make a living treating humans.
The Guild would leave you alone. Rendall and his Brackenholt people would never have looked your way.
You wouldn't need Bjorna's party or the beastkin quarter or the clinic at Rowena's.
You could have a clean, quiet life with none of the trouble. "
"I could."
"So why don't you?"
The question sat there in the cold air between us. We passed the produce vendor from earlier, who had his full display out now, turnips and onions and something green I didn't have a name for. A pair of kids ran across the street ahead of us, laughing about something.
"Because I don't pick my patients by what's convenient for me," I said. "I'm open to healing anyone. I've healed an elf, a human, and beastkin. There just appears to be more drama when I heal the beastkin. I think it's ridiculous."
"That's a simple answer."
"It is. But it's the real one. Every patient I've seen at the clinic, every person who walks through that brothel door, they're coming because nobody else will see them.
Not because they can't pay. Not because the cases are complicated.
Because the Guild decided that some people don't count.
And I just don't agree with that. I can't make it make sense in my head no matter how many times someone explains the politics to me. "
Nott was quiet for a while. Nothing about her changed, not the stride, not the face. But she'd turned her head toward me somewhere in the silence, and the dark eyes that had been on the cobblestones were on me instead.
"The accounts I read at the academies described Outworlders as disoriented," she said. "Frightened. Confused by the System, struggling with the language, desperate to go home." She paused. "None of them described someone like you."
"I'm not sure I'm that different from the others. I just landed in a place where there was work to do and started doing it. There's no way to go home that I know of, so why do I need to focus any energy on it?"
"That's what I mean," she said.
We climbed the stairs to the apartment. The coal-pot was still going, the air inside carrying the smell of banked heat and the lingering trace of Bjorna's morning coffee.
The book Nott had left on the bench was where she'd set it, the page she'd been reading still marked with a strip of dark leather.
She picked it up and glanced at the bench. Then she crossed to the table and sat down there instead.
She didn't open the book. She held it in her lap and looked out the window at the avenue below, where the midday light was laying its flat gold across the cobblestones and the rooftops and the smoke from Larg's chimney.
I put the kettle on the coal-pot for tea. "Thank you for coming with me."
Nott held my gaze across the table. The severity was there, the cheekbones and the jaw and the dark lines at her temples. But something had shifted behind her expression, something I hadn't seen before or hadn't known to look for.
"It was a good errand," she said.
"Yeah, but it was good to get to know each other a bit better. We're a party, and we are going to spend a lot of time together… and our lives will be in each other's hands."
"You're right. I just have trouble letting people in. It isn't just you. It's everyone except Bjorna. She's the only person I feel I can be perfectly free with. I'm getting there with Liv and Sif, but it is a work in progress. Astrid was who I was also close with, but she's gone now."
"You can feel free with me. I mean, we just bought portal scrolls together. You can't get much more intimate than that," I said jokingly.
Nott giggled for the first time.
"See, there it goes, your walls just came down and we are pals now," I said, grinning.
"You are… I don't know exactly."
"I am something… good, I hope?"
"Yes, something good, but I don't know what yet."
"I'll take it. Just as long as you like me enough to shoot monsters that are going to try and kill me at Cold Hollow."
"If I'm not busy, I’ll try."
"Oh, look at you with the sarcastic comeback. There is hope for you yet."
Nott chuckled again and turned her attention to her book.
I poured the tea and took it to her.