Chapter 92: The Medic in the East Wing

Chapter 92: The Medic in the East Wing

Mara read her son’s message standing at the linen press, with the communicator half hidden in a folded pillowcase.

It had buzzed in her apron while she was showing the east-wing girl how to fold the good sheets, and she lasted until the girl went down for the next basket. Then she read it once quickly, the way she’d once read charts in a corridor, and once more slowly.

She wants to hear about your work from you, not from me.

I told her about our conversation, then got stuck when she asked about your responsibilities at the clinic.

She put the communicator back in her pocket before the girl came back up the stairs.

"Your hands," Mara said when the basket thumped onto the floor.

The girl looked down at them. Her knuckles were split across the backs, red and shiny from lye.

"It’s just the washing, ma’am," the girl said.

"It’s just the washing until it cracks open and goes bad." Mara took the little tin from her own pocket, the one she always carried, and pressed it into the girl’s palm. "Twice a day. After, not before. And wear the gloves from the scullery, even if Cook laughs at you."

"Thank you, ma’am," the girl said, closing her fingers around the tin.

Mara went back to folding and did not think about the message at all for at least a minute.

She waited until the afternoon had gone quiet before she let herself think properly.

Her sitting room was at the far end of the east wing, small and warm, with one good window over the kitchen garden. She closed both doors and listened to the stairs. The walls here were thin, and Beatrice’s maids used the back staircase. One went past, humming. Then nobody.

She sat in her chair and read the message a third time.

She had bought shoes last month with her own money, at the market in town, and nobody had said a word. That was spending. A journey was something else. Anyone leaving the house overnight went into the steward’s book, and the steward’s book went up to Edmund’s study every evening. She had never once seen her name in it.

She would worry about Edmund soon enough. Right now, she dreaded the doctor’s questions.

Seventeen years. She had been a good medic at nineteen, quick and steady, and her instructor had once told her, as if conferring a medal, that she had the hands and the temper for it. Since then she had dressed a child’s scrapes and sat with servants through fevers. Somewhere in a clean office at the best academy in the world, a doctor was going to ask her what she knew, and Mara was going to open her mouth and find out it was nothing.

Silas had spent his goodwill walking into that office. He’d spend money too, if she let him. She didn’t want him wasting either on who she used to be.

You’re thirty-six, she told herself. Not dead.

It came out sounding like her old instructor, which helped a little.

She thought, without meaning to, about the carter’s boy.

He’d been eleven, maybe, with a burn across his palm from a cracked lamp crystal he’d been told not to touch. Not a dangerous burn, but a deep one, and the mana in it had made the edges angry. She had dressed it every morning for six days. He had sworn at her on the first day and cried on the second. On the fifth he’d closed his fist all the way for the first time and looked at it as if he’d invented hands. On the sixth he’d brought her a bruised pear he had very obviously stolen.

Nothing about it was remarkable. She had loved it anyway. She had loved knowing exactly what to do next, and doing it, and watching it work.

Then she called her son.

Silas answered on the first chime. He was sitting on his bed with the lamp behind him, and Nim was curled against his hip with something brassy on a cord around his neck. His color was still good. She checked anyway. She always would.

"You got my message," he said.

"I did." She kept her voice low out of habit. "Tell me exactly what she said. Not what you think it meant. What she said."

Silas described Kerr’s questions and the possibility of supervised work after an assessment. Mara listened for the parts the message hadn’t given her: what the doctor had asked, where Silas had hesitated, whether the invitation had sounded like an obligation. It hadn’t, from what she could tell.

"She told me not to build a plan on what I hope neutrality means," Silas finished.

"Sensible woman," Mara said.

"She is," Silas agreed. "It was annoying."

Mara almost smiled. "What did you tell her about me?"

"About the patients you told me about. Your training, what I knew of it. How you can look at me on a screen and know what’s wrong." Silas hesitated. "I suppose your Talent did most of the difficult—"

"It didn’t," Mara said.

He stopped.

"My Talent helped sometimes," she said. "Most of the work was hands and eyes and patience. Dressings. Flushing a mana burn before it set. Counting someone’s pulse while they shouted at you. Knowing which patient who says he’s fine is lying. You don’t do that with a Talent. You do it by paying attention for ten hours and not getting bored." She heard her own voice getting brisk and let it. "If she asks again, tell her I was good at noticing things. I still am."

"Sorry," Silas said. He looked it, but he also looked interested. He was looking at her as if she were someone who knew a thing he didn’t.

She found she liked being looked at like that by her own child a great deal.

"And if the conversation goes well," he said, warming up, "and the assessment goes well, then I could start finding out about rooms near the academy, and whether—"

"Silas," Mara interrupted.

He shut his mouth.

"You’ve got me examined, hired, and living in a new city," Mara said, "and I haven’t said good afternoon to the woman yet."

"I wasn’t going to do anything," Silas protested.

"I know," Mara said. He’d gone pink, and she softened her voice. "I love that you think about it. Let me speak to her before you start looking at rooms."

He nodded. "All right."

Down in the kitchen garden, the cook’s boy was pulling onions. In the room above, someone was moving furniture.

"I want to talk to her," Mara said.

Silas went very still, the way he had as a little boy when he was afraid a word would make her change her mind.

"Send me her contact," she said. "I’ll write to her myself. Tonight."

"I’ll send it now," Silas said.

"Good," Mara said. "Don’t spend anything or contact anyone else yet. I’ll ask if I need help." She rubbed her thumb over the edge of the communicator. "There is something you can do. Tell me the truth if I sound like a fool."

"You won’t," Silas said at once.

Mara smiled. "You haven’t heard me speak to her yet. Promise."

"I promise," Silas said. "If you sound like a fool, I’ll tell you."

"Thank you," Mara said.

The contact arrived while they were still on the call. She saved it, then made him show her his knee again when he stood up. He complained but bent it for her, and she watched the easy movement with a relief she still wasn’t used to.

The knee was fine. Mara let him sit down, ignoring his look. She had missed too much of his illness to apologize for checking now.

When the screen went dark, Mara took a sheet of paper from the drawer and sat at the little table by the window.

She did not want to write a letter. Letters were where she said too much. She wrote a list instead, in the plain shorthand her instructor had beaten into her.

Trained three years, clinic, then worked there. Ward, dressing room, and outpatient. Gate post rotation when they asked for extra hands.

Burns, mana burns, channel shock, fractures, wound care, fevers. Triage on busy days.

Out of practice since before my son was born. Some household nursing since. Nothing formal.

Need to relearn: current reading instruments. Current dosing. Anything new in channel care. Probably more than I know.

She paused over the last line. Her instructor had always preferred questions to excuses after a mistake. She left it in.

Then she opened her communicator, copied it into a short message under Dr Kerr’s contact, added two lines of introduction in her own name, and did not mention House Rooke at all.

Her thumb hovered for a moment.

Upstairs, the furniture stopped moving.

Mara sent it.