Chapter 95: Ask Me About My Work

Chapter 95: Ask Me About My Work

Mara had chosen the hour carefully.

Late in the morning, the east wing emptied. The laundry went out to the drying green, and Beatrice’s maids were upstairs readying their mistress for visitors. Nobody came down this end of the corridor before the midday meal unless they were lost.

She sat at the little table by the window with the communicator propped against the sugar bowl, her list beside it, and her hair pinned tighter than she’d worn it in years. She had changed her blouse twice, which was ridiculous.

At the agreed time exactly, the screen chimed.

Dr Kerr’s face appeared: a woman perhaps twenty years older than Mara, gray-haired, sitting in a cramped office with files stacked behind her. She looked tired the way good medics did, around the eyes and nowhere else.

"Ms Bell," Kerr said. "Thank you for writing."

"Thank you for agreeing to speak to me, Doctor." Mara heard her own voice come out stiff and careful, the way it did when she spoke to Edmund’s guests. "I’m aware your time is valuable. I trained for three years at a clinic and then practiced there, primarily in the ward and the dressing room, with some outpatient work and occasional gate post rotation. My areas of experience included burns, mana burns, channel shock—"

"You can put the list down," Kerr said.

Mara stopped. Her hand was, in fact, resting on the list.

"I’ve read it. It’s a good list." Kerr leaned back. "Tell me about a normal morning in your dressing room. What came through the door first?"

For a moment Mara didn’t know what to say. Nobody had asked her that in seventeen years.

"Carters," she said at last. "Early. Before their first run. They’d come in with yesterday’s hurts because they couldn’t afford to lose a day’s work, so they’d waited all night. Crushed fingers. Rope burns. Once a man with a nail through his boot he’d been walking on since the evening before." She found she was almost smiling. "Then the children, when the schools opened, with whatever they’d done on the way. Then the quarry hands at midday, and those were the bad ones, because crystal burns don’t look like much for the first hour."

"Why not?" Kerr asked.

"Because the mana’s still in them," Mara said. "The skin looks pink and clean, and underneath, the channels around the burn are swelling. If you dress it like an ordinary burn, it looks lovely until the evening and then it blisters right down to the meat." She stopped, because that had come out rather more vividly than she’d intended. "I’m sorry. That was—" ℴℴ𝘮

"Accurate," Kerr said. "Go on. What did you do instead?"

Mara told her.

She told her about flushing a fresh crystal burn before dressing it, and the instructor who rapped your knuckles with a pencil if you skipped it. She told her about counting channel-shock pulses in her head while families asked questions, and the trick of getting a frightened boy to hold his own bandage end so he’d stop fighting her. Somewhere in the middle of it, she realized she had stopped choosing her words. She was simply talking, quickly, with her hands moving, the way she hadn’t talked in a long time.

Kerr listened without interrupting. Now and then she wrote something down.

"All right," Kerr said eventually. "Let me give you a patient."

Mara’s stomach tightened. She folded her hands on the table to keep them still.

"A first-year comes in after a Talent accident in a practice room," Kerr said. "His hand’s burned, not badly. He’s walking, talking, a bit pale. His mana flickers when he speaks, a little in and out, if you’ve got any sense for it. He says he’s fine. He says he has a lecture in twenty minutes and wants to go to it. What do you do?"

Mara considered the patient, working through the signs as she once had beside a bed.

"He doesn’t go to his lecture," she said. "He sits down. First thing. Then he stops using mana, all of it, even the little bits people do without thinking. I’d flush and cover the burn, but the burn isn’t what I’m worried about. Channel shock comes late. Half an hour, sometimes more. So I keep him where I can see him, and I watch his breathing and his color and his hands. If his flow settles and he stays warm, he can go, but not on his own. Somebody walks him."

"And if it doesn’t settle?" Kerr asked.

"Then he isn’t mine anymore," Mara said. "If his hands go cold, or the flicker gets worse when he’s resting instead of better, I get the senior. I don’t try to be clever with it."

Kerr wrote that down. Mara watched her do it and felt her face go warm.

"That last part," Kerr said, "is where people go wrong. Clever medics especially. They want to be the one who fixes it." She tapped her pen against the pad. "Now. You’ve sat him down. You want to know what his channels are doing. What do you read him with?"

"A resonance needle," Mara said. "Along the inside of the wrist, then the elbow—"

She stopped, because Kerr’s face had changed very slightly.

"We haven’t used needles here in about eight years," Kerr said. "Flow plates. Do you know them?"

Mara felt the old flush of being caught out in front of a ward sister. For a second she wanted to bluff and let the doctor assume the rest.

"No," Mara said. "I’ve heard the name. I’ve never held one. I wouldn’t know how to read it."

"Thank you for saying so," Kerr replied.

"What would I need to study?" Mara asked. "To catch up enough for the assessment?"

Kerr listed it plainly: current reading instruments, especially the plates; current dosing for channel shock, which had changed; a few newer dressings. Nothing she rattled off sounded impossible. All of it sounded like work.

"I’ll send you some introductory material," Kerr said. "It won’t make you current. It’ll show you how far you have to go." She put the pen down. "Ms Bell, I’d need to see you work before I could say more. But your experience is real, and you’ve given me reason to trust your judgment. If you can come here in person, I think a fuller assessment would be worth both our time."

Mara heard herself say thank you, and then the screen was dark, and she was sitting alone with her list and the sugar bowl. Down in the yard, someone was beating a rug.

Worth both our time, she thought.

Silas called just after the midday meal. She could see sand on his sleeve and a chalk mark across one knee.

"How did it go?" Silas asked.

"Let me sit down," Mara said, unable to keep the smile out of her voice. "There’s quite a lot to tell you."

She told him about the carters, the patient who said he was fine, the flow plates she’d never held. He listened with his whole face, the way he used to as a boy.

"She liked that I’d call the senior if he got worse," Mara said. "That I knew when to ask for help." She’d expected to be judged on everything she could remember, and Kerr had praised her for knowing when she’d reached her limit. "She wrote it down," Mara added, still pleased.

"That’s good," Silas said. "That’s really good." He hesitated, and she watched him visibly stop himself from saying the next thing, whatever it was. "What do you want to do now?"

For a moment she considered describing the flow plates instead. It would be easier than saying what came next, and he was interested enough to listen. But she already knew her answer.

"I want to go," Mara said. "For the assessment. In person."

"Then—" Silas began.

"Which means I need leave to travel," Mara said before he could finish. "And I’m going to ask your father for it."

Her hands were cold. She had asked Edmund for small things over the years. She knew what his face did when he was going to say no.

"He might refuse," Silas said quietly.

"He might," Mara agreed. "But I won’t be asking for nothing anymore. I’ll be asking to go somewhere for a reason, and I’ll know what the reason is. That’s different."

When the call ended, she took a fresh sheet of paper from the drawer.

She wrote three versions. The first was too humble. The second explained too much. The third she kept.

My lord,

I ask for a quarter hour of your time, at your convenience, to request leave to travel to Crownless Academy for a professional medical assessment, at the suggestion of the infirmary’s senior physician.

Mara Bell

She read it once and didn’t change a word.