Keifon froze on his way down to the bread bag, too distracted to be irritated with himself. “How?”
“A set of lenses, like a telescope. You have to aim it at a very bright light — the sun, or focus a lamp through more lenses.” Her hands sketched out the size of the apparatus, something small enough to hold. “He rigged it up to look through a sample, and he says he can see all sorts of things. Live water, blood — anything living.”
He hefted the bread and continued toward the canal. “Huh. Energy, though? Even in water? You can’t see the difference between purified water and not, that’s the entire reason water sickness exists.”
“This guy says he can. Says the energy particles are very small, and if you magnify them enough, you can see them. They’re running tests now. I bet Blackhall is like a kicked-over beehive right about now.”
“Hm.” He glanced into the alleys as they passed. A few people were asleep. He’d check in with them next time.
“It’s in Nessinian, of course. Full of technical terms. But I could translate for you. It hasn’t been released outside Murio yet.”
“Thanks. I’ll try the original, it’s good practice.” A curl of smoke wound out from under a bridge, marking Keiva’s cooking fire. “Actually, though, if you could translate it into Kaveran, I’m sure everyone at the hospital would like to hear about it. Crackpot theories aside, it’s an interesting idea.”
“Yeah, I bet they would. I’ll do that.”
Keifon waved to a woman heading toward the cooking fire. “See you there?”
“In a minute, sure.”
“All right.” Keifon willed his pulse to slow. He knew Agna would keep her professional front intact. He knew that a few people would see his friend as an intruder; some still saw him as an intruder, after all. The deeper levels, with more complex echoes, were harder to predict. He’d confessed to Agna that he’d lived like this for a while, and that he’d feared for his life. She’d seemed to understand, at least intellectually. But with the advantages she’d had, he wasn’t sure she fully understood where he had been. What you are, something suggested.
What I was. No — where I was. That’s all. The street people in Wildern were not defined by their current situation. It was harder to apply that kindness to himself. Agna squeezed his arm. Her smile helped, as it always did.
“The young Yanweian doctor’s here,” someone announced, and Agna’s expression turned impish. Keifon looked away to meet Keiva, climbing the stairs from the narrow stone walkway along the canal. Keiva was still able-bodied and young enough — younger than Gaf or Dr. Rushu, anyway — but here she stayed, instead of following the barges. Keifon was grateful for every day she stayed.
“Mornin’.”
“Hi, good morning. How’s it going?”
“It’s going. And who’s — oh, don’t tell me, your Nessinian friend.”
It was clear enough from her pale skin; he could hardly hide her identity. “Ah — yes, this is Agna. Agna, this is Keiva. She makes sure everybody gets fed around here.”
“Pleasure to meet you.” Agna waved and accepted the Kaveran-style handshake.
Keifon nodded toward Agna’s package as Keiva led them down the stairs. “We got some pork from the butcher, he said, and poultry — more bones than meat, though, I think. Mostly bread today.”
“Ah, well, we’ll make of it what we can.” Keiva reached out for the butcher’s package, and Agna surrendered it and stretched her arms.
“Bring that bread over, we’ll see what we have.”
Keifon followed her under the bridge with Agna in his wake. In the damp shade, a few more people sat along the fused-brick wall. Keiva’s base of operations was reserved for the young and the old and the sick; most of the others, like Gaf, filtered out to the borders. They came in when the stew was distributed at dusk, to eat and trade and talk, sharing news and bringing fuel for the fire. Keiva kept the stew boiling day and night, kept an ear out for the city police, and protected who she could.
Keiva unwrapped the butcher’s twine as she walked, stepping around the patches of algae on the stones. “Well, it’ll do,” she said. One by one she plucked bones and trimmings from the mass, checked each one, and tossed them into the stew pot. All of it seemed to meet her standard, a point in the butcher’s favor. When it was gone, she folded up the paper and coiled the twine into a skein. “Now, what baker did you raid for all this?”
Keifon passed her the bread. “Sweet Lavender, over by Agna’s house. They’re training a new apprentice, Zea said.” He pulled on his shoulder with the opposite hand, stretching out the tense joint.
Sorting out the bread on a piece of canvas, Keiva held up a charred roll. “Hope it’s working. Ha — or not, for our sake.”
“They’ll still give us what they can, I think. Especially when Zea is working.”
“Yeah. She’s a good kid.”
Agna chose that moment to shift her weight, and caught his eye when he glanced up. Just the trace of a smile sent a wash of heat up his neck, remembering her unspoken suggestion at the bakery. He did think Zea was cute, he had thought about asking her out and resisted it, and she sometimes reminded him of Agna. The connections between those three facts had kept him awake some nights. It was too risky to talk about right now, so he did not reply. He’d prefer to unburden himself to a priest about it, but he had not yet gathered the courage to seek one out. Until then, he would have to carry this worry around or wait for it to go away.
Keiva held out one of the larger rolls, singed at one end but otherwise good. He accepted it — another of the rituals — and unfolded his pocketknife to scrape off the char. Despite the lead ball in his midsection brought on by Agna’s matchmaking obsession, he was famished.
“No, thank you, I’ve had breakfast,” Agna said to a similar offer. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Let’s see.” Keiva piled some of the bread on the now-empty bag as though it were a tarp, and Agna picked it up as Keiva directed. Keiva twirled a hand in the air, suggesting the surrounding area. “Take this around, let everyone pick. If they give you grief, move on. I’ll deal with them later.”
“I see.”
Keifon watched a thousand tiny clues — the tension around her eyes, the stiffness across her back — for any sign that Agna did not want to be here, that he had made the wrong decision. She was determined to do what she had offered to do, and if she were nervous, he could not tell. She set off to distribute the bread among the scattered group.
Watching her pick her way past the clumps of people along the canal, Keifon bit into his roll. Keiva traced his line of sight, watched him for a second, and said nothing. She picked up the canvas, piled with the rest of the bread, and folded it into a bundle. “Honestly, this’ll hold us for another day. Unless people want two today and nothing tomorrow. Always arguing about that. There’s a question for your priests.” She tore off a piece of a roll she’d left aside. “Does she know why you do this?”
Keifon snapped back to Keiva’s face. He’d watched Agna hurry away from a woman whom everyone called Aunt Wizie — he should have warned Agna that she had a problem with foreigners. “Uh, yeah. I told her a while ago. I mean — not about coming here. But she knows about me.” He took the last bite of bread and left the thought half-finished. She knew everything about him. Nearly everything.
He’d have to compliment the baker’s new apprentice, he thought, pulling himself off that track onto a tangent. Apart from being scorched and a day old, the bread was quite good.
Agna returned with a few rolls and a resolute expression. She gave the rest of her bread to Keiva. Now that their hands were free, Keifon gave her a hug. Keeping his voice low, he spoke in Nessinian. “Thank you. Is everything all right?”
“Mostly. Some said… some things.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry.” He allowed himself another second and let her go. “It gets easier.”
She shrugged. “It’s like dealing with patients, kind of. …You, too?�
��
“Yeah. Yanweians more than Easterners. A lot of people have never met an Easterner. Yanweians they’ve had practice resenting.” He gauged her chuckle and the nervous twitch she had of fussing with her hair. She was relaxing a little, at least. “But as people get to know you, you’re not The Easterner, you’re you.”
“Yeah, can’t imagine what that’s like.” A harmless edge had developed in her voice. That injury had been lanced and healed long ago. Once she had been a non-person to him, and he to her. The distance between then and now made it hard to breathe if he thought about it too long.
“I don’t mean that you have to come back. Only that it isn’t personal, and people will get to like you over time. If you — if you wanted to. Come back.”
“I understand,” she said, cutting off his nervous chatter. “If I can help… maybe I will.” She straightened her shoulder bag’s strap and faced Keiva, ready for action.
“Keifon tells us you’re a healer.”
“Yes, ma’am. I can’t stay too long, but if there’s anything I can do, I’d like to help.”
Keiva stood and dusted her hands. “Well, that’s up to the doctor here. He knows what needs to be done.” She stirred the stew pot with its long ladle. The unclassifiable edible smell fought the summer reek of the canal.
Keifon swallowed. It would be a relief to make rounds in some fresher air. “Bargi’s leg would be my first priority. I don’t think it’s likely to heal right on its own. We can see if she’ll let us heal it.” At Keiva’s expansive, blessings-giving gesture, which had to be more than a bit sardonic, Keifon led Agna toward Bargi’s spot. She normally stayed at the edge of the storehouse district, but since the accident she had migrated to a corner not far from Keiva’s cooking fire, where a set of access stairs met the canal wall. The stew pot was one of the few objects in this world that never moved, and everything else was measured in relation to it.
When they were out of earshot, Agna touched his elbow. “Hey. I can’t do too much, I’m sorry. I’ll need to pull a full shift after this, and I don’t want to crash before I’m done.”
“Of course, I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise. It’s probably best not to leap in anyway. I had to spend a month or two getting to know everyone before they’d trust me. Bargi, this patient — she’s very easy-going. I know she’s seen Tufarian priests before, and she’s keen to get back on her feet. I don’t think she’ll cause trouble.”
“Hm. Well, that sounds all right. Broken bones take a lot of energy, but they aren’t too time-consuming. Usually.”
“Whatever you think is best,” he said. “You know how to manage your strength.”
“Though…” She stopped and turned her back to the damp canal wall. “I think I need some time to digest this before I go to work. It’s a lot, all at once.”
“Uh… all right, we can leave now if you want.”
Her breath huffed out, not quite impatient, not quite irritated. “No, I’ll do what I said I would. Just that — we need to talk later.”
The tightness in her voice squeezed his throat like a giant’s fist. “I’m sorry.”
“Do you even know what you’re apologizing for?” She clutched her bag strap, her knuckles whitening. Without thinking, he’d taken a half a step backward. Dread spiraled through him. With the cold doorways of Ceien layered under this place in his mind, it was too easy to believe that she could just leave him here and walk out of his life. Before he could unload his panic on her, Agna had gone on, her voice soft and edgeless. “Look. There’s too much to talk about right now. You should have told me. I’d still have come. That’s why I’m mad at you. Because you thought you had to trick me to make me come with you. Or something. I don’t know what you were thinking.”
“I was…” The back of his neck was cool and damp under his fingers, and rubbing it did not soothe the tension winding up in his shoulders. “Afraid. Ashamed. Stupid. I know. I know.”
Agna spread her arms and dropped them. “Yeah. Kind of. And you know I still love you, even if you did something stupid.” She stepped toward him and squeezed his upper arms, making him face her. “And if you say anything about kicking you out of the house, I am going to throw you into the canal. Are we clear?”
Keifon could swallow and nod, no more. She was right, and he was overreacting. All he could think was that his life might have come back to a place like this if it weren’t for her. It wasn’t true, not really. He would always hold on for Nachi and the gods and the hope that the betterment of his life so far had not been a fluke. But some part of him saw Agna standing between himself and the night. He needed to leave after this, too. He needed to return to the apartment over the empty gallery and be alone and let this storm pass.
First, he had to hold it together one more time. He had to be a professional. He had to be the young Yanweian doctor who was not any of those things.
He covered her hand with his and squeezed it, and she let her grip drop. “All right for now?”
“All right for now. Just a little further.”
She nodded and followed his lead. They rounded another staircase to Bargi’s spot. The ground was thicker with empty bottles than Keifon would have liked. But Bargi was injured, and he hadn’t been able to spare enough painkillers to make much of a difference. Agna could help.
Bargi pushed up on one elbow and heaved her athletic body to a sitting position against the wall. Her face was ashen, despite her flirtatious tone. “Hey there, cutie pie.”
“Hey, Bargi. How’s it going today?”
“Fricking hurts,” their patient gritted out cheerfully. “What’d you think?”
He knelt by her side, and Agna, perhaps made wary by the bread rounds, lingered a few paces away. Keifon waved her closer. “This is my friend Agna, the healer from Nessiny, the one I’m staying with. I thought she might be able to do something for your leg.”
“Music to my ears.” Bargi hoisted her leg in both hands and dragged it out straight, panting with the effort. The splint had held, at least. Keifon checked under the bandages that held the simple wood slats in place, as Bargi ground her teeth and muttered curses. The leg was still swollen and purple-black with bruising, but no more so than yesterday. He resisted probing further. Agna could assess the damage without causing more pain. He met Agna’s eyes, and his friend came forward, kneeling in her pale-blue summer dress on the damp stones. Her healer’s robes were packed in the bag over her shoulder, but he had worked with her long enough to recognize her caretaking mode.
“Hi. So how did this happen?”
Bargi hissed out a breath as she shifted her weight. “Working on the new church building. Fetch and carry type shit. Day by day, good enough work. Fell off the damn scaffolding from ten feet up.” Her laugh was half a wheeze. “They paid out the day and told me to go to the Bennies, but beg your pardon, screw that. It’d take all they paid out and more besides.”
In Agna’s eyes Keifon saw the same calculation and diplomatic dodge that had gone through his head three days ago. The Benevolent Union charged on a sliding scale, never more than a patient could afford. Their income came from donations, partner organizations, and the patients who could afford to pay. But misconceptions persisted, especially where the Union’s footprint was new.
Agna flexed her hands over the broken leg. “Have you ever had energy healing before?”
“Yeah, by the Tufarians. I know how it goes.”
“That’s good. Ready? I’m just going to look for now.”
“Knock yourself out.” Bargi settled her back against the wall. Feeling useless, Keifon considered offering his hand for Bargi to grip, but thought she would prefer to soldier through without it. He supported Bargi’s knee and ankle instead, propping her foot in his lap and holding up her knee to take the weight off her leg.
Agna pushed away some of the bandages to expose more skin, then cupped her hands around Bargi’s leg just above the ankle. Her eyes glazed over, a look that had become familiar to Keifon over the la
st two years. She was connecting her healing art to Bargi’s life force, tapping their energy together like streams of water. She did not light the pale green glow that her healing could summon; she usually chose to make her work invisible and silent. But Keifon saw Bargi’s breath slow and deepen.
“That’s got to hurt,” Agna murmured. Bargi colorfully agreed, and Agna cracked a smile. “The shin bone in this area is more or less gravel. But. It’s fixable. Ready?”
“Do it.”
Agna pulled a leather cord from her bag and tied her hair at the back of her neck, though some damp strands still clung to her skin. Keifon shifted his position to better support Bargi’s leg for a long stretch, so that his own knee would not cramp. To his surprise, she unclamped one hand from the blanket she sat on and held onto his shoulder. Catching her eye, he let his smile tease a little. She’d always liked flirting with him, and distractions were hard to come by right now.
Two things let him know when Agna got to work: first, Bargi’s hand relaxed, and she wiped the sweat from her forehead. Agna’s healing art had deadened the nerves in her leg, relieving the pain fully for the first time in three days. Second, Agna closed her eyes and went very still. Though Keifon saw nothing change about Bargi’s leg, he felt minute scrapes and crackles as the bones settled and knit into place.
When he was eight, Keifon had been kicked in the arm by one of his parents’ horses, and he’d been carried, screaming, to the Tufarian church in town. The priests had set his arm and sent him on his way, dizzy and exhausted but whole. When Agna had healed him — three times, during their travels together — it had not been exactly the same. The god’s energy, funneled by the priests, had felt cooler and quicker, like a splash of spring water on a stifling summer day, rather than a long soak in a warm sea. But in either case, he had been hurt and then made well.
The Tufarians vowed that the unbelievers’ healing power was an unholy perversion of the god’s power that they channeled. Out of reverence for Tufar — not his patron god, but still holy — Keifon had avoided forming an opinion either way. And in the end, perhaps it didn’t matter. It might be sacrilegious to think so, but he could never deny that Agna helped the people she healed. He kept this idea to himself, turning it over and over in his prayers. Such good deeds could not be wrong.
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