“Ouch,” she said, as she finished her meal. “Do the lords let them keep enough to live?”
Lady Barb smirked. “The villagers are very good at hiding food,” she said. “But if you should happen to notice a cache, keep your mouth shut.”
“Understood,” Emily said. If the local lords were anything like the Barons of Zangaria, the question wasn’t how much they took, but how much they let their peasants keep. “I won’t say a word.”
She cleaned up the table, then watched as Lady Barb filled the cauldron with water and boiled it with a simple spell. “We’ll be seeing people as soon as we open until dusk,” Lady Barb predicted. “I know you haven’t taken the oaths, but I suggest that you keep your mouth shut about anything you see here. If someone asks, point them to me.”
Emily nodded. Students who became healers took complex oaths, some binding them to secrecy and others preventing them from claiming obligations from their work. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be a healer, even though she’d mastered most of the basic healing spells, and no one had asked her to take the oaths. But she promised herself she’d keep her mouth shut anyway. No one would talk to a doctor if they thought the doctor would broadcast the news to the entire world.
There was already a small queue of people outside when Lady Barb opened the door. Emily watched as the first one, an elderly woman, was shown into the room and the door firmly shut behind her. The woman gave Emily a droll smile, then removed her skirt and sat down on the table without being asked. Her legs were marred with dark marks, as if she was bleeding under the skin.
“Old age,” Lady Barb said, very quietly to Emily. To the patient, she remarked; “It’s a wonder you’re still alive.”
“Too stubborn to die,” the old woman said. Her voice was cracked and broken, but Emily could hear grim determination in her tone. “I’ve outlived four lords and I would like to outlive a fifth.”
Emily watched as Lady Barb cast a healing spell, doing what she could. “Your body is slowly breaking down,” she said. “I don’t think it can stay active for much longer.”
The woman shrugged, stood upright and pulled her skirt back on. Emily felt an odd sense of queasy fascination as the woman nodded to her and hobbled towards the door. Lady Barb opened it, allowed her to leave and then invited the next person inside. He was a young boy, holding his arm as though it pained him.
“See what you make of it,” Lady Barb said, addressing Emily. She looked at the boy and smiled at him. “Don’t worry. My assistant will take care of it.”
Emily gulped. Healing was complex; she might not be bad at it, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to test her skills on a young boy. He couldn’t be older than ten, she decided, as she placed her fingertips on his arm – he gasped in pain – and cast the first spell. Sensations flooded through her mind, telling her that he’d broken his arm and then had it badly set by a mundane doctor. He’d been incredibly lucky not to wind up a cripple, which would have ensured an early death. The villagers wouldn’t be able to provide for a cripple.
“Good work,” Lady Barb said, when Emily explained what she’d found. “Now...fix it.”
Emily braced herself and cast the second spell. Most healing spells tended to deal with the immediate problem, but in this case there were other problems that might only be made worse if she sealed the bone back into place. The body wanted to heal, she’d been told, yet if the damage remained untended long enough the body might come to believe that was the natural state of affairs. Emily slowly returned the bone to where it should be before carefully repairing the rest of the damage.
She settled backwards with a sigh, feeling tired and exhausted. And to think that was only her first patient!
“Stay still,” Lady Barb said. She checked Emily’s work, and nodded in approval. “Good work.”
Emily flushed in relief.
“Take this potion for now,” Lady Barb directed the boy, “then come back this evening if you are still sore.”
The boy nodded, sat upright and scurried towards the door. Emily watched him go, silently praying she hadn’t missed anything.
Lady Barb reached out and squeezed her hand gently, then called for the next patient. An alarmingly thin woman, obviously pregnant, crept in as if she expected to be attacked at any moment. Lady Barb stood, helped her to sit down, and checked on the baby with practiced ease.
“I think he’ll be coming out in a few more days,” she said. The woman relaxed with obvious relief. “But you need to eat more and avoid heavy activity.”
The woman snorted. Emily saw her point. The villagers might make some allowances for a pregnant woman, but they couldn’t afford to have anyone just doing nothing. For all she knew, the woman was expected to go straight back to housework and the other endless chores village women did. They were expected to do everything from cook to sewing new clothes for their families. No peasant woman could afford to laze around like a lady aristocrat.
“It could easily be worse,” Lady Barb said, as the woman left the room, closing the door behind her. “I’ve seen children strangled in the womb when the umbilical cord wraps around their neck, suffocating them. They’re often still in the womb until delivery, but when they are delivered they’re dead. Even magic can’t bring them back to life.”
Emily shuddered. Pregnancy wasn’t something she’d thought much about, even though she knew it was her duty to deliver an heir for Cockatrice. On Earth, there were midwives to help with the birth and technology that could tell a baby was in trouble before it was too late. But here...death in childbirth was far from uncommon.
If the woman had needed emergency help, could they have helped her? She’d never practiced helping someone to give birth.
The next few patients were simpler, thankfully. Lady Barb inspected them, used some magic to heal their damage and then lectured her patients on being more careful next time. Some of the damage reminded Emily of battered students after Martial Magic, although Sergeant Miles had normally healed any damage as soon as the class had finished. Here...if there was fighting, there would be no one to help the injured. One man had even lost an eye.
“I can’t repair your damaged eye,” Lady Barb told him, tartly. “What happened to it?”
The man shrugged. He’d been in the pub, he explained, and a fight had broken out. He didn’t remember what the fight had actually been about, only that he’d enjoyed himself and wanted to do it again. Emily looked at him and shook her head. What was the point of battering one’s fellow villagers to a pulp, then doing it again and again?
“They don’t have much else to do with their lives,” Lady Barb told her, once the patient had departed. “They work with the animals, grow their small crops, sing and dance...and drink alcohol they produce themselves. None of them can read or write and they’d be suspicious of anyone who could, even us. Readers and writers work for the lords.”
Emily nodded. Zangaria might have avoided the stifling bureaucracies of Earth, but it did have a network of educated men who kept careful tabs on what the peasants should be able to produce each year. They were intensely hated, if only because their predictions didn’t always jibe with reality – and, naturally, their predictions were never wrong. Banishing them from Cockatrice had been one of Emily’s first decisions, when she’d finally worked out just how baleful an influence they were. It had made her very popular with her subjects.
They paused for lunch, then handled the next set of patients. Most of them had minor injuries – she guessed that the headman had done some organizing – but a couple seemed reluctant to talk to either of the magicians. Lady Barb had to point out, sardonically, that they could hardly heal someone if they didn’t know what was wrong before the men confessed to having problems with their private parts. Emily looked away, embarrassed, as Lady Barb inspected the damage, then promised to brew potions to handle the problem. She washed her hands thoroughly as soon as the men went out the door.
“They should have been more careful where they put it,
” Lady Barb said, angrily. “I’ve yet to see a whore in an inn who didn’t have something nasty waiting for anyone foolish enough to touch her.”
Emily winced. “But what about their wives?”
“What indeed?” Lady Barb asked. “I can brew a potion to deal with the wasting rot, but if their wives don’t drink it too, the disease will just re-infect them.”
She glanced out of the door. “There’s only two more people waiting to see us,” she said. “I want you to handle them while I make a start on brewing the potion. Don’t worry; if you find something you can’t handle, don’t hesitate to call for me.”
Emily nodded. The first patient turned out to be an older man who had a nasty cough. Emily ran a check, discovered an infection in his lungs and removed it, then told him to be more careful what he smoked. He was still laughing as he walked back out the door. Emily sighed, and called for the final patient. He was a young boy, short with dark hair and blue eyes; Emily quietly estimated him to be no more than ten years old. The way he looked around, peering into the darkest corners, suggested he was jumpy. But there was nothing obviously wrong.
“You’re safe here,” Emily said, feeling her heart go out to him. She couldn’t help feeling a sense of kinship with the young boy. There was something about him that reminded her of herself. “Sit down on the table, please.”
The boy walked over to the table and stopped, unmoving. Emily frowned; he wasn’t sitting down or undressing...or trying to speak. Was he mute? Or...she hesitated, then motioned for him to undress. His entire body trembled as he pulled his shirt over his head and dropped it on the ground. Emily took one look at his back, then looked away, horrified. Her gorge rose within and she had to swallow hard to prevent herself from being sick.
She’d seen horror. She’d seen Shadye and the Mimic. But this was different, all too human – and somehow all the worse for it. The boy’s back was covered in dark scars, several ending in very nasty bruises. Emily had seen marks on her own buttocks when she’d been caned by the warden, but this was worse. The skin had broken under the blows and become infected in several places. It was clear, she realized, as she forced herself to concentrate, that the boy hadn’t been caned. The bruises at the end of the scars were where the belt buckle had hit and broken his skin.
Be clinical, she told herself. But it was so hard to look and not feel the desire to tear the person who’d beaten the boy into hundreds of tiny pieces. She could turn them into slugs and stamp on them, turn them into rabbits and set the dogs after them...there were so many options, but none of them would help him now. The infection was spreading so rapidly that she was honestly unsure how he’d stayed alive, let alone reasonably mobile.
“Finish undressing,” she told him, even though she didn’t really want to know. She raised her voice, hoping that Lady Barb wasn’t in one of the stages where the potion couldn’t be left untended for more than a few seconds. “I think you should take a look at this.”
She looked back at the boy, then turned away and threw up, violently. The bruises covered his buttocks and the back of his thighs, marching down his skin with almost military precision. Emily had had problems sitting comfortably for hours after the Warden had caned her, but this...she cursed herself for ever moaning about the Warden’s punishments. This was far worse than anything she’d ever endured, even in the moments everyone had wanted to blame her for the Mimic’s trail of bodies.
Lady Barb looked pale as she ran her fingers over the bruises, then pushed the boy into bending over the table. Emily looked away, sickened. Lady Barb’s voice was cold and clinical, but Emily knew her well enough to hear the outrage she couldn’t quite hide.
“No sign of rectal damage,” she said. “But, under the circumstances, it’s a small mercy.”
Emily shook her head when Lady Barb motioned for her to take a look. She’d always disliked examining private parts in class, even though the parts were mounted on a homunculus. Here, she didn’t want to strip the boy of what little privacy he had left...no, that wasn’t entirely true. She didn’t want to see any signs of whatever else had happened to him. It was selfish, but she couldn’t help herself.
“No physical reason for inability to talk,” Lady Barb noted. “Muteness probably comes from fear. Mental damage is a very strong possibility.”
No, Emily thought. The Allied Lands stigmatized any signs of mental trauma or illness, fearing that it was a sign of necromancy. There were no psychologists to help coax the boy out of his trauma, no one who might be willing to help...she closed her eyes, wondering if there was something she could do to help. But she couldn’t take in everyone, could she?
“Pass me the painkilling potion,” Lady Barb ordered. Her voice was still clinical, almost completely dispassionate. “And then stand ready to help me if necessary.”
Emily hated her at that moment, hated her cold clinical approach to the problem. Cold logic told her that rage and fire wouldn’t help, but cold logic was no comfort. Lady Barb took the potion, helped the boy to drink enough of it to numb his entire body, then started casting spells over his back and buttocks. The infection would have to be removed before the skin could be healed.
It hadn’t been once, Emily told herself, as she watched, fighting to avoid retching again and again. The boy had been beaten to within an inch of his life, not once, but many times. Each of the scars lay on an older scar...she wasn’t even sure how the boy had remained alive for so long. How often had he been beaten that he’d managed to keep going despite the pain?
She watched the scars heal up, remembering one of the lectures Lady Barb had given her class when they’d talked about working as healers. It was quite possible for someone to be tortured, healed and then tortured again, prolonging his torment indefinitely. Lady Barb had told them that it wasn’t quite a violation of Healer Oaths, but they might have to be prepared to decide if they wanted to cooperate or not. And, if they decided poorly, they might be blamed for the whole affair.
“We can’t send him back,” she said, as the boy slipped into an enchanted sleep. Lady Barb helped him down to the floor and placed him on a rug, but even so he didn’t look comfortable. Emily wondered what nightmares would torment his sleep, then decided she didn’t want to know. “What are we going to do with him?”
Lady Barb shook her head. “I’ll have to talk to the headman,” she said. “He will have to make the final decision.”
She turned and headed for the door. “Stay with him,” she added, as she picked up her staff. “He shouldn’t wake up for a few hours, but just in case...keep an eye on him.”
Emily watched her go, then turned back to the boy, picked up a blanket and draped it over his body. He looked small, too small. He’d been deprived of food as well as love and care.
Poor bastard, she thought. But we can help him, can’t we?
Chapter Fourteen
IT WAS NEARLY TWO HOURS BEFORE Lady Barb returned, two hours that Emily spent alternately reading a book and keeping an eye on the boy. He twitched and moaned in his sleep, but not enough to break the spell. Emily watched him, wondering if there was something she could do to help, yet nothing came to mind. All she could do was watch.
She shuddered as she looked down at the pale skin covering his back. It would be days, if she recalled correctly, before the skin had tanned enough to blend in with the rest of his body, but at least it wasn’t scarred. Emily couldn’t escape the memory of looking down at the scars and wondering just what sort of person would do such a thing to a defenseless boy. It wasn’t punishment, she told herself firmly, it was abuse. No child deserved to be beaten within an inch of his life.
How long would he have lasted without their help? His scars had already been infected. It wouldn’t have been long before the infection killed him. Even a necromantic rite would have been kinder.
She tried to concentrate on her book, but her thoughts kept mocking her, pointing out that her stepfather hadn’t been so bad. He’d never laid a finger on her. But the thoug
ht made her sick.
She looked up as the door opened and a grim-faced Lady Barb stepped inside. Emily watched as she walked over to the child and cast a handful of spells, then swore out loud and rolled the child over. His chest looked unmarked, but he was so thin that Emily could see his bones clearly. He looked like a famine victim from a third world country.
“I spoke with the headman,” Lady Barb said. “His...aunt and uncle believe that he was possessed.”
Emily stared at her in disbelief. Possessed?
“Or so they claim,” Lady Barb added. “There are odd traces of magic on him, but nothing demonic.”
“Oh,” Emily said.
She struggled to remember what little she knew of demons and demon magic, but there was almost nothing in the open section of Whitehall’s library beyond a single word: don’t. Shadye had wanted to sacrifice her to a demon-like creature, she knew that much, yet it was one of the few issues the Grandmaster seemed reluctant to talk about. The one time she’d asked, he’d told her to leave it alone.
“It’s not uncommon for someone to be touched by wild magic to the point where their behavior becomes erratic,” Lady Barb said. “You know just how many spells there are that influence behavior.”
Emily nodded. Even First Years knew a handful of mind control spells, as well as simpler tricks to influence and manipulate their rivals and enemies. It was yet another reminder of why Whitehall was so important. Someone on the outside, practicing on defenseless mundanes, could do a hell of a lot of damage before he or she was stopped. But this boy didn’t seem to have any magic of his own.
“It doesn’t help that his parents died years ago,” Lady Barb added. “I suspect his aunt and uncle were reluctant to take him into their home.”
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