The Healers' Road

by S E Robertson

  He looked at her and then sighed. “Maybe it’s different in Nessiny, then. In Yanwei it’s – it’s shameful to be indebted to someone, especially outside your family. You treat it so casually, I – thought you just liked to debase me.”

  She was struck silent. “I – hm. A little. That was petty of me. I’m sorry.”

  He nodded, and found his voice. “Thank you. Apology accepted.”

  “And it is different in Nessiny. Or... well, maybe it’s different for me, too. I don’t like to think about people not having enough money. It wasn’t something that you were supposed to talk about at home.” She pushed her hair behind one ear. “It was strange, being friends with Esirel – my best friend from the Academy. She had almost nothing, and it bothered her so much. I couldn’t imagine not having anything I wanted. So I gave her things, and sometimes she was offended. And we never talked about it.”

  He took a drink of water, turning this over. “You were trying to help her.”

  “Yes. With you... I don’t know. When I saw that you didn’t like it, I was glad. I was getting one over on you, because you... you know so much more than me about practical things, and–” She threw her hands up. “I was an ass. That’s all.”

  He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I was glad to know more than you, because you were so fond of reminding me that you were better than me.”

  “But we’re done with that. Right?”

  “Yes. I’m-I’m glad. I think I can learn a lot from you.”

  His reluctance to say it made her blush harder. “I could learn a lot from you, too.” She found the Benevolent Union log, pretending to be overheated, even though dusk was beginning to cool the air. “So – back to the clinic. Whichever one of us is free will ask the patient about their problem. If they don’t know, we’ll check them out, diagnose and decide who should take on the treatment. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.” He smiled a little – a genuine smile, not the sarcastic smirk of a point scored against her. Behind her makeshift fan, she smiled back.

  Keifon: Gifts

  “So, what are you getting Laris for Lundrala?” Keifon took another bite of melon, the only thing he had felt inclined to eat for dinner.

  Agna looked up quizzically from her bowl of sliced tomatoes and cheese. The mere thought of the dish made Keifon want to slug ginger extract, but she ate it nearly once a day lately.

  “I... suppose I should get something. They celebrate it here, don’t they.” Several of the merchants had taken to posting signs, subtle and unsubtle, proclaiming their wares’ fitness as gifts. Keifon nodded in response to the rhetorical question. Agna bit her lip. “Hmm.”

  “Has he mentioned anything in his letters that he might like?” He took a drink, finished his slice of melon, and tossed the bare rind onto his plate. He eyed the remaining fruit – less than half left. He cut another wedge as Agna pondered.

  “I don’t think so. He talks a lot about – well – he’s supposed to go on a trip in the spring, for his work, down the canal to Vertal. Driving some cattle to market. He talks about that a lot. It might be a new direction for him, so it’s important to him. And... other things. But nothing about gifts,” she said hastily. She eyed Keifon. “You’re not going to eat an entire melon and nothing else, are you?”

  Keifon shrugged. “It’s hot.” She made a noise halfway between a growl and a gurgle. Keifon decided to ignore this. “Well... what does he do?”

  “He reads a lot. Works on the ranch. Makes friends with everyone.”

  “Writes to you.”

  “Writes to me.”

  “Hm. A book?”

  “Is that enough? I’ve never gotten anyone a Lundrala gift. I mean, there are plenty of Church of the Four followers at home, but my family mostly celebrated Balance holidays. Esi just went along. She didn’t care much. – She was Church of the Four.”

  “Ah.” He tried to backtrack through her nervous explanation. “I think a book is enough. It doesn’t have to be expensive, and you’re not supposed to get more than one thing. It’s supposed to be... personal. Representing what’s between you.” She blushed a little, and Keifon turned his attention back to eating. What was between them, indeed. “But you can get whatever you want. I’m sure he’d appreciate it.”

  “I see.” She returned to her dinner, pausing to nibble on her fork meditatively. “Wait, is it just – you know, romantic people, or...”

  Keifon chuckled. Romantic people? “People who are connected to you. Friends, family, things like that.”

  “Oh... oh, damn,” she muttered.

  “What is it?”

  “That’s more people.”

  “Mmhm.” Keifon tallied it in his head. He had to mail some gifts for his brother and Nachi soon. Then... he supposed he would get something for Agna, now. They were connected through their assignment, after all. Who else? Something small for a few of the merchants, like Baran and Wayron. Nelle, now that the herbalist seemed to have annexed him as an ally through Agna. Edann was a more complicated case. Keifon stretched out on the ground, munching and pondering.

  “Lying down while you eat is bad for your stomach,” Agna said in her clinical tone.

  “Ngh.” A little flicker of reflexive anger flared and died. She wasn’t wrong, and she was looking out for his health. Keifon sat up, lounging on his hand. ...Edann was complicated. He was unquestionably one of the central people in Keifon’s life right now, but if Keifon were to bring a Lundrala gift, Edann would snap at him. And he wouldn’t get Keifon anything in return. In fact, Edann would be doubly insulted by the pressure of having been given an unreciprocated gift. It seemed against the spirit of the holiday, though. It didn’t seem right not to acknowledge their... whatever they had. Besides, the only gift Keifon could think of was wine, and that wasn’t appropriate.

  Agna distracted him from a mental track involving more inappropriate and less tangible gifts by getting up to wash her dish. Keifon cut the remaining melon into two slices and offered her one. She gave him another scolding look – about eating nothing but melon for dinner, he gathered – and accepted it. She meticulously sucked the juice out of each section before biting in.

  Two gifts to post, one or two gifts in person, about five token gifts. He could afford all of that. It had been a little less expensive to share food and laundry expenses with Agna, since Laketon. And he hadn’t added up the figures yet, but he suspected that they were going through more patients per day now.

  Agna slurped one more bit of juice off her rind and tossed it onto the heap on Keifon’s plate. She licked her fingers. “Where does it stop, though?”

  “Hm?”

  “I mean, Laris, and Nelle. And – and you. Is that it? Or everyone in the caravan?”

  “Eh...if you talk to them a lot. I’m going to get the same thing for a few of the people in the caravan. Baran and Wayron, people like that. Acquaintances. It’s expected that you’ll get your acquaintances all the same thing, or types of the same thing. Something small and impersonal, but something that says you’re thinking of them.”

  “Ugh, this is complicated.”

  “Heh. It’s not that bad. You don’t have anything like that in Nessiny?”

  “Not really. You give people money on their festival. Or flowers. You wrap it up in this little package. The money, not the flowers.”

  “Their festival?”

  “Yeah, when they turn a year older.”

  “Hm. Odd that you call it a festival.”

  “Well, it is a festival. Mine’s Midsummer.”

  Keifon’s melon-stuffed stomach panged with guilt. Midsummer had passed, and he hadn’t known. “I’m sorry I missed it. Um… if you don’t mind me asking… how old did you turn?”

  “Twenty-one,” Agna shrugged. “So when’s yours?”

  “My birthday? It was, uh, about three weeks ago. But that’s all right, I don’t need a lot of fuss.”

  She laughed. “You’re Midsummer too, then.”

  “A ways after Mi
dsummer.”

  “...Still. ...Unless... you celebrate it down to the day in Yanwei.”

  “We...do,” he said. “They do in Kavera, too. So you...don’t? What do you do?”

  “You round to the closest festival,” she said, as if stating the obvious. “Unless you’re a little, little kid. After two years your parents stop counting exactly when you were born. Unless they’re trying to be funny.”

  “That’s...hm. So a quarter of everyone turns older at the same time.”

  “Yeah, more or less.” She considered this, crossing her ankles in front of her. “You must never stop celebrating, then. If everyone has a separate day.”

  “Heh...well... it depends. But you usually just get someone one thing, like Lundrala.” He smiled, remembering, and considered whether to tell her. It wouldn’t hurt anything, he reminded himself. She wasn’t out to hurt him anymore. “My nanbur was a birthday gift. Combination birthday and Lundrala. I was nine.”

  “That’s sweet. Who was it from?”

  “All the hands on my parents’ ranch. They all pitched in.” Shiu had delivered it, though. Shiu had been his favorite, and everyone had known it.

  “Oh, what kind of ranch do your parents have?”

  “Horses. Did. They’re dead now.”

  Agna rocked back as though she’d been struck. “Oh. I-I’m sorry.”

  “Murdered,” Keifon clarified, though it never helped. “By bandits. Came to steal the horses. I was eleven.”

  “Heart of the world,” she murmured. “I’m so sorry.”

  He shrugged. Her sympathy was a stone tossed into a chasm that yawned to the center of the world. But it was all she could offer. “Thank you.”

  Instead, he told her about the day he’d gotten his nanbur. He’d tried to practice on Shiu’s nanbur before, and the ranch hands had all decided that he was old enough to get his own. He told her how proud he had been, because he thought they’d all begun to see him as an adult. He’d been desperate to grow up, at nine. He’d been two years away from growing up, and he’d had plenty of time to regret it.

  “So you’ve been playing for – a long time.”

  Keifon half-smiled. “Sixteen years.”

  “I wasn’t fishing for numbers,” she said, putting on a wounded tone. “I meant to compliment you on your dedication.”

  “Hmn. Thank you. It’s difficult, so you have to keep practicing. But I like it.”

  “You always seem to.” She looked away, awkward again. Keifon took the opportunity to excuse himself with his plate full of rinds and walk it to the camp’s compost heap. When he came back, Agna was seated by the unlit fire pit, lost in thought.

  “How about a swim?”

  “Eh.” She shrugged. “Maybe when it gets dark.”

  “Well... leeches. Bugs.”

  Agna shuddered. “Right... right. ...I guess so.”

  Something was wrong, something she didn’t want to come out and admit. The new moon was a couple of weeks away, so that wasn’t it. He sat cross-legged, across the fire pit from her. When it gets dark... she had been so self-conscious the first and last time they had taken a swim in the river. It had taken her half an hour to throw off her dressing gown and sprint to the water. “Nobody’s looking,” he said. “It’s all right.”

  She blushed to the neck of her robes. “Well... everyone looks. All the time.”

  “Nnn – well – if anyone makes you feel bad, I’ll drown them. How about that?”

  She laughed painfully. “You’re just trying to get a bigger Lundrala gift. Personal assassins have got to jump to the top tier.”

  “Right behind poison-tasters.” He had made her smile, at least. He could do that now.

  Agna: Connections

  The new Benevolent Union compound in Wildern was built in the style of the other, more historical buildings on Wildern’s central streets, with grand timbers and white plaster walls. The bartender’s directions had brought them to one side of the building, where a sign over the door displayed the Benevolent Union seal and the medical aid symbol. It seemed strange to see the two devices on a real building; they had become so associated in Agna’s mind with their own clinic tent.

  She and Keifon scuffed their shoes at the doorway and stepped into a clean, simple waiting room, where several patients, most merely sniffling, waited on wooden benches. Perhaps this was why their business had been slow yesterday. No matter – it was all for the same good. They approached the reception desk, and Agna cleared her throat.

  “We’re the Benevolent Union healers from the fall caravan,” she explained, picking up the name that the people in Wildern used for it. “We were interested in seeing the base.”

  The agent behind the desk gestured ironically. “You’re here. Though you should probably go to the main atrium and start there. Around outside to the right, or I suppose you could go through the back way.” He waved toward the opening of a hallway behind him. “Head down this way and look for the blue signs.”

  Agna gave him a gracious nod. “Thank you.”

  The wood-floored hallway murmured with voices and distant footsteps. Side hallways led to examination rooms and sickrooms, labeled with tidy green signs. Ahead, the hallway ended at an intersection, also annotated by signs: Offices, in blue; School, in red. Agna and Keifon took the turn toward the offices.

  The base in Vertal was an administrative hub and a dispatching center at its heart, housing agents as they came into the country and deciding what to do with the army of hands and minds at the Union’s disposal. The Wildern base was a center of at least two of the Benevolent Union’s true missions: education and medical aid. The Vertal base thought; the Wildern base acted. It was, Agna admitted, kind of exciting, despite its isolation. And as a building, it was beautiful – well-ordered and modern inside, harmonizing with its surroundings outside.

  Wildern was a charming backwater, as far as she’d seen, but the Benevolent Union had begun to revive it into something more promising than Laketon had been. The base had drawn more commerce to the area to support the agents who had moved here to teach and heal. The locals bragged about their tiny storefront library and the new construction at the edges of town. Wildern was small, but it was growing.

  The hallway gave onto an atrium, where the receiving staff oversaw the comings and goings of the base. From there, two polished wooden staircases angled up to a second-floor overlook. Keifon drifted toward the central desk, picking up the pamphlets on display. Agna drew closer to the paintings on the walls. She didn’t recognize the artists. Most were idealized, fanciful depictions of the northwestern Kaveran countryside, with the unrealistic contrast and intensity of color that had been in fashion in Kavera for the last several years. It was a well-curated collection, fitting the location and function of the building – a flagship project in such a small town could be expected to promote some local pride.

  The largest painting, in the angle between the two staircases, was a more typical depiction in oils of a posed crowd of people. Agna perused it in turn. Half a dozen Kaverans were arrayed on one of the same staircases that loomed over her head. Most held tools, or carried them hooked into their belts – hammers and hand saws and so on. The last, leaning casually against the banister, wore a suit of more fashionable cut and a meticulously clipped beard. And beside him –

  Agna froze. One was not a Kaveran; his skin was too dark, even for the rest of the sun-browned group. His hair was cut short – he hadn’t grown it back out – and his shoulders and arms had filled out with more muscle. He was not wearing the green cloak, though she could see the sword belt slung around his hips. The sword itself was hidden behind the well-dressed man next to him, but she knew what it would have looked like, and she knew its name. Satri. “Unity” in Alhara, the language of the Islands.

  Someone had approached her. “Are you all right?” Keifon tracked her gaze to the painting. He read the title plaque aloud – something about the dedication of the building.

  Agna remembered how t
o read. A larger plaque below the painting said Wildern Base Dedication. Aines Shora, Project Head. Construction Lead Team... She skimmed the unfamiliar names and titles, to the bottom. She reached out for the raised bronze lettering, because she needed to touch something to anchor herself to the world, and her lifelong indoctrination would not allow her to touch a painting on display.

  Rone Sidduji.

  “It’s him,” she whispered. “The – the Islander, there, on the right. That’s Rone.”

  “...I see.” He did not ask questions, did not ask why a sworn shrine guardian would show up in a painting of a construction team in some Kaveran backwater. She didn’t have answers. She could spin theories about collaborations between the Church and the Benevolent Union; she could concoct stories about secret shipments of supplies, attacks from brigands, or evil rival architects. But the truth was that she simply didn’t know. She didn’t know why Rone had been here, because he wouldn’t say.

  Keifon cleared his throat. “He’s, uh. A nice-looking fellow.”

  The incongruity broke Agna’s trance, and she laughed, stuffing her wrist against her mouth. Keifon half-turned as though making sure that no one had heard them, and his bearing tightened as one of the base’s agents approached them.

  “That’s the team that built this base,” the agent said, in a calm, cultured voice, laden with pride. Agna turned, and flicked a look at the painting. He was well-dressed, with gray-frosted hair and a meticulously clipped beard. He was the last agent, standing next to Rone in the painting.

  “I know him,” Agna blurted. She waved vaguely behind her. “Rone Sidduji. We – we went to the Academy together.”

  The agent’s face softened, smiling with something very much like nostalgia. “Ahhhh, lovely. I admit that he was my favorite of Weston’s team.” He joined his hands behind his back, gazing into the painting. His smile was almost dreamy. Agna’s heart raced. Rone had always gathered admirers behind him, but they had always been other students.