Halwen’s bandage glowed when she unwound it.
Only faintly.
A pale line appeared beneath her fingers and faded as the cloth lifted from Aoi’s shoulder.
I leaned forward.
“What was that?”
“A dressing.”
“The light.”
“Spent treatment.”
“What treatment?”
Halwen looked toward the door.
I recognized a physician deciding whether an assistant had become less useful than an empty room.
Aoi intervened.
“I saw it too.”
“That,” Halwen said, “is unfortunate.”
She set the old bandage in a bowl.
“The infirmary maintains a recognized treatment station. Certain dressings benefit from the Crown’s Healer’s Hand.”
“A skill belonging to the King?”
“To the kingdom.”
She washed her hands.
“The distinction matters when one dies.”
I looked at the bandage again.
It resembled ordinary cloth.
“How much does it help?”
“A little.”
“How little?”
“Enough that I would prefer not to do without it.”
She pressed two fingers beneath Aoi’s ribs.
Aoi’s breath stopped.
Halwen waited.
Then moved her hand.
“Still tender. No drills. No lifting. No sudden declarations of being recovered.”
“I wasn’t going to--”
“You were preparing the expression.”
I found myself enjoying that.
Aoi saw.
Her eyes narrowed.
I became interested in the window.
The boy waiting outside the infirmary had burned his hand.
He stood beside his father with his wrist held carefully away from his body. A kettle had tipped in the kitchen. The skin across his fingers was red and rising.
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Halwen took one look and brought him inside.
His father stayed near the door.
“We can pay some,” he said.
“Then pay some,” Halwen answered. “Later.”
She cooled the hand.
Aoi shifted on the bed to make space for the boy to sit.
I held the water basin.
The boy watched me.
“Are you the king?”
“I have been accused.”
“Mother says you’re in charge of the beans.”
“An important department.”
He considered this.
“Can you stop putting the skins in?”
“I shall convene an inquiry.”
Aoi turned her face away.
Halwen reached for the folded dressings.
Then stopped.
There were three left.
She looked at the boy’s hand, opened a drawer, and took out ordinary linen instead.
The father saw it.
“That other kind,” he said. “Could he--”
“This will cover it.”
“But the other--”
“I have three crown dressings. I have a man upstairs with an infected leg and a woman who tore badly in childbirth. Your son’s hand is painful. It is not deep.”
The father looked at the cupboard.
I could see the argument assembling.
He wanted the better thing for his child. Explaining allocation would not make the wanting smaller.
Halwen put the dressing within reach.
“Hold his arm steady.”
He did.
The boy cried while she wrapped it.
When they left, I asked whether the limitation was citizenship.
Halwen frowned.
“What?”
“Who receives the benefit.”
“Not for these. This working recognizes the treatment station and qualified care. The cloth is prepared here. Some workings follow citizenship. This one doesn’t.”
“And preparation takes time.”
“And materials. And my mana. And clean water. And a clerk willing to renew our registration when he has more interesting things on his desk.”
She began washing the bowl.
“If you are about to ask whether magic eliminates washing, the answer is no.”
I had been about to ask something else.
I said nothing.
She did not need the encouragement.
In the afternoon, Orra sent me to inspect the old bathhouse.
I had begun to understand that accepting authority made one unusually available for unpleasant errands.
The bathhouse stood against the inner wall. Its roof sagged. A tub the size of a small pond occupied most of the floor.
No one had heated it in months.
“Wood,” Orra said when I asked why.
We stood in the doorway while rain dripped through a hole above the furnace.
“The crown working reduces heat loss,” she continued. “Doesn’t start a fire for us.”
“Another national benefit.”
“You’ve discovered those.”
“Recently.”
She looked at me.
I waited.
“No,” she said at last. “I’m too busy.”
“For what?”
“The questions that raises.”
She pointed to the roof.
“Can your new labor register spare two people?”
“Depending on whether you want them fed.”
“Yes.”
“Then I shall negotiate with the provisioner.”
“Tell him I find him expensive.”
I wrote down the repair.
From the wall above us, a soldier called for the gate to be opened.
A handcart stood outside.
A man and woman waited beside it with three rolled blankets and a cage containing a furious chicken.
Orra went to speak to them.
I remained by the bathhouse, watching rain fall through the roof of a building the kingdom was still helping to keep warm.
It was a more complicated form of abandonment than I had expected.
Aoi walked to the kitchen that evening.
With help.
She insisted the help was temporary and therefore not worth mentioning.
I carried her bowl back while she leaned on the wall.
“You learned something,” she said.
“Several things. Most involved roofs.”
“About the blessings.”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“If this district left the kingdom, some of them might stop.”
“Would they?”
“I don’t know which ones. Or when.”
Aoi took a careful step.
“So ask before you make a country.”
“I had not scheduled it for tomorrow.”
“You’ve got that face.”
“I possess only the one.”
“The planning face.”
We stopped beside the well.
Aoi was breathing harder than she wanted me to notice.
I looked toward the kitchen rather than at her.
Beyond it, the boy with the burned hand sat on a stool while his father cut bread into pieces.
“Four months,” she said after a while.
I turned.
“I let people wrap me in things, give me medicine, teach me skills. Half the time I didn’t ask how it worked because I was tired.”
“You had reasons.”
“So do all these people.”
She nodded toward the courtyard.
“If you change whose country this is, you’ll be changing things they don’t even know they rely on.”
“I understand.”
“I know you understand the sentence.”
The distinction was irritating.
I kept it.
We resumed walking.
At the infirmary door, Aoi took her bowl from me.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “Berden.”
“Yes.”
“And eat breakfast first.”
“Why?”
“You become particularly unbearable when you’re hungry.”
“A remarkable diagnostic achievement. Halwen must be delighted to have an apprentice.”
Aoi shut the door in my face.
Not hard.
Hard enough.