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sandry

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There's a young girl sitting in Milliways with a steaming mug of tea in her hands. With summer wearing on in Emelan, Milliways is a bit chilly by comparison. Enough to make her glad of the extra layers of black cambric she's wearing this evening, and even of the black veil covering her hair.

Sandry has spent the day visiting her great uncle at his citadel in Summersea. It's for this reason that she's wearing her fine mourning instead of a more comfortable dress. Duke Vedris is not the sort of man to fuss at her over her clothes, but Sandry knows that he appreciates his niece being turned out properly.

It had been a very nice visit, and Sandry looks happier than a child clad all in black should rightly look.

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"Some of them do."

Sandry takes a sip of her tea.

"A lot of mages--mostly the ones from Lightsbridge--work all sorts of magic. Lightsbridge is known for academic mages. Winding Circle works a bit differently."

Her knowledge of the differences is somewhat vague. She's mainly repeating what her teachers have told her.

"My friends and I have magic that only seems to work through certain things, though. Mine is with thread. Tris's is with the weather. Briar's is with plants. And Daja's is with metal."

"Ours is more... general. Everyone who can do it, they can do the same kind of things, but not everyone can do all of the things. We can sense other people's thoughts or feelings, or send our thoughts and feelings to others, that's the most basic level. Some of us can heal, some of us can help plants to grow, some of us can move things with sheer spirit. Small things, though. Only working together can any of us do bigger magic, and that hadn't happened for hundreds of years."

"Why not?" Sandry asks.

That doesn't seem like the sort of skill that people would want to lose, especially for centuries.

"Nobody knows for sure. I have a theory, though. It's all tied together with the troubles we had, and are still having. And why we don't have priests anymore. There was a... disagreement in ideology, and a group of people were imprisoned underground, secretly. Our people were divided, for hundreds of years. Each side was only half of the whole, and divided, our powers are much weaker."

He takes a sip of tea. "That's what I think, anyway."

Sandry's eyes have gone very wide.

"Imprisoned underground?" She looks fairly horrified.

"But why?"

"They..." He takes a deep breath. "Our ancestors came from Earth, many many years ago, after it had been destroyed by anger and violence."

Even now, after having told the story many times both in his world and here, the words are still hard to say, and he says them quietly, glancing around like someone might overhear him using obscenities.

"The people who came to our planet, they were some adult scientists and a lot of children. The scientists disagreed about whether the children should be told about the Earth and what had happened to it. One felt that if the children knew about violence, it would follow them. The other felt that the children had to be told, that they had to make a conscious decision to choose peace. But that one was very old, and he died, and his followers were the first prisoners."

Sandry's eyes have not gotten any less round.

She feels a hard knot of sympathy in her stomach for those prisoners. Being imprisoned under the ground sounds like a (literal) dark business. And Sandry and the dark have a tumultuous relationship.

"What happened to them? After they were put underground. They were just left there?"

"New people who got too close to the secret were put there too, and they stayed there, for hundreds of years. It got very crowded, and they couldn't get out, and food was scarce--they could only get what they could reach through the openings in the Root, which wasn't much, especially with so many people. But they took care of each other, and shared what they had. And then we freed them."

"That's terrible!" Sandry looks as righteously indignant as it's possible for an eleven year old girl to look.

Which is, to be fair, pretty indignant.

"Left there to starve--all over a silly disagreement?"

Her indignation, it should be noted, is not directed at Neric himself.

"How did you find out they were there, to free them?"

He doesn't look very happy about the situation either; only the fact that they had been freed makes it bearable.

"There was a girl--a few years younger than you are, I'd say--and they were going to eat her pet, because there was no food. So she ran away, and since she hadn't had much to eat in a very long time, she was small enough to fit through an opening in the Root, and we found her."

People have been driven to far worse things than eating pets in times of desperation. Sandry has seen it first hand.

She hastily draws the god's circle over her heart.

"Was she all right?"

"She was frightened, even more so when she saw us--we were priests, my friend and I, had the seal of the priests right here."

He taps his chest, where on his robes is currently the seal of the Council. "It was the priests who had locked her people away, so they were all afraid of us, and some of them hated us. But we took her to stay with my friend's family, and... would you believe, his sister had been very ill for a long time, with a sickness that had no cure, but being with the child from the other half of our people healed her?"

"With magic?"

Sandry fiddles idly with her drop spindle. She's used it so much in her meditation that just having it at hand is enough to make her feel calmer and more centered.

"The troubles you were talking about--they're from the prisoners now being freed?"

And now living among the people that some of them hate and fear. Sandry knows enough of politics to see where that could create problems.

"Not with magic. We'd tried healing her with magic, but nothing worked. The sickness--the wasting, people who had it just stopped eating or going to work or doing anything but drugging themselves with Berries and dreaming. They'd just fade away until they died... and there was nothing we could do about it. There were more and more cases of it every year."

He falls silent, staring intently down at his cup of tea. He'd lost both his parents that way, and it still hurts. It takes him a few moments to gather his thoughts again, and when he speaks, it is more quietly.

"Being with someone so different from herself, so full of life and feeling, brought her back from the edge of death. Just being together. They saved each other, and then they saved us all."

Sandry wonders if this sort of healing is the same as what she has experienced since moving to Winding Circle (and to Discipline Cottage in particular) with her teachers and friends and new skills to learn. Things that make one feel alive and interested in the world again.

"It sounds like an odd sort of disease," she says. Fever, pox, pain--those things were signs of sickness. Not dreaming.

"It's the only one we have, really. We cured all the others long ago, but that one eludes us. All we can do is hope that what worked for the children works for everyone... I think it will, but it takes time."

In a way he's almost glad he's not a healer anymore. It felt a bit like lying to people.

"What are diseases like in your world? Is there sickness, and injury?"

Sandry is quiet for a moment, her breathing shifting slightly. It's the sort of breathing that Niko had taught her and her friends during their meditation lessons; the sort that is meant to calm the mind.

Breathe deep. Hold for a moment. Breathe out.

"Of course," she says. "People get hurt--cut, bruised, break bones. And sickness, yes. Fevers, poisoned blood, lung sickness, poxes."

Breathe deep. Hold for a moment. Breathe out.

"Smallpox was very bad last fall."

He watches her, brow furrowing slightly. He doesn't seem to be doing well with his questions today.

"I am sorry to hear that, and I'm sorry if I reminded you of something unpleasant. I hope your people are doing better now?"

Sandry smiles with determined cheer.

"Well, being ill or hurt is never really pleasant, is it?"

"I was ill when I first came here. It wasn't pleasant at all, but I felt much better afterward--there's a sense of relief, a sense of being alive. I'd forgotten how that felt. Not being alive, but the feeling of really being alive, if that makes sense. It feels warm, and comfortable."

"Like you can't appreciate being well until you've been sick properly? I suppose that makes sense," Sandry says.

"What did you have?"

"I don't know what it was, but as soon as I came through the door, I felt like I was dying. But a man helped me, with some kind of magic, and I've been fine ever since."

A pause.

"Well, clumsy. Everything's heavier here than it is at home. But I can walk and I don't drop things as much anymore."

"How very strange."

Sandry's world has magic aplenty. But variations in gravity are quite another matter.

"People here are very kind though. Most of them seem willing to help if you have a problem."

"And you don't seem at all clumsy to me," she adds, reassuringly.

"Thank you." He smiles. "And yes... everyone I've met here has been very nice. Strange, compared to the people at home, but very nice all the same. Caring, helpful, curious--do you know Nancy?"

Sandry shakes her head.

"I haven't met anyone named Nancy. Who is she?"