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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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"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?"

"She's very nice... she's from London. She's got a group of children in her world that she takes care of--they've all got nobody else, so they look out for each other. We're going to be learning proper medicine together, so we can help people."

Sandry grins.

"I think that is quite admirable," she says with a very noble nod.

She wants to do things to help people as well. Possibly with her magic. As soon as she figures out what that might be.

"I don't know how it is in your world, but in mine... in our thirteenth year we are given apprenticeships, and those are the jobs we do for the rest of our lives. If I can't be a priest anymore, the least I can do is try to be a healer again. Most of it, we were taught, is listening to people, and making them feel comfortable."

It's never easy, when the job you thought you'd spend the rest of your life at no longer exists. But he's determined to find something.

"It's like that in some places in my world. Mostly in families of craftsmen or merchants. But not all do things that way."

Sandry herself was born to nobility. Good for naught but to be waited on and to marry. That was what she had heard someone say once.

She doesn't quite know what she is to spend the rest of her life doing, but she is determined that there will be more to it than that.

"Do you want to be a healer again?"

"I think so, yes. I don't know what else I'd be good at--most other jobs we have take a lot of training, and I'm too old to go for training again. I'd probably be best off doing what I already know."

And maybe, just maybe, if he tries very hard, he'll be able to develop proper healing powers. It's not likely, with how his other powers have been fading, but if he can only find the answer... he still has hope.

"You never know. You might find something that you're good at and like better. Something you might not have thought of before."

"I certainly never expected to have thread magic."

"There's the Council, but I don't think I have the patience to make that my job for the rest of my life. Beyond that... maybe my place is in here."

He takes a bite of cake.

"Were you going to do something different, before you discovered your magic?"

"There must be some reason why people find this place." A door to another world can't be simply a random occurence.

Sandry fiddles idly with the end of the silk thread, which has wrapped itself around her forefinger.

"I never really thought about it before," she admits. "My parents were nobles. I suppose I always just thought I would...be a noble."

Not a grand aspiration when put like that, but it was all that Sandry had been raised to know.

"I never thought I would be a mage. People who have magic generally show signs of it when they're much younger than I am."