"Yes, he found me."
"You must be very important to him if he left his patients to search for you," said Alethia. "You didn't—?"
"We didn't see each other."
"But he risked it," Alethia said in a peculiar tone, and tried to Read Melissa. But her poor powers could not penetrate the barrier Melissa felt around her reactions to the meeting at the pier—a barrier hiding something Melissa herself was not sure she understood.
The little boy could not stay out in the sun for long; soon his mother gathered up the protesting child, and both women went up to the cottage. Melissa helped cut up vegetables for dinner, while she and Alethia laughed over memories of hiding from the cook at the Academy when it was their turn to wash dishes, and how they had cajoled extra sweets out of her. Melissa's sorrow dissipated. She never did get around to crying on Alethia's shoulder.
Rodrigo arrived home smelling of salt air and fish, kissed his wife and son openly, and went apologetically off to the public bath so as to be presentable for dinner. Melissa was hard-put to account for Alethia's infatuation; her husband was quite ordinary in appearance, hardly taller than she was, slightly overweight, hair faded from salt and sun, eyes disappearing into leathery wrinkles that marked the man of the sea.
But when he returned, clean and dressed in a fresh tunic, she Read the rapport between husband and wife—and the deep, abiding love beneath it. Physical appearance was nothing to them; their minds met and twined in an endless dance. Their powers might be small, but they were beautiful—and for the first time in her life, Melissa felt left out of a gathering of Readers.
She returned to the hospital that evening, her mind at ease. Spending hours in the presence of people living life fully, caring for their child and awaiting the next with joyful anticipation, Melissa had lost her gloom. She would work toward positive solutions—and that meant first doing so well in her medical training that she would be chosen to stay here at the hospital. She would complete her training, and then devote her life to finding a way to prevent the infection that had killed her patient.
Before she could even begin, however, she was faced with another hopeless patient—and this time it was Alethia's little tow-headed son. Now, as Melissa left the sickroom to find Alethia, she was still Reading Primus. She had insisted Alethia lie down in her own room, promising to call her if anything happened… but she could not merely Read for the mother now. She would have to hold her friend as she told her the truth. They had to attempt surgery.
Alethia, though, was sound asleep on Melissa's bed. The strain of her child's illness along with her advancing pregnancy had finally exhausted her. Perhaps it would be best if-she didn't know when they took her son into surgery. She certainly needed the rest. Melissa tiptoed away, and returned to Primus' side, trying to judge the moment when she could have no more hope that the medicines would take hold, but before there was danger of the appendix rupturing.
Jason was wrong. I wasn't born to be a healer. He should have known when I couldn't learn advanced Reading.
After her earlier patient had died, Melissa had driven herself to perfect her surgical skills, becoming fanatical about boiling everything in the sickroom, not just the surgical tools, attempting techniques to keep incisions as small as possible and to shorten the time the patient was exposed. But medical skills were not all she was here to learn.
She was expected to continue her lessons in Reading—and those did not go well at all. She had barely managed to learn to leave her body behind while her «self» went out of body. She hated the feeling, fearful that she would lose herself, never to return to the physical. And she was completely incapable of leaving the simple plane in which another Reader might perceive her for one of the planes of privacy. She must learn to do that before she could become a Magister Reader, and be safe from being married off as Alethia had been.
She saw Alethia often, and knew that there was absolutely no pretense to her friend's happiness. She began to understand more clearly the joy of Readers united both mentally and physically, and sometimes—especially when she had failed again at one of her Reading tests—she thought she might not mind being married off… if it were to the right man.
Facing surgery on Alethia's son, she almost wished that she had been failed by now, and thus could avoid this responsibility. Hers were the best techniques anyone had for abdominal surgery; she could not ask another surgeon to perform the operation or she would be denying the child his best chance to survive, small as that chance was.
It was time, Melissa decided. She sent an aide she trusted to scrub the child with the precious soap smuggled in from the savage lands while the authorities looked the other way.
She supervised the preparation of the surgery herself, the swabbing of the table with alcohol, the boiling of the instruments. She and her assistants scrubbed themselves with soap and rinsed their hands in alcohol—but it was not enough. Their hands were where the infection clung, in their pores, to sweat out as they worked. And they could not boil their hands.
Primus was brought in, drugged with opiates. He was unconscious, his pain gone for the first time in days. Melissa breathed a prayer to the gods to assist her. She worked rapidly but thoroughly, Reading to be sure she cut out every bit of infection, and sewed up the wound with greatest care. Then she just stood there, wishing, willing, that the wound remain clean. She concentrated so hard that her Reading blanked out for a moment, and she became dizzy. But that would accomplish nothing. There was nothing to do but wait.
Alethia woke to the news that the surgery had been done. She sat by her son all night, while Melissa slept only fitfully. In the morning Primus was awake and crying at pains in his abdomen, but they were only gas, and Melissa did not want to drug him again. The herbalist gave him tea, and they placed fresh compresses over the incision. It was still too early to know what organisms might be breeding in the child's intestine—but Melissa could not Read anything that seemed dangerous. She slowly let hope creep up on her. As the hours passed, her hopes grew. The second morning Primus asked for breakfast—and hope became certainty.
Melissa asked Magister Jason to Read Primus before she would believe it—but the boy was healing. There was no infection. She turned to Alethia, who had been Reading with them, and the two women embraced, tears running down their faces. "Oh, Melissa," Alethia sobbed, "how can I ever thank you? No one else could have saved my little boy." And for a moment Melissa felt as if Magister Jason's arms were around her, too.
The next morning she was called for the first time into one of the privacy rooms. The screen was set up—Magister Jason wanted to talk with her.
"Melissa, yesterday I was so proud of you that I went to Master Florian to recommend that we keep you here at the hospital. I have never seen a healer progress so rapidly! You have more than a year to study; by the time you finish, there will not be a more skillful surgeon in the empire."
"Thank you, Magister," she said, blushing under his praise… but something in his voice warned her that he had not called this conference to congratulate her.
He sighed, part sorrow, part exasperation. "Do you know what Master Florian told me?"
"Probably that my Reading skills are not progressing as they should." She wished she could see him, and resisted the temptation to Read through the screen.
"You have made almost no progress since you came here. Soon you must go on to the healing of minds rather than bodies—and you cannot do that if you have not advanced much further. We should not be using this clumsy apparatus—by this time you should achieve the plane of privacy with ease. I am removing you from hospital duty three mornings each week. You will spend that time improving your Reading."