Mum and Dad didn’t seem to mind working all night. They were also busy trying to get Kel signed up to apprentice to this speaker named Jwell who was even more stuck on himself than usual and Kel was pretty dismal about it.
It was kind of depressing because of the three of us I’m the only one who wouldn’t have minded the training I was due for. Although it wasn’t exactly a wizard I wanted to be. I had this fat-headed idea that I wanted to be a healer. It takes a lot of work to learn and then nobody wants to know you after they find out what you do for a living. Nobody’s supposed to get sick. And if you do it’s probably your fault. And then it’s a huge loss of face to admit you don’t seem to be getting better on your own and need help. But everybody gets sick, and almost everybody at some point has to go to a wizard who admits doing healing (not all of them will; it’s rough being a social exile), so pretty much nobody will risk saying any more than ʺgood dayʺ to a known healer for fear someone will see and draw the wrong conclusions.
Injuries are even worse than getting sick. Injuries, unless you got them in battle, mean you’re a careless slob. Before the king made duels illegal about a hundred years ago, there were a lot more duels than were fought, if you follow me, so people had an excuse for having hurt themselves (ʺAnd you should see the other guy!ʺ). But real duels also killed a lot of people, so it was a good thing the king forbade them.
The only healers that make any money are the smoothers—the ones that make the evidence go away, the scars and so on. But they’re not respectable. You don’t invite them to dinner or encourage them to marry into the family. Even soldiers don’t go to smoothers, although they wear their medals and duty badges outside their clothes so everyone knows they’re soldiers. My dad is a seriously good carpenter, and a smoother once tried to interest him in making artificial limbs. A really good smoother can give a wooden arm or leg some movement like a real one, but the fake one has to be nearly perfect. Working with a clever smoother would have meant more money, but my dad wasn’t interested. My parents are nothing if not respectable.
Since I was always bumping into things, maybe that’s why I had some sympathy for the careless slobs of the world. Every mother (and most fathers) knows about gimpweed for bruises. Nobody’s going to advertise that they might need it by growing it in their own garden but you can find it near the edges of any deciduous forest. I used to pick it when I saw it as a kind of charm against bruising and I think it must work because I don’t have nearly as many bruises as I should for all the running into things I do. It also means that I can kind of slip a stem or two to anyone I can see needs it and because I’m only a clumsy kid and no threat to their dignity they mostly let me. One or two of the mothers in the village have even told me that it seemed to work better when it came from me but I knew that was just them feeling sorry for me. Or too busy to go find some themselves. I did tell them that they didn’t have to say that, I was happy to let them have some any time.
Our village did have a wizard, an all-sorts wizard, which is to say she did a little bit of everything. Most all-sorts aren’t very good at anything but she was good at almost everything, good enough that if she told you she didn’t feel like doing something you believed that she didn’t feel like it and it wasn’t that she couldn’t. Nobody could understand why she stayed here in Birchhome. She’d come when I was three or four and she was still here. She could get you or your parcel somewhere faster or easier than a horse or a messenger could, if dragons made you nervous. Her love philtres were so good that she had an almost equally good business in antidoting her own philtres, and if you needed a few words to say over your new house or your pregnant wife or sister or your winter solstice party when you really needed a better year next year, she’d give you some weird little verse that didn’t look like much but that you could feel thunk into place when you said it out loud.
She’d made Dad one of her verses the year his workshop burnt down (he and the cat got out but nothing else did). He was standing in the framed-out door for the new shop, which didn’t even have walls yet, and he was afraid we were going to run out of money before the walls got built, and Mum was mad at him for spending money on the verse. So it wasn’t a great atmosphere for any charm with Mum standing there throbbing with annoyance, and Dad was so tired and discouraged he couldn’t even straighten up properly and he read the words in such a low mutter you could barely hear them.
And then there was this really strange pause that didn’t seem to have anything to do with time, and you could feel something like a big wet fog of discouragement roll itself up and go away, and then Dad straightened up and Mum sort of got shorter as the anger drained out of her, and they looked round and smiled at each other, so then Dag and Kel and I did too.
But what I really liked about our wizard is that she also did healing, and she did it like it was no big deal. Wizards, even all-sorts, are really conscious of their dignity, aside from worrying about whether anyone will ever talk to them again if it gets out that they do healing or that they don’t make you beg for it first. Maybe they make a big fuss about dignity because they’re only third on the list after dragonriders and spiritspeakers.
Ralas lived a little outside of the village, which made it easier to sneak off there and ask about your chilblains or your old dad’s cough or whatever. I should know because I did—sneak off to ask her things I mean—some of the mums that asked me for gimpweed asked me about other stuff too, and if I didn’t know, I asked Ralas. She never seemed to mind, and she always told me anything I could use, that I could pass on. She always seemed pleased to do it too. She liked helping people. Wizard training is supposed to make you want to help people if you aren’t that way to begin with but I bet she didn’t have to be taught to want to. And she never made me feel like a dumb clumsy kid when she said she’d have to see someone herself, that what was wrong sounded sort of complicated. And she never said ʺTell the old so-and-so to come here and pay my fee and stop trying to get it for free out of a kid.ʺ
Also although I’m really healthy, I have a sort of negative gift for finding sick hedgehogs and birds with broken wings and stuff, and I always brought them to her. A lot of them stayed on after they got better. So when I say ʺsneak offʺ you can sneak as much as you like but you won’t surprise her, because she’s got all these three-legged or bald or blind or somehow crooked-up creatures going squawk and squeal and chirp and yelp and so on, every time anyone comes near. And a lot of people did come to see her, people that weren’t from our village too, so it was pretty noisy out there a lot of the time.
Mum and Dad and I were at a craft fair once and a foogit pup got trod on by a horse. Nobody knew who the pup belonged to and it was lying there crying with its leg at a funny angle and all sort of mashed looking. Everybody stared the other way. Once the animal was damaged no one was going to claim it, not when everyone else could see, and it was near noon and the craft fair wouldn’t be over till sunset. It was weird somebody had brought it at all—it was way too young to be useful—and while foogits aren’t the brightest lamp at the festival, you don’t get wild foogit pups in the middles of craft fairs, so it must’ve belonged to somebody.
I asked someone where the town wizard lived, and I picked the pup up as carefully as I could—although it was amazingly good about this and sort of relaxed into me as if company was better than nothing—and went there. It was a grand house in the middle of town with stars painted all over it and a long fringe of charms hanging over the front door. It gave me the creeps—Ralas didn’t use any of that show-offy stuff—but it didn’t matter so long as he knew how to set broken bones. But whoever it was who answered the door wouldn’t let me in to trouble ʺthe master.ʺ I’d just managed to say, ʺHe has a broken—ʺ when Stoneface said, ʺThe master doesn’t deal with vermin,ʺ and shut the door. I’m not sure if he meant me or the pup. It’s true I hadn’t thought about how I was going to pay, but I don’t believe the door thug had got that far in his thinking either.