The Magic of Recluce - L. E. Modesitt [149]
“You sure we can do this?” Bostric asked yet again. Sawdust stuck to his forehead, glued in place by his sweat. For once, there was no mock-respect, no banter, and that told me that even he was worried.
I sighed. Doing the work was getting to be the least of my problems.
“Would anyone like some cold redberry?” interrupted Deirdre. “Allys had a little ice left over.”
I nodded, wiping my forehead again.
“I’ll take mine without ice,” Destrin whined.
“Ice, please,” Bostric added. “I need to cool off even more now.”
Both Deirdre and I ignored his added comment. Destrin hadn’t heard it.
Deirdre served me first, and I drained nearly all of it in one gulp, trying to cool off from too much warmth in the shop. Destrin was always cold, and while I could take the cold, adapting to too much heat was far harder.
Finally, I wiped my forehead again. “I’m taking a walk.”
Neither Destrin nor Bostric said a word.
“Will you be back by midday for dinner?” asked Deirdre from the stairs, where she had stopped.
“Probably. I just need some fresh air and to think a while.”
She nodded and was gone, her feet barely whispering up the steps.
After leaving the leather apron in my alcove and pulling on one of my two plain shirts, I stepped out onto the street.
Left or right? To the left lay the square. I turned right, taking a deep breath of the cooler outside air, avoiding a puddle that still remained from the rain the night before. The evening showers hadn’t been as bad as the ice and rain storm several days earlier, but for the past eight-day late spring fogs had clouded the streets in the early morning right after dawn. Just as winter had been late in leaving, so too spring had lingered.
Click…click…My boots rang on the stones as I ambled down the street of jewelers and around the corner into the wider street where the healers practiced.
Not all my time was spent in the shop, nor in cleaning the stable, nor riding Gairloch, nor in obtaining the woods from Brettel for our work. Besides my slow night-studies of order, and my cautious attempts at applying them in small and hidden ways—like creating stronger glues by working with the internal order of the broths—I also wandered through the streets of Fenard, just somehow trying to understand why it felt the way it did.
According to the book, feelings preceded understanding. I hoped the understanding didn’t lag too much, because I was definitely having worried feelings, particularly after having seen Antonin and Sephya entering the prefect’s palace.
Even recalling her gave me a chill, more so than seeing Antonin, or feeling him brushing me aside…or walking down the healers’ lane.
Each healer had a different sign.
Rentfrew—Disease Casting. That one was in white letters upon a red background, over a doorway that radiated, to my senses, a dull white-red.
I forced my feet not to cross to the other side of the pavement.
Clickedy…clack…clickedy…A black horse pulled an equally-black carriage away from an awning-covered doorway further up the street, heading away from me.
Healing. The letters were etched into white oak and painted green. No aura surrounded that doorway. Either simple physical medicine with herbs and the like, or a pretender—or both.
Another doorway bore only the sign of a snake twisted around a staff. Why, I had no idea.
A woman wearing a heavy cloak and a broad-brimmed dark-leather hat with a black veil glided from a doorway almost in front of me and back down the slanting pavement toward the street of jewelers. The odor of roses upon roses told me more of what she was even than the sickness buried within her—that disorder that had so wrenched my guts when first I had sensed it in such profusion when Bostric had led me into the street of harlots. Since then I had noted it within a woman peddling combs in the square, and even in a lady attached to