G17

The healer's name was Priya, and she arrived at the Iron Lotus Hermitage on a Tuesday morning in the third week of the four's residence there, and Arjun, who was in the middle of a cultivation exercise involving a significant quantity of focused fire-earth energy and a very large stone, promptly lost control of the stone. The stone dropped. Fortunately onto the practice floor and not onto anyone's foot, though it left a small crater in the packed earth that Chitragupta looked at with an expression of mild resignation. Priya did not notice the dropped stone. She was being greeted by the hermitage's senior healer, a serious older woman named Vimala-ji, in the manner of one professional welcoming another — with the efficient practicality of people who had a great deal to discuss and very little time to spend on formalities. She was perhaps eighteen. She was carrying a healer's pack that was, Arjun noticed with some part of his attention that he was unable to turn off, meticulously organised — the flaps closed with careful knots, the strap adjusted to minimise shoulder strain on the long walk in. She had the kind of dark eyes that looked at things properly, all the way at them, without sliding off. Her hair was in the practical braid of a working healer. She walked with the careful step of someone who was in the habit of noticing what she was walking on. She was, in short, completely unremarkable in any individual feature, and the combination of them produced in Arjun a sensation he had no reliable prior experience with, which was therefore extremely confusing. He picked up the stone. He replaced it. He resumed the cultivation exercise. He did not look at Priya again for the next thirty minutes. This was, he later reflected, the most sustained effort of concentration he had managed since arriving at the hermitage, and it was not directed at the stone. Priya was not a mark-bearer. She was a travelling healer — one of the wandering medical practitioners who moved between villages and communities too small or too poor to have permanent healers, carrying their skills and supplies across distances that more settled practitioners did not cover. Vimala-ji had apparently known her family; the connection that had brought her to the hermitage was one of those practical professional networks that healers maintained with the same care that merchants maintained supply chains. She was staying for two weeks. She would share the healing work with Vimala-ji, replenish some of her herb stocks from the hermitage's extensive gardens, and then continue south. Kiran, who was the only one of the four with any obvious claim to professional overlap with Priya, spoke with her on the first afternoon about medicinal preparations. Arjun watched this conversation from approximately thirty feet away, while ostensibly attending to his cultivation practice, and was annoyed to find that he was paying more attention to the conversation than to the cultivation practice. Kiran, who noticed things, noticed this. He said nothing. He was kind. The first time Arjun and Priya spoke directly was on the fourth day of her residence, at the evening meal. It was not a planned conversation — he sat down at the eating platform with his food, and she was already there, and the social conventions of a shared table meant that the absence of conversation would itself be a kind of statement. So he said something ordinary about the food, and she said something ordinary back, and they ate in the companionable quiet of people who are comfortable with silence. Then she said, without apparent premeditation: 'Your left shoulder. You're favouring it.' He looked at her. 'I'm not.' 'You are. Slightly. You've been compensating for three days.' She had the direct, unpretentious way of speaking that Arjun was accustomed to from people who spent most of their time addressing practical problems. 'Old injury?' 'Practice spar. Last week. It's nothing.' 'Probably a strained rotator — the muscle group here.' She indicated, with a small gesture that was professional and entirely matter-of-fact, the relevant area. 'If you keep compensating, the compensation becomes its own problem. The body builds muscle memory around the guard.' She paused. 'I can look at it, if you want. Takes ten minutes.' Arjun looked at her. He thought several things in rapid succession, none of which he said. 'All right,' he said. The ten minutes happened after dinner, in the small treatment room adjacent to the herb storage, in the manner of any healer examining any patient — entirely practical, professional, with Priya's hands finding the relevant muscle with the efficiency of someone who had done this a hundred times, and Arjun sitting very still and breathing very carefully. 'There,' she said, finding a tight point. 'Feel that?' 'Yes.' 'You need to stop using that arm in the overhead pressing motion for four days. And I'll give you a salve.' She released the point and made a small note in the battered journal she carried. 'You cultivators are all the same — you feel the energy so acutely that you stop feeling the ordinary body.' 'That's not entirely inaccurate,' Arjun admitted. She glanced at his hand — the amber mark, which had become a constant presence he'd largely stopped noticing. 'Does it hurt?' 'The mark? No. It's warm sometimes.' 'Hmm.' She did not ask more, which he appreciated. Many people, encountering the marks for the first time, became either reverent or frightened or intensely curious in ways that were exhausting to navigate. Priya simply catalogued it as information and moved on. 'Thank you,' he said, when she had finished. 'Don't use the arm overhead. Four days.' She was capping her salve jar, not looking at him. 'And if you're going to keep training at the intensity I can see you training at, come back and let someone check you before problems compound. Healers are for prevention, not just repair.' He stood. Then, because something in him required it to be acknowledged in some form: 'You're very good at this.' She looked up from the salve jar. For a moment, in the lamp-lit room, she looked at him directly — all the way at him, the way her eyes did things. 'Yes,' she said simply. 'I know.' He went back to the dormitory. He lay on his mat and looked at the ceiling for a while. In the bunk across from him, Kiran's voice came out of the darkness, very quietly: 'Four days without the overhead press. The shoulder will be fine.' Arjun stared at the ceiling. 'Go to sleep, Kiran.' 'I'm just saying—' 'Go to sleep.' Silence. Then, from the darkness: 'She's very competent.' Arjun put his arm over his eyes. The amber mark pulsed, warm and steady, and paid no attention to his attempts to make it behave.