Four years later:
Humble Scholar Doctor Pinadarya dal Faladun frowned in concentration as her fingers moved through the strokes that formed the Knife of the Fire, one of the mystery sigils of Saint Zhepin. She had spent the better part of a year learning it from the monks of Saint Zhepin in their isolated temples on the Thousand Isles and had practiced it hundreds of times on the enormous fleshy leaves of the ewer plant that grew moss-like on the damp stones of the island cliffs.
But it was a different matter to ensoul the Knife of the Fire on a living person. Leaves picked from the cliffside did not bleed. They also did not risk dying if Pinadarya wasn’t quick, or sure, or precise.
She reminded herself that it was a simple choice between maybe-life and certain death. If she did nothing, her patient would die as surely as if she made a mistake with her sigil.
Nearly five years spent on the battlefields of Lebran during the war should have accustomed her to equations such as these. Except that wounded soldiers were not usually accompanied by a distraught young husband who wrung his hands and sobbed at her to do anything, anything, anything at all to save his soulbonded who had found himself the wrong way under a fallen tree.
Pinadarya had been careful not to make any promises. Of all the organs, an injured liver was one of the most unforgiving. Already the patient’s bruised abdomen was extended and hardening from the blood pooling inside. But if she could just find the correct vessels to cauterise with the Knife of the Fire without at the same time cutting into some other vitally important bit…
There. The sigil was complete.
Pinadarya took a steadying breath and cast the sigil as she exhaled. She pressed her right hand flat on the sedated young man’s skin, right above his liver, and said a silent prayer to Nur the Many-Eyed and Saint Nezear to guide it. With her senses sunk deep into contemplation and guided by her instruments, she had been able to discern the main points of internal bleeding from the disrupted flow of ethem, life force, but it was not as if she could exactly see what she was doing.
The moment she felt the sigil take, she gripped her lodestone with her other hand. Ensouling the Goddess’s Eternal Breath through a sigil meant transforming one kind of ethem into another. There were always some dissipation during the process that had to be grounded.
“Did it work?” whispered her assistant.
Doctor Yelman was the resident physician of the Temple logging camp where Pinadarya had been called earlier that day in great emergency and with much undignified bowing and scraping to her reputation and experience during the war. At five foot two, Pinadarya was of perfectly average height for a Vallenese female, but no one would ever call her physically imposing. Yet Doctor Yelman all but cowered before her. It was unbecoming. Not to mention annoying.
Pinadarya took up her luminary and gently placed the smooth crystal on the patient’s abdomen. She closed her eyes. Some things were better felt when you denied yourself reliance on ways of looking you took for granted. She considered the patient’s ethem: depleted, flowing weakly — but no longer in the turmoil of an uncontrollably bleeding wound. The Knife of the Fire had found its target.
“Do you want me to take over the rest?” Doctor Yelman asked tentatively. “You seem… exhausted.”
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“I’m used to it,” Pinadarya said shortly. “You can go tell his husband that he will very likely live.”
*
Back at her lodgings late that afternoon, Pinadarya collapsed on her bed. Her landlady had taken one look at Pinadarya staggering through the door and had immediately sent for food. Pinadarya was starving, as she always was after extensive work of the kind she’d just done. She just didn’t know how she was going to muster the energy to eat.
Making an incision to drain the blood pooled inside her patient’s abdomen had been easy enough, but then she had spent the next two hours doing balancing therapy, carefully shifting ethem to strengthen that of her patient’s while coaxing his own to recover.
And, yes, Doctor Yelman could very well have done it. Not as well as Pinadarya, to be sure, but more than well enough. Why hadn’t she just let him?
She scrubbed her fingers through her chestnut curls and scowled at the water-stained ceiling of the rundown but scrupulously clean room.
You use exhaustion to punish yourself, Noble Servant Humyang of Saint Zhepin had told her. For a failure that exists only in your mind. It is as imaginary as your belief that punishment will solve anything.
Even now, years after Pinadarya had left the misty, muggy Thousand Isles and the sanctuary of its temples, Humyang’s words made her fume. The fact that they had been said, as everything Humyang said, in a soft, motherly tone, the old priest’s face crinkling with kindness and compassion, just made them even more infuriating.
What did Humyang know? What could she know? In eighty years she had not left her island even once. If not for her fondness of Vallenese sesame puffs, she might as well have been oblivious that there even was a world beyond the green jungle-quiet that surrounded her ancient temple.
What could she know? Of war, and of loss, and of failure?
Pinadarya had left the Isles not long afterwards. There had been sadness and understanding in Humyang’s eyes as she gave Pinadarya her final blessing. It had made Pinadarya only angrier. She wished now she had left on better terms. She wished many things.
The knock at her door was a welcome distraction. Even more welcome was the tray of food that followed it. Steamed bean buns, a thick vegetable country soup, curried tofu, pickles and rice.
“You have a letter,” her landlady said, nodding towards the thick envelope tucked into the side of the food tray.
Pinadarya looked askance at the University seal on top of the thick, expensive paper, and stopped herself from grimacing. “Thank you.”
She closed the door on the landlady’s disappointed curiosity. Before eating, she scrubbed her hands with the guava leaf soap she always carried. On the back of her right hand, the sigil of Saint Nezear was a bright, living silver-white, recently re-ensouled at one of the shrines of her patron saint. In the palm of her left hand, a soulbond sigil was fading. Soon, it would be gone entirely.
Pinadarya closed her hand on the sigil, and on any thoughts of the bearer of its twin. Despite her rumbling stomach, she paused to ensoul the prayer-sigil of the Open Hand over the tray of food. It was not common practice outside of the military orders and the most pious of households, but she’d picked it up during her time in Lebran during the war, where the fear of enemy spies and collaborators was ever-present. Ingesting impure food would render a Sigilist forever incapable of ensouling, and it was not unheard of for the Carnifex Barslanders to undermine their enemy through tainted food.
But Pinadarya’s sigil glowed a pure bright white and, after muttering a perfunctory thanks to Khada, She who Provides, she tore into her meal.
It was only after two steamed buns, a bowl of rice and pickles and most of the tofu that she pulled the letter closer. She tore it open and, sipping her soup, flattened the paper on the table with one hand to read it.
A moment later she put her soup cup down so hard it spilled. Grabbing the letter with both hands, she read it again.
She was seething even before she was done. Oh, now all of a sudden they needed her? The sheer bloody nerve. The audacity. The affront. It was insulting that they would even think that after everything — everything! — she would happily and eagerly trot back to them with her tail wagging.
The expensive paper made a very satisfying flame in the little fireplace, helped by the generous wax of the ostentatious seal. There was a brief flare of colour from the ink, and that was that.
If the University wanted her back, if they truly wanted her, it was going to take much more than a letter.
