Page 3 of A Healer's Wrath

The Master spent the next hour pulling one bottle after another off the shelves, hiding the labels, and asking me to identify the contents by look and smell. He occasionally lifted a metal instrument and asked its name or use.

If I closed my eyes, I could imagine the pudgy man to be my mother, as she often played the same game before opening her doors to patients. By the time I was seven or eight summers old, I could name every unction and ointment in her care.

By the time the Master had exhausted the final bottle, any nervousness I’d felt earlier in the day had drifted away. His tests were easy compared to the daily drilling I received at home.

Then Rist asked a question that left my mouth agape.

“How would you use magic to assist in healing?” He adjusted his spectacles and waited .

“I, uh, I wouldn’t . . . sir.”

He lifted his brows. “And why not?”

“Well, Master, I don’t have any magic.”

He glared so long I began to fidget beneath his gaze. Then he stepped forward and held out his meaty palm. “Give me your hand.”

The jumble of nerves I thought long settled decided to dance a jig in my chest as my slender fingers fell against his.

He laid his other hand atop mine and closed his eyes.

If he’d had a golden collar, I might have thought he was using magic to search for something. It looked like what I had seen Mages do when they visited the capital seeking the rare few who might have been born with magical abilities.

In all the times we had watched them test in public, never once had a Mage discovered another of their own.

Master Rist was not one of them.

His eyes opened, and he gave me a fatherly smile. “I feel nothing, child—not that I expected to. Spirits, I am not even sure what I thought I might feel, having no magic myself.”

“Then why try to find it in me?”

He chuckled, sounding more like the rumbling of a blacksmith’s bellows waking from a winter’s slumber. “Because I am a foolish old man.”

He patted my hand and stepped back.

“Right, then, no magic. Such a shame, especially for one with your gift of intellect.”

My head lowered, as though I’d just failed one of his tests.

Rist’s voice softened as he asked, “Why do you want to study healing?”

I looked up and studied his eyes. Of all the questions he asked that day, that was the one that surprised me. It seemed so simple, so obvious; and yet, asked aloud, it loomed overhead like a specter threatening to envelop and consume.

“Because . . . I want to help people . . . like my parents.”

He nodded. “And how would you like to help people?”

“Healers make people feel better. They take away aches and pains. They give people happiness. No one makes people smile like Father. I want to give them that, to give people their smiles back.”

He stared for another eternity, then his lips curled and he nodded, as if deciding something. Then the old man turned and stepped toward the door. As his hand found the handle, he looked back and said, “If you study and apply yourself, you will be the best of us, Irina Santender. You mark my words.”

Chapter three

Irina

As a candidate for apprenticeship, I knew I should have been nervous about the Master’s probing of my knowledge. The amount of understanding required to earn a blue smock was daunting and required years, if not lifetimes, of study. I had never spent time with other apprentices, but Father said that, while many entered a Master’s service, few earned their smock. The success rate alone should have sparked fear in my young heart, but healing lived in our home. It was part of our lives and had been since I was old enough to speak my own name. Mother and Father had likely drilled years of training into my head without me even realizing it. The Master’s tests were simple by comparison to their ceaseless prodding.

Despite the advantage my parents afforded, I tried to answer with sincerity and humility, two traits Mother said were more important to a physiker than any potion or tool. Was I proud of my knowledge? Did I enjoy confounding the Master and his questions? Absolutely, yet I also knew enough to understand just how little I understood.

---