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  Healer Sanje was an extremely tall woman, as tall as most men and certainly much taller than her father. She was also quite thin, with an oddly angular face, and slow, graceful movements, as if she thought out each movement carefully and choreographed it before executing it. Sanje’s eyes were an unsettling silver, her hair, jet-black. In her green Healer’s robes she was an unforgettable character.

  “Walk with me,” Sanje ordered, letting go of Abi’s chin, and making a tiny gesture to indicate Abi should walk alongside her. They left the examination room, moved down the hallway of the treatment and recovery wing of Healers’, and out into the herb garden. Sanje didn’t say a word the entire time, just glided along with her head tilted down slightly, as if she were meditating.

  The many scents of the herb garden tickled and teased Abi’s nose. Some people found it dull because most of the plants did not have big, showy flowers. She never had and actually preferred it to the formal gardens. They paced slowly between the beds of herbs, tending in the direction of Companion’s Field but taking little detours as Sanje paused to examine this plant or that.

  “Do you know what synesthesia is?” she asked, finally, when Abi was already a bit unnerved by the silence.

  “No,” Abi replied.

  “It’s a rare condition. I personally would not consider it a defect, but rather an enhancement of the senses. Some people experience two senses at once with a single stimulus, such as hearing a particular note and at the same time, seeing a particular color.” She hummed a note, and Abi was completely unsurprised to discover Sanje had a very good voice. “A person with synesthesia would hear that note, and see, say, the color blue at the same time. Another note, and instead of blue he would see yellow. More often, a person will see or experience particular letters or numbers as distinct colors. If you asked them how they saw the letter ‘A’ they might tell you it was red.”

  “Huh,” Abi said, thinking about it. “That must make listening to or reading anything a bit distracting until you get used to it.”

  “Which is why I am known for treating it,” Sanje said. “For some, especially those who are born with the condition, this is perfectly normal and enjoyable, and removing the ability would lessen their lives. For those who are older, for whom the condition has come on because of a head injury or illness, especially adults, it can be confusing and distressing to suddenly be able to taste shapes when you eat your food. I have had some success in removing the secondary sensations in people like that.” She glanced sideways at Abi and waited.

  Well, they want me to get this Gift under complete control, not get rid of it. So . . . “So they think you can give me synesthesia?” she hazarded. “So I can see stress in objects instead of just feeling it?”

  Sanje smiled broadly, a very catlike smile. “They told me you were clever. Good. I like clever people. Dull ones irritate me, especially those who expect to be told what to do, and if they are not told, do nothing, even when something that needs doing is right in front of them. Yes, that is what they would like me to do. I think it’s quite possible. I’d like to go farther than that, actually. I’m sure you realize that there is stress in anything that is not lying completely flat on the ground.”

  “Actually, there’s stress even in something like that, but it’s so weak it doesn’t matter,” Abi corrected.

  Sanje nodded. “I’d like to train you to the point where you can sense and see how and where that stress flows in everything rather than seeing only the intolerable stress that makes things break. But how do you feel about that?”

  She didn’t answer right away. If she was actually going to become a full Artificer, and not just a mystical-damage-detector . . . such a Gift would be very useful. She would not just be able to correct and direct the repairs of things that were breaking down, she’d be able to help build them right in the first place. The more she thought about that, the better she liked that idea. These past few days of study and classes had been opening up new vistas in her mind. Until enrolling in Artificers, she’d had no interest in her entire life in building or designing things, but now . . . she’d changed her mind completely. Now whenever she looked at a building, she found herself imagining it if had been built differently. More pleasing. Stronger.

  And becoming one of those Artificers who were known for designing beautiful structures would help her help her father too. Of course, when she’d first enrolled in the Artificers, she’d not wanted such a reputation, since everything she had done for her father until now had involved remaining fundamentally unseen. But this would be a different sort of disguise—like the times her father pretended to be highborn and gave himself a flamboyant personality. If others concentrated on what her persona of Master Builder could do, they might not pay much attention to what she was doing. Artificers with a reputation had extraordinary access to all manner of important and common people, from the ones who had the wealth to commission important buildings to the very secretive building tradesmen that constructed them. These were people Mags would ordinarily not be able to put an agent among. By honing her Gift to the point Sanje described, she’d be killing not just two birds with one stone, but an entire flock of them.

  “If you can do it without driving me insane,” she said, once she’d thought it all through, “I think that would be an excellent idea.”

  Sanje had a quite musical laugh. “Well said,” she agreed. “I think I can promise that. So, if you have time to start, is there some place on the Hill where you know that a structure is under stress?”

  “It’d be easier to build something,” Abi pointed out. “A board up on two bricks or stones, then pile bricks or stones in the middle until it’s ready to break.”

  Sanje laughed again. “Oh my, how very practical! You will make a fine Artificer, I think. Yes, let’s do that, so that I can ‘read’ how you experience it.”

  There were always repairs going on the Hill; they followed the sound of hammering to the stable, where they found the Palace carpenter at work replacing the top of a stall that a horse had chewed on. He was perfectly willing to give them the damaged board, and the gardeners always had spare bricks. Then Sanje looked for a place they would not likely be disturbed and quickly spotted one. In less than half a candlemark, they were sitting together on a bench at the fence around Companion’s Field, Sanje with one hand on Abi’s shoulder, Abi slowly putting half-bricks onto the weakened board, and three Companions watching the proceedings with great interest.

  “Hmm,” Sanje said, at exactly the moment when Abi sensed that wrong feeling in the board. “Hm-hmm. Yes, I can work with this. Take the bricks off, and start again, would you?”

  Anyone watching us is going to think we’re daft, Abi thought, and glanced up at the three Companions with their heads over the fence, all in a row. Including them. But it was a lovely early-summer day, not too hot, not too cool. The bench wasn’t particularly uncomfortable, and she’d been explicitly told that Sanje was to have her entire afternoon. And this wasn’t any sillier looking than other Gift training she had seen. So with a mental shrug, she took the bricks off and began piling them back on again.

  Now, when she’d taken them off, she’d counted them and laid them all to the left so she’d know when to quit even if this Gift of hers wasn’t being reliable. But the moment she laid the second-to-the-last brick on the board, she felt the strain under her hand and stopped.

  “Good,” said Sanje. “Again.”

  Wondering if that had been a fluke, she took off the bricks and started again. But this time she felt the strain with three bricks to go. And Sanje took her hand off Abi’s shoulder.

  “Again,” Sanje ordered. “This time without my help.”

  She sensed the strain as that uneasy, almost queasy feeling with three bricks to go, and Sanje dusted off her hands wearing a smile of satisfaction. “Keep working without me,” the Healer told her. “If you start to get a headache, stop. I’ll see
you in a sennight at the same time in my examination room.” And with that, the woman got up and left, leaving Abi sitting on the bench, gazing after her with curiously mixed feelings.

  “Did she just—” she asked, looking at the three Companions. Two of them cocked their heads to the side, as if they didn’t know either, but the third nodded vigorously. “Huh,” she said, and unbuilt the bricks to build them back up again, over and over, still with the same result of sensing the strain with three bricks to go, until she started to get a sort of headache that actually felt more like “muscles” in her skull were tired. Figuring that was what Healer Sanje had been talking about, she gathered up her pile of bricks and her board and went in search of a place to keep them for practicing later.

  Since all her classes were in the morning and it wasn’t time for supper yet, she went back to the family apartment. Normally it would have been empty—her mother and father at their duties, her brother Perry minding the pawn shop down in Haven if he wasn’t doing something else for Mags, and her youngest brother Tory at lessons of his own with the King’s youngest, Kee. But it looked as if lessons were over for the day, because Kee and Tory were in the center room of the suite with their backs to the door, sitting on the floor using Kee’s great mastiff, Gryphon, as a backrest. The other mastiff belonging to the Royals, Drake, was without a doubt standing watch over the Queen, as he had from the moment she first knew she was pregnant. But Gryphon was Kee’s and Kee’s alone, from the time Perry had given the mastiff to the child. From where she stood in the doorway, she could tell the two boys were engrossed in something but not what that something was.

  “Why were you stacking and unstacking bricks all afternoon?” Tory asked, before she could announce her presence.

  She blinked and walked farther into the room. “Did you Farsee me?” she asked in return, as they both turned to look at her over Gryphon’s back.

  Tory shook his head, then nodded, then shook it again. “Not me,” he said, sounding doubtful. “It was both of us together. We can’t see anyone but family, though. We’ve tried. You’re weird.”

  “No, you’re weird,” she corrected, as Kee laughed.

  “No, you are!”

  They went back and forth with this a few more times, before Tory returned to his first question. “So, if you’re not weird, which you are, why were you stacking and unstacking bricks all afternoon?”

  She plopped down on the floor beside them, and when the great mastiff shoved his huge head under her hand for a scratch, obliged absentmindedly. “You know how I could tell the bridge was going to fall?”

  Tory’s pupils dilated. “Don’t do that again!” he said with alarm.

  “No, I have to do that again,” she corrected gently. “I just have to make sure I do it a long time before the bridge is going to fall, so I can tell people to fix it so it doesn’t fall down. That’s what I was doing all afternoon. Learning to how tell a whole lot earlier. So I can get the bridges fixed and nobody gets hurt.”

  Tory relaxed. “Oh, all right,” he agreed. “Who was that funny Healer?”

  “Her name is Sanje, and I guess she has ways of making Gifts like mine stronger and easier to use.” Just because she’d never heard of anyone who could do that, it didn’t mean that ability didn’t exist, right? And at least one of the Companions seemed to agree. She remembered how Sanje had specifically said “I can work with this” when she’d demonstrated her Gift, so probably Sanje couldn’t work with everything. Maybe she was a kind of Mindhealer. That would make sense. That would make a lot of sense. If you could Heal something, you could probably make it stronger too.

  Or maybe it wasn’t a matter of making it stronger, maybe she was just making it easier to use? And it was Abi herself who was going to make it stronger by practicing with it?

  And maybe I should stop speculating and just follow her instructions. As long as my Gift gets stronger, more reliable, and easier to use, that’s all that matters. How it gets that way makes no difference.

  “Can she do that with us? Make it so we can Farsee other people besides our families?” Tory wanted to know, interrupting her thoughts.

  “And just who do you want to spy on, hmm?” she asked. “Little busybody—”

  “Anyone Papa wants us to,” came the unexpected answer, as Kee nodded vigorously.

  “Well, you’ll have to ask Sanje that yourself,” Abi replied, “Because I don’t know.”

  “Can’t you ask?” Kee popped up with. “Then we could listen.”

  “No, I won’t,” she replied. “Ask her yourself. If she can, and she wants you to know she can, then she’ll tell you.”

  “That’s not fair! She’s helping you and you didn’t ask her to!” Tory protested. Kee looked doubtful.

  “No, but that’s because I didn’t have to ask her. Someone else did, someone important, way more important than me. I was ordered to work with her, probably by the same person. And don’t pout,” she added, as Tory looked stormy. “Perry got to go off with Papa and got Larral when he was old enough. Now I’m getting my Gift trained up because I’m old enough. If you two want something done to make your Gifts stronger, you need to talk to Mama and Papa and see what they say.”

  “Don’t want to,” Kee said, but in a thoughtful way, not a rebellious one. “Don’t want people to know yet.”

  “Well, all right, then. In that case, you’ll just have to accept that the only people you can Farsee are family members.” There. She’d just tied them all up in their own logic and put a neat little bow on top.

  Tory made a face. So did Kee, but it wasn’t the same face. It was more like one of surprise. “Abi, c’n I stay here overnight with Tory?”

  “Uh—” Kee had done so before plenty of times but—“I guess so, but why?”

  “Cause Mama’s about to have the baby and people are going to start running around and everybody’s going to forget I want to eat supper,” he said, matter-of-factly, just as a commotion started in the area of the Royal Suite and there was a lot of running in both directions out in the hall.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Well,” her father said, when she had finished telling him all of the surprising things that had happened this afternoon. There was still activity going on in the Royal Suite, but things seemed to be moving along at the expected pace, and everyone except the Queen was happy with how the birth was going. And nothing was going to make the Queen happy except getting that baby out of her as quickly as possible. Abi was just glad not to be in the Queen’s shoes—or, rather, lack of them. If being pregnant was bad, obviously giving birth was worse.

  Kee talked a servant into bringing some snacks, then he and Tory settled into Tory’s room for a game that involved picking straws out of a pile without making any of them move.

  That had given Abi the chance to get her father to herself and tell him about her progress—and the boys.

  Mags considered everything she had told him for quite some time. “Well,” he said again. “I din’t know Gifts c’ld be strengthened either. I knew yer use of ’em could improve over time an’ with practice, but I din’t know you could make ’em stronger.”

  “It may not be that,” she pointed out. “It may just be this Healer can open things up a bit in my head.”

  “Still, somethin’ t’ file away. I am innerested that she c’n give you a way t’ see things instead ’f just feelin’ ’em.” He sucked on his lower lip a moment. “Does th’t mean yer gonna get t’ be more precise once she does thet?”

  “I think so. I’m pretty sure. Right now it’s kind of hard to measure and compare levels of I’m feeling sick. I think it will be easier when I can see the stress and how it flows.” The more she considered that, the surer she became, in fact. “And I’d really rather using this Gift meant I can use my eyes, and not feel like I’m going to throw up. If she can turn this ‘sense,’ whatever it is,
into sight, that would be lovely.”

  “Well, I’ll leave thet up to you an’ her. Now ’bout the boys—”

  Abi did her best not to roll her eyes. “Tory’s probably going to pout when he finds out I told you.”

  “He didn’ pledge you to secrecy did he?” Mags seemed very amused.

  “No, he didn’t say anything and Kee just said he didn’t want anyone to find out,” Abi told him.

  “If they didn’ want anyone t’ find out, they shouldn’t hev been doin’ it in th’ middle ’f th’ great room in th’ middle ’f th’ day,” Mags pointed out, and looked over to one side. “An’ Kee an’ Tory, if yer watchin’ now, an’ I am sure ye are, we’re gonna to hev a talk in the mornin’.”

  He smiled suddenly.

  “They were watching, weren’t they?” demanded Abi, a little annoyed that her private talk with her father had been eavesdropped on.

  “A’ course they were, from the moment you walked inter my workshop. I jest don’ want them to know yet I c’n tell when they are.” Now he laughed, and grinned at her.

  “So you’ve known they can Farsee all along?”

  “I suspicioned it. But I didn’ know their limitations, so thank you for findin’ thet out, Abi.” She felt mollified, and pleased. “Tomorrow they are gonna get the big Heraldic lecture on privacy an’ what happens if’n they violate it.”

  Well, that made her feel a good bit better about telling her father. Tory could just get over his sulks at being told on.

  “I gotta say that I’ve never heard of two childern only havin’ a Gift when the two of ’em worked together, though,” Mags continued. “I’ll hev t’ report this t’ th’ experts an’ see what they can make of it.” He sighed theatrically. “Why is it that none of you younglings c’n neither be completely normal, nor hev regular Heraldic Gifts?”

  “Because you’re our father,” Abi teased.

  He laughed, and sent her to her room to study.