When I Was Your Age -- bonus snippet

Malas Aksoy had been the kuracar long enough to know that the week before classes started was always the busiest week of his semester. It was a week where the new initiates, fresh in a new location and full of excitement and apprehension, crammed in as many stupid injuries as they could before their schedules became weighed down with the tedious business of education.

It was never the legacy mages, who’d had the fear of embarrassing their families driven into them and spent their first few months being absolutely model students while ruthlessly practicing their burgeoning political skills on each other when they thought the teachers weren’t looking. It was always the commonfolk-born, those students who’d managed to secure a place in Skolala Refujeyo through grit or excellence or, more often than not, money, without any existing baggage or necessary cultural context to practice what anyone who’d been around mages for more than six months would consider common sense. And they always showed up with such weird injuries, too.

So the strangest thing about Malas’ first patient for the semester was how normal her injury looked. She strode into the hospital ward, taking in the scenery with wide, awed eyes, the cut on her hand bleeding profusely over her new grey robes (awkwardly and incorrectly worn) and onto Malas’ nice clean hospital floor. So far as he could see from across the room, it looked like an ordinary, if deep, cut.

Nothing about her made it obvious what her native language was. “What happened?” he asked in English, taking a guess, and her eyes snapped from the snow outside to his face as if she’d only just noticed that he was there. Their eyes met, and Malas immediately downgraded the normalcy of the wound to the second strangest thing about the visit.

The first strangest thing was how she looked directly into his solid, robins-egg-blue eyes without a flinch, as if they were totally normal. Malas had known people who’d take a decade before they’d look him in the eyes. Nobody was ever completely fine with his appearance at first glance.

“Sliced it open cutting an onion,” she said in Russian (darn it), confirming his suspicions of a mundane injury. “Can you help?”

“Let me have a look.” He took the girl’s hand in his, not bothering with gloves. The magic that held his dermis together wouldn’t allow for any tiny cuts or abrasions that blood could get through. “What’s your name?”

“Aly.”

“Can I scan this with magic, Aly?” Malas had always found that asking permission made for a better relationship with his patients, especially with the commonfolk born.

She nodded. Malas performed the scan.

“It’s not a very bad cut,” he told her, which wasn’t technically completely true. The slice across her palm was deep enough that he could see bone. Left in the hands of the average doctor, Aly would have restricted mobility and coordination, and probably some mild persistent pain, for life.

But in his hands, the injury counted as not very bad – the tendons hadn’t been cut. All the tissues that had been sliced could be repaired by the body over time, so his job was trivial – provide the bracing to allow for perfect healing. He’d done it hundreds of times before.

Aly, though, looked a little disappointed at the reassurance. “You mean you scanned it already?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t feel anything.”

Malas chuckled. “My patients don’t. The scan is passive. You’ll feel this bit, though.” He poured magic into the wound, directing it to take the shape of muscles, veins and skin, to hold things together in the correct orientation until the cells could replace it.

Aly frowned at her hand, flexing it experimentally. “You’ve got two spells. Called ‘the kuracar’.”

“Yes.”

“But you’re also called the kuracar.”

“Ah, yes. My position is a result of the spells, so – ”

“How did you get them? Did you get one in your Initiation and then one later to become a doctor? Or were they both in the Initiation?”

“No, they both came from my master. They work together, they always come together. I did an apprenticeship, and got them.”

“So you have three spells?”

“No, just two.”

“So you didn’t do the Inititaion?”

“You’re just full of questions, aren’t you?”

“Magic is interesting. I want to know how it works.”

“Well, you’ve definitely come to the right place. You already seem to know a lot about me.”

“You’re really famous.”

“I supp – wait a moment. You didn’t cut yourself just to come and ask me questions, did you?”

“Of course not! I’m not an idiot! I figured I’d probably get hurt eventually, so I thought up what questions I wanted to ask when it happened.”

“Well, that’s… efficient. I want you to come in to take some antibiotics every morning for the next two weeks, just to make sure that cut doesn’t get infected. It should be fine, there was no foreign material in it and onions have antibiotic properties already, but just in case. Here’s your first one.” He handed her a pill. Malas never gave fourteen-year-olds their full antibiotic courses to take on their own – they always stopped early, or forgot, or made the absolute genius decision to take two pills a day so they could get it done twice as fast. Better to make them come in every day, where he could keep an eye on them.

She dry swallowed the pill before he could hand her a cup of water. “So you knew you were going to be a healer all along?”

“I was one of several apprentices, I didn’t – ”

“So what would you have done if you hadn’t gotten the spells?”

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Aly.”

“Because Dr Leucine says that you can trace the fundamental nature of – ”

“Goodbye, Aly.”

“Thanks, Mr Aksoy.”

“No problem. Try to be more careful with knives.” Before she left, he checked that she had her location on on the school map. She did. Good; that meant he had her registered name without her needing to spell anything for him. AsHe was pretty sure that asking her to spell her name would probably end up in Malas being interrogated for his whole life story.

He watched her leave and started a new patient log for Alania Miratova, noting the nature of the injury and the prescription. He hoped that she would be more careful with knives. He didn’t want to see that one too often.

She seemed exhausting.