Chapter 20: Twelve Months and a Day

I took the signed page of terms out of my pocket and laid it on the long kitchen table.

Caius looked at it, and then at me.

"Term one," I said. "Twelve months and a day, and then I walk out the front door and nobody stops me."

"The stake is void."

"The paper isn't," I said. "I want to see the door again."

He did not argue.

He walked me down the hall, opened the front door and stood aside with his hands at his sides.

"Nobody stops you," he said.

I walked out onto the porch and down the steps, and the gravel crunched under my boots.

I could feel every stone through the soles, and I could feel my own hands.

At the gate I turned around.

He had not moved from the doorway, and the guards were looking carefully at the pines.

"I'll be at the clinic," I said.

"All right."

"I might not come back tonight."

"I'll leave the gate open," he said.

The clinic was crowded by ten.

A boy of eight sat on the examining table with his forearm bent at an angle that made my stomach turn.

His mother held his good hand and looked at me with desperate hope.

I laid my palms on his arm and called up the gift.

It came so fast that I nearly lost hold of it.

It was warm and wide and deep, with nothing pulling at it.

The bone knit under my hands in a few minutes.

The boy flexed his fingers and stared.

"That's the best one yet," Winnie whispered from the door, wiping her eyes.

"Don't tell the other healers."

"I'm the only healer."

"Well, then, don't tell yourself."

I was locking the clinic door that afternoon when a shadow fell across the lot.

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