We arrived in the capital hours before sundown. The city of Altaluvia was not the medieval European affair I had expected. It was alien in tiny ways that piled up so high that it became barely recognizable. It was a mishmash, it seemed like, of ancient Roman toga fashion tempered with jackets and other overgarments to combat the cold and pillared and circular brick buildings colored diversely. Streamers of geometrical shapes hung between the gaps of adjacent houses, and everywhere seemed to have a roof-access where flags flew with the wind, decorated in emblems, logos, and family crests of all kinds. Everything was larger than I had expected a pre-industrial city to ever look like, likely a consequence of attributes. Even the roads were cobbled since we entered the gates of this great city, and we were likely not even in the aristocratic district yet.
A shopkeeper for a golden yellow shop dusting her porch looked up at the stagecoach, and I could see that golden yellow reflected in her eyes as well. I made it a game to see whether people actually painted their houses in accordance with their eye color, and was more or less certain of the fact after a few minutes.
I passed an expansive beaten grounds cleared for a bunch of people to wrestle in the dirt while others watched and socialized. They were exclusively men as well. Perhaps wrestling was a national pastime? I wouldn’t deem it unlikely; they were at war. There was an English king that banned every sport aside from archery at one point in history, exactly for such a reason.
“Reza,” the old lord began. I looked up at him, expression neutral. “You will be granted a guest room, where you will stay. I will summon servants to clothe and wash you before arriving for dinner where I will convince my wife and daughters that you are a traveling folk healer who has vowed to repair my legs. Be prepared to weather their scorn.”
I nodded. He continued.
“Tomorrow morning, you will conduct the healing behind closed doors, but my wife will likely make sure that the capital’s premier doctor witnesses you in action. It is up to you to make it look convincing. Remember; it is your life on the line if he decides that you used madness to aid me. He may not be immediately suspicious; those razed of mind tend not to be very subtle, but any small thing can change his mind.”
“Does he know of your injuries?” I asked. “No medicine or treatment can repair crookedly healed bones.”
“No,” he admitted. “That is why the process will look gradual. I will shout at you for wasting my time while you do your best to convince me that the treatment is only just beginning. After a few days, I will reveal that I am, indeed, feeling different. By then, I will publicly announce you as my household healer, and you will be able to live here for as long as you can be of value to me.”
It was flimsy, and only likely to work on a person that no one really took seriously anymore, or cared enough about to look into closely.
Heroes were only as important as the fear people still feel about the crisis they resolved. No one remembered the Naval Incursion anymore, but the elderly and historians.
We arrived at the Reizenbrahm estate in good time, a central manor of an almost Byzantine architecture surrounded by trees arranged in rows, wide swathes of short-cropped grass and a pond where golden long-beaked… birds swam. They weren’t quite like swans, with shorter necks, but they had hefty bodies almost twice their size.
Mr. Sheruna the coach driver opened our door and helped Reizenbrahm out. He was good at pretending to be disabled, but my decidedly supernatural perception could pierce through that veil with ease. His agony was faked and his legs were too steady, unable as he was to truly mimic the tremor of legs with ruined knees and soft bones.
I followed after him while he sent orders to have everything prepared in a good-natured manner. I almost forgot that he was the same type of man that picked up a random traveller for no other reason but to help her be on her way.
A pair of female servants dressed in sleeveless robes matching their eye colors, blue and red, showed me to my room without much fuss, not even looking at me all that much. They remained professional to the extreme, though I could easily see that they were also wary of me, seeing as ‘our’ nations were at war.
When we arrived at the door, the sapphire-blue woman gave me a short nod. “I will prepare a bath for you in a moment.”
Ruby-red nodded as well. “And I will prepare a change of clothes.”
They opened my room, and I entered. They closed the doors behind me as I beheld the large space I was allocated to. There was a single central bed, an ornate wooden study desk and an equally ornate chair tucked into it, and one wall was bedecked with clear glass, the curtains drawn and restricted by glistening and thin gold ropes. A door led out to a balcony overlooking the topiary and the well-kept grounds where not a soul treaded.
I gently fell on the bed, the soft feathered mattresses almost swallowing me up before the springiness pushed back deliciously. I almost fell asleep there and then.
I looked down at Farhaan. More and more fat began to deposit on his body as he grew healthier and healthier. That said, he was dangerously short on muscle mass, what with being carried every moment of the day.
I stood up and put him down on the bed, watching him squirm, clearly unused to not being held by me constantly.
I, too, felt strange, not having my arms curled. It felt like I had let him fall, and though it was an unpleasant sensation, I ignored it as best as I could.
Since the bed was beginning to frustrate him, I put him on the floor instead, and sat across from him. He was on his back, flailing his limbs weakly like an upturned beetle. I flipped him on his stomach. He tried to push himself up to no avail.
After a few minutes, he grew tired. I used Rested Body on him, and he kept at it again. Eventually, after a couple of casts, he grew bored of it entirely and just… laid there.
I used Rested Mind and Rested Body again, and though the flailing resumed, it hadn’t done so with as much enthusiasm.
Then, he started crying.
I had to physically stop myself from ripping him off the ground at breakneck speeds, instead gently lifting him up.
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He stopped crying the moment he entered my bosom.
Well, that was easy.
I breastfed him for a couple of minutes as my breasts were beginning to well up with milk and needed the relief. I could have invented a spell to reduce my lactation, but Satiation couldn't take care of all Farhaan's needs, or mine for that matter. Gut bacteria, stomach-acid, the entire digestive system actually, worked on a series of interconnected pieces that any major deviations could prove dangerous. Once the child was full, which still left me rather burdened with milk, I put him down again and his flailing grew even more spirited.
He was almost capable of pushing himself up to flip over by the time the maids returned with a wide basin of water and a change of clothes.
They left me to my own devices quickly enough and I played with my son in the water. As he splashed and giggled, I couldn’t help but smile as well.
Then… then I laughed.
I couldn’t tell how long it went on. Being off the road, out of the woods and in the confines of a house shouldn’t have made such an appreciable difference to how safe either of us were, and yet I was filled to bursting with satisfaction. We got this far; we could make it to the end-goal. That was more possible than ever.
We got off the water, dried off, and I spent the next ten or so minutes figuring out the toga. It looked much better than the servant’s robes, made of soft and smooth cashmere-like white fabric with hazel accents that matched my eyes, and a rope belt to be tied around my waist the same color. The robe terminated a little above my knees, but thankfully they had a pair of baggy white pants as well that I could wear. Despite the strangeness, I found myself liking it a lot.
They had a change of clothes for Farhaan as well, making me starkly aware of how long he had gone without any clothes. A bundle of cloth had been his only protection from the elements for far too long.
Now, he looked like a miniature version of myself.
I held him up by his tiny arms. “You must be feeling very dapper. Isn’t that right, young man?” I brought him closer and hugged him. He latched onto me with more force than he ever had. I almost shed a tear.
We really had come very far.
A knock came, and sapphire-blue entered. “You are summoned for dinner with the lord and his family.”
I followed after the two from behind. Farhaan gurgled in contentment as he shifted, the sensation of clothing a novelty he had not yet gotten used to.
I barely even noticed how long and winding the corridors were, or how many flights of stairs we took, and it only hit me when I stopped to consciously consider it. Comparing my physical attributes to how long I could walk in the forest or on the road barely felt real to me, but being inside a building truly showed me those differences. If I went back home, I would be on par with the strongest men and women on Earth.
But this wasn’t Earth, and it wouldn’t do if I rested on my laurels now, no matter how much I wanted to. I could use a month or ten just playing with Farhaan. It didn’t even have to be in a mansion.
The servants finally led me through a large door into a room with an impractically long and narrow table where two people were seated on each end, farthest away from each other. It was Reizenbrahm and one other woman, dressed in an opulent toga festooned with strings of amethyst gems matching her secondary color theme, and likely the color of her eyes; royal purple.
“Our guest has arrived!” Reizenbrahm turned around to face me. “Please. Have a seat in the middle. They will bring your food out imm— ah, would you look at that!”
A servant man with black robes trailing behind him brought a tray of food and placed it in front of the chair before the middle of the table. There was a mug of a deep gold liquid next to a plate of medium rare red meat that I was hesitant to call beef on account of this being a different world, but the side of vegetables were… almost recognizable, if I didn’t look at them too hard.
The servant held out my chair and I sat on it as he pushed it inward. Like I had seen, the table was impractically narrow to the point of no one could eat in front of me. At best, someone would have to sit diagonally or right next to me. I didn’t see a point in this at all.
“You are Reza the healer?” The woman that was likely Reizenbrahm’s wife (for she was too old to be a daughter) asked. She wasn’t as old as him, but that wasn’t a surprise. She was aged like fine wine, however, her advanced age not detracting from her charm, though that was likely on account of the attribute. Noblewoman that she was, it was likely she had a lot of it, and mental attributes, to the exclusion of physical ones.
A specialist in social interactions, I couldn’t let my guard down.
“Yes, I am,” I said with a low voice and a slight smile. “I will do everything in my power to help your husband,” wording was important, so I likely wouldn’t win many points if I couldn’t even claim to be able to cure him. That said, it would lead to less attention once I pretended to heal him with herbal remedies and some good old Chinese bonesetting I had only read about in passing.
“Does it please you to know that a man on his last legs would even beseech someone like you for treatment?” She asked, all smiles. “How much have you demanded in compensation? Don’t be shy, just tell me.”
Would telling her that I only took upfront payments make her more or less likely to have a doctor watch over the lord’s procedure?
Wow, she really was a specialist in interactions. I usually would be able to make good guesses when interacting with Reizenbrahm. His wife was a whole other beast. Eventually, the presence of something I was tempted to call ‘love’ in her expression was the one thing that convinced me from acting like a common quack. “If I cannot heal Lord Reizenbrahm, then I will not take any money from either of you.”
“I suppose a stay in this manor is reward enough for someone like you,” she responded without missing a beat, almost convincing me that she had that response ready for my choice in answer. “Your kind would do anything to taste the opulence of your betters. Was the Sky City too hard?”
“Wife!” Reizenbrahm exclaimed.
She shrugged innocently. “I’m only inquiring upon the origin of our honored guest, husband-mine. Tell us, Reza. Why Aellia?”
“I am infatuated by this country,” I said. “And all its greenery that grows freely everywhere I go. I don’t see the sense in staying in a desert when I can be here.”
“Well, surely the oases provide,” she said. “At least if you’re useful enough for your tribe. Are you just a useless exile?”
I snuck a glance at Reizenbrahm, who only told me with his long-suffering expression to deal with it.
I decided to change tacks. “I will have you know that we have already begun treatment,” I said. “And my Lord Reizenbrahm reports less pain than ever before.”
She looked up at her husband in shock, and he nodded, though it was a strained one. “It’s a stopgap measure at best, so we must make haste with true treatment while it lasts.” Was he not on any anaesthetic drug? Well, he was a high-Power individual. Did that also affect his metabolism, making drugs useless on him? I shouldn’t have said anything.
That seemed to calm her down a little. “If that is true, then I must thank you, but you should still give it to me as honestly as you can; what are the chances that my husband may walk again unaided?”
An absolute certainty. “Not all patients respond to the treatment,” I said. “I am cautiously optimistic that we may be able to proceed to the next stage, but it is early days. We should temper our optimism.” Never let it be said that I wasn’t on my way to becoming a doctor in my past life. I already knew one of their primary skills; vagueness and bullshit.
“Please eat, Reza,” Reizenbrahm’s wife bade me. “My name is Losinda Frugenrahm, the lord’s wife. If you already alleviated some of my beloved’s pain, then you should already have been compensated, but if you manage to truly aid him, then I will be in your debt.”
I nodded, affecting an expression of gratitude.
“But,” She slammed her palm against the table hard enough that my mug of mystery beverage almost spilled. I hadn’t been able to suppress my startled jump. “If you are who I think you are, the kind of person that would take advantage of someone’s plight, then — and I will not mince my words — I will kill you. With my bare hands. While your child watches.”
“Wife!”
“You have been warned.”
I swallowed down my indignation as I gave her a shallow nod. She was… unapologetic. If anything, I could respect that. And she would change her tune in the coming days anyway.
My food went untouched for the rest of the night.