The next day, Ruyo went to the Vissio family estate, a walled hilltop villa with a little orange grove. And a birdbath-like pillar which was Ruyo's first shrine in town. The family servants waved and called out to her, saying, "Good to have you back in town! What have you been doing out there?"

Ruyo chatted and handed out more magic to everyone, and met with the boy Virid. She said, "How many ruins have you been in now? Four?"

"Five! I got to visit one of the less awful parts of the city underworks. Not much to see there, but I've been comparing architecture."

Ruyo asked one of his older brothers, "How's business? It should be improving as the war winds down, right?"

The businessman, able-bodied but exempt from personal involvement in the war, frowned. "It's not back to normal yet. The enemy fleet raided Port Desire. Where I believe you'd been requested."

That place stood along the east coast, north of anywhere Ruyo had been lately. She'd been asked for, by the family of a man who'd been justly hanged in Averell. Supposedly that family had renounced him and wanted to make amends. "How badly were they hit?" she asked.

"Some damage to our side's ships and docks. And the people on them." He sighed. "You can't be everywhere at once, I know."

She nodded. "I'll visit soon." Turning back to Virid she said, "You talked about building roads using earth magic. How about port repair?"

"We could use my earth elementals as a kind of faster stonework construction. They affect dirt and rock, so once you have them it, um, sort of multiplies what you can do. At the very least they can carry rocks."

"I should get you to talk with the quarry town Frostcrag." She worried this new magic would undercut their main industry. "A team of water mages should be able to hold the water back long enough to help build."

The older brother said, "Yes, that's sometimes done already. Of course you can make sure there are many more low-level mages helping. The Council would like your help to experiment with improving the swampy tow-path between here and the coast."

"I'll add it to the list," she said.

Virid said, "They also had me try to do an experiment like yours, putting an earth elemental into somebody. That's pretty scary. We couldn't get it to work."

Alarmed, Ruyo said, "They had you experimenting on people?"

"A little. We didn't get far. They're too solid, and, um, I didn't like trying to do to that to prisoners."

She fumed. The researchers had guilt-tripped her earlier about the need to help the war effort. She was willing to take the moral responsibility for maybe killing somebody, among prisoners offered a reduced sentence or people who were already badly ill. Pushing the boy into joining that work didn't seem right. She, after all, had experience already at killing people.

She said, "I don't blame you. You're probably better off doing safer things, until we better understand this magic."

Before she left, the household cook asked to speak with her. While talking about magic and food, he quietly said, "Did you know that the Vissio family themselves lost some slaves to your abolition campaign?"

Ruyo paused in her work of cutting vegetables. "I thought they didn't have any!"

"Oh, we here are all free. Out in the fields though, not entirely. Their lordships have avoided mentioning that."

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

She resented having that hidden from her, but it likely wouldn't have changed her actions. "I suppose it doesn't matter now."

"When the troops come home, there'll be a bunch of people who got freed and conscripted by your demand. Where are they going to go?"

Ruyo didn't look forward to having them sent straight to her doorstep. Averell had already done that to the least able-bodied among the new freemen, making them her problem. "Thanks for the warning."

#

She sought out a doctor who'd been involved in the medical project. The bespectacled, stooped old expert met with her in his clinic of stone and mage-lights.

"Smells like liquor in here," Ruyo said.

Nusina became visible. "Oh, are you cleaning with alcohol?"

The doctor nodded. "I took your advice, spirit. Don't know if it helps, though my apprentice enjoys setting metal tools on fire after dipping them. Lady Ruyo, can you create alcohol?"

"I haven't tried yet. Since you have the pure stuff, could I get a sample?" She conjured a little bottle and a cork.

He looked impressed by the feat. While pouring a bit of the distilled, clear liquid for her he said, "How has your medical training been going?"

"I've had more practical experience at wound treatment lately than I'd like. But I'm being asked about things like regrowing fingers, and it seems like something I should be able to do now."

"That's advanced work. Easier to patch up a wound than to create or alter existing flesh." He looked at Ruyo's strange, inhuman arms. "But the body knows how to repair itself. And it seems you're doing things differently." He explained how high-level healer mages did the job, not that he could do that himself.

Nusina said, "It might be time to try studying rats and the like. It may seem cruel, but it's a step toward being able to heal people better."

Ruyo didn't relish the thought of chopping off the feet of an animal for research, even after being in a war. But it'd probably be necessary. "Has anyone around here got an injured pet?"

She soon got presented with a third-rate old cat, missing half its tail and two toes. The old scrapper was perfect for her purposes, hardly moving from its basket. Ruyo began with the tail. By slipping into the frame of mind she used for healing, she sensed the damage at that scarred, lightly furred stump. This was different from a fresh, bleeding wound that gave her direct magical contact with the water inside the body.

"What I need is a version of that spell we were doing to put an elemental into a person. That'd give me greater influence. Is a cat going to cooperate with that?"

The cat wasn't pleased when she tried to push a floating waterball to where it'd overlap its body. After some frantic clawing and hissing they had to drug the poor beast senseless. She tried again and got the elemental placed to cover the damaged tail. Now she had a stronger sense of the damaged body. Thinking about her recent medical experience, she gently stretched out the cat's spine and created an intangible scaffold of light where it should go. Before her eyes, over long minutes, the torn flesh extended several inches. There was a feeling of exhaustion fighting Ruyo's effort though, and not her own. She explained this to the doctor and he said, "It might be drawing on the creature's own food or energy. Only so much you can do at once."

Gingerly she released the magic and let the elemental puff away into vapor. The cat now sported a longer tail that had no fur on its end. "I got the sense that it'll fill out properly. The skin felt the same as the intact part."

The doctor said, "Impressive. Not a standard technique but it seems to work."

"I'd feel a bit more confident about working with humans now. But this isn't going to make much difference unless it becomes available to more people. I can't devote much time to it yet." She'd worried from the start of all this that she'd be forced to be a full-time healing dispenser.

The spirit bobbed. "But it'll be good for an occasional favor. Long-term, we could set up ways to grant this power to others, or just give general water magic to more people and let them study the specific healing spells."

The doctor had his assistant take the cat away for later study. "What can you tell me about those strange healing pods in the hospital? They seem designed to work without an entire team running them."

Nusina answered for Ruyo. "We might learn to imitate some of their function. We're probably also influencing the magic available to Ruyo's followers."

"So long as you don't interfere with our existing healing spells!"

After leaving the office, Ruyo asked silently, "Am I overwriting the nature of water magic in a way that might harm others' work?"

Nusina said, "A little. It's already a well-established field, and defined partly by how people think it should work. So most of what you're doing is adding, rather than changing."

"I suppose Elly has more responsibility in her area, then, since her element isn't well defined yet. What must that be like?"

"She has our example to draw on, at least, and she doesn't seem the type to make it about death and decay."