Book One – Chapter 19

Could you do that? Could you just … put a new bone where the old one had shattered? Replace a bad one with a good one? Yu had never heard of such a thing. If this had been a tairan’s leg, or a borman’s from the settlements, they would have cut it off right then and there. If no healer wizard was present, you amputated and made do with what remained. That had been common sense for Yu, a knowledge solid as stone, right until now.

Why did no one know about this? Or did Tria? Perhaps she did. Yu had no idea. It was not like he had ever bothered to talk about worldly medicines — but still, this was beyond worldly. This seemed so impossibly advanced and life-changing, that it should be practiced all over the settlements. If this worked, if this could actually restore a shattered leg, then every village and every den of cripples should know.

Yu’s thoughts twisted further. Life in the estate had always seemed isolated, yes, but never … primitive. He knew that the Barnstreams were remote and rarely the first to receive news of whatever the world elsewhere had discovered, but whenever there had been derisive talk about the northern desert peoples or the north-eastern fishing folk, with their crude cultures and simple lifestyles, Yu had never, well, counted himself among them. He had never included the estate in that. It had always been the settlements, with all the backwater people, and, apart from them, the estate, with Tria and him. Tria was everything that Yu associated with knowledge and progress. She was his measure of worldliness itself. But now, the longer he stared, the more that certainty unravelled. Everything in here seemed so much more complex. The tools. The rods. The vast array of tinctures — none of it belonged to Tria’s care facility. Yu had never really looked, and yet he simply knew that there were too many things here that he had never seen.

This could not be Bubs alone. He could not be the only one who operated like that. He was just a mianid, and he was way too young to have come up with any of this, to have created this range of instruments and methods all by himself. This was not invention. This was inheritance. It was a fragment of the greater world. Knowledge and skills from beyond the North, the ability to shape bone and reverse loss without a word of magic.