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The father helped his son with a thankful murmur. As they left, Kaladin dutifully washed his hands in the exam room’s basin. He’d picked up his father’s mannerisms in that regard. Wisdom of the Heralds, it was said. He’d met some of those Heralds now, and they didn’t seem so wise to him, but whatever.
It felt strange to be wearing a white surgeon’s apron. Lirin had always wanted one of these; he’d said white clothing made people calm. The traveling butchers or barbers—men who often did surgery or tooth work in small towns—tended to be dirty and bloody. Seeing a surgeon wearing white instantly proclaimed, “This isn’t that sort of place.”
He sent Hawin—the town girl who was reading for him today—to fetch the next patient. He dried his hands. Then, standing in the center of the small exam room, he released a long breath.
“Are you happy?” Syl asked, flitting into the room from the one next door, where she’d been watching his father work.
“I’m not sure,” Kaladin said. “I worry about the rest of them out there, going into battle without me. But it’s good to do something, Syl. Something that helps, but doesn’t wring me out like an old washrag.”
Near the end of his time as a Windrunner, he’d found even simple sparring to be emotionally taxing. Daily activities, like assigning duties, had required so much effort that they’d left him with a pounding headache. He couldn’t explain why.
This work—rememorizing medical texts, seeing patients, dealing with difficult parents or lighteyes—should have been worse. It wasn’t. Busy, but not overwhelmed, Kaladin never saw anyone who was hurt too badly—those went for Regrowth. So while there was tension to his work, there wasn’t immediacy.
Was he happy?
He wasn’t sad.
For now, he’d accept “not sad.”
Hawin led in the next patient, then excused herself to run to the privy. This patient was an older man with a patchwork beard and a friendly face. Kaladin recognized him; Mil never had been able to grow that beard out like he wanted. While the clinic drew mostly from the people who had lived in Hearthstone, his little town had sprouted significantly in the last few years. Most of the refugees hadn’t been Herdazian, but Alethi from villages closer to the border. So while Kaladin felt he should know all of his patients, many were strangers.
It was good to see Mil again. He’d always been less mean to Kaladin’s family than some others. The old man was complaining of persistent headaches. And indeed, the same painspren from earlier in the day wiggled back up from the floor. After ruling out the easy causes—dehydration, lack of sleep—Kaladin had him describe where the pain generally originated from, and whether the headaches affected his vision.
“Hawin,” Kaladin said, “read me the list of migraine prodromes please. You’ll find them at the divider between head and neck…” He trailed off, remembering his reader had left.
A moment later though, a different voice said, “Um, prodromes. Right … Uh, just a sec.”
He looked toward the reading desk to find Syl laboriously lifting pages and flipping them over. She didn’t have much strength in the Physical Realm, but ignoring gravity—walking up into the air to tow the page by its corner—helped, and the book wasn’t far from the appropriate page.
She found it and landed on the large tome, kneeling to read the words one at a time. “Neck stiffness,” she said. “Um … conster … cons—”
“Constipation,” Kaladin said.
She giggled, then kept reading. “Mood changes, cravings, thirst, um, I think that says frequent need to pee. Storms. Stuff goes out of you, and it’s bad. Stuff doesn’t go out of you and it’s bad. How do you live like this?”
He ignored that, chatting with Mil about his pains. He suggested visiting the Edgedancers for Regrowth—but Mil’s pains had been around for months, so it was unlikely that they could do anything.
Fortunately, there were medicines that could help, and—with Jasnah capable of Soulcasting a wide range of substances—they had access to rare medications. Though Kaladin and the queen didn’t often see eye to eye, it said a great deal about her that she was willing to take time to make medicine.
Kaladin gave Mil a requisition chit to get some from the medical quartermaster, and told him to spend a month recording each and every headache, with signs he’d noticed of it coming on. It wasn’t much, but Mil grinned ear to ear. Often people just wanted to know they weren’t fools or weaklings for coming in. They wanted to know their pains were real, and that there was something—even something small—they could do about the problem. Simple affirmation could be worth more than medication.
He waved farewell to Mil, grateful that—despite several lifetimes’ worth of tragedy squeezed into the years between then and now—much of his surgeon’s training remained. He walked over to Syl, who had settled down with her legs over the side of the book. Today she was wearing something akin to what his mother often wore: an unassuming skirt and a buttoned blouse, faintly Thaylen in style.
“So,” he said, “when did you learn to read?”
“Last week.”
“You learned to read in a week.”
“It’s not as hard as it seemed at first. I figured you’d need someone to read for you, as a surgeon. I think I might be able to become surgery tools too. I mean, not a scalpel since, you know, I don’t actually cut flesh. But your father was using a little hammer the other day…”
“For testing reflexes,” Kaladin said. “It’s best with a cloth wrap on the front, or rubber. Can you become things other than metal? I’d love to not have to share the stethoscope with Father.” Another expensive tool that Taravangian’s surgeons had provided for them upon request.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I feel like … I feel like there is a lot to explore with our powers, Kaladin. Things that in the past maybe they didn’t have the time or resources to think about. Because they were always fighting.”
He nodded, thoughtful. Syl got a far-off look in her eyes, and when she noticed him watching, she plastered a smile on her face. That struck him as fake; she seemed to be trying a little too hard today. Or maybe he was projecting.
He stretched, then stepped out and peeked into the waiting room. Only a handful of people remained today. So Kaladin had time for a short break.
He walked along the hallway into the family room, which had a door out onto the communal balcony. As he’d hoped when they’d come here, that wide balcony now served as a general-purpose meeting place for the people of Hearthstone, like a town square. Laundry flapped on lines to one side. Children ran and played. People sat and chatted.
Kaladin trailed out to the edge of the balcony. Below he could see Dalinar’s armies gathering for the trip to Azir. He forced himself to look and to acknowledge he wasn’t going with them.
A figure in blue streaked by, soaring through the air. Leyten must have seen Kaladin, because a short time later a larger group of Windrunners hovered up near the balcony. Most everyone stopped their activities, children running to the balcony’s edge.
As one, the Windrunners saluted. The Bridge Four salute; though most had never been in Bridge Four and didn’t use the salute to one another, they always gave it to him and other members of the original Windrunners.
