Stepp-ing lightly

It’s happened.

I can’t beleive it’s happened.

Tubori hands ran over the fabric of the apron once more, fingertips tracing over the embroidery she once had thought a humorous joke between friends was now a reality. The fingers on her hand were thin things, spidery things peppered with old scars. On her lower left index knuckle, a brand from when she was careless with a pair of tongs under Miss Maebel’s tuteluge at the forge. The teacher had chuckled warmly as the girl hopped about the room cursing in every language she knew, and then again as she smoothed salve over the burned flesh. It wasn’t the last burn she in her life as a jeweller, she had warned, and she was right. Though luckily, the girl had grown into a herbalist in her own right and improved on the salves used and what burns she received only marred her flesh with a vaguely imperceptible change of skin tone but to her, they were the badges of a trade that had served her well in the few short years she had been in Lithmore.

What was more difficult to hide were the small white slivers that laced the sides of her fingers, other badges of another trade that severed her well. Small slips of the knives she worked with when she was first learning how to cut back flesh for cleaner stitching. She had been so nervous as it seemed to be against everything she had learned as a student, cutting away the living tissue that still bled, but as Lord le Orban had pointed out, a seamstress can’t make a dress trying to sew together frayed cloth. With his guidance and coaxing, she remove what was lost, and salvaged what she could of the man.

Now it was her voice that was coaxing the students, reassuring and teaching them. Sending them into danger.

She paused at the sudden thought before a wave of guilt rolled over her. It had been something she had spent many restless nights thinking about. Her eyes open, staring at the ceiling of her office as the problem put forth be the Queen herself roiled in her head. Southside. Her medicia students were all young, most of them came from rich families and the others where either Reeves or Knights., unwelcome in the lower parts of the city where the ragged people lived. A people who trusted the Brotherhood to keep them and dealt little with the arrogant men and women who paraded around the center of Lithmore as if they meant something. The winter this year had been especially hard this year and the young woman’s heart went out to them. Noone in Lithmore would want for good health, that was her duty to uphold and there was one option in her mind. So, in shaking penmanship she had wrote the letters, trembling in her uniform she had met the Tenebrae and received the guise. A white mask and a simple black robe. There was only one person she knew she could turn to to keep the secrecy of the recluse, untrusting peoples and it was them she gifted the robes to. Now, the White Man was being whispered in the lower places as a blessing from the Lord of the Springs himself, and pride swelled in her chest. Maybe next year a clinic on the edge of the border of south and north could be established, as the Lord Keeper had mentioned but that would have to wait for the thaw to begin.

Her fingertips ran over the words once again and now there was sadness. How many nights had she sat in the tavern with Ailyn, sipping her tea as they jested together about her taking on the position of Magnate to the beautiful Charali, but only when the wild woman became her Epion, of course. It had been her who had made the apron for a lowly nurse in the Madison, a hope for better things to come. But those better things had also weighed the physician down, slowly sapping away her time and duties as the Master craftsman of the Merchants of Lithmore. And now … she had written and spoken to to her friend and now, she was a merchant no longer. Again there was a flash of guilt at the betrayal of such a close friend and of a guild who had been by her side in good and bad, in successes and in drunk, naked terrorising of the city as well. The girl wondered if her friend felt betrayed. It had felt they were like sister at one stage but as much as she had tried to deny it, a seed of jealously had been sown in her heart when Ailyn had found herself a husband and now would bear his children.

With a small sigh, Gwenith le Stepps folded the apron neatly in three before placing it in the chest with her other clothing. The words “Royal Physician” in gold thread gleamed gaudily on the front of the apron before the Tubori woman sealed it away for the couriers to take away to her new apartments.