Mercedes Lackey - The Serpent's Shadow

But I'm sure, sure, that he would never have forgotten to shake out his boots. Never. And Sia and Singhe would never have missed a snake in the bungalow, unless some magic had been worked to keep them from scenting it. Surya had tried to warn her daughter in her last hours, but by then she had been so delirious with fever that all she could manage was disjointed phrases. "Shivani," was the only name that Maya had recognized; Surya had been terrified of "the serpent's shadow," and that alone should have warned Maya to beware of snakes. But she had been prostrate with grief, and thinking not at all.

That had been no ordinary krait that killed her father, Maya was certain of it; that was when she had known she had to escape if she wanted to live. And despite her grief, her loss, she did want to live!

"Oh, Maya—I can see why you would want to leave. I am so sorry." Amelia reached for Maya's hands, and Maya reached to take hers, taking comfort from the younger woman's sympathy, even though she could not possibly understand the greater part of what had driven Maya here. "You have friends here, you know, and we'll try to keep you from being too lonely."

Maya held tightly to her friend's hands, glad beyond telling for the warmth of genuine friendship offered. "If you weren't my friend, Amelia, I would find this place desolate indeed," she said warmly, and was rewarded by Amelia's smile. "Thank you."

"Thank you, my dear," Amelia replied, and chuckled. "In all candor, I'm afraid you're sometimes going to think that my friendship is purely selfish. If you had never come here, I would never have been invited to a little paradise like this, and be treated to enough warmth that I can close my eyes and think I'm in a midsummer garden. Sometimes I think that spring will never come!"

"And I feel the same," Maya replied ruefully. "I cannot believe that spring is anything more than rain and leafless trees!"

"Oh, it's well worth the wait, thank goodness, or we English would go mad," Amelia laughed. "If you can get away for a weekend, I'll take you into the country once spring is properly here, and you'll see. We'll even take the train to Oxford, hire bicycles, try our hands in a punt, and go scandalize the male dons! What do you think?"

"I'll look forward to that," Maya said, meaning every word, and from there the discussion diverted to Amelia's fellow medical students at the London School of Medicine for Women, then to the teachers. Amelia had a knack for mimicry that was the equal to a monkey or a parrot, and she had Maya in stitches before too long.

When she left, Maya was sorry to see her go, but Amelia needed to get back to her lodgings before dark, and Maya kept early evening office hours, since most of the women of her practice were never awake before noon.

Tonight she saw three women. One was a music-hall dancer, suffering from the usual foot and knee complaints, and terrified that she would lose her job if she couldn't perform. She had come straight from the theater, hoping against hope to have a cure before the curtain came up. Her friends had clubbed their pennies together for a cab because she couldn't walk the distance. She looked completely out of place in her short, frilled, scarlet dancing dress with a froth of cheap petticoats, bodice covered in cheap spangles and tinsel, her hair done up on her head and crowned with three faded ostrich plumes that had seen better days.

"It's that Frenchy can-can, Miss Doctor," the girl said, her face pasty beneath the makeup she wore, as Maya gently manipulated the swollen knee. Beneath the makeup she was also dowdy, to put it bluntly. Ordinary face, ordinary talent, but extraordinary legs. Her legs were what she'd been hired for; if they failed her—Maya didn't have to guess the rest. "It's thrown me knee out, it has, and me ankles hurt so—"

"I quite understand, dear," Maya soothed.. "Now, you're making your muscles all tense, and that's making it hard for me to help. Can you sit back and relax for me?" She looked up at the pale round of a face with two red patches on the cheeks, and the eyes hidden in smudges of charcoal. "I think I can fix this for you, if you'll just relax."

"No knives, no operatin' then? You can fix it now?" There was hope there. "I saw a doctor at a clinic when it started gettin' sore, an' he said there oughta be an operation, so I left an' tried t' work it off."

The other doctor was probably looking for a poor little fool to experiment on, Maya thought bitterly. There were surgeons and doctors of that sort, perfectly willing to work at charity clinics just so they could find people who wouldn't complain if they were used to try out some new apparatus or theory.

"No, dear. Your knee just got a bit out of joint— not quite dislocated, but enough so you'd be in pain," Maya replied. A lie, of course; the ligaments were torn, but she could fix that. "Then your poor ankles weren't quite up to taking on the extra load, you see. The more it hurt, the more you threw yourself off balance, and that just made things worse. Like trying to put out a fire by throwing paraffin oil on it."

Satisfied with the explanation, the girl leaned back in the comfortable easy chair Maya had placed in the examination room, and Maya called on her magic.

This she could do, had been able to do from the time she could toddle, with no need of tutelage from Surya. Healing came as naturally to Maya as breathing. With her hands making slow, soothing massaging motions on the girl's knee, she reached down, down, deep into the native, living earth and rock beneath the pavements of the city, deep into the heart of her own little jungle, and up into the life force of the city itself. Where there was life, there was power, and that power could be channeled into healing. It poured generously into her, glowing emerald, sparkling topaz, golden brown and warm, bringing with it the taste of cinnamon and honey in the back of her mouth.

She gathered all of it into herself, the golds, yellows, and velvety browns of the earth-energy, the peridot and leaf-green and turquoise life-energy; she brought it in through her navel and transmuted it into the ever-verdant emerald green of healing, sending it out in a steady stream through her hands.

"Cor—that feels good, that does," the girl murmured, in a note of surprise. "Feels warm!"

"That's because I'm getting the blood to flow properly around your knee," Maya told her. "This is quite a new treatment—German, you know."

"Oh, German," the girl repeated, as if that explained everything. "Them Germans, they got all the tricks, don't they, then?"

Maya laughed, a low and rich chuckle. "So they think." She continued to pour healing into the knee, mending the tears invisibly, without scarring, and leaving enough residual energy that the ligaments could continue to strengthen themselves. The girl was going to need strong knees if she was going to dance the can-can. She moved down to the ankle, which fortunately suffered only from strain; she pulled out inflammation and pain, leaving ease in her wake. Simple magic, simply done, but satisfying. When she stood up, the girl got up carefully out of the chair, and her eyes widened as she tested her knee and found it strong and supple again, then rose on her toes and did an experimental kick over Maya's head. Maya had been expecting this, and didn't duck.

"Blimey! It's better!" she blurted, and flushed with pleasure.

"And mind you don't skimp on your exercises from now on, nor on your warm-ups," Maya replied, as the girl fumbled in her worn velvet reticule and pressed her five-shilling fee into Maya's hand. "That's what got you into this trouble, you said so yourself. Does a fiddler mistreat his fiddle? He keeps it warm and safe; he doesn't play it in the rain, nor ask too much of it until it's been limbered and ready. Those legs are your instrument, my girl. Treat them right, and they'll put bread in your mouth for a long, long time. Don't be tempted to show off your kicks until you've warmed up your muscles and stretched them out."