The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,26

upon it, some big and some small, that it bore in patience. It did all things in patience, following where its mistress led at the same steady pace and never once faltering.

Also it had a gun, set in its back, that turned and quartered all the time and looked in every direction. That gun, and the drudge’s perfect aim with it, was the reason why Ursala could walk the roads alone and not get killed or et. I don’t know that anyone ever seen it fire, but then I never seen any woman or man offer slight to Ursala, or gainsay her. You would have to be a reckless wight indeed to do such. She weared a bracelet on her wrist that was the same grey as the cutter blade, and like the cutter blade it was said to turn silver when Ursala bared it and looked at it a certain way. It was tech, and it was called the mote controller. It made the drudge mind her and obey her.

Ursala was from elsewhere, and she looked it. She was tall and thin as a willow stick, her face all sharp and the bones of her body plain to see in the strange, tight weeds she wore. Her eyes was green, with darker green painted over the lids of them, as shiny as oil on water. Her skin was a darker shade than anyone’s, even mine and Athen’s. Her long, black hair was wore in a kind of braid down her back, with beads wove into it. She had a way of holding herself, flicking her cloak to make it hang the better and looking at you straight all the while, like as if to say “I’m a queen, where I come from. What are you, now I’m standing here?”

She was different when she was doctoring, and different again when she was drinking, but no matter what she done there was not much that was warm in her and not much that was bending. In her doctor work, she was patient and steady and used her voice to calm you, but I never seen her touch anyone outside of what was needed to find a hurt or tend to it, and even then she done it with a set face and a frowning look.

When she was drinking, she was wont to talk to herself inside her tent, like she was keeping up two sides of an argument. She liked wine a whole lot, and drunk it whenever it was put in front of her, but it didn’t seem to make her happy. And if it fretted her to be with people when she was sober, she just plain couldn’t bear them when she was in her cups.

It was no secret that Catrin Vennastin misliked Ursala, very strong. Nobody knowed why exactly, but it almost seemed to me like there didn’t need to be a reason. They was just opposites, not in anything they said and done but in who and what they was. Catrin was strong and fixed. Ursala was strong and wandering. I don’t know how to say it better than that.

And anyway, long and short of it, it didn’t matter. Ursala was needed, lots of ways. Mostly she was needed to doctor. Shirew Makewell did well enough for the hurts of the everyday. She could bind or burn a wound, dig out a choker seed, set a limb, put a poultice on a scald. But Ursala could see the places inside you that was hurting, and she could go inside you to make them right again. She done this with a machine that was inside the drudge, that she called a dagnostic.

I’ll tell you a story to show how that worked. When Athen was eight she had terrible pains in her stomach, bad enough to make her scream if you even touched her there. She had had the pains before, and they had gone away in their own course. This time, they didn’t go away but got worse, and Athen sickened. She was burning up from the inside, though our mother sponged her with cold water every few minutes. Her breath come less and less until you couldn’t hardly see her chest move. Jemiu thought she would die. She didn’t say it, but I seen in her face that she thought it. No tears, just the hard set of facing into a grief that hasn’t quite come yet.

But Ursala turned up at the village gate when Athen was