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