People cram into the hospital, two to a bed. Patients have taken to bringing their own pallets, so there is hardly any space between cots and Aleys must inch her way to the heads of the sick without kicking the suffering on the ground. Fingers clutch at her hem, grab at her ankles. She wants to heal them. But there are so many, and she feels like an imposter, like she’s donned holiness like a costume. Like she’s playing at being a saint. Because she can’t trust her own hands. The gift is quicksilver, running through her fingers, pooling in her palms one moment, evaporating the next.
Aleys cures a shepherd of dropsy, a carter of a sprained ankle. With each healing, she grows less and less substantial, as if she’s thinning at the edges, becoming transparent as wavy glass. For when the feeling comes, there is nothing better, a rush of golden honey followed by a glorious shiver, particles of light shaking loose from her body. She could dissolve in the glory. She touches foreheads and drives out demons. Cords unfurl and infants gasp. Food repels her. She wants only this medicine in her veins. Aleys wants more and more and more. She prays for more. Her need only grows, shooting through her thinning vessels, the light replacing blood and marrow until she is laced with canals of light that flow toward the sea. She is a city of light, and afterward, when she goes dark, she is exhausted and craving.
For just as quickly, the gift lifts like a flock of sparrows, and Aleys is dropped from a great height, fallen boneless to the floor. She tries to summon the light to her hands, blows on them to kindle sparks, but she clutches only mud. And as the glow fades from her bones, doubt fills her marrow. It slinks through her limbs and sidles into her heart and curdles her gut. She crouches at a bedside and feels nothing. Her tongue swells from salted prayer. Ida clutches her hand, knowing. Ida, who has healed and failed to heal so many. Aleys tries, she tries so hard, but nothing comes. The eyes of the suffering beseech her and she knows herself a fraud. Has he abandoned her? Is she unworthy?
Or maybe she’s imagined the whole thing.
“Father,” she whispers to Lukas as a patient turns to the wall, coughing, “you best give him last rites.” She is heavy with silt. Nothing is coming. Still they pull her toward the next bed. Aleys would cry with frustration, but she’s too spent.
She believes. She doubts. If only God would clarify. Why can’t he make himself plain? If she’s chosen, as Friar Lukas insists, why can’t he send an angel to explain? But there’s no angel, no message. Everyone around her is so sure, so desperately certain, and she’s so bewildered. So lonely. People think she has the power of judgment, that she is choosing to save only the righteous. She thinks, I prayed for a gift, but I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask tobeGod.
Later, in the hall, Lukas tries to comfort her. “Child, it is not ours to question his choices. Do not despair. You’ve already saved two souls this afternoon.”
Has she? A palsy stilled, a breech delivered safely. She’d been a distant spectator, not a healer. Her hands had been dead. She’d have been more useful if she’d held a washcloth.
“I had nothing to do with those.”
“What are you saying? Of course you did.”
“No, I was numb.”
“Let me feel your hands.”
She shrinks within her robe. “No,” she says. She doesn’t want his touch.
He stiffens. “What do you want from me?”
“To teach me the difference between coincidence and miracle.”
But he can’t. He sees only God.
At night, Aleys washes in the basin and falls, near dead, onto her cot. Every morning, someone collects the water from her basin. Somehow, it ends up in the street, for sale, in little vials bound with red thread.
When she wakes, the magistra is at her side, keeping vigil.
“When you first came”—Sophia traces her finger gently across Aleys’s cheekbone—“you didn’t have these shadows.” She puts the back of her hand to Aleys’s brow, testing for fever. Aleys wants Sophia to keep her hand there, and reading her mind, Sophia does. “Child, he asks much of you.”
“Lukas? Or God?”
“Both.” A fast twitch in the corner of her mouth. “Neither knows much about limits.”
The weight of Sophia’s hand is like an anchor. “Magistra, I’m tired.”
“I know.” Sophia turns her palm over, smooths Aleys’s brow. “Do you want to stop?”
Aleys just wants to lie here, to rest. Yes. No. “I don’t know.”
Sophia nods. “You’re only human. Come, sit up and eat.” She reaches for a mug of barley and milk, puts the cup in Aleys’s hands. Aleys wraps her fingers around the cup, tilts it back, and tastes honey in the still-warm gruel. Sophia is looking out the window, across the courtyard. She appears lost in thought.
“Magistra?”
“Mmm?”
“What if it’s all in my head? If it’s not real?” Sophia tips her chin, studying Aleys. “I don’t want to be false.”
Sophia takes the empty cup. “Whatever gift God has or has not granted, I know you’re in earnest.” She holds the mug in her lap.
“Sometimes I feel things, in my hands. Then I don’t. I can’t tell whether I’m imagining it.”
