Sera is the brightest fragment in decades.
“Stop staring at me like that.” She snaps a cloth tight between her hands and lays it across the swollen belly of the woman on the table. “It’s unsettling.”
“I’m not staring. I’m admiring.”
Her eyes flick to mine. Brown, not green, but sharp enough to cut and narrow. “You say that to every woman in this family.”
“I mean it every time.”
She makes a sound that is not quite a scoff and not quite a laugh, which is also Elara’s. “Right. Tell me her aura.”
I look at the woman on the table. She’s been laboring for nine hours, the child inside her turned wrong. Three midwives tried everything before someone rode for Sera, who arrived with her leather case of instruments and her scandalous theories aboutsurgery and her very specific request that her “uncle” accompany her.
Uncle works under most circumstances. Our family line abandoned trying to explain me to outsiders sometime around the third generation.
“Her aura is strained,” I say. “Flickering at the edges. The child’s is separate. I can distinguish it now.”
“That’s good.” She reaches for a blade so clean and precise it looks nothing like the ceremonial knives of the old histories.
“Or bad. Depending on what you do next.” I pause. “What exactly are you planning to do with that?”
“Cut her open.” She says this the way one might announce the weather. “Remove the child through the abdomen. Stitch everything back together.” She positions herself at the foot of the table. “It works. I’ve done it eleven times successfully.”
“And the other times?”
“Two.” A beat. “They were a long time ago, and I’ve improved considerably.” She glances up at me. “Don’t give me that look.”
“I’m not giving you a look.”
“You’re giving me the look my great-however-many-grandmother described in her diary. The one that apparently meansI find this simultaneously impressive and profoundly alarming.”
She kept diaries. Of course she kept diaries. And of course, Sera read them. “She was an accurate writer.”
“She was.” Something softens briefly in Sera’s expression, like a candle flame in a draft—there, then steadied. “Right. When I cut, I need you to narrate every shift in the aura. Brighter, dimmer, which direction. Specifically.”
“I’m aware of how auras function. I’ve been reading them since before your kind discovered fire.”
“And I’ve been performing surgery since before you discovered that hovering over a patient is unhelpful.” Shedoesn’t look up. “So we’re both operating outside our comfort. Ready?”
“Proceed.”
The blade descends.
I watch the woman’s aura as Sera works, calling the shifts the way a sailor calls the wind. “Steady. Dimming—hold. Stabilizing.”
“Good?”
“Relatively.”
“‘Relatively’ is not a medical term.”
“Neither is ‘cut her open and stitch it back together,’ yet here we are.” I pause. “She’s stabilizing. Continue.”
Sera continues. Her hands move with a confidence that borders on defiance, each cut deliberate, each stitch placed with the grim precision of a woman who has decided that losing patients to me is an insult she will not tolerate.
“The child’s aura is very bright,” I offer. “Impatient.”
“Runs in the family.”
