Page 100 of Beds and Blades

She examined me with the brisk, impersonal care she gave everyone, which I was beginning to understand was not coldness. It was competence without decoration. Her hands found the bruises along my hip and shoulder where the ground had introduced itself with enthusiasm.

“Nothing broken,” she said. “You fell well. Or luck briefly impersonated skill.”

Caen laid her hands over the worst of the bruising.

I had seen her heal before, but I had not felt it. It was a slow, deep settling, as if the pain had been making an argument and Caen had calmly presented better evidence. The ache loosened. The sharpness went out of my shoulder. My hip stopped broadcasting its grievances quite so loudly.

Then Caen looked at the glasses in my hand.

I had been trying to decide how to ask. Whether it was possible. Whether asking made me ridiculous. Whether it was better to pretend I could function indefinitely in a blurred medieval war zone.

Caen simply held out her palm.

I put the two broken pieces into it. She turned them over, studying the cracked lens and the snapped bridge.

“These let you see?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Glass shaped to correct the eye,” she said. “Your world makes fine things.”

“I cannot replace these here, can I?”

“You are thinking about the wrong problem. Your problem is not the broken glass. It is the eye itself. The glass only compensates for it.” She set the broken pieces on the table with surprising gentleness. “I do not need to mend the compensation. I can mend the cause.”

I went still.

“You can fix my eyes?”

“I can correct what is bent in them.”

“Hold still,” Caen said. “This will feel strange, and you will want to pull away. Do not.”

She placed her thumbs lightly at the outer corners of my eyes.

“Keep them open.”

I kept them open.

There was pressure. A sensation of something inside me being measured, adjusted. The warm blur of the room tightened.

Resolved.

Caen’s face, very close to mine, snapped into a focus I had not had from my own eyes since I was eleven years old.

I sat there and looked at the world with naked eyes.

And saw it whole.

“Oh,” I said.

Apparently that was becoming my entire vocabulary for the genuinely astonishing.

“Better,” Caen said, sitting back.

She looked tired. Drained. The skin around her mouth had gone pale, and one hand stayed on the edge of the table a moment too long before she let go.

I blinked. The room stayed clear. I blinked again, because replication mattered. Still clear.