Page 19 of City of Stone and Silence

“You want me to tell you you’re a monster, because of what you can do?” She pauses for a moment, looking upward. “You know what they say about people like me.”

That’s the other secret, the one I didn’t learn until long after I’d started working at the hospital. Grandma isn’t just good with bandages, needle and thread. She’s a ghulwitch.

Not a powerful one, of course. It’s an open secret that the Immortals allow Ghul touched to operate in the city, providing minor healing and preventatives. But everyone knows that ghulwitches are unclean, unholy, which is reason enough for them to keep their abilities secret.

“I know,” I tell her, feeling suddenly embarrassed. She’s lived with this her whole life, however many decades that’s been. “Sorry. I just—”

“Don’t be sorry,” she snaps, and starts walking again. I scurry to catch up. “Have I told you about the first time I saved someone’s life?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It was my cousin. I wasn’t much older than you, and he was about the same. My father and his brothers all lived together, so the boy was as close as a brother, and when he fell sick I stayed by his bed all the time. His guts swelled up, and he cried like a pig getting slaughtered. Worthless doctor my uncle brought in told us he was being tested by the Blessed One, said a few prayers.” She pauses to spit in the road.

“Did you know … what you were?”

“By then I did. Can’t explain what it’s like, any more than I guess you can explain what you see when you’re looking inside someone’s head. But I could feel … anything alive, and what was happening. Just a little. I was a curious little thing. Used to practice on rats.” She shakes her head. “Killed a lot of rats. But I touched my cousin and I could see what was wrong. Something had gotten tangled up in his guts, and he couldn’t shit. That was all, just shit building up, but it was going to kill him.”

“So you healed him?”

“I figured, what did he have to lose?” She shrugs. “Maybe I shouldn’t have. I know a bit more now about what can go wrong. But I did it. Unknotted his guts and smoothed things along and saved his life.” She glances at me. “Of course, when I did that, everything that had been festering came rushing out. Learned a lesson that day.”

I wrinkle my nose. “What lesson?”

“You do what you can with what you have.” Her grin is sharp as daggers. “Sometimes, you want to help someone, that means you get covered in shit.” She rolls one shoulder with a pop. “Come on. Still plenty of work to do.”

When I tell Kosura that story, she breaks down laughing, hiding her face behind a dirty bedsheet until she can get control of herself.

We’re doing laundry, on the hospital’s third floor. Keeping the sheets clean and mended is a never-ending battle, and we all pitch in whenever we have a few moments free. I’m worthless with a needle, so I pile the baskets of parti-colored bedding—stitched from rags, flecked with blood and who knows what else—into the great wooden tubs, then carry buckets of boiling water from the hearth in the corner. Grandma is a big believer in boiling water, which she says keeps disease from spreading. I suppose she would know.

Kosura, of course, stitches as tiny and neat as any professional seamstress, so she works on fixing rips and tears, saving what she can and putting aside what she can’t to be cut into patches or torn up for bandages.

The thing about Kosura—

If I’m being honest, the thing about Kosura is that there is no thing about Kosura. She’s from the Eleventh Ward, but she seems to have a natural grace that elevates her above the coarse manners of most people here. She’s tiny, shorter than me with long, thick hair and lively eyes, and seems to contain enough energy for a person twice her size.

When I look at her, I feel like an imposter. She’s not mage-born, has no Wells to draw on, no special reason to help. But she’s here anyway, nearly every night. Her father is a merchant, successful as Eleventh Ward merchants go, but she spends her evenings sewing bedsheets and wiping up vomit and doing all the other awful things that go with running a hospital.

For all that, she’s the closest thing I have to a real friend. She’s a year older than me, though she’s so innocent sometimes it makes her seem younger. Grandma trusts her, and she knows about the mage-blood sanctuary, though of course I haven’t told her about my own power. As far as she knows, I’m here out of the kindness of my heart, just like she is.

“I’m sorry,” she says, when she can keep a straight face again. “I can just see her saying that, you know?”

“It’s a very Grandma story,” I agree, stirring the cloth in the steaming tub. “I just have a hard time picturing her at our age.”

Kosura grins. “Back in the time of the Blessed One, you mean? Before the Empire?”

“Right. Everyone had stupid haircuts and spent their time fighting duels and dying of unrequited love.” History is not my favorite subject, and much of my understanding comes from popular dramas.

“I think the stupid haircuts were a little later, but otherwise that sounds basically accurate.” Kosura leans forward over her stitching. “Speaking of unrequited love. I hear you had an adventure today.”

I roll my eyes. I would trust Grandma to take any important secrets to her grave, but anything gossipy she passed on immediately. “It’s not like that.”

“You saved a boy from the Ward Guard! No doubt he’s ever so grateful.”

“He ought to be.” I shrug, trying for nonchalance. “But I doubt I’ll ever see him again.”

“That’s what makes it so perfectly tragic! Think of him, lying awake at night, pining for your half-remembered face glimpsed by moonlight.”

“Maybe not my face.” I flush, but only a little, and tell her the particulars of how I’d gotten rid of the Ward Guard. By the end, she’s shaking with laughter, the half-mended sheet thrown over her head.