"I think it safe to say we've outdone Elminster for greatest foolery ever committed to paper," I said gloomily to Rolf after surveying our scattered writings pertaining to all our patient cases with growing pessimism. "This isn't useful at all."

"Obviously you haven't read his collected essays on Calimshan." Rolf ticked his teeth together thoughtfully, contemplating the canvas ceiling above us from where he lay on my cot, then slipped one hand out from behind his head and waved it at the papers on my lap. "This is just the beginning. Now we organize our notes and look for the common threads." He resumed his position, tapping one boot contemplatively against the other.

"How do we do that?"

"Depends on the situation. How would you begin?"

He'd asked me some variation on that question several times already, and it felt strange. The notion that someone so much older than me, with an evidently vast acquaintance with the healing arts, would care what I thought about any of this was still a foreign one. Even Father, who had always praised me as being bright, had founded that approbation on my aptitude for taking instruction. It would never have occurred to him to prompt me for my independent reasoning on a situation—with the apparent expectation that I might arrive at some conclusion which differed from his, and furthermore that such a conclusion was of value.

"Um…" I thought carefully, then decided to skim our notes again.

"Stop that."

I frowned and looked up. "Stop what?"

Rolf propped himself up on one elbow and looked at me. "Take your pick—being cautious with your ideas, for one. Waiting to talk until you have a complete answer. Thinking I know and expect a right answer. Thinking a right answer exists. Thinking my opinion is important."

"Isn't it, though? You're the healer. Shouldn't you be telling me what to do?"

"Excellent point. And yes, expertise does suggest a certain amount of authority on a subject. But it can also limit one's thinking in unpredictable ways. I've seen contagions before, certainly. But I haven't seen anything like this before. I might very well make incorrect judgments about this illness because I assume it has certain characteristics in common with other diseases. In fact—I already have. It truly didn't occur to me that divine healing might kill the patients." He raised his eyebrows. "So… try again. Think aloud, if you need to, or write it out, if that's better. How do you arrange information to make sense of it? Visualize that."

"Well…" I chewed my lower lip. "I'm not hesitating like you told me not to," I added preemptively. "I'm just thinking for a second."

"Certainly."

"You made a list of all the people who got sick. Is that right?"

He nodded. "Before we started this."

"I think that's how I would begin, like that. May I write on it?"

Rolf made an affirmative gesture and I shuffled through the pages until I found the list of names written in his tight script. "Just a minute. I think I have to start putting it on paper before I know what makes sense to me."

He nodded. "That's fine."

"So, I have the list," I said after a moment. "Next I'd try to think of things about those people that might matter, which might affect the course of an illness." I looked at him uncertainly.

"Such as?"

"How old they are."

"Good start. What else?"

I thought about it. "What they do for a living?"

"Why would that matter?"

"Oh. Is that… not helpful?"

"Not what I said. What might someone's occupation tell you about them? About their health?"

"Um…" Unbidden, my mind ran to the smithy, which was unwelcome, but also made a certain amount of sense because I knew more about it than any other business in the village. Britt worked with fire, every day, and metal, and he was inside most of the time. He was strong, from his work. He probably breathed more coal smoke than most people. He didn't get much sun. He had such nice skin, for a man. He—

I realized I was holding my breath and released it shakily. I was going to be out of control, fast, if I couldn't think of something besides Britt. I looked down at the list and tried to focus.

"Oswin?"

I cleared my throat heavily without looking up. "Nothing. I'm just… going to begin and see where that gets us. Will you hand me that thing? What is it called?" I motioned vaguely.

Rolf reached over the side of the cot and passed me the thin, smooth-sanded piece of wood I'd indicated. It was a clever invention, with a spring mechanism at the top that secured sheets of paper onto the hard writing surface. "It hasn't really got a name yet. I suppose I think of it merely as a writing board."

"Well, if I think of something better I'll tell you." I clipped my list of patients to the board and set it on my lap. I penciled a vertical column in next to the list of names and wrote Occupation at the top. "Some of this I can fill in from my head," I said, "but we might go faster if one of us writes and one of us reads things off."

"You're already writing. I'll read." I held the pile of notes out to him and he reached out and took them, rifling through them. "What do you have so far?"

"Occupation. Let me fill that in quick and then we'll do age." Innkeep. Shopkeep. Cooper. Baker. I sighed to see Cora's name among the afflicted. Farmer. Stable groom. I paused. Housekeeper, I wrote, feeling a sad ache in my chest. Bonnie had been kind to me, and loyal, and her being sick also probably meant that Jessy wouldn't get my package. I forced myself to move on. Tailor. Herbalist. So we wouldn't be able to ask Greta about her sleeping draughts.

I licked my lips and continued, through peddlers, and wagon makers and cobblers and then… Blacksmith, I wrote a bit unsteadily, once for Britt, and once for his father. I sucked in a slow breath and made myself keep going. Miller. Turnip farmer. Barley farmer. Wheat farmer. Butcher. Bean farmer. Weaver.

"Gods," I muttered. "There must be seventy people on this list."

"There are likely many more than that," he warned me. "Those are only the patients who ended up here. There could be twice that number of sick—especially among rural folk who don't know that they're part of an epidemic."

I swallowed a lump in my throat. The village would never be the same, without all these people who gave it personality and made it home. Not that I had a home any longer, but still…

"This may sound callous," Rolf said. "But for this part of the process, I find it helpful to distance myself from thinking of patients as… people. That's best left for the bedside."

"Because it's too distracting?"

"Precisely. Although obviously you're permitted your difference of opinion."

I pinched the bridge of my nose, despairing at how preoccupied I was with thoughts of Britt, and how anxious I was to have something, anything to make me not think of him. But simply to see his name on the page and to write his occupation down had given me such a miserable jolt. How was I to be any help, or to think clearly, if I couldn't even read his name to myself?

I realized it had been a moment since I'd last spoken. "Sorry. I'm thinking."

"Never apologize for thinking," Rolf admonished me pleasantly. He paged through our notes, making small addendums here and there while I gathered my thoughts.

"So…" I said finally. "Is there a way to not think of them like people? I've known most everyone in the village all my life. And that's good, sort of, but it's also bad because it means my feelings about them will be in the way." I looked down at the page and pointed at Cora's name.

Rolf set the papers down and regarded me with undivided attention.

That was a habit of his I was really beginning to like. I wasn't accustomed to anyone but Britt and Jessa seeming so genuinely interested in what I thought.

"When I see her name I don't think female, baker, thirty-something. I think how she makes my favorite lemon tarts, and has the nicest smile, and how I'll miss her terribly if she doesn't make it." I paused uncertainly. "Right? Is that what you meant? About distraction?"

"That is precisely what I meant," he said after considering my question. "Though if there's a way to excise one's feelings about people for purposes of analysis, I don't know of it. I expect for most of us it's one of those essential qualities that comes along with being a person." He fiddled the pencil between his thumb and forefinger. "Are you familiar with the term recusal?" he asked. "Verb form, transitive, being to recuse oneself? I needn't bore you if you are."

I shook my head. "I don't think so. Different from refusal? Are they related?"

"Yes, they spring from the same etymological root. To recuse oneself is to—having recognized one's inability to approach a situation objectively—voluntarily remove oneself from acting on that situation. Does that make sense?"

"Yes."

"It has applications in other professions as well—but in mine, it means generally that for a physician to be too close to a patient often works to the patient's detriment. Not in simple cases, obviously, but in situations, particularly deadly ones like this, that require some careful, rational thought. You are right to think that your feelings will cloud your judgment. It's unavoidable."

I nodded, trying to stave off my disappointment. He was right, of course, I saw that plainly enough. I wondered if he would let me look at his travel journal while he worked on this. Perhaps he'd stay nearby so I could help answer an occasional question. That wouldn't be so bad.

Rolf studied me, scratching idly at his jawline where his whiskers were beginning to turn scraggly. "Why so glum at that, Oswin?"

"I guess I was feeling a little disappointed," I confessed. "I hoped I could be more help, that's all."

"Well, the conversation isn't over." He studied me. "To acknowledge one's lack of objectivity isn't easy. People don't like to think of themselves as biased. So you saved us a lot of time by accepting that and not taking it as a personal indictment on your character."

He waved a hand. "But I digress. I was explaining recusal—and part of that explanation is that the upholding of professional ideals is all very good when one is in the city and can easily find another healer or obtain the necessary resources for the patient's care. But, when other arrangements for care aren't available, one must simply make do."

Rolf sat up on the cot, swinging his legs over the side and planting his boots on the ground. "What I'm saying, Oswin, is—who the hell else can do this work, if not us?" He looked at me expectantly.

I looked around. Five clerics, frantically busy, and him, and me, and all those patients. "What do we do about the problem of bias?"

He rested his hands on his knees. "We either work with it, and try to be aware of its presence and to allow for it in our decision making—or, if possible, find a way to compensate for it. You have extensive knowledge, which I expect will be tremendously useful, of these people. You also know you can't look at them with the necessary detachment for evaluating their cases on a strictly factual basis. What shall we do to counteract this problem?"

I had a feeling he already had some idea, but wanted me to work it out for myself. "Just a minute," I said automatically, although Rolf already seemed to have figured out for himself that my silences were generally a product of me turning something over in my head. It was a nice contrast from Father, who had the habit of breaking my concentration by prompting me for a faster answer when he felt I was taking too long.

Rolf turned back to our notes while I thought things over.

"I think I have something," I said a while later. "But it'll mean some extra work copying things down on paper, and it'll have to be you, not me… is that all right?"

"I expect so. Tell me your idea."

"All right, so, if bias comes from knowing the patients too well… then I need a way to look at their facts but not know who they are. So, without their names or occupations."

"Good. Go on."

"So, what if we finish what I started from your list—finish thinking of the different factors, and I tell you everything I know about them before we try to think what any of it means. But then when we're completely done recording the facts, instead of trying to use the list, what if we give each person a number?"

He nodded. I thought I saw approval in his eyes, and began to think perhaps my idea might have some merit after all.

"You should be the one to number the patients, so I won't know them. It won't matter if you do."

"And why is that?"

"Because you're not the one with bias." I was gaining momentum. "Then—we make a new list, with numbers only, listed with all the facts for each patient."

"Good." He paused. "Are you one of those people who thinks with your hands? Because you looked like you were weaving an invisible tapestry just now."

"Oh." I felt my cheeks redden. "I guess I do that sometimes."

"I wasn't criticizing. I was just curious to know what you were thinking when you did that."

"I suppose… I was picturing in my head the best way to look for the common threads, like you said. In a list they're all just there on the page. So…"

"So…?" he prompted after I didn't go on.

"What if we tore off each patient line onto its own strip of paper? Then we can lay them out and sort them however we want, change them around, really see it."

He frowned.

"Is that a bad idea?" I asked reflexively. "Does this… waste too much paper?"

"No, none of that. You're just reacting to my thinking face. You have your air weaving and your vacant silences, and I have my disapproving frowns."

"I have vacant silences?" I asked with surprise.

"Oh, you look positively vacuous when you're thinking. Every intelligent word out of your mouth is a delightful surprise." The words might have been insulting, but they were delivered with a smile that dimpled his ruddy, sun-weathered cheeks, as if this were a private joke just we ugly thinkers shared.

Incredibly, I felt myself smile in return, even if just a little.

"Judging by how frequently you feel compelled to explain or apologize for these interludes, this habit of yours must have been objectionable to your previous teachers."

"I guess my Father—" I began, then changed my mind. "I didn't know that. I'll try to remember."

If he was curious about my aborted reply, he didn't let on. "Oh, don't try to change it. You probably can't, and anyway, it's useful. Your aspect of profound stupefaction is what tells me when not to interrupt you."

I laughed, then cut myself off, equally surprised and horrified at myself, that I would laugh, on today of all days. My eyes flooded.

"Try not to think that way," Rolf told me, correctly guessing my mind. "You will laugh, at times, without warning or intent, and it's no betrayal to him. Nor is it a sign that you didn't care enough, or that your way of grief is somehow wrong, or inadequate." He reached for his pack and drew out a clean rag about the size of a handkerchief, passing it to me. "Let me tell you something. Grief is a miserable, heinous, ugly thing. And while some like to pretend otherwise, in my experience most people never truly get over a loss like what you experienced today."

I wiped my eyes, and then wiped them again, and again, as I listened.

"Over time," he said, "you will find a way to make room for this grief in your life. Or, perhaps it's more accurate to say you'll find a way to make room for a life in your grief. It's not a straight path. One day, though it feels impossible now, you will have times when you feel nearly normal again. But those normal-feeling times will be punctuated with moments, or days, or weeks in which you feel exactly as you do now. It isn't a setback, or a failure. It's simply the way the mind works." He crossed his arms and sighed, drumming his fingers on one elbow. "The cruel trick is that those hard times are generally brought on by things that feel trivial—a smell, a flower, a glint of sunlight—any little thing might make you think of him. Just know, the smallness of the thing doesn't invalidate the sentiment it evokes."

After a moment of silence that I used to wipe my eyes a few more times, he spoke again. "Nothing I say will change the fact that now it feels wrong to laugh or smile when you're 'supposed' to be sad, and that conversely, in the future it will feel equally wrong to cry when you're 'supposed' to be better. But, try to understand with your rational mind that it isn't wrong. It'll make it easier to forgive yourself those feelings. All right?"

I nodded.

"You don't look stupid at all right now," he observed, as if in disapproval, though the humorous twitch at the corner of his mouth gave him away. "Were you even listening?"

I liked him very much just then, for defying the sobriety of the moment and giving me a quick hand up out of the well I'd fallen into.

"We were discussing," he resumed without additional preamble, "your idea of tearing off strips of paper for each patient."

"And you were thinking on it. Except that I interrupted you."

"Oh, yes. I haven't ever done it before, and I think we should try it. Let's get started, shall we?"

∞—∞—∞

Two hours later, we had some seventy-odd numbered pieces of paper, and a makeshift table made from a couple of boards set over two cots, at which I was presently seated.

"First let's look for single-factor patterns," Rolf suggested, looking up from the writing board. "See if a significant number of patients seem to share any particular trait. How many men infected, versus women?"

I sorted the slips into two piles. "Thirty-eight women." I counted the second. "Thirty-four men."

"Nothing unexpected there. How about age? Infant to ten years, eleven to twenty, and so on."

This took a bit more sorting. "Baby to ten—eight. Then going up in increments of ten—fifteen, eighteen, fifteen, eight, and eight again. So, more younger people are sick."

"Do you think that's a potential causal factor? Or does it simply reflect the age composition of the village in general?"

I considered that. "The second, I think. I wish we had a list of everyone in the village so we could look at the ones who didn't get sick, too."

"That would be helpful," Rolf agreed, "but I find that wishing for things one can't have is generally an unproductive use of time." He skimmed the list. "I don't see any patterns in terms of occupation, either. Indoor or outdoor, town versus rural, working with animals, exposure to materials, nothing."

While he muttered to himself about that, I sorted the slips into piles based on any other thing I could think of or infer from the other information on them. I started with residential location, sorting them by what part of the village they lived in, poring over the piles and wracking my mind for anything useful. After a while I gave up on that and tried sorting by the other things we'd written down—religion, married or unmarried, number of children—until I ran out of factors.

I sighed and swept all the slips into a single pile again. I'd begun all this by thinking about the unusual characteristics of my case—the sleeping draughts, for a start. But I'd also broken my leg. Oh, and I'd died. I supposed nobody else had that in common with me.

"Anything over there?" he asked after some time had passed.

"No."

"What did you look at?"

"Patron deities. Sources of drinking water. Even stupid things that shouldn't matter. Married or unmarried. Number of children."

"Drinking water? What made you think of that? We didn't list that one."

"No, we just listed where they lived. But I read once that a contaminated water source can spread sickness. I guessed which well, based on the part of town they worked in and their occupational category."

"And what did you find?"

"Nothing. Northeast—eight. Southeast—fifteen. This time of year, the creek is dry—they probably used the well on the east end of the village. Then the two western areas of town were a total of twenty-seven people, who all likely used the well near the greengrocer. There were twenty-two who didn't live in the village at all and probably got their water from farm wells or streams."

"Anything special about the northeast area? Only eight cases there."

"I think it's just that there aren't as many houses there."

"Ah. Well, all the same, good use applying something you read. You're indeed correct that tainted water can cause sickness."

"Not in this case, apparently."

"No, perhaps not." Rolf scratched at his whiskers again. "Not surprising. I didn't expect our task to be that simple, especially since we don't have the rest of the village for comparison. We should evaluate combinations of factors and cross reference those with outcomes."

"Outcomes?"

"Dead or alive," he clarified. "Survival times."

"Oh." I nodded.

He went back to looking over the list and reviewing our notes, and I sorted the slips of paper into two piles—the thirty-three deceased patients in one, thirty-nine living in the other. I pulled the one with deceased patients back over to me and began rummaging through it, idly pushing pieces of paper around on the table.

Of the only eight children on the list of patients, five were already dead. That was sad. Three had lingered on for six days. I pulled over the other pile and picked out the surviving patients under age ten. The longest any of the three living children had been sick was only three days. I wondered if we would find an answer in time to save them.

I stared at those slips a while longer, then recalled that the other group with eight patients was those over fifty. The youngest, and the oldest. It made sense that those were the two smallest groups of the sick, since they were also the two smallest age groups in the village as a whole.

I separated out all eight slips for the patients over age fifty and looked at them. Only one dead, compared to the five children. And that person had lived thirteen days, compared to six.

That seemed odd. But perhaps the adults had gotten sick more recently. I looked over the slips of the other patients in that category. Not so. Seventeen days, twelve, sixteen, fifteen. They were hanging on over twice as long as the children.

Puzzled, I again sorted my slips back into piles of deceased and living patients, lining up each group in ascending order by age. Finished, I surveyed the deceased list with a growing sense of befuddlement. Maybe this was the sort of pattern Rolf meant us to find—of the thirty-three dead, fully twenty-four of them were under age thirty. And only three were over forty. I ruminated on this a little longer before turning to the slips representing the patients who still lived.

Thirty-nine people. I chewed my lower lip as I looked them over.

Rolf made a contemplative sound. I looked up, but he was still looking down at the list of patients, frowning thoughtfully. "Did you find something?" I asked.

"No. Maybe." He glanced at me. "What about you?"

"I don't know yet. Will you… come look at this?"

He got to his feet and stood looking over my shoulder. "Take me through your thoughts."

"These are the people who died. Almost half are young—under twenty. And three-quarters are under thirty. Only three who died were over forty."

"Hmm. Meanwhile, I thought I noticed an inverse trend."

"What's that?"

"I was reviewing the patients who lived, looking at what they had in common."

"And they were all older?"

He nodded, studying the slips on the table in front of me. "Tell me how you got here."

"Well… I noticed there were five children in the deceased pile, and then I remembered there were only eight children in the total patient population. So, more dead than alive. I thought that was very sad. And then I recalled that there were also eight patients in the over-fifty group. But when I looked at them, only one had died. And they were living longer."

I looked up at him.

Rolf nodded. "Keep going."

"After that I started looking at people in their teens and twenties. More of them were dying than the other age groups, and dying faster. It just doesn't make any sense. It should be the weakest people—the very oldest, and the very youngest—dying first. Right?"

When Rolf didn't answer, I looked up again to see him frowning again as he scanned the bits of paper I'd lined up. I decided not to interrupt. "I agree," he said after a while. "The strongest are dying most quickly. Look how long the oldest patients are hanging on. Over two weeks, some of them. And only five of the adolescent group have made it to eight days." He motioned to several of the slips.

"Just like the healing spells. Whatever would normally help a person get better—it's killing them instead." I frowned. "But what does that mean? It seems important, but I don't know what to do from here."

"We look for outliers."

I was about to ask what an outlier was, but Rolf was on a roll.

"We found a trend. The young and strong, and those who have been helped with divine magic, seem least resistant to the illness. To find out why, we look for the people whose cases don't fit that profile—anyone who should have died quickly and didn't, and conversely, anyone who shouldn't have died, but did anyway."

"Like this one?" I picked up a slip of paper and handed it to him. Male, age twenty, deceased, but had somehow survived nine days longer than anyone else his age—except me. I had a feeling I knew exactly who it was.

Rolf looked at the paper, then set his hand on my shoulder and gave me a sympathetic squeeze. "Yes. Like this one." He clapped me on the shoulder. "Chin up, Oswin. You've done well. Let's find the others."