The Pelican's Bequest 1 / Chapter 21: A Deluge of Owls
Only when Madam comes in to my laboratory for her favorite soothing vapor that evening do I take up the thread of our earlier conversation. "Why is it practically everything in Wizard culture goes back to the Time of Tribulation, but no one can even agree on why it happened?"
"If a wizard knows his faults he'll certainly not share them with anyone else for fear of them being used against him," Madam Lessmore says with the heterodox air I love in her. "Perhaps it's something similar."
"Indeed." And I tell her my theory about the venereal outbreak that might have been at the root of the wars known as the Tribulation.
"That's a fascinating idea." She is suddenly animated. We discuss various possibilities and then she breaks off. "It's a shame we couldn't publish something like that, but it would cause mayhem, all that apparent justification of anti-muggle sentiment."
"I wasn't proposing to tell anyone but you."
Madam fidgets.
"Well, I've been meaning to tell you, Severus; the records I've been keeping of our summer exploits have begun to take the shape of monographs," the nurse says, suddenly nervous. "I'll bring them tomorrow—we can discuss them then." And she is gone.
As usual I have a full night of experimentation ahead of me, one of the best ways to block out all worries from my mind, so I don't think of it that night or the next day, when we have a contagious curse two children got out of a book somewhere and subsequently infected most of their peers.
Lessmore produces a tiny packet from her robe and reconstitutes it while I prepare us each a rejuvenating tea in my laboratory. If I'm exhausted, the fifty-something nurse must be tired as well, though she seems to have the stamina of a Dromedary Moose.
"These are your notes, then?" I ask, reaching for the parchments. Her eyes are on me as my face falls. "'A Proposed Mechanism for Variations in Antigen Response, by Severus Snape and Madame Aramis Lessmore'; 'Hot or Cold, Complementary or Congruent: The Complex Chemistry of Cutaneous Conditions, by Madam Aramis Lessmore and—' Lessmore explain yourself!"
"That title was a bit overly clever but they like that sort of thing at the Wizarding Physick Monthly."
"You have submitted these, these sketches, these fragments, to accredited journals WITH my name and WITHOUT my consent?"
"There's nothing wrong with the data. It's everything I've been submitting to you as part of our division of labor—you track what ingredients you use and in what amounts, and I organize it and give it back to you, with a few suggestions from me, for your further study."
Speechless with rage and betrayal, I paw through the documents. "These are all in a ridiculously preliminary stage. They're mere suggestions! Things we've discussed over tea! It's embarrassing! I'm writing a retraction this moment."
All of the parchments are in her hands and she is looking at me with a new danger in her eyes. "I knew you wouldn't understand. Of course they're very preliminary. Of course they need double-blind studies, if possible, controlled conditions, larger study samples—do you have access to those things? Because this small rural practice is all I can offer you." Her eyes soften slightly. "This is the way you attract attention from the people who can get you all the things you need for your work. They can get you in a school, even, or at the very least a grant to expand your laboratory here. I took a step without your permission because I knew you would never allow it."
I open my mouth. She raises her hand. "If you look at all the monographs, our names alternate in sequence because I knew neither of us would agree to be first."
I slump back in my chair, defeated. Blast this woman for knowing me so well! "Has there been any response?"
She laughs. "Oh, no, you don't know how these academics work. Everything is very slow. Today's outbreak of Clinging Carbuncles would make an excellent follow up to the first article we sent to the Nursing Journal—a much larger sample size to illustrate that some children needed a different kind of remedy."
That's all it takes for the world to fall away and she leaves me after an hour of excited debate, each of us promising to write half of a monograph over the weekend and combine it on Monday.
By Tuesday, it's been sent. I feel rather pleased with myself. Lessmore made it readable, of course, but I'm the co-author of an article! To a dusty publication read by only the most arcane minds in Wizarding Europe.
On Wednesday, it's all forgotten because we are attending the arduous and (for me) terrifying breach birth. When the child and mother survive I have to leave the room because I'm laughing—that breathy laugh like James and the other boys used to direct at me. It's just too huge, what the nurse accomplished that day.
On Thursday morning we happen to be spending a little extra time upstairs in the infirmary because Madam Lessmore has thought perhaps I would get in the way less during her incantations if I knew which movements to expect from her. She's miming through the gestures slowly when I happen to look over her shoulder at the window. "Look out!" is all I can think of to say, and in a flash, we've both hurled a bolt of our magicks to throw up the window sash just in time.
A deluge of owls sweeps into the room, scattering their envelopes all over the cots.
We have to leave the window open when we rush off to our first appointment, and only at lunch can we open some of the packets the nurse had the foresight to scoop into her bag.
"My dear dilettantes,
Thank you for the most entertaining fairy story I have read since I was a babe. The idea that a Creeping Curse could be treated by anything other than a good strong syrup made of a basic solution to flush out the offending toxin is not only completely improbable but a foolish waste of time considering all of the pressing concerns true scientists grapple with for the good of Wizarding Society every day. Nevertheless, my taste in literature has always run to the fantastic, so I pray you, engage your minds in that direction instead.
Ever himself,
The Honorable Professor-Physician Bactrius L. W. N. Gromwick"
"Oh, Lessmore, I'm so sorry," I begin, not sure why I feel I've let her down when this publishing business was her idea.
She has a huge smile on her face.
"This one is good:
The addition of this so called booster ingredient for the (as far as a mere scientist can tell, completely random) subgroup of patients reminds me of the child's habit of repeating a spell more than once because the inexperienced caster thinks mere repetition is the source of magic. It stands to reason that one group receives the best formulation of the remedy (the one with this fabled potentiator ingredient, or the original) and the other is the unfortunate control group. The fact that both of your groups had similarly good outcomes probably means your potentiator is useless, or that your data is flawed. Should you wish to learn more about the deductive method, please consult my children's textbook, 'Bending the Mind to Logic,' and feel free to let me know if it was not sufficiently elementary for you.
From Hildegarde von Uppingbrau, Dean, Nursing Academy, Lowenbrau, Bavaria"
Lessmore's cackle drowns out my moan that this must be what it's like to receive a Howler.
"Isn't it grand? It's like a dream come true!" And then she's showing that she did inherit her parents' talent for laughter. When she comes up for air and catches my expression she's off in another paroxysm. "They'll debate that black is white and your head is your heel if they think you're casting aspersions on their existing publications, and now they obviously smell the possibility of a new, a new—"
"Do I need to give you a tonic?" I ask drily.
"Oh and this one, from Professor Belligerus Bick. I treated him when I worked as resident nurse at the Hallowed University of the Hebrides. He used to call me his 'bustling hell-bitch whose only talent was shattering his concentration with my poking and prodding.' I wonder how he is."
"He should be hoping to never cross my path," I reply with venom. How dare he speak to Lessmore in such a way?
She begins to calm down at last. "Severus, I knew you wouldn't understand. These people, all they do is write nasty letters and heated articles back and forth to each other when they're not undertaking exactly what Gromwick said—the work that keeps our world moving ahead. Novel ideas make any civilization work, and we have so few in our society. That they come from crusty old souls with an odd sense of humor just helps separate those in the know from the amateurs. Insults are the scholar's Guild Language."
"Then I must be a hopeless dilettante because I see no humor in being invited to read a children's textbook."
She begins picking at her food again. "You see, this is exactly why you never got on with your Aunt Adele. She was a scholar, of sorts, and no doubt studied with these kind of people for a time. It rubs off on you, the banter, and underneath they're all so sensitive. You just have to keep in mind—academics are like children. If you imagine them with a tail, then they become the nice kind of beastly."
"My feeling is that Aunt Adele was always the wrong kind of beastly, tail or no tail!"
We finish our lunch while passing letters back and forth. They all do end with some kind of invitation to further embarrass ourselves, I suppose.
"Madam," I venture as we move on to the next patient. "Miss Bundle is a scholar, is she not? To have learned as much as she has at such a young age she must be, yet she's always been very straightforward with me. We get along quite well, in fact."
"Well, that's because you have something she wants," Nurse Lessmore reproaches, shooting me a look that communicates everything she's surmised about my relationship with the librarian. "You'd be kicked out of the guild for pandering to an addict like that."
That evening we return to a cold infirmary and piles of letters mixed with feathers. "Now we have to answer them all," she says brightly.
"Madam, I must intervene. You put in a strenuous day of work, often accompany me in my research at night, and then I have every reason to think you spend the rest of your time organizing data and writing. These letters are not so important for you to risk your health with another responsibility, and I can't be bothered with them." I've been sneaking various supplements into the teas I make for my friend, concerned that she is not of an age to be pushing herself so hard, but she seems to be in the flush of her prime when it comes to our research.
"Oh, don't worry, Severus, there's an old technique we can make use of," the nurse says mysteriously. "And don't you want to send a few choice words back to these academics?" She staves off my sudden enthusiasm. "I'll show you next time."
We have Friday and Saturday off so on Sunday, after very easy rounds, the nurse introduces me to a technique used by people with a busy correspondence: the Quisquam Quill.
"I wrote several responses on my own, and the quill began to grasp my syntax and tone to the point where it wrote this on its own:
"Thank you very much for your amusing risposte to our theory, but I am afraid your reasoning is entirely unsound. You of all people should recognize that the Theory of Individual Direction, accepted by all scientists of stature since the beginning of last century, says that each person's unique magic plays some part in their reaction to pathogens and to medicaments. We are sorry that you have wasted your time with supposed 'Paracelsan' texts written by charlatans for the credulous. Please consult the more complete list of references below in addition to those cited in our article.
Wishing you an enjoyable dip into the pure waters of the true alchemical tradition,
Madam Aramis B. Lessmore, Bonded with the Nursing Guild of Britain
Severus Snape, Student, Hogwarts School of Wizardry
"Could you have written better?" she challenges me.
"Perhaps less kindly, but no, it will do."
She gives me a chance to read a few before we send them, but it's not as interesting to me as our work. After a good portion of the school's common owls are dispatched, often with two or three letters directed in the same vicinity, we turn our attention to the small number of new envelopes that arrived in the little basket we've set on the stone windowsill for that purpose. They are more in the same vein, but from farther away, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, some minor Greek islands. The ones in other languages will take me some time to decipher, I'm thinking, when a whoop, a definite whoop, comes our of the dignified nurse's mouth.
"Oh, oh," her face is turning an odd color and it takes her a moment to compose herself before she snatches a parchment and begins to write a personal response.
"What is it? Let me see," I reach for the letter, but it is the set of wizard photographs I that catches my eye.
They appear to be identical, though one is marked "Before" in an execrable script, and the other reads "After."
A small man of about sixty with a turtle-like head poised on a thin body stares straight at the camera with the intractable look of someone who doesn't even consider he won't get his way. Such is his rigidity that only the movements of a few scientific instruments behind him betray that it is a magic, moving, photograph.
That and the slight sway of his—
My eyes can't stop traveling from one photo the other, scrutinizing the academic's nakedness, when Madam Lessmore begins to read:
"Our dear Professor Ipswitch, We are very interested to hear about your charm which, so you claim, can cloak a magical signature. But since we specified that our methods, while still held in complete secrecy, do not involve a photographable entity or the patient's physicality per se, we did not hope to be so fortunate as to see ALL of your considerable charms.
We laugh so hard and so long we have to take a tonic.
I have to hand it to the always-resourceful Madam Lessmore: if she hadn't published the ideas I wanted to spend a lifetime studying before releasing, I would never have been exposed to some of the brightest minds in the wizarding world who could help me make that study happen. Within no time at all we've established a more or less regular correspondence with some of these acid-tongued bastards who are nevertheless making my theories expand by leaps and bounds by virtue of their hidden suggestions.
Two of my favorites are Bugstein and Bonestein, women not yet old, partners in scientific work (and other matters, I grew to think) whose arabesques of mockery reminded me a little of Cousin Veronica's, except these two harpies didn't care about my parentage. None of the academics probably cared about the ancestry of their latest target. Thus I could simply appreciate their democratic bile they spread to Lessmore and me equally in their first memorable missive:
"Ah yes, children, so you have come to have dreams of turning lead into gold and discovering the Philosopher's Stone so you can wreak havoc on the world that can so little afford yet another pair of fools to loot it for their pleasure. It happens every few years, these alchemical dreams, and all they prove is the old adage, 'Like seeks like,' which is indeed the true utterance of the great Paracelsus, and not the more sanguine 'like cures like,' as goes the rumor, which he may well have spread himself, the rogue!
Your vanity and your presumption are the only things great about you—not even your bathetic claims to be part of what you surely think of as the 'one true' Paracelsan tradition distinguish you in any way from the puling masses desperate to stand out, even if it is only for their sheer audacity.
How are we so sure that you are charlatans of the worst kind? How do we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you wouldn't be able to distinguish dealbation from rubification if your lives depended upon it? Because we happen to be in the possession of the mummified head of the Great Medick, and on rare occasions it, he, chooses to speak.
He spoke to us after we read aloud your risible foray into study far beyond your station, and remarked, well, he nothing so much as laughed at it. He was surprised, furthermore, that the Invisible School, from which you have apparently misappropriated some of your ideas, is still going.
The Head laughed for quite a long time, and we must commend you for bringing so much delight to the desiccated remains of the father of Western science. It, he, was so delighted that we should like nothing better than to stretch those leathery features into a grimace of delectation over certain forms of tomfoolery, with which he was much acquainted in his lifetime, that have not yet gone out of fashion.
Intransigently,
Professors Laura Bugstein and Dora Bonestein, Clandestine University of Tel Aviv."
"They can't be serious."
"You grew up with the Paracelsan method as something you do, which means it holds no real romance for you," Lessmore reminds me. "For everyone else, Paracelsus and alchemy are the precursors of much of our present-day knowledge, but the link has been lost, and many thinking people have felt this severed thread to be an acute loss. Witches and wizards have been trying to make sense of the myths and contradictory traditions for centuries, and while our society has alchemical terms and techniques distributed within our magic, Muggle society sees in it only a path not taken. Probably the two illustrious professors have so seen many treatises claiming to speak with an authority about humors they can hardly believe our papers rise above mere delusion."
"Yes, yes," I'm nodding impatiently. "That much I gather. The head, the head, Madam. Do they really possess anyone's shrunken head, much less the Great Philosopher's? And converse with it?"
She shrugs, not interested in the grisly detail. "It was a common practice at one time to preserve whatever bits you could get your hands on when a Christian saint died. But perhaps they were merely trying to test how credulous you are. It's no more preposterous than the rumor he faked his own death and is actually wandering around, immortal, somewhere in Asia."
Shivering with delicious horror, I compose this letter myself.
My dear scholars and most revered remnant of the Great Physick with whose learning I have been regaled since childhood,
Thank you so much for your concern about our unremarkable showing among other misguided seekers after alchemical truths. We especially appreciate your clarification that it is "like seeks like," which is much more in line with our investigations in treating common maladies with magical compounds, in which we have sometimes seen that the therapeutic picture is a little more complicated."
Here I relate the story of the little boy and Belvedere the spider.
"Perhaps the illustrious Head would clarify still further—how can we distinguish between a magic or a condition being attracted to a compound because they are similar, and an attraction based upon the first party needing the second in some way?
I give a brief summary of the Red compound that so helped the Blue Lilly.
Between the illness or antigen itself, and the cure?
Here I tell them about the difference between the Gorgon Lion's venom and its own nature.
These are thorny problems indeed and of first importance in applying the Paracelsan method to our magical patients, as two magnanimous souls such as yourselves must have contemplated many times with the clarity of heart that the recluse and the social misfit ironically tend to exhibit.
Agog with impatience until your reply,
Severus Snape under the tutelage of the formidable Madam Aramis Lessmore, Bonded with the Nursing Guild of Britain."
"I do believe you've gotten the hang of it," Madam chuckles. "Yes, their reply is by far the most on point of all the others. Maybe they do have the real head. It recognized some of your mother's ideas as coming from the Invisible School."
Over our short correspondence with these two—two and some fraction—lunatics I could never tell who exactly had said what. Was it the Head that suggested I take another look at mercury, sulfur and the other elements so often mentioned by Paracelsus and his contemporaries. I'd never been able to pay much attention to these and some of the other obscure classification methods like earth, air, water and fire, and the planets in addition to sol and luna, because in terms of potions, active/passive, hot/cold were the things that made a potion "go"—in addition to the magical color, of course.
That there was more to a human than to a Pseudosnake Beetle, was painfully clear to me the one time that Nurse Lessmore had to neutralize the effects of my salve upon a patient. My two big successes of the summer—if you can call a man losing his hand and a boy losing his best friend and pet spider unqualified successes—stand out most clearly in my mind, but every day was filled with frustration and a sense that I was only helping to a fraction of my potential. Some consultations I did nothing but stand there and listen for some command coming from the patient's magic that never came. Other times I streaked their foreheads with half a dozen compounds until Lessmore shot me a look telling me to let it be.
A few times, especially in the case of fevers, my treatment made things fractionally worse but nurses have very good magic against most fevers, so there was no harm done.
The worst time happened right before we were inundated with owls. I'd sensed the many loopholes and guesses in my theories from the start and habitually spent many nighttime hours making my crystal aviary of stolen magic fly towards or against a test compound lowered in a phial into their midst. It was impossible to tell why the Yellow Active Warms and the Blue Active Cools had a notable attraction to salts cut with copper, and yet seldom coincided on anything else. Every compound from my collection, as well as every raw ingredient I could find, was cycled through the collection of magics. Every nonsensical reaction was noted down in great detail, and then, disheartened that there seemed to be no pattern at all, I would go through the series again, hoping that at least the nonsense was replicable.
Treating patients—none of whom I knew as well as Lilly or of whom I possessed a shard of their magic in myself like the samples—was like trying to translate a wordless murmur into a safe and effective treatment on the spot. A galvanizing sort of fear that could usually be counted upon to stretch my sensitivity beyond known limits.
Or to delusion. I'm still convinced that I "heard" something coming from the teenage girl who must have been about my own age. She was an au pair just arrived from France, and so perhaps that was it—Lessmore's French was basic but my far better grasp of the language had me distracted with the task of translating.
"Will the mademoiselle tell us what she ate on the last day she was able to eat?" I ask politely, using my developing sense of how the patient would prefer to be addressed. Her eyes are huge in a gaunt face.
"It was a week ago. Potatoes, carrots, beef. Honeyloaf custard for dessert. The food is plain but good."
I translate while Lessmore nods impatiently. "Ask her how they treat her."
We get the picture of a girl who enjoys the two little children in her care, has some schooling in charms from an institute in France, and has enjoyed her two months in Britain until last week.
The information comes to us between heaves. Lessmore uses her magic to relax some of the muscles in the girl's gastrointestinal tract to ease her urge to vomit. The patient sinks back against the pillow. I dab at her lips with a wet cloth. Her eyes half-close and when I see the whites something in me springs into action.
"She is a bright blue, passive, hot," I say over my shoulder to the nurse, who is reversing her muscle relaxation spell in case she targeted the wrong muscle by mistake.
"And her illness?" Lessmore's voice is grim.
"An allergy of some kind to something in the English countryside, but that leaves thousands of possibilities. It's hard to tell what the original cause can be from the symptoms that are just a generalized immune reaction."
It turned out to be the honey. Or rather, the bees that made the honey were a magical species unique to the area and had a special mold on their legs that was taking hold in her system after having the honey for pudding. A convoluted chain of events that we might not have found out if I didn't almost kill her.
The pelican is ready with the healing steam. Jeweled Gentian Flower, powdered beetles and wormskins, along with a mild copper salt that reacted when I brought the phial to her bedside. In short, things that I'd used many times before, in that combination even, to no ill effect.
She took a deep, appreciative breath and her heart stopped beating.
"Get it away! Turn it off!" the nurse is bellowing at me, and I pour one of my neutralizing agents on the glass before smashing it in fright.
"Restarting a heart is nothing," my friend said over and over to me that night. "Wizards' hearts stop all the time in the middle of spells. It was—"
"If you say 'nothing' one more time I shall scream."
"You correctly identified the mold she started coughing up. I would have had to take a sample to a specialist. It might have been too late," she tries to appease me.
"Because I have spent all of my summers except this one collecting insects," I bite off, staring balefully at the magics going around and around in the prison I made for them. Introducing a sample of the same preparation into my little menagerie produced no notable reaction at all, not even from the two blue passive warms. What kind of an idiot tries to base actual treatment on such a few samples? "For the girl's sake it would have been better if I'd done the same this summer."
"She's on the mend now; it might have been a day or two had you not been with me," the nurse says quietly. "Severus, I thought we agreed: you are my intern, I take responsibility for you. If I let you do a little more than the average intern, it's only because I've observed you for years taking your potions science as seriously as any professional. I let you treat me! Do you think I swallow any potion or inhale any vapor just because someone tells me it's for my own good?"
This is true. Lessmore has a bit of a mania about getting sick from foreign substances. She has a few spells she says in her secret language over food and drink purchased in restaurants.
Madam strokes my hair and I sob. "I saw my mother, I saw the magic at her mouth, just like for Mum before it flew out and she collapsed in on herself," and I cry for a long time for the mother who never lived long enough to see me trying desperately, stupidly, to use my strange gifts for something good.
"I've had patients die on me before while treating their textbook ailment with the textbook cure. I've caused chemical burns with the most common lotions for rashes. We can't know everything," Lessmore's voice comes from above where my head is resting on the table. "But you can't stop, Severus, you know this." The breathy laugh coming from my mouth disturbs me as much as her words. "Let me tell you a story.
"When you asked me about my family earlier in the summer, I didn't tell you about my sister." I look up. "Yes, I have a sister. JoJo, for Josefina. She is two years younger than me, so she was eight and I was ten when we lost our mother, and one year later I left for Hogwarts."
Madam waits for me to grasp the import of her words. "Her parents were gone and you left her soon after."
She nods. "She never really got my aunt the way I did—I discovered that she was just taciturn, she was salt of the earth and you couldn't pay her to crack a smile. She never did anything but order around her own children like an army. JoJo went to Cape Verde to live with my grandparents, and the environment suited her much better."
"Do you see her?"
"Yes, I do now. I see her once a year on my trip to the island. Here is a picture of us,"
It's a muggle picture but the woman standing next to a younger Lessmore practically leaps off the page with the strength of her presence. Her skin is the color of dark wheat and her hair is long and full with a loose curl.
"Formidable," I say in French.
Lessmore laughs. "That she is. JoJo inherited my mother's gift for organization and is one of the wealthiest women on the island." Her face looks suddenly older. "But we didn't speak for almost 15 years after I left her.
"Imagine you're a child of 9. Your sister leaves you all alone to go to some school no one has ever heard of, and where you can't join her, can't even visit because none of the adults you know want to go anywhere near it. She held it against me so that she didn't even come to my Bonding Ceremony when I became a nurse."
This last hurt is the one that comes through in her voice, and the nurse pauses a moment before continuing.
"It wasn't until a few years later that I heard about a genealogist who could trace any magical ancestors for you. Since I lost my parents so young, I had no one to ask—my Aunt Penny was positively phobic about anything having to do with Hogwarts, so she was never any help. And you can't blame me for wondering if I was the first in my family or not. I paid this rather seedy little man to look into it for me, thinking that Cape Verde had to be one of the most out of the way places on earth and thus a difficult place to fake information for.
"The report he sent me was completely accurate as far back as living memory could go, and it went much farther. Each of my parents had a female ancestor who was a witch, making me one sixty-fourth magical blood. When I sent the report to my grandmother to confirm that her side of the family had been depicted correctly, my sister saw it and called me for the first time. Something about seeing it in our bloodline made her finally understand that it wasn't something selfish I got in my head one day as an excuse to leave her.
"When I say I'd give anything to have those 15 years of my life with her in it, I mean, anything but my magic. "
The nurse has my full attention and she looks at me with a pain she seldom reveals with me.
"I'm not good with people, Severus. Can you think of anyone at the school, other than you, that I exchange more than the absolute minimum of social niceties with?"
I shake my head.
"But I've made a good life for myself as a nurse. A full, contented life, because I followed my Gift. It's not been a sacrifice at all, because there really wasn't another way for me. As much as I would have loved to have stayed by my sister's side when we were young, there was something even more important than her well-being calling me, I'm ashamed to say."
She takes a deep breath.
"I didn't want to tell you about my sister at the beginning of the summer because I didn't want to push you in any direction. But you can't deny the abilities you've displayed these months, Severus. You could have spent the time taking notes for some theoretical treatise, and I would have been satisfied at giving you a chance to observe work in the field. But you rolled up your sleeves and got involved; you made me proud in front of my, er, colleague." We chuckle at the expense of Dr. Panderous, "And you even did some good, whether you'll admit it or not."
She leans forward, closer than usual. "Severous, this could be your life, in one of the healing professions—the guild of your choice, once they get over their prejudices and see what I've seen. It can be a good life for you, if you want it. And yes, we've all left something behind when we decided to follow our destiny, but very often at some point you look back and see that it wasn't as close a choice as you thought it was at the time."
Madam Lessmore falls silent and hunches back in her chair as if embarrassed.
"My dear friend, working and experimenting by your side is one of the greatest pleasures I have known," I say honestly, but at the same time crushing the memories of all the pleasures forbidden me. "I fear that nothing in my life will ever be easy—what school would accept an Alkahest, after all?"
The nurse winces at the term, as she always does. If it's a slur, I haven't heard it said often enough to have developed an immune response to it.
"So I don't know if I will ever be bonded to practice anywhere, but that doesn't mean that our work can't continue as we have been."
And then we return to discussing our latest paper, which is much more comfortable for us than a heart to heart.
My notes from that time period amazed me for years afterwards and could fuel dozens of future theses.
Here is a partial list of the papers Lessmore and I published in magical journals around the world:
Person vs. Poison: Observed Patterns of Potion Response that Cluster Around the Disease's Properties
Psychoneutical Aspects of the Immune Reaction
Novel Uses of Common Medicinal Herbs
The Undiscovered Variables: Suggested Areas of Further Investigation in the Mapping of the Magical Signature
Handedness of Patient and Practitioner: Treatment Differentials in the Field
The Darkest of Arts: Clinical Portraits of Cloaked Illnesses and Curses
The Second Birth: Theories about the Onset of Puberty and Individuation
The Use of Metals in Medicaments: Suggestions and Cautions
Choosing and Mixing Healing Vapors
A Handbook for the Correct Configuration of Wand-Hand Salve Diagrams
Potions Pedagogy in the Authentic Paracelsan Tradition
Methods for the Untrained to Acquire Discernment of the Magical Properties
Least Harmful Methods of Treating Nightmares
Healing Trauma through Practice: Exercises for the Ill-at-Ease.
And several I wouldn't have dared to publish under my name, but which I sent to some specialized journals I was too terrified to purchase to see if they ever appeared:
Sexual Orientation: Suggested Therapeutic Supports for the Questioning Wizard or Witch
Healing Trauma II: The Unspoken Wound
Beyond Bigham: Paraphilias and Sexual Mosaicism in an Enlightened Age.