-The 8th of Icah, 5th month of year 3245-

Shigeo shifted the veil across his nose, it pressed along the bridge and he couldn't seem to find a spot that wasn't driving him crazy. He was in the back rooms sweeping the floors. They weren't required to wear the veils constantly anymore, but the workroom opened directly outside and once or twice people have entered bringing supplies for Recovery Girl. Nothing was coming in today, so after a quick glance around checking for Recovery Girl, he took off the veil and let it hang under his chin like a translucent white beard.

Spring had transitioned to summer and the brothers had slowly transitioned from books to practical lessons. Today was Shigeo's turn to brew potions, mix medicines, and create the salves using the recipes Recovery girl had left for him. Shigeo found the set recipes and simple maths led to an easily structured day and had come to enjoy it more than dealing with people on the clinical side of the house. Downside was it also meant it was his turn to clean the back room while he watched potions brewing.

It was when he was crouching and sweeping the pile of dirt into his dust pan that Shigeo noticed a book that had fallen back behind one of the shelves. He swept up his pile and set the pan and broom to the side. Shigeo quick tucked the loose end of his veil into his kimono and got onto his stomach to get a better look.

It was a book.

Maybe a journal or notebook that was about the two hands wide and two hands tall. The leather book was bound with a braided grass cord. Most of the color and details were covered in a thick layer of dust, dirt, and bits of crushed plant matter that had settled along the edge of the wall where the book was currently trapped. Shigeo had to wiggle under the shelf to about his shoulders to reach it.

He came out coughing and covered in dirt. He patted his hair, clothes and veil clean, watching puffs of dust flying into the air and catching in the beams of light from outside. The veil would need to be washed again, but it was worth it as Shigeo turned over his prize. The hard leather cover was a deep earthy brown that once had been accents of green, but age seemed to have faded the color.

Shigeo ran his fingers along the design pressed into the leather on the front. It seemed familiar and he got up and found a cleaning cloth on the work table. Shigeo pausing to take a quick glance at the potions simmering on the burners. They were fine so he left them alone and turned his attention fully on the book.

Shigeo's heart beat fast as he wiped the dirt away and the impressions in the leather became visible. It was a spell book. He's hands trembled as he undid the cord binding it shut and his fingers were clumsy as he hurried through the motions. With great fervor he opened to a random page near the end.

Empty.

Shigeo flipped through the book from start to finish. Only about a third of the pages held spell equations and those that were there were very simple. Recovery Girl didn't have magic, her root had, like most people her age, shriveled up with disuse. If she had healing magic she wouldn't be in some random frontier town, she would be in a city working in a big hospital or she would be in the capital as a member of Claw.

Was this one of her family member's? Shigeo wondered, studying a spell equation meant for healing small cuts, Should I ask her?

Shigeo envisioned that conversation ending poorly. She didn't talk about her family or her past really. She said she is too old to be saddened by old memories all the time. So, Shigeo imagined he'd get no answers and end up bookless. Shigeo tucked the book inside his kimono to show Ritsu. They would have their fun and Shigeo would return it a day or two later with Recovery Girl none the wiser. He went about his day like nothing had happened and didn't say anything to Recovery Girl or Ritsu during dinner about what he found.

Ritsu had started the dishes while Shigeo cleaned the dining area. The brothers had started to find their space in Recovery Girl's home. They had replaced the clinic stools the brothers were using in their first few weeks with newly purchased chairs. The brothers also got their own dishes and utensils to eat with, and that was only the start. Recovery Girl's home had changed a lot in the last three months since the brothers started living there. It was a little more cramped in the sitting area and around the dining area, but with two able bodied boys at her disposal Recovery Girl had set them to work on projects she couldn't do alone.

The living area was clean. Wear and tear that went unaddressed for so long was fixed and painted over, and the most difficult, but needed change was the floor. The rough and uneven boards were sanded down or replaced and it was given a new polish. No more did they have to tread carefully across the floor to avoid splinters in their feet, or jamming their toes. The brothers didn't understand how the little old woman survived it for so long, as she was largely dependent on her cane.

It was the smallest place Shigeo had lived to date, but it was his favorite yet. They didn't have much space, he and Ritsu, but the little room once cleaned out, was still theirs. The room was too small for two futons, but once they pushed the one they shared into one of the corners, there was enough room for a single desk and two chairs to study at. Everything they had, they shared now.

Tensions rose sometimes, but at the end of the night, they laid shoulder to shoulder, hands clasped together as they listened fearfully to the passage of military troops. Even though they didn't pass through the town as often anymore. Every time they heard the rhythmic beat of boot and hoof outside the town's meager wooden walls, the brothers prayed they didn't stop and just continued northeast to the border.

When they finished cleaning up dinner Ritsu asked, "Is there anything else?"

Recovery Girl looked up from her chair in the sitting area and said, "No, you two did good today. Go study."

Shigeo got up from the chair he was resting in, but in his hurry to get back to his room his balance was off and it was much more awkward and loud than he intended. He started to shuffle to their room, holding the book to his side with one hand to keep it from slipping to the floor.

"Shigeo." Recover Girl called after him, "Come here."

Ritsu saw the nervous sheen of sweat on Shigeo's forehead and the tense look in his eyes and mouthed, What did you do?

Shigeo didn't acknowledge his question and walked back with an apprehensive jitter to his movements. Recovery Girl eyed him carefully, and by the time Shigeo reached her, he could see she had a laundry list of things noted in her head that seemed off about him.

She grabbed her cane and pulled Shigeo's face down to her level, hooking the knotted head of the cane on the back of his neck. Her hand felt along his forehead and cheeks and she pulled on his lower jaw to look in his mouth.

"Have you been hiding something from me?" She asked and Shigeo gulped feeling the book tucked at his waist and the bead thrumming to life to counter his rising anxiety, "Are you sick? You haven't been trying to treat yourself have you? I haven't taught you how to prescribe medicine yet. I don't care how far ahead you have read, if you are feeling sick come to me okay?"

Shigeo nodded but didn't say a word fearing he would say something to get her to ask more questions. The book felt so bulky and massive in his kimono.

"You haven't been looking good lately. You are peaked and I noticed you're unstable on your feet. Are you sick? Or have you touched something in the back room you weren't supposed to?"

Shigeo shook his head no, it wasn't a lie if she was talking about mishandling toxic components and not spell books. She hadn't made them mix anything with toxic ingredients yet anyway. Her eyes squinted into thin, distrustful slits.

"Ritsu take your brother to bed. No studying tonight, just rest." She unhooked her cane from Shigeo's neck and leaned back to her chair.

Shigeo bowed slightly and hurried down the hall with his brother following closely behind.

"Shige what was that about?" Ritsu asked, once he closed the door behind him, "Have you been feeling sick and didn't tell me? We share a bed, I would like to know."

Shigeo flopped onto the futon with an exasperated sigh. He covered his face with one arm, and pulled out the book he was hiding, holding it high in the air.

"I thought she found out I had this book." He said wiggling it in the air for his brother.

"You have what?" Ritsu sat by his brother and took the book out of his hands and paged through it, "Brother… this is a spell book. Where the hell did you find this?"

Shigeo spread his arms to his sides, "Under a shelf in the workroom. It looks like its been there for years."

"Does she have a Root?" Ritsu asked, flipping between the last written page and the start of the empty section of the book.

Shigeo shook his head, "No. If she did, it withered up decades ago."

"This could be decades old." Ritsu said while peering closely at the blank pages, "She only had equations in here that a kid might learn in their first year… wait."

"What?" Shigeo sat up and looked over Ritsu's shoulder.

"Can't you sense the magic off this thing?" Ritsu asked cocking his head to the side to look up at his brother.

Shigeo shook his head no. He hadn't really been feeling for anything, with the bead suppressing his magic his sense of magic was muddled.

"Are you sure Ritsu?" Shigeo asked, "You haven't had the best senses since… you know."

Ritsu shot him a dirty look and said, his voice thorny, "There is some kind of illusion spell or something hiding information on these pages. They have a sheen to them that you only see on enchanted paper."

Shigeo looked closely at the pages, they reflected light from the lamp in the room but it just looked like very smooth paper. Focusing on the pages more caused the bead in his pocket to thrum to life and eat the magic before he could use it.

"Look all the pen lines smeared onto other pages except these two pages," Ritsu had the book open to the last written page and the first blank, clean page.

It wasn't too noticeable but there was a contrast between the clean, almost emalculate pages found in the last two thirds of the book, compared to the age weathered appearance of the first third.

Ritsu slapped the book with the back of his hand, "Just take the bead and set it on the blank page. If there is an enchantment I bet it'll cancel it out."

Shigeo took out the red bead and rolled it between his fingers. His skin tingled where the bead rolled along it. He touched it to the blank paper. For a second nothing happened but like watching milk spiral into a drain, the white on the paper was pulled into the bead leaving behind a page of spell equations. The brothers shared a shocked look and frantically dispelled the remaining pages until they uncovered four very long, very detailed healing spells.

"I didn't know healing magic was so complicated." Shigeo flipped between the ten pages that comprised half of the first, and shortest spell.

"I knew it was difficult but this is insane." Ritsu's mind was working quickly to decipher the glyphs and equations in front of him.

"She told us to go to bed." Shigeo said after a beat of silence.

"She told us not to study, and to rest." Ritsu countered, "This is practically leisure."

Shigeo knew he should have been responsible, but instead his curiosity kept his mouth shut. They hungrily went page by page through the book. Eventually, they brought writing material to the futon and began breaking down the spells, going late into the night.

Shigeo started to gather their notes and hide them under the futon after he fell asleep for the third time. Ritsu didn't have enough fight in him to stop Shigeo from plucking the book out of his lap and hiding it under the futon as well. The next morning Recovery Girl had to give them the day off to recover from their sudden illness.

The brothers kept the book secret from Recovery Girl. It took them about two weeks of concentrated study to crack the first spell. They even burned through Ritsu's Birthday, requesting the day off to explore the mountain and instead walked somewhere and study it undisturbed.

The discovery was rather anticlimactic once the brother's realized it was just a bigger, more energy expensive version of the smaller wound healing spell already in the book. Although, Ritsu was impressed with the craftsmanship it took to streamline the spell and the energy output so it reduced the chance of rebound that could kill the caster or the patient.

Shigeo didn't fully understand Ritsu's enthusiasm for the fine details, but the sigil was rather beautiful. It was a painstaking process decoding and finding the right components for the ink, and it took just as long to learn how to properly draw the sigil. He eyes traced along the intertwining circle of fifty or so looping lines that flowed in and out of each other. It was like capturing the motion of an entire river in one condensed still image. He placed his hand in the center of the sigil imagining what it would be like to use his magic for something like healing everyday.

"Brother?" Ritsu stopped his impromptu lecture on spells, and watched his brother resting his hand on the sigil.

Shigeo took his hand off and set it in his lap, "We should give Recovery Girl the book back."

"We…" Ritsu started to say but he looked at the book and their notes. They were falling behind on their studies with Recovery Girl. If she didn't suspect something, which she did, she'd figure them out soon. So he nodded, "Yeah, we should. What were we going to do with this anyway? I can't cast spells, let alone one this powerful."

"And I can't really cast spells right now either." Shigeo stated, but something about this was nice. It was familiar.

"I kinda felt like old times." Ritsu stuck the nail on the head and Shigeo murmured in agreement, Ritsu said softly, "I know we hated the academy but- I kind of miss it. Well some of it."

Shigeo examined the sigil more, he saw curtains of black silk and heard a joyless voice the longer he dwelled on the past, he mumbled, "I don't know."

"That's all I knew. It's weird to think we can't go back." Ritsu leaned back on his arms, "I miss my friends."

"I understand." Shigeo patted his brother's shoulder, he didn't quite feel the same but he could understand, "It wasn't all bad there, but… I think I like it here better still, and we shouldn't be lying to Recovery Girl."

"Alright, but who is going to tell her?" Ritsu stared pointedly at Shigeo.

Shigeo took the book and left the room without Ritsu. Apologies and explanations formed in his head as he walked down the hall and spotted Recovery Girl sitting in her chair, eyes closed.

"Shigeo?" She opened her eyes and her gaze drifted down to the book he was nervously holding in his hands, her eyes focused intensely in a moment of recognition, "Where did you find that?"

Shigeo's elaborate apology and explanations died on his lips as he stepped forward and held the book out for her, "I'm sorry. I found it in the workroom and I was curious so I opened it."

"You saw them?" She took the book and opened it, flipping towards the end to the advanced spells.

"Yes, and the ones hidden behind the enchantment." Shigeo nodded remorsefully.

"You shouldn't have done that." She said with a sigh, her tone not angry or even disappointed but sad and longing, "How did you break the enchantment?"

Shigeo hesitated but he removed the bead from his pocket, "I have been using this. I'm- I don't know how much you were told, but my magic is unstable and I use this to help control it."

She held out her hand and Shigeo placed it in her palm. She rolled it around for a while and gave it back.

"I want you to be careful with that." She told him, "Carrying gems without some kind of protective casing can be dangerous. I made the mistake once in my youth, no amount of healing magic can reverse the adverse effects of a powerful gem. It's a reason people imbed magic gems and stones in rings and amulets."

She got up and left to her room and returned a few minutes later with a hair pin. She popped loose a pearl from the mouth of a coiled dragon and put the bead in its place.

"Since you think I don't know you remove your veil all the time in places you shouldn't, I am going to give you this. Its my old pin and it'll hold up your veil better." She tucked the pin in his hair behind his ear, the tingling, numbing sensation disappeared but the effect on his magic didn't waiver. She stepped back and said, "The alloy its made out of is for magic gems. I'd imagine it a little more comfortable than having it directly touching your skin."

Shigeo touched it lightly, but he looked at the pearl-like gem, "What did that used to be?"

She wrapped the pearl in a silk cloth, looking at it both sadly and fondly, "Just an old charm I used in my youth. It's not much use to me at this age but maybe another maiden or gentleman, might be interested in it. You're a little young yet to need something like this... It'll need a new casing though before someone new takes it."

It was vague but it was enough of an answer for Shigeo right now. He shuffled his feet awkwardly. He didn't have much more to say, but the expectation of a punishment kept him standing there. Recovery Girl paged through the book, a sadness in her eyes that came when she was remembering something. Shigeo hoped he wouldn't have that look in his eyes when he was older but he supposed he wasn't much different. He had a lot of sad memories to look back on already.

"You can go." She said as she closed the book, tying the braided cord shut.

"Really?" Shigeo half turned away, unsure if this might be a trap. Not that she has ever done it before, but there was a first for everything.

"I think you coming forward and telling the truth shouldn't be punished. I wish you would have come sooner but, I am happy you came to me at all." She said with an understanding that Shigeo didn't know he needed from her, "Those spells, you wouldn't be able to cast them without a Healing Root anyway. So… you can go."

"I'm sorry." He apologized again and left.

He returned to the room and Ritsu sat up on the futon and turned on the lantern.

"I didn't hear a thing. Was she angry?" He asked.

Shigeo replied with a small shake of his head, "No she was… sad but not about us. It was something else she remembered I think... but, she didn't punish us. She was happy we told the truth."

"Really?" Ritsu said with the same disbelieving tone Shigeo had.

Shigeo got into bed next to his brother.

"New pin? Wait, is that the gem from Shou?" Ritsu turned on his side to examine the pin.

"Yeah, it is. Recovery Girl gave it to me." Shigeo unclipped it from his hair and clipped onto his clothes, "I like it better here, at this house. I think I'll look back and smile at these memories."

Ritsu cocked an eyebrow at the odd statement but he didn't say anymore about it. The brothers bid each other goodnight.