Mizuki squirmed slightly. “So you mean your whole body.”
“I’m a healer, first and foremost,” said Hannah. “I’ve got familiarity with bodies. But I can also limit it, if you’d like, to just your face, your arms, your legs. It would make healin’ easier.”
“It would?” asked Mizuki. She was looking at Hannah’s face a little closer, scanning its features, and Hannah stood there, letting her look. It was a perfectly symmetrical face, which allowed easy removal of blemishes and things like that. Clerics of Garos were known for their beauty, and in the larger cities, it was a rare member of the upper class that didn’t have some kind of symmetricalization done to them. A symmetrical face was beautiful, as a general rule, but symmetricalization had to be done carefully, and sometimes the results could be odd or represent so fundamental a change that the person wouldn’t be recognized by their friends and family. Verity was upper crust, as Mizuki had said, but didn’t seem to have had symmetricalization done. That might have been because she was pretty enough without it.
“Basic symmetry repair needs the two halves to be very close to the same,” said Hannah. “So, somethin’ like an oak shield, the grain of the wood means it’s harder, ay, because the two halves of the shield are so different from one another. That’d be mixed symmetry repair. Unless, of course, you have a shield made from the same piece of wood, butterflied apart.” She made a motion with her hands.
“Okay,” said Mizuki slowly. “Hey, why do you think that Alfric was trying to rush us in without training and stuff?”
“No idea,” said Hannah. It felt a bit like Mizuki wasn’t paying attention, which Hannah had found somewhat the norm when she talked about religion with the laypeople.
“I was thinking it was just big-city energy, but the more I think about it, the less it feels right,” said Mizuki. “Feels… fishy.”
“Are you ready?” asked Hannah. She took a penknife from her pocket, then held it above the back of her hand.
“Blegh,” said Mizuki. “Blood.”
Hannah hesitated. “Well, I could symmetricalize somethin’, I suppose, but this is faster, ay.”
“Fine,” said Mizuki as she took in a breath.
Hannah cut herself, a long stinging cut across the back of her hand, then lined everything up in her mind and connected to the wonder and majesty of Garos, God of Symmetry and Order. People described the feeling differently, but for Hannah it always came with a tingling at her extremities as a mark of success. She let the heightened sense of her own symmetry fade away once the cut was healed.
“See?” asked Hannah. The wound had vanished and the pain with it. Her hands were once again perfectly symmetrical.
“Doesn’t that hurt?” asked Mizuki.
“A bit, ay,” said Hannah. She shrugged. In the course of her time at seminary, she’d hurt herself so many times that she was used to the pain. “Did you see it though? The… magic?” The word she’d grown up with was ‘miracle’, but in the seminary they used ‘manifestation’, which had never quite sat right for Hannah.
Mizuki nodded. “It’s still there. It’s got a kind of… energetic flavor to it.”
“Flavor?” asked Hannah.
Mizuki waved a hand. “You know sorcs don’t go to school, right?” she asked. “Or at least not most of them. It’s a very personal magic. We end up making up our own words for things a lot of the time.”
Mizuki raised one hand into a fist, then opened it with force while thrusting out. There was a single licking arc of electricity, barely visible in the sunlight.
“Disappointing,” said Mizuki. “But… stronger than I’d thought it would be?”
“We’re in a party, ay?” asked Hannah.
“Does that… help?” asked Mizuki, blinking.
Hannah nodded. “I suppose maybe there are things a school for sorcs woulda taught you, ay?”
“But why would it help?” asked Mizuki. “The aether is the aether. I’m using your castoff. It shouldn’t matter that we’re in a party together.”
“Parties help anyone,” replied Hannah. “All my spells work better on party members and a bit less so on guild members. It’s a matter of connection.”
“The aether is the aether,” Mizuki muttered, as though she was willing to match her ignorance against Hannah’s knowledge. Her confidence crumpled quickly though. “I just don’t get why it would work, since being a sorc isn’t about connection, it’s about the aether. Your castoffs are, I guess, connected to you, and being a party member means they’re connected to me, but it shouldn’t matter, that’s all I’m confused about.”
“You didn’t feel it when we were in the dungeon?” asked Hannah.
“Maybe,” said Mizuki, frowning. “To be honest, my heart was in my throat most of the time, and I was just trying to fight down the panic. I thought I was just doing a good job.”
“And you did!” said Hannah. “But also probably bein’ in a party helped you out.”
Before they could move on to the next biggest piece of Hannah’s healing arsenal, Verity returned. She’d tied back her hair and put on a different dress, this one white with lavender highlights, and she was carrying her lute, which she carefully set down.
“What happened here?” asked Verity, looking around at the overgrown garden. She seemed taken aback.
“It used to be a garden,” said Mizuki with a shrug. “Grandpa was really into gardening, it was how he relaxed. I never really took to it though.”
“This is horrible,” said Verity, still looking at the plants. She didn’t see the sour look on Mizuki’s face. Verity drifted over to one of them, a bushy plant with broad leaves and a single drooping flower. She reached down and stuck a finger in the soil, then looked at the base of the plant. “You poor thing.”
“I said I never really took to it,” said Mizuki. “Can we leave it at that?”
“Oh,” said Verity, standing up. “Oh, I didn’t mean—I didn’t mean it like that. I just—in Dondrian it’s one of the womanly arts, and it was my favorite.”
“Gardening is… womanly?” asked Mizuki.
“I don’t know what it’s like in Kiromo, or even in Pucklechurch,” said Verity, “but there are five womanly arts in Dondrian. Gardening, needlework, reading, music, and languages. I was always terrible at languages.”
“Well, I do know how to read,” said Mizuki. “So one out of five isn’t bad.”
“You don’t speak Kiro?” asked Hannah.
“Two out of five isn’t bad,” said Mizuki, nodding.
“Well, reading is more, ah,” said Verity, measuring her words. “There are quite a few books you’re expected to have read, along with keeping up with more current works, and being a proper woman means being able to allude to all these books you’ve read when in conversation with others and to understand the references that everyone else makes.” She shrugged.
“That sounds horrible,” said Mizuki.
“Ah, I think I have a better understandin’,” said Hannah. “It’s not ‘womanly arts’, it’s stuff for rich women to do.”
“Well,” said Verity, frowning, “I’m not sure I would say that.”
“Did you have maids, growin’ up?” asked Hannah.
“A few,” said Verity, folding her arms. “But the success of my family isn’t—I mean, it’s not like those things are—needlework is a plainly useful skill, and gardening is too.”
“Hey,” said Mizuki, “why isn’t cooking a womanly art?”
“Well I have no idea,” said Verity. “It’s not like I made them up.” She shrugged again, then looked at Mizuki. “I’m sorry if I insulted your garden, I just,” she looked around again, “I like gardening.”