Wren rang the bell at the front gate and waited until the wooden doors creaked open. Tried to stand tall as their shadows stretched toward her, inevitable. On the other side was a woman—Sister Mel, who’d caught Wren weeping more times than she cared to admit during her first month there.

“By the Goddess! Is that you, Sister Wren?”

“Yes.” Wren blinked away the sting of tears. She wouldn’t be caught out again. “I’m back.”

The sickbay of the Order of the Maiden echoed with consumptive coughs and groans. On a backless stool, Wren worked on her third patient of the day, a woman sporting a broken wrist. Truly, the universe had a twisted sense of humor—or a sense of cruel justice she had to admire. She’d spent all afternoon trying not to dissolve into hysterical laughter, which seemed to concern her patient some. Even now, her forehead was pleated with worry as Wren worked with her mouth screwed tight.

Awash with the glow of a hundred healing hands, the room seemed to swim with cold candlelight. Rows of beds stretched from wall to wall like pews in the nave. In too many ways, being among them felt like being a child again, the eternal discomfort of her hunched back, the tension in her hands, the infuriating rasp of rough-spun fabric. Her habit, as horrible and itchy as she remembered, was earthy brown. The color represented the symbol of the Goddess’s fundamental mystery, the dirt in which things grew and were buried. Wren, however, simply thought it was ugly.

Acolytes of the Order of the Maiden believed healing to be a divine pursuit. A goodness done so that the Goddess’s favor might magnify threefold. Although she hadn’t lived here in years, memories of her lessons still plagued her: cold stone walls at her back, hard wooden benches beneath her, crumbling theological manuscripts in her hands.

The Goddess has bestowed the world with a gift most holy, the embodiment of her divinity, Saint Gia, the Order’s founder, had written. Immense knowledge—one that, without her light, grows cold. For every step toward understanding our impermanent forms, let us take three steps toward understanding her Mystery.

But Wren had never found comfort in faith. Here, healing was nothing but a grim obligation. Over the past week, when she crawled into bed with her every joint aching from the overuse of her magic, Wren’s older Sisters told her it wasn’t always so awful, so busy.

In three hundred years of war, there had been quiet periods. But devout Queen Isabel had renewed military efforts with an unprecedented fervor, and those left behind still suffered. Honorably discharged soldiers, seeking management for chronic pain. War orphans, wallowing in illness after nights spent in the cold. Common people, injured on the job but unable to quit.