Anyone watching us is going to think we’re daft, Abi thought, and glanced up at the three Companions with their heads over the fence, all in a row. Including them. But it was a lovely early-summer day, not too hot, not too cool. The bench wasn’t particularly uncomfortable, and she’d been explicitly told that Sanje was to have her entire afternoon. And this wasn’t any sillier looking than other Gift training she had seen. So with a mental shrug, she took the bricks off and began piling them back on again.

Now, when she’d taken them off, she’d counted them and laid them all to the left so she’d know when to quit even if this Gift of hers wasn’t being reliable. But the moment she laid the second-to-the-last brick on the board, she felt the strain under her hand and stopped.

“Good,” said Sanje. “Again.”

Wondering if that had been a fluke, she took off the bricks and started again. But this time she felt the strain with three bricks to go. And Sanje took her hand off Abi’s shoulder.

“Again,” Sanje ordered. “This time without my help.”

She sensed the strain as that uneasy, almost queasy feeling with three bricks to go, and Sanje dusted off her hands wearing a smile of satisfaction. “Keep working without me,” the Healer told her. “If you start to get a headache, stop. I’ll see you in a sennight at the same time in my examination room.” And with that, the woman got up and left, leaving Abi sitting on the bench, gazing after her with curiously mixed feelings.

“Did she just—” she asked, looking at the three Companions. Two of them cocked their heads to the side, as if they didn’t know either, but the third nodded vigorously. “Huh,” she said, and unbuilt the bricks to build them back up again, over and over, still with the same result of sensing the strain with three bricks to go, until she started to get a sort of headache that actually felt more like “muscles” in her skull were tired. Figuring that was what Healer Sanje had been talking about, she gathered up her pile of bricks and her board and went in search of a place to keep them for practicing later.