“Still wanting to run, are you?” Sanje chuckled. “We will see. In the meantime, it is sufficient that we have steered your Gift into using another sense. Now you must sharpen it further. As you yourself pointed out, everything man builds contains stresses. It will serve you well if you can see them, whether they are balanced or not. This will be very useful to you.”

Abi opened her eyes again, and looked up at Sanje, feeling a bit chagrined at her own bad manners. Stupid, Abi, and rude, to demand something from someone who has done so much and asked nothing of you. “I’m sorry. You’ve spent all this time with me, learning about my Gift and turning it into something a lot more useful than it was, and I haven’t even said thank you.”

“And now you have.” Sanje nodded. “Now go and practice. When you can see the stresses in every thing, then send word to me, and we will see if it is possible for you to learn to make it come and go at will, and then to use it at the same time as ordinary vision.”

She didn’t wait for Abi to thank her again, she merely turned gracefully and glided away, back to Healers’ and the House of Healing, her long black hair waving gently as she moved.

Abi would have liked to have spent the rest of the day testing this new aspect of her Gift, but Master Leandro was waiting to give her and Perry a workout, and he was not a patient instructor. So she carried off her bricks and board and left them in the waste area and ran off at top speed to Lord Jorthun’s mansion, which stood in the area of the most impressive such buildings, just outside the gates of the Palace.

Perry and Larral were already there, Master Leandro was not. “How’d the session go?” Perry asked, lying on the grass in Master Leandro’s practice yard in the garden, as usual, using Larral as a backrest. Abi dropped down on the soft grass beside him, reveling in the green scent and the feel of the warm sun on her back.

“Healer Sanje did something so that instead of just feeling where stress is, I can see it with my eyes closed,” she said excitedly.

“How can you see it if your eyes are closed?” Perry asked, then shook his head. “Never mind, it’s probably how I can see what animals are seeing. Well, that should make it easier to tell how much stress there is on a thing. Right?”

“A lot,” she agreed, and that was when Master Leandro stalked into the yard and they both leaped to their feet. He regarded them thoughtfully.