“There’s nothing to forgive. And it’s something we can easily remedy.” In fact, I’m excited at the thought. As uncomfortable as the surgery was this morning, it was still fascinating.

He peers at me thoughtfully. “I hardly know where to start. Where do your interests lie? What parts of medicine excite you the most?”

“To be honest,” I say, slightly self-conscious now, “over the past few months I’ve been mostly preoccupied with rose plague.”

“Understandable. What aspects of it?”

“Better treatments, mostly.” It seems too presumptuous to say I’ve been looking for a cure, and too embarrassing to tell him of my numerous failures.

“Rose plague seems an apt place to start our discussions. I’ll see what I can procure in terms of scrolls from the academy. We can go over them together, and you in turn can tell me what your people have learned about the disease.”

A smile pulls at the corners of my lips. “I would like that. Very much.”

Jesmin is true to his word. Tablets of medical records soon arrive, as well as the occasional scroll. He apologizes that he can’t get me more, but we’re limited by my disease. Tablets can be passed through the fire and returned to the imperial library, but any parchments, once they enter the rosemarked compound, must stay here. In addition to these records, Jesmin shows me the detailed logs he’s kept of every person who’s come into the compound. Jesmin’s painstakingly noted each patient’s date and circumstance of infection, entry, and the day they finally died.

In the few hours I can spare away from my patients, I pore over the material. The Amparan view of medicine is quite interesting. While Dara healers view the body as a set of systems (sustenance, air, and mind, among others) that become weighed down with disease essence, the Amparan physicians focus much more on anatomy and the individual organs. I suppose that’s why their surgeons have been so successful, but their insistence on breaking down the body into parts means they sometimes miss the subtleties of herbs and potions, which by their nature infuse the body as a whole.

The information in these records is valuable for other reasons as well. Over the past weeks, I’d been so preoccupied with placing Dineas in the army that I’d lost sight of Tal’s charge to find out how the Monyar soldiers fell ill. Now though, as I read over these texts, it’s clear that there might be useful information here.