Lilia tied on the linen belt that secured the clean rag between her thighs. She dressed in a long skirt of Cora’s, too big and too long for her. The tunic they gave her was also too big and made of itchy wool, but it was warm. Cora loaned Lilia her shoes and stuffed them with straw to keep them on Lilia’s feet.

“The sick wait on no one but me,” Emlee said. “Up, up. Let’s go now. See how useful you are.”

Cora handed her a sticky rice ball as Emlee pushed her out the door.

Lilia walked after Emlee, wolfing down the rice. Emlee strode purposefully down paths, around refuse. She called to those sitting around the fires, knew the names of all the dirty children, at the breast and apron strings, and the others, the orphans who ran in packs.

Emlee greeted two young women sitting outside the awning of a lopsided hide tent. One of them carried a twisted bundle of firewood. Both women looked relieved to see Emlee. Emlee introduced Lilia. They led them inside the dim tent.

“Have you seen yaws before?” Emlee asked.

Lilia shook her head.

They stooped over a young man who lay in a corner of the tent. He turned his face to them.

Lilia’s stomach lurched.

Something had chewed away the center of the man’s face. Where a nose and upper lip should have been was an open wound of flesh, leaving the top of the mouth open, the lower teeth visible. His left eye was lower than the right, drawn down into the wound that was his face.

Emlee handed Lilia her pack of supplies. “Open that up,” Emlee said. “Get familiar with it.”

Lilia sat down behind Emlee as the old woman settled beside the faceless man. Lilia unrolled Emlee’s pack of supplies. She had two dozen vials of herbs and mixed concoctions, none of them labeled. She had several kinds of scalpels, a mirror on the end of a metal rod, a small file-saw that Lilia could hold easily in the palm of her hand, and a length of clean gauze wrapped in a thin paper that smelled of everpine.

In the days that followed, Lilia became intimately familiar with the contents of Emlee’s kit. She learned the names of all the potions and how to mix them. Emlee brought her to births and deaths. Lilia saw cancers and gonorrhea, dysentery, gangrene, syphilis, and diseases she had no name for but the ones Emlee gave them: orange fever, billicks, sen rot, and skin ulcers and lesions that ate away arms and faces and feet. They treated frost-bitten drunks, women whose insides had been cut out by Dorinahs and left ill-treated, men who had been castrated and become infected, urinated blood and pus – when they could urinate at all.