Chapter Text
The first time it happened, Baird hadn’t been aware of it, because he had only been a few minutes old. But the story went that Baird’s mother, the Duchess Edith of Queenscove, had been bleeding out after the birth, and even her husband — a prodigious healer — couldn’t staunch it. Then someone set the infant on Edith’s chest and he emitted a dark green flash. When the shrieking died down, everyone realized that Edith’s bleeding had stopped. Baird’s father sat down heavily and looked at his newborn. “Who told you to do that?” he asked, and baby Baird yawned.
As soon as Baird was old enough to control his Gift and understand death, his father took him to clinics in the Lower City and the sick bay in the palace and the healing wards in the temple district. He worked on the simple things — cuts and colds and whatnot. This was when he first met his cousin Lianne of Naxen, ten years older. She looked at Baird’s father and frowned prettily.
“Uncle, he’s nine,” she said.
“Nine with the power of a grown man,” said Baird’s father, washing his hands. “Baird, influenza is trickier than a cold. You’ll need to be sure to check their bowels and not just their lungs.”
Lianne, who was being seriously courted by the Crown Prince of Tortall and had some spine as a result, put her hands on her hips. “Do you give him any chance to be a child?”
Baird looked between the two of them and didn’t say anything. His father paused, and made a political assessment.
“Do you deem that important, Lianne?” he asked carefully.
Lianne lifted her delicate chin and looked at Baird’s father with the gaze of someone who knew she would be Queen one day. Her usually gentle eyes were firm. “I do.”
After that, Baird had less to do. Instead of rounds with patients, Lianne took him horseback riding and set him up with an arms master to learn sword fighting and introduced him to the Crown Prince. Roald could barely stop looking at Lianne with huge, loving eyes long enough to greet him. At their wedding the next year, Lianne dressed Baird in a smart outfit and had him carry the rings to the altar.
The year after that saw the recurrence of the green flashes. The first was on his mother, after she’d fainted on the stairs and broken her neck. Baird had seen her topple, and seen the moment of impact. The resulting burst of light left a maid with spots in her eyes for days; but the Duchess Edith stood up from her fatal fall like nothing had happened. The second was when his little sister had gone swimming in the lake out back at Fief Queenscove and lost her strength. A footman dove in and towed her limp body to shore. Baird heard the shouts and came running, and as soon as he took her little face in his hands there was another green flash and she rolled over and hacked up a tremendous amount of lake water and snot and proceeded to be fine. The last was on his beloved cousin Lianne, whose miscarriage had led to hemorrhage. Roald’s loving eyes were full of panic. Baird stood by the bedside and took Lianne’s hands and nearly set the curtains on fire with the force of his Gift exploding out of him. Lianne sat up for the first time in days and asked for something to eat and Roald burst into tears.
The problem with all of these flashes was that he couldn’t control them, and he couldn’t predict them. They surprised him as much as they surprised anyone else. His father took him to see the young scholar Myles of Olau, who pointed out that all the people Baird had healed in this way were related to him, and perhaps it had something to do with blood, and that in the meantime a university was a very good place for a boy with Baird’s talent and smarts.
Baird was accordingly enrolled, and spent the next eight years in medical study.
He loved every moment. Bodies were fascinating, and unruly, and each one of them was different. He never understood why the diagrams of skeletons in his textbooks were so precise. People were so much better and stranger than drawings. He spent as much time as he could doing practical rotations and as little time as he could with his nose in books.
The green flashes didn’t come back, and Baird’s strength and focus grew. When he was eighteen, he delivered now-Queen Lianne of her only child, a son they named Jonathan. Lianne announced that Baird was to be made the private healer to the Royal Family. The university hastily handed him its highest credentials and sent him out the door. Five months later his little sister, gray in the face, arrived at his rooms in the palace to tell him there had been a carriage accident, and that Baird was Duke.
Baird wept on Lianne’s shoulder for the loss of his parents. She put Jonathan in his lap. The baby waved his little princely fists and gazed up at Baird with his big blue eyes. Baird held him and kissed his cheeks and when he’d calmed down he handed the baby back to Lianne and went to figure out how to run a fief.
He had help. Myles of Olau was a bit of a drunkard but frighteningly intelligent. Baird’s friend from university Harailt of Aili helped find trustworthy folk to put the estate in order and keep everything running smoothly. And Ilane of Seabeth and Seajen, who was about Baird’s age and his favorite dance partner at court parties, contributed her prodigious mathematical abilities to reviewing accounts with him.
“Should we get married?” he asked Ilane one day, over a stretch of papers in the library of the Queenscoves’ townhouse in Corus.
Myles, ostensibly chaperoning but actually napping in the sun, snorted.
Ilane cut her eyes at Myles. “Hush, you.” She looked back at Baird. “No, we shouldn’t.”
Baird rested his chin in his hands, feeling just a little plaintive. “Are you sure?”
“I’m very sure,” said Ilane firmly. “We make very good friends. We would make terrible spouses.”
“Mostly because Ilane is in love with that little Mindelan fellow,” yawned Myles.
Ilane turned slightly pink. “How do you know about Piers?”
Myles smiled and said nothing. Ilane huffed and returned her attention to the Queenscove wheat accounts. Baird sighed and did the same.
“Please don’t stop spending time together, though,” said Myles after a moment, opening his eyes to look at them earnestly. “Everyone thinks I’m doing two noble bloodlines a tremendous favor by keeping them pure until matrimony can be established. I love being thought of as altruistic.”
Ilane rolled her eyes at him. But they continued to meet a few days a week, until Piers and Ilane did indeed marry, and then she went to Mindelan in the far northwest aglow with happiness. Baird was not the only young man at the palace bereft at her departure.
Baird spent about four years as private healer to the Royal Family. There really wasn’t much to do beyond monitor Lianne’s asthma. Roald was healthy if sedentary, and Jonathan had only the occasional sniffle as he grew up. The light workload meant he could spend as much time as he wanted doing what he’d done as a child and as university student: regular rotations throughout the city, sometimes going further afield if Lianne was doing well. He learned about local allergies and built systems for little villages to dispose of waste safely and found new tricks for stopping sexually transmitted infections. Occasionally he gave lectures at the university or led practicum courses, ignoring the mutters from his fellow aristocrats that it was hardly suitable for the Duke of Queenscove to be dragging students to muck around with the sick of the Lower City. “This is where the learning happens,” Baird told his students, some of whom were older than he was, all of whom knew he was the youngest Master Healer the university had ever produced. “It happens here. Not in a book, in a body.”
The winter Baird turned twenty-five, he received a summons from King Roald.
Roald was sitting behind his desk. He motioned for Baird to sit.
“Linley of Disart died last night,” Roald said.
Baird blinked. Linley had been Chief Healer for decades. Baird had hardly seen him; the man had barely left his library, let alone done fieldwork. He murmured the usual condolences.
Roald waved the condolences away. “Baird, I’m appointing you Chief Healer.”
“Oh, no thank you,” said Baird immediately. “I’m not good at politics.”
“I beg to disagree,” said Roald, in his mild way. “You are very good at politics. You have convinced the Merons, the Rosemarks, and the Jesslaws to build sewage systems. You and Harailt of Aili have quietly overhauled the curriculum for final-year medical students at the university. And last year, when Eustace of Runnerspring assembled a coalition to reverse the custom of providing healers for one’s serfs and servants, you had a very public and very persuasive talk with him.”
“I appreciate your Majesty’s knowledge of these affairs. But, no thank you. I’m too young. You’ll need someone with more experience.”
“Baird, in your case, youth and inexperience are not related. You went into the university when you were ten years old. By fifteen you were better than your teachers. We talked about sending you to Carthak for more study, then realized they’d want to keep you, and you know how I like to avoid war.” Roald straightened a paper on his desk. “It does, however, seem that you need a little more experience in recognizing the difference between an invitation and and order.”
Baird looked at him. Roald was called The Peacemaker, but he was Jasson’s son, still. The king raised his eyebrows. Baird cleared his throat. “Your Majesty, I accept.”
Roald sat back and smiled. “Oh, good. Lianne will be so pleased. Your first assignment is to go visit my father’s favorite general, Emry of Haryse, who by all reports is determined to pneumonia himself into an early grave.” He handed Baird a letter of introduction. “Please go do what you can to get him to sit still for a few months.”
Baird went.
Roald’s assessment had been right. Emry of Haryse, who had led The Old King’s empire-building conquests into Barzun, was not inclined to sit still. Baird pushed his way through the layers of old healing magics that blanketed Emry’s insides after years of injury and diagnosed a lung disease that should have been caught months before. He did what he could with it, ignoring the way the general resisted his work.
Afterwards, Baird cleaned his hands and gave his instructions. He was in the middle of telling the general very firmly that riding out-of-doors in cold weather was absolutely forbidden until his lungs could heal when he was drowned out by a shriek and sudden commotion outside the window. Emry lurched to his feet and seized the casement. His eyes narrowed. “That cursed child,” he snapped.
Baird looked over Emry’s shoulder. A story below them, people were rushing to cluster around a luminous billow of gray silk. Baird could see one leg emerging from the billow. It laid at a stark and unnatural angle against the snow. Even from here he could diagnose a diagonal fracture of the tibia and fibula. At the far end of the stable yard, a horse danced away from the man-at-arms chasing after it. Cause of injury assumed.
He was down the stairs, moving quickly, feeling vaguely grateful for the weather. Whoever was injured would feel slightly less pain in the cold, but would need to be moved inside to avoid frostbite.
Emry was right behind him. He was just as fast with a lame leg and bad lungs as Baird was thirty years younger. “I told her not to ride that horse. She’s never listened to me, not once —“ they emerged into the yard, and Emry waved his cane. “Move out of the way!” he ordered, gesturing towards Baird. “Wilina!“
The little cluster of people parted. Baird’s heart went suddenly into his throat.
There was a beautiful woman in a gray silk gown reclining on the snow. She was very tall, and had brown hair and exquisite dark eyes that looked just like Emry’s, and her leg was definitely broken in at least one spot. She was cradling one hand in the other in a way that said to Baird: compression fracture. There was sweat beading at her temples, and she was pale with pain. She looked up at her father. “No one’s allowed to kill that horse,” she snapped.
“We’ll talk about that later,” said Emry.
“No, we’ll talk about it now. She’s going to be a beautiful horse. It’s not her fault no one trained her sooner.”
“That horse just threw you —“
“I’m fine.”
“I’d like to be the judge of that, if I may,” Baird managed to say, firmly ordering his heart back down into his chest.
Two sets of dark eyes looked at him. Emry waved a hand. “Baird of Queenscove. New chief healer. The king sent him to tell me to stop having fun.”
Wilina’s mouth twitched. “Did he.” She extended her broken hand to Baird, in a gruesome parody of a courtly gesture, and raised her lovely eyebrows. “Wilina of Haryse. The poor attitude is genetic.”
Baird, feeling slightly dazed, knelt on the snow and took her delicate, smashed hand very gently in one of his and rested his other hand on her leg. Her skin was warm and soft and up close she smelled like oranges and cotton. He just meant to do an initial diagnosis and check that his assumptions were correct, but as soon as he started to slip into her body he realized he might be terribly in love and lost his control completely.
There was a great flash of green that melted the snow in a six-foot circle around Wilina and Baird. By the time he blinked to clear his eyes her leg had straightened out, perfectly healed.
The stable yard went silent.
Wilina smiled.
She gently wiggled her now-uncrushed fingers in his palm and said, very quietly, “your Grace, you’re being awfully forward with your affections —“ and Baird realized he still had his hand on her bare leg, in front of everyone, in front of her father. He snatched it back and started to murmur an apology but she muttered “stop it. I’m teasing you. Pull me up.”
He stood, and pulled her up by her newly healed wrist, and glory she was tall, and straight-backed, and once they were both upright she shifted her grip so she could hold Baird’s hand and turned to look at her father and said: “he’s staying for dinner.”
They were married in less than six months.
(Baird went to Myles and said what had happened and Myles smiled and said he’d always had a suspicion that Baird’s flashes might be about love.)
Loving Wilina was so easy and also marriage was work. Baird said as much to Lianne one day. The Queen laughed. “Do tell,” she said, eyes dancing. Baird started to say that if he and Wilina could just live out in the countryside and do whatever they wanted, it would be so much easier, but here in Corus with the weight of the Queenscove duchy on their shoulders and the eyes of the aristocracy on their backs —
Then he caught Lianne’s raised eyebrow, and decided that the Queen of all people was not exactly the person to complain to about being in the public eye. He stopped talking.
His cousin patted his arm, which she was delicately holding as they took a turn through her rosebushes. “It will get easier over time,” she told him kindly. “And Wilina is a natural at all the politics.”
This was true. Wilina ignored the whispers about her motherless upbringing and her mannerless military father and swept into function after function weighted with the Queenscove emeralds, tall at Baird’s side. She could have the whole room eating out of her hand in half an hour. Watching her work made Baird weak in the knees. Sometimes, in bed together after nights like those, he made her keep the emeralds on.
“Better her than I,” he murmured.
“You seem to be handling your own politics very well,” pointed out Lianne.
“I work for the good of the public health,” said Baird. “I don’t do anything political.”
“The arguments you get into with the conservatives would seem to belie that, dear,” said Lianne.
“Oh, Wil writes me scripts for those,” said Baird.
Lianne smiled. “And how much do you have to edit those scripts?”
Just last week Wilina had tried to convince him to follow up the talking point of just because letting people die is affordable doesn’t mean it’s acceptable (with which he agreed) with you stone-hearted, clay-brained, clod-footed imbecile (with which he also agreed, but knew he couldn’t say to the Baron of Marti’s Hill). But Baird was a loyal husband. “Not a single word,” he told the Queen, straight-faced, and she laughed.
Baird had emptied out Linley of Disart’s fusty libraries, sent the volumes to the medical college, and turned the rooms into a healing ward for the palace staff. He’d taken an adjoining room for his own office. Prince Jonathan, now in page training, stopped by regularly to say hello. He would bring his young friends after they’d been clobbered in the usual page brawls, but were too embarrassed to be seen going to the pages’ healer.
“There is no shame in seeking relief,” Baird told each of them, over and over, healing their split lips and black eyes and sprained wrists. Eventually it got through their thick heads, and the flow of boys slowed to a trickle.
But one year Jonathan started bringing one younger boy in particular. Alan of Trebond was a tiny redhead with unusual violet eyes and, based on his repeat injuries, a tremendous aptitude for picking fights. Baird inspected Alan’s knuckles for the sixth time in as many months. Jon leaned against the wall and looked on with amusement. “You just don’t know how to let things go, do you, fire-top,” he said.
Baird raised his eyebrows at Jonathan. “I’m sure that’s a skill you can impart,” he said, just on the line between mild and sarcastic. It was a line he could walk, given that he was nearly an uncle to the prince; and the prince himself was self-aware enough to know that he’d inherited a virulent strain of his mother’s stubbornness. Jonathan grinned.
“Trust me. Compared to Alan, I’m a priestess of the Merciful Mother. What was the insult today, Alan?”
The boy kicked his heels against Baird’s examining table. “Someone cut me in line,” he muttered.
Baird lowered Alan’s hand. “Good grief, lad, that is hardly worth a fight.”
Alan glared at him. “Well, it escalated.”
Jonathan laughed. “You escalated it.”
Baird listened to them talk back and forth, Alan grumbling, Jonathan gentler and more mature than Baird had ever heard him. This friendship was a solid one. By the time he’d fixed Alan’s hands, the younger boy was in a begrudgingly better mood. Baird let them both go with an admonishment to stay out of trouble, and watched Jonathan sling an arm around his small friend’s shoulders as they left.
Baird’s workload ebbed and flowed depending on the amount of resistance his peers gave to his projects. He had to sleep in his office a few nights a week for nearly a month while he convinced the university to send its most advanced students on year-long residencies in rural areas. One night, after that month was done, he came home to find his wife in the dining room of their townhouse with another man.
There was a brace of candles lit on the empty table. Wilina was standing at one end. At the other end stood the man. He was tall, and young. He wore a simple shirt, undone at the neck with the glint of a gold chain tucked inside, and well-worn breeches and soft boots. His thick brown hair was swept back from his face.
He stood in Baird’s dining room like he owned it. He looked at Wilina like he might own her, too.
Baird raised his eyebrows.
“Come in and close the door behind you,” said Wil, voice low, not looking at him.
Baird did. When he walked to Wilina’s side, she cleared her throat. “This is my husband, Duke Baird of Queenscove,” she said to the man, clasping her hands in front of her.
“Evenin’,” drawled the young man. He didn’t bow.
“And how shall I introduce you?” asked Wilina, a little pointed.
“However you like,” he said, easy, eyes glittering.
Wilina pressed her lips together, and then turned to Baird. “This is… Master Cooper. Of the Lower City. He has some information for you.”