Off the record. Subject anonymous at her insistence and at mine. Presence tier, unaffiliated. No House, no lineage, nothing placed. A fever town in the Boundary Lands. Location withheld and the season altered. My own notes, made at the time, are in brackets.

Conditions

I'm recording the conditions because they turned out to be part of the finding.

I didn't arrange this. I'd been in the town four days on other business when the sickness turned, and she arrived on the fifth in a cart with two crates of what turned out to be nothing more exotic than clean cloth. I was told a physician had come. Nobody in that town used any other word about her, then or since.

I knew what she was from the far end of the street. At Presence there's no such thing as arriving quietly, and I've documented enough of them to recognise the feeling, though this particular version of it was new to me.

Every account I've collected describes proximity to Presence as pressure on the mind. What I felt was my own pulse. I became aware of my heartbeat and then couldn't stop being aware of it, and the awareness stayed with me for the whole eleven days I spent in that town. It didn't hurt, and it wasn't really unpleasant, but I never once stopped noticing it.

She apologised for it on the second day, unprompted, before I'd said anything. She can't stop it, and she never has been able to.

I asked for an hour on the ninth day, when the ward had emptied enough that she was sleeping. She gave me two, on the condition that I write nothing that could place her, and I've kept to that in a fuller sense than usual. The town and the season are altered here, the sickness is too, and I haven't written her age.

The control case

Every subject I interviewed this year had been placed. Five Houses had worked on their children by five different methods, and every one of them had done it before the apertures finished opening. I had no clean case of the opposite and no obvious route to one.

Scholar: Nothing was ever placed in you.

(She was washing her hands while we talked, and she kept washing them long after they were clean.)

Physician: No. There was nobody to do it. Where I was raised they'd have thought placement was a thing farmers did. They had their own arrangements.

Scholar: Which you're not going to describe.

Physician: Which I'm not going to describe.

(She'd already said she wouldn't talk about where she came from, and she'd been awake for three days, so I didn't push.)

Scholar: But three arrived.

Physician: Three arrived. Twice, as it turns out, and I'd rather do that part last if you don't mind, because it's the part that upsets me and I'd like to answer your ordinary questions first.

What she carries

(She agreed to describe all three on the condition that I record no method. There's no method to record, and she knew that.)

Scholar: Start wherever you like.

Physician: Blood stays where I put it.

(She said it as though it were nothing much.)

Physician: Mine. Anyone's. If something is leaking and I'm near it, it stops leaking, and it stops whether or not I've decided anything about it.

Scholar: That's a physician's whole trade in one sentence.

Physician: That's how I ended up a physician.

(She shook the water off.)

Physician: It doesn't wait for me to decide. There was a man two years ago, past saving and in a great deal of pain. It was going to take him about a quarter of an hour, and I stood in the room and held him at four hours. I could not put it down. His daughter was there.

(I stopped writing for a moment, and she waited.)

Physician: The rest of the time it saves people, a great many of them, and I wouldn't be without it.

Scholar: The second.

Physician: I know what's alive near me and how it's doing.

(She turned a hand over.)

Physician: Every heart in a building, the rate and the pressure and whether it's failing. Whether somebody is frightened, because I can feel their heart going. Whether somebody is bleeding somewhere I can't see. Whether the woman across the room has about a month left, which she does, and which she hasn't been told.

Scholar: Can you close it?

Physician: No.

(Flat.)

Physician: Markets are difficult and barracks are worse. In a busy tavern I've got a hundred people's hearts going at me at once. I sit near doors.

Scholar: And the third.

(She took her time here, and I didn't fill it.)

Physician: Nobody can take anything from me unless I give it.

Scholar: Meaning what, in practice?

(She sat down, which she hadn't done until then.)

Physician: Nothing gets in. Nothing can draw off me or ride me or make me do anything, and nothing borrows. People have tried things on me, and none of them worked. I'd be dead otherwise.

Scholar: But.

Physician: The trouble is it treats help the same way.

(She looked at her hands.)

Physician: I can't be carried when I'm ill. I can't be talked down. Somebody offers to take the night shift and I find I've already said no before I've thought about it. I've watched myself do that for years and I can't stop it. It isn't me being stubborn.

Scholar: You can't accept help.

Physician: I can't accept anything.

(She said it evenly.)

Physician: I've got used to most of it, but not that part. I'd give that one back if I could.

What this confirms

It confirmed more than I went looking for.

The wild three are shaped by the Source. All of hers are one thing seen from three angles: what is in a body, what a body is doing, and what belongs to a person. Every part of all three is that, and it matches the pattern I've documented in fire, water, earth, air, light and darkness.

And I couldn't place her Source. I'm not well equipped to write about this part.

I asked what she was connected to. The answer was none of the six. I won't reproduce it, partly because she asked me not to and partly because I didn't understand it well enough to write it down without inventing something. I put it to her that I'd never heard of such a thing. She said that made two of us, and that she'd spent years looking for anyone who had, and had stopped.

Whatever she's joined to, all three of her forms are made of it, the same as with the six. Whatever governs that belongs to connection itself, and holds whichever Source sits on the far side.

I've taken this as far as I can. Somebody better trained than me should go and ask properly. I've chosen not to.

The severing

(This is the part she asked to do last.)

I've written in these notes that a foundation can't be changed, because it's the shape the aperture took while opening, rather than anything stored in the practitioner. The obvious test is impossible to arrange.

It happened to her once, and she didn't choose it.

Scholar: You said three arrived twice.

Physician: I was a practitioner before I was this. An ordinary one. Water. I was at Intent and not going much further, and everyone around me was polite about it, and I knew what the politeness meant.

(A pause.)

Physician: I had three. Wild ones, since nobody placed anything. I could tell you what they were.

Scholar: Please.

Physician: I could keep a thing from spoiling. Keep it, I mean, which is different from preserving it, and I've never been able to explain the difference. I always knew where the nearest water was. And I remembered wrongs.

(She almost laughed.)

Physician: That was the third. I could not let a thing go. I was nineteen, and one of my three was more or less a grudge.

Scholar: What happened to them?

Physician: Gone.

Scholar: All three.

Physician: All three. There was a night. Somebody was doing something to me that I was not going to survive in any way that mattered, and I refused it, and the refusing went further than I meant it to.

(She said this very steadily. I don't think she felt steady.)

Physician: I cut the connection I had.

Scholar: Closed it.

Physician: Cut it. And then I made another one, out of the only thing I had left, and I've never met anyone who could tell me whether that ought to be possible.

Scholar: And three arrived again.

Physician: Three arrived again. New ones, shaped like the new thing. Inside about four heartbeats.

(She looked at me for the first time in a while.)

Scholar: So yours changed.

Physician: No, mine died. What I've got now came with the new connection.

Scholar: Was there a fourth?

Physician: No.

(No hesitation at all, which told me she'd asked herself the same question.)

Physician: I kept checking for about a year. Three. There has never been anything but three.

I've thought about this for some weeks, and it's easy to read the wrong way round.

It looks like proof that a foundation can be changed, and she never changed hers. She lost a connection and grew another, and the second connection did what every connection does, which is to produce three. The count held through an event that destroyed everything else about her practice, and there was no fourth.

So the number belongs to the connection. It's neither a convention of teaching nor a property of the person. One connection gives three forms, and if you're somehow able to trade the first for a second you get three again, and they're the new one's rather than the old one's.

This is the only such case I've ever heard of. She doesn't know how she did it, and she asked me more than once to write down nothing that might help somebody try.

Scholar: Do they mutate? These ones?

Physician: Nothing's changed since. Same three, same shape.

Scholar: Narrower? Broader?

Physician: Got bigger when I did. Same shape, more of it.

(She understood what I was actually asking.)

Physician: You're asking because House people's forms change and mine don't.

Scholar: I am.

Physician: Mine came out of me, so there's nothing for them to change towards.

(That's the clearest statement of it anyone has given me, including five House representatives who've thought about this professionally for their whole working lives.)

Closing

Scholar: Do you have a name for them? The three?

Physician: No. Houses have names for things.

(I think she was amused.)

Physician: I've just got three things I do.

Scholar: The Lorekeepers are calling them foundations.

Physician: Then the Lorekeepers can call them that.

(She thought about it.)

Physician: Innate, if I have to pick one.

Scholar: Would you have wanted placement? If somebody had reached you as a child.

(The longest pause of the conversation, by a good margin. She'd gone back to the basin.)

Physician: I've thought about that a lot. A House chooses what it puts in a child, and somebody thinks about what that child is going to need. Nobody did that for me. Mine came out of what I was and what was being done to me at the time. Nobody picked them to be good for me.

Scholar: Is that a yes?

Physician: It's a no, and I'm not proud of it.

(She was rinsing cloth.)

Physician: I'd have been easier to live with. I'd have been somebody else, and I've met the person I'd have been, near enough. She was at Intent and going nowhere.

Scholar's note

The most useful two hours of this enquiry, with a woman whose name I don't know and whose town I'll never write down.

After a year spent on the extraordinary I very nearly left out the ordinary part. She was there for the fever. That's what she was doing when I found her and what she went back to when I left, and she left herself four days later, before the town had properly worked out how to thank her, which I'm told is a habit.

There are perhaps a handful of people in the dominion at her tier. Almost everything I've written here concerns the night she cut herself free and what grew back. What she actually does, most days, is arrive in places too small to have a physician and stay until the sickness has passed.

One further note, which I make against my own better judgement.

There's a wanderer's tale that has been going round the river-towns for some years about a woman of blood who cut herself free of something. I've heard it told in more than one district, and it's a good tale, but it's only a tale. Sitting in that ward it occurred to me more than once that I was talking to somebody the story would fit.

I dismissed it each time, for a reason I've since had to look at properly. The tale describes a figure walking the roads trailing red, terrible and unmistakable. What I had in front of me was a tired woman in a borrowed apron who had been awake for three days and kept washing her hands.

I've written elsewhere, more than once, that a story preserves one true thing and loses everything else. I've apparently yet to learn to apply it in the direction that would cost me anything, and I'm writing that down here so I remember it next time.