The Serpent's Shadow by Mercedes Lackey Page B

cab because she couldn’t walk the distance. She looked completely out of place in her short, frilled, scarlet dancing dress with a froth of cheap petticoats, bodice covered in cheap spangles and tinsel, her hair done up on her head and crowned with three faded ostrich plumes that had seen better days.
    â€œIt’s that Frenchy can-can, Miss Doctor,” the girl said, her face pasty beneath the makeup she wore, as Maya gently manipulated the swollen knee. Beneath the makeup she was also dowdy, to put it bluntly. Ordinary face, ordinary talent, but extraordinary legs. Her legs were what she’d been hired for; if they failed her—Maya didn’t have to guess the rest. “It’s thrown me knee out, it has, and me ankles hurt so—”
    â€œI quite understand, dear,” Maya soothed. “Now, you’re making your muscles all tense, and that’s making it hard for me to help. Can you sit back and relax for me?” She looked up at the pale round of a face with two red patches on the cheeks, and the eyes hidden in smudges of charcoal. “I think I can fix this for you, if you’ll just relax.”
    â€œNo knives, no operatin’ then? You can fix it now?” There was hope there. “I saw a doctor at a clinic when it started gettin’ sore, an’ he said there oughta be an operation, so I left an’ tried t’ work it off.”
    The other doctor was probably looking for a poor little fool to experiment on, Maya thought bitterly. There were surgeons and doctors of that sort, perfectly willing to work at charity clinics just so they could find people who wouldn’t complain if they were used to try out some new apparatus or theory.
    â€œNo, dear. Your knee just got a bit out of joint—not quite dislocated, but enough so you’d be in pain,” Maya replied. A lie, of course; the ligaments were torn, but she could fix that. “Then your poor ankles weren’t quite up to taking on the extra load, you see. The more it hurt, the more you threw yourself off balance, and that just made things worse. Like trying to put out a fire by throwing paraffin oil on it.”
    Satisfied with the explanation, the girl leaned back in the comfortable easy chair Maya had placed in the examination room, and Maya called on her magic.
    This she could do, had been able to do from the time she could toddle, with no need of tutelage from Surya. Healing came as naturally to Maya as breathing. With her hands making slow, soothing massaging motions on the girl’s knee, she reached down, down, deep into the native, living earth and rock beneath the pavements of the city, deep into the heart of her own little jungle, and up into the life force of the city itself. Where there was life, there was power, and that power could be channeled into healing. It poured generously into her, glowing emerald, sparkling topaz, golden brown and warm, bringing with it the taste of cinnamon and honey in the back of her mouth.
    She gathered all of it into herself, the golds, yellows, and velvety browns of the earth-energy, the peridot and leaf-green and turquoise life-energy; she brought it in through her navel and transmuted it into the ever-verdant emerald green of healing, sending it out in a steady stream through her hands.
    â€œCor—that feels good, that does,” the girl murmured, in a note of surprise. “Feels warm!”
    â€œThat’s because I’m getting the blood to flow properly around your knee,” Maya told her. “This is quite a new treatment—German, you know.”
    â€œOh, German,” the girl repeated, as if that explained everything. “Them Germans, they got all the tricks, don’t they, then?”
    Maya laughed, a low and rich chuckle. “So they think.” She continued to pour healing into the knee, mending the tears invisibly, without scarring, and leaving enough residual energy that the ligaments could continue to