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mourned."
    Her mind shied from that as from hot metal: instant rejection. He had never had a child, and they had had this discussion before.
    "I am not speaking of your child," he said. "A mother's instinct is beyond training... so it must be. But the years you have lost, that you call yours: no one owns time, no one can claim even an instant."
    Her heart steadied again. She could feel the heat in her face; it would have betrayed her. That shame made her blush again.
    "Venerable Master... what I feel... is confusion."
    It was safest to say what one felt, not what one thought. More than one tradition had gone into the concept of Discipline, and the Venerable Master had a Socratic ability to pursue a lame thought to its lair and finish it off. She dared to look at him; he was watching her with those bright black eyes in which no amusement twinkled. Not now.
    "Confused? Do you perhaps believe that you can claim time as your own?"
    "No, Venerable Master. But..."
    She tried to sort out her thoughts. She had not seen him for so long... what would he know, and not know, about what had happened to her? How could he help if she did not explain everything? Part of her early training as a novice had been in organizing and relating memories and events. She called this up, and found herself reciting the long years' adventures calmly, softly, as if they had been written by someone else about a stranger's life.
    He listened, not interrupting even by a shift of expression that might have affected her ability to recall and report what had happened. When she was through, he nodded once.
    "So. I can understand your confusion, Adept Lunzie. You have been stretched and bent past the limits of your training. Yet you remained the supple reed; you did not break."
    That was acceptance, and even praise. This time the warmth that rushed over her brought comfort to cramped limbs and to spaces of her mind still sore despite Cleansing the Stone. She had been sure he would say she had failed, that she was unfit to be an Adept.
    "Our training," he was saying, "did not consider the peculiar strains of those with repeated temporal displacements, even though you brought the original problem to our attention. We should have foreseen the need, but..." He shrugged. "We are not gods, to know all we have not yet seen. Again, you have much to teach us, as we help you regain your balance."
    "I live to learn, Venerable Master," said Lunzie, bowing her head.
    "We learn by living; we live by learning."
    She felt his hand on her head, the rare touch of approval, affirmation. When she looked up again, he was gone and she was alone in the pavilion with her thoughts.
    Retraining, after that, was both more and less stressful than she had feared. Her pallet in the sleeping hut was comfortable enough after Ireta and she had never minded plain food. But it had been a long time since she'd actually done all the physical exercises; she spent the first days constantly sore and weary.
    All the Instructors were perfectionists; there was only one right way (they reminded her) to make each block, each feint, each strike. Only one right way to sit, to kneel, to keep the inner center balanced. She had never been as good with the martial skills of Discipline; she had always thought them less fitting for a physician. But she had never been this bad. Finally one of them put her at rest, and folded herself down nearby.
    "I sense either unwillingness or great resistance of the body, Lunzie. Can you explain?"
    "Both, I think," Lunzie began slowly, letting her breathing slow. "As a healer, I'm committed to preserving health; this side of Discipline always seems a failure to me... something we haven't done right, that let things come to conflict. And then some physician—perhaps me, perhaps another—will have to work to heal what we break."
    "That is the unwillingness," said the instructor. "What is the body's difficulty? Only that?"
    "I'm not sure." Lunzie started to slump, and reminded