Hyllis Family Story 1: Telekinetic Read Online Free PDF Page B

joint there. There was a tiny bit of fluid in that joint in the good foot, but a great deal more fluid in the sick joint on the left. The fluid in the joint on the left also felt… thicker, or otherwise somehow, not quite right. In addition, Tarc could feel more fluid in the soft tissues all about that gouty joint. After a moment he realized that the extra fluid must be what their normal senses perceived as swelling.
    Tarc ’s father brought over a pair of crutches. They had been made from fairly straight limbs that had a wide fork at the top. Padding had been wrapped around the fork and the bottom tips wrapped with wire. Daussie brought out a bag of dried willow bark.
    Benson, very grateful for the help, paid more generously than Tarc’s mother had requested and stumped out on his way back home to rest and elevate his foot as Eva had instructed. Tarc and the other members of his family started back on the many chores required to keep the tavern working.
    As customers began to filter in for lunch Tarc wondered whether, in a bigger city, enough patients would come in needing his mother’s skills that she could support the family without their having to keep a tavern. As soon as the tavern’s usual slow time in the afternoon began, his mother sent him upstairs with instructions to stop his other reading and begin studying their atlas of anatomy. At first he felt angry to be sent off early to study, but as he climbed the stairs he heard Daussie complaining. He grinned to himself, thinking of her downstairs working while he was up studying.
    To his surprise, Tarc found the world of anatomy fascinating. The atlas started with the arm. Inside his own arm his ghost found each of the structures shown in the book’s drawings. Somehow, he had been thinking that each person’s insides were different, but apparently they were similar to a surprising degree.
    Later, Daussie came upstairs to work on her own reading assignment. She told Tarc to head back down because the kitchen needed water. As he passed through the kitchen his mother grasped his wrist to stop him. “What’s the name of this bone?” she asked, pointing to the midpoint between his shoulder and elbow.
    Staring wide-eyed at her, he said, “I don’t know.”
    “Didn’t you start at the beginning of the book?”
    He nodded.
    “And you didn’t see the arm bone in there?”
    “Yes, and I compared it to my own. Mine seems to be shaped almost exactly like the ones in the book,” he said with evident surprise. “I’d thought that there would be a lot more differences.”
    Eva nodded but frowned, “Why don’t you know its name then?”
    “I thought I was just supposed to learn where things were and how they were hooked up. What do the names matter?”
    “So you and I, and other healers can talk to one another. If you’re going to take care of people, you not only need to know what their parts are, but what the names of their parts are. The language is important !”
    Tarc shrugged, “Okay, okay, I’ll learn the names.”
    “With your talent, you can simply feel the insides of people to know what their parts are . The only reason to study that book is so that you can learn the names and how things are supposed to be arranged. It really helps, when you’re wondering whether there’s something wrong, to know how things are supposed to be.” She shrugged, “Of course if the problem is just with one part of someone, you can just compare it to the matching part on the other side of the same person. For those parts that don’t have both left and right versions, you can just compare them to someone else. Or yourself, if you know you’re normal. But if you want to be good, you’ll know what it’s supposed to be like before you start comparisons.”
    She tilted her head, “That’s why I had you compare Mr. B enson’s feet to one another. So you could see what was different about the sick foot.”
    Now, Tarc frowned, “But there’s so little we can do .