East of the Freed Territory

The settlement of Verrath was three days east of the freed territory's boundary.

It had been there for sixty years.

Three hundred and forty people.

A river.

Two mills.

The kind of settlement that had no particular reason to exist except that the ground was good and the river was reliable and sixty years ago someone had decided to stay and others had followed.

Its physician was named Soren.

Not the Soren who traded the eastern borderlands, not the Soren at Verrath who had appeared in other records — a third Soren, in a settlement of the same name, which was either a coincidence or evidence that certain names and certain places were attracted to each other across the continent in ways no cartographer had yet mapped.

This Soren had been the settlement's physician for eleven years.

She was forty-one.

She had no Force affinity.

She had practical intelligence, diagnostic precision, and the patience of someone who had learned that most illness announced itself in patterns if you were paying the right kind of attention.

She had been paying the right kind of attention for three months.

Something was wrong.

The animals first.

This was always how it started in the case histories she had read during her training — not the Force cultivation texts, the ordinary medical literature, the accounts from settlements near disturbed ground.

The horses in the eastern paddock had been restless for three months.

Not ill.

Restless in the way of animals that were uncomfortable with something they couldn't identify.

She had examined them.

She had found nothing wrong.

She had noted it.

The dogs had become quieter.

Not sick.

A strange quiet had settled over them. They were not tracking movement, not following smells, not interacting with the settlement in the way dogs interacted with settlements they had organized their lives around.

They were present.

They were breathing.

They were doing nothing else.

She had noted this.

The birds had left the eastern side of the settlement.

Not dramatically — she had not woken one morning to find them gone.

Gradually, over six weeks, the birds that had nested in the trees on the eastern side had moved to the western side without appearing to have made a decision to do so.

She had noted this.

She kept a journal.

She had been keeping it for three months.

The people.

This was harder to describe.

Not illness.

The people of Verrath were not sick.

They were — she wrote in the journal, trying several words before settling on one — reduced.

Not less capable.

Less present.

Conversations that should have had the full feel of two people engaged with each other were happening thinner now, and she could feel it even without being in them. Eleven years of reading a community's health through how its members interacted had taught her that.

The baker still made bread.

But the baker's presence to the making — the way skilled people were present to skilled work, the attention that was also a kind of care — was less than it had been.

The children still played.

But the full absorption of children in play, the total engagement that made children's play a different thing from adult recreation, was thinner.

She had begun conducting conversations differently.

In her rounds — she walked the settlement every morning, checking in, the way a good physician checked a community's health by being present to it — she had begun asking questions she didn't usually ask.

"How do you feel today, not physically but in yourself?"

The answers had been consistent across twelve people over three weeks.

"Fine," they said, "just a little flat."

"Fine, just—" a pause, looking for the word, not finding it.

"Fine," with the air of someone for whom fine was not a report but a habit.

She wrote all of this in the journal.

She was a physician.

She had been trained to diagnose.

Diagnosis required: naming what was wrong, identifying its cause, prescribing what addressed the cause.

She could not name what was wrong.

She had looked through every text she had access to.

She had found references — in the older texts, the pre-Sealing accounts she had studied in training because the history of medicine required knowing what practitioners before you had encountered — to something that sounded like what she was seeing.

The accounts were brief.

The physicians who had written them had not known what they were seeing either.

What they had described: settlements near certain eastern territories where the quality of life — not the standard of living, the quality of being alive — had slowly diminished in ways that no individual illness could account for.

The settlements had been abandoned eventually.

The physicians had not been able to say why.

The accounts were two hundred years old.

She read them.

She recognized what she was seeing.

She did not know what to do with the recognition.

She wrote a letter.

Not to the medical establishment — the establishment had no category for what she was describing, which she knew because she had found no post-Sealing accounts of what she was seeing, which meant the establishment had not encountered it in living memory.

Not to the Iron Throne's garrison, which was three days west and which had no framework for health problems that weren't injuries or infections.

She wrote to the Tide Courts' network.

Because the Tide Courts' network was the continent's most comprehensive information system, and because she had been a Tide Courts' regional correspondent for six years, reporting on settlement health patterns in exchange for access to the network's medical literature archive.

She wrote: I am a physician in the settlement of Verrath, three days east of the freed territory's boundary. I have been observing a pattern for three months that I cannot diagnose from any literature I have access to. I am describing it in full because I believe accurate description of an unknown pattern is the correct response when the pattern cannot be named.

She wrote: animals restless, then quiet, then gone from the eastern side. People present but thinner in a way I can only describe as less alive than they were. Not sick. Not dying. Reduced. The oldest accounts I can find, from two hundred years ago, describe the same pattern in settlements adjacent to certain eastern territories. Those settlements were eventually abandoned. I do not intend for Verrath to be abandoned. I am writing this because someone with more information than I have may know what I am seeing.

She sealed the letter.

She sent it through the Tide Courts' network.

She went back to her rounds.

That afternoon she walked to the settlement's eastern edge.

She walked it every day.

She pressed her palm to the boundary stone — the stone the settlement's founders had placed sixty years ago to mark where the settlement ended and the open ground began.

She had been pressing her palm to the boundary stone every day for three months.

Not because she knew what she was doing.

Because it was the closest she could get to a diagnostic reading of what the eastern ground was.

The stone on the eastern side of the boundary felt different from the stones on every other side.

She had not been able to name the difference.

She named it today, three months in, having watched the pattern develop and having written the letter and having returned to the diagnostic process with fresh precision.

She named it: the stone on the eastern side felt like a room after the people have left.

Not after they had been gone for years.

The way a room feels ten minutes after the people have left.

When their warmth was still there but the part that made the warmth theirs was not.

She wrote this in the journal.

She wrote: the stone on the eastern side feels like a room ten minutes after the people have left.

She wrote: the warmth remains.

She wrote: but the part that made it theirs is not there.

She closed the journal.

She pressed her palm to the boundary stone one more time.

She felt it.

The warmth.

The absence of what made it theirs.

This is going to get worse.

I don't know how much worse.

I sent the letter.

Someone in the network will have seen this before.

Or they will know someone who has.

She walked back to the settlement.

The dogs were in the western yard.

Present.

Breathing.

Doing nothing else.

She made her rounds.

She checked on the baker.

She checked on the children.

She checked on the horses, which were still restless.

She checked on the settlement's sixty-year-old channels — what it had built, what it held, what it was giving to its people — and felt them thinner than they had been.

She did not know she was checking channels.

She was checking the settlement's health.

These were the same thing.

She had always known they were the same thing without knowing she knew.

She went to bed.

The letter was in the network.

Three days west, in the freed territory, the channels were sustaining.

Three days east, in Verrath, the channels were thinning.

The boundary between them was a stone she pressed her palm to every day.

She did not know this.

She knew: something was wrong.

She knew: she had done what a physician could do.

She knew: she would keep doing it.

The settlement breathed.

Thinly.

Still.