"She's…" Rashid stopped himself. "Cutting a hole. Well, well. How extraordinary." He turned to Steck, who was helping Dorr settle into a chair to wait. "When you told me about Tober Cove, Maria, you didn't mention anything about giving a Gift."

"It's stupid superstition," Steck replied airily. "Beneath a scientist's notice."

Cappie pushed herself out of my arms to confront Steck. "You think I'd let the doctor cut my daughter just for superstition?"

Steck shrugged.

"You know this is crucial," Cappie snapped. "Without the Gift, the gods won't accept Pona when she goes to Birds Home. She'll be Locked her whole life."

"Really?" Rashid's voice had just shifted from idle curiosity to something more intense. "Tell me about this Gift."

Neither Steck nor Cappie answered — they were too busy glaring at each other. Finally, Dorr spoke in her half whisper. "The first year of a child's life, the gods don't take the baby to Birds Home; traveling is hard for infants, and their mothers can't come along to nurse them. Instead, the gods accept a symbolic substitute for the child: a Gift of blood and bone that's carried to Birds Home in place of the actual baby."

"And the doctor's taking such a Gift right now?" Rashid asked. "I really must see this."

"That isn't a good idea," I piped up, but Rashid was already pushing his way through the door that separated the waiting room from the much larger surgery beyond. Cappie rushed after him and I hurried behind… which meant I was just in time to have Gorallin shout at all three of us.

"What the devil do you think you're doing?"

"Ahh…" said Cappie. She had stiffened at the sight of blood on the doctor's hands.

Gorallin had many granite-hard rules about practicing medicine, and one of them was, "Never let parents see the taking of the Gift." When I'd brought in my son the year before, I waited outside, shuddering in Cappie's arms until it was all over. It only took ten minutes, and if Waggett had cried or wailed, I hadn't heard a peep. When Gorallin brought the boy out of surgery, the incision at the back of his neck was no more than a nick, neatly closed with a single stitch. Within months, the scar was scarcely visible… and in a few months more, I had calmed down enough to stop looking at it every night.

However, when we barged in on Pona's Gift-giving, there was no closed incision, no neat stitch, no baby skin carefully cleaned to hide all trace of what happened. Pona, six months old and naked, lay belly down on Gorallin's operating table. A generous wash of blood had spilled down the sides of her throat, dribbling onto the table's iron surface; and in the middle of the bloody cut at the back of her neck, the red-smeared white of bone peeked out.

"Fascinating," Rashid said.

"I don't need an audience," Gorallin roared. She held a scalpel in one blood-specked hand.

"Sorry," Rashid told her, with no apology in his voice, "but I'm a Knowledge-Lord. I live to learn new things. How does this work exactly?"

Gorallin glared at him. Like many people that day, she must have been debating whether she could tell a Spark to go to hell… perhaps trying to judge how much luck she'd have throwing him bodily from the room. Then she grimaced with acceptance of the inevitable — no one has ever stopped the Sparks from doing what they want, and it's a waste of time to try. "Just watch," she muttered, "and if you have stupid questions, save them till after."

She turned back to Pona and began to deposit tiny scraps of baby flesh into a test tube.

Cappie closed her eyes when Gorallin started scraping out picks of Pona's bone. I didn't, but I wished I could close my ears.

Scrape-pick.

Scrape-pick.

Scrape-pick.

"The Gift is taken from the spinous process of the sixth cervical vertebra," the doctor suddenly announced. I suppose even Gorallin had the sensitivity to know what the sound was doing to Cappie's nerves. "That's the prominent nub of bone at the back of your neck."

"Why there?" Rashid asked.

"Because that's what the gods want," Gorallin snapped. "There are alternate sites if there's a medical reason why the Gift can't be taken from the standard spot, but I never have to use them."

"And what exactly do you take?" Rashid clearly wanted to lean his face right down over the doctor's work but was holding himself back.

"Blood and bone," Dorr murmured. When she'd seen that Gorallin wasn't going to kick us out of the surgery, Dorr had silently entered too. "The gods require us to give blood and bone as a token of our obedience. It is the only price they accept."

"Actually," the doctor said, "I take bone and a bit of muscle tissue. Skin too. The blood comes for free, but I don't go out of my way to get any."

"And who taught you what was needed?" Rashid asked.

"My predecessor… who learned from her predecessor, and so on back to the first doctor in Tober Cove. She was taught by the gods themselves."

Steck made a disdainful sniff. She had come in with the rest of us, but was making a show of dismissive boredom. No one paid her any attention.

"And you seal all the tissues in a test tube," Rashid said, "which you send off to Birds Home?"

"That's right." Gorallin laid down her scalpel and picked up a fine needle for stitching the wound closed. Baby Pona didn't move; she lay breathing quietly, pacified by an anaesthetic the doctor had given before we arrived.

"The gods must think this Gift is very important," Rashid mused, "if you have to slice into every baby. Don't you worry about doing permanent damage?"

"I know what I'm doing," Gorallin bristled. "Babies heal quickly."

"But suppose a child is sick," Rashid said. "That must happen occasionally. If a baby is so sick that this surgery would risk its life…"

"Then I tell the parents it's too dangerous to take the Gift," Gorallin answered. "I'm a doctor, you…" She stopped herself in time. "I don't harm my patients," she finished grimly.

"You just carve up their necks," Steck said.

"A tiny cut!" Gorallin growled. "And given the alternative…"

"What's the alternative?" Rashid asked quickly.

"Becoming Locked," Dorr told him. "Spurned by the gods. Cursed to remain the same sex forever."

"So if you don't send a test tube for a child this year, the child can't change sex next year?"

"That's why the Gift is important," Gorallin said. "You think I bleed babies for fun?"

Cappie took a deep breath. "I wouldn't let her do this to Pona if it weren't necessary. What kind of savages do you think we are?"

"All over the world," Steck sneered, "people mutilate their children and say it's necessary. The greater the maiming, the more they claim it's a sign of civilization."

"Excuse me," Rashid said, "while I have a private word with my Bozzle." He crossed the room in two strides, grabbed Steck by the arm, and almost shoved her into the waiting room. As the door closed, I heard his harsh whisper. "So you want to take the moral high ground, do you? When you forgot to mention they take tissue samples from the children and…"

Gorallin looked at the rest of us and rolled her eyes. Cappie, Dorr and I all nodded. Outsiders were inherently crazy: unbalanced at best, and often insane. If spilling a few drops of Pona's blood saved her from that blinkered confusion, the price was worth it.

Cappie helped Gorallin swab blood off Pona's body. It mopped up easily; in less than a minute, the baby's skin was back to its clean soft pink, and the black-stitched incision just an inoffensive line no longer than my fingernail. As Cappie slipped Pona into a new diaper and her summer smock, the doctor ran through a set of instructions that she must have given dozens of times over the years: how to care for the cut as it healed, how to check for signs of infection. Cappie nodded carefully as Gorallin spoke… and I noticed that Dorr, standing silently in the corner, nodded too.