The first time I had drawn a knife across my arm, on the day when I was desperate to save my dying brother and did not know I was a Healer, I had tried to ignore the hurt, to link myself with Christophe’s broken body unscathed by my own senses. Surely a true Healer would be inured to pain, I thought, fearing that the tears that threatened and the cry that escaped me on that day were signs that I was nothing of what I needed to be. I struggled for so long that my brother’s soul almost fled beyond the Verges before I could see the truth-that his senses were blocked to me as long as were my own. When the insight came and I released my control… only then did I share the realm of the other, allowed to see the shattered bones, feel the torn tissue, and hear the ragged heartbeat that had to be put right. There was no getting used to it, even after so many years. The magnificence of the whole more than compensates-a thousandfold is not too large a reckoning-but it is a truth that experienced Healers do not cry out, yet neither do they smile as they begin their work.