Zora

A practical doctor from the village of Ardwick, about forty years old. A hard sceptic with a precise eye and a dry, matter-of-fact tongue — she explains everything by nature, work, or chance. Her diagnostic refrain is "where's it from": she sees a symptom and asks at once after its cause. A widow; she learned to work and to live alone, and did not look to replace what she had lost.

In "Goldie," a runner from the hamlet of the Combes brings her to healings that break everything she knows about the body: ribs broken and knit in a month, wounds closed before their time. Zora runs the inquiry like a doctor — a pattern, a map, a test of soil and water — and comes to a warm, dark-golden stone dug from the clay by the old ford, around which these impossible healings turn. She runs up against a wall: the folk of the Combes speak of a blessing, not of a stone. She returns to Ardwick changed, with one thing she cannot name, and with a new apprentice at her work — she took Nia on with a gesture, not a contract. The question "where's it from" she settled into peace, not into want of an answer.