“Careful,” Rohana said tonelessly.
The rippling surface of the open wound slowly paled, turned purple again, and as the lights around it brightened, turned red, then a smooth, healthy pink . . ..
Rohana shifted her hands, drawing her fingertips above the repulsive open gash across Jaelle’s face. Alida brought the blue jewel stone close, and Magda, seeing it without sickness this time, found herself caught up in what was happening. She saw with a curious double vision those nerve currents under the skin, the slashed and broken and infected layers of skin and muscle and escaped, oozing blood, the seeped poison around the eye . . . she felt, with an inner itch and tension inside her mind, what Alida was doing: lowering her consciousness farther and farther, into the cells, exerting the tiniest pressures (How! How?) on each cell, so that she actually felt the blood and poison as pressures against the light-lines of the nerves, sensed the tiny, delicate membranes, the pressures against them . . ..
“Careful,” Rohana said again, a low soft neutral sound, but to Magda, deep inside Alida’s awareness, it was like a shriek of warning; and with infinite caution, Alida eased the carefully intricate pressures, moved her touch away from a small ruptured blood vessel, felt and almost saw the tiny tensions of fluids so near the eyeball, the glowing inner mechanism of the eyeball and tear ducts, so near, dangerously near. Ease up just there . . .. Something in the back of Magda’s mind said, Psychokinesis: the power of the mind to exert delicate cellular changes. Her consciousness seemed wholly sunk inside that light, bending pressure. She looked at Jaelle from a great distance. As if I were up somewhere near the ceiling and looking down . . .. Giddy shifts of perspective.
Magda thought, somewhere back in her mind, I can do that, too, and found her attention focused on the healing slash in her own arm, sensed the inner pressures, somehow wrenched them into consciousness, feeling a faint sting of violent pain, somehow outside herself, which vanished without trace . . ..
She shook her head as if to clear it. She was standing firmly on her own feet, and Alida had covered the blue stone. She blinked as if dizzy, and looked down at Jaelle in amazement and shock. There was now no hideous, festering slash crisscrossing Jaelle’s cheek; only a narrow, bright red seam, still jagged and raw, from which one drop of clean blood oozed. The nick in the eyelid was gone, and the closed eye, beneath its fringe of lashes, was no longer swollen.
Alida drew a long sigh of weariness. Mechanically Magda pushed up her sleeve, staring in puzzlement at where the bandit had gashed her arm with his poisoned blade. There was no puckered red line there now; only a firm white scar, which looked long healed. Did I dream it?
Alida thrust the wrapped stone inside the front of her dress. She looked at Magda, with a questioning frown, but did not speak to her. “Jaelle?”
Rohana touched Jaelle’s forehead lightly. “She is asleep, I think.”
“Good; while she sleeps ‘the healing will be finished,” Alida said, and gestured to Peter. “Leave her.”
He tried gently to withdraw his hand, but the fingers were locked around it. He settled himself into a comfortable position on the floor and said, “I’ll stay.”
Magda tiptoed to Jaelle’s side and drew the nightgown up over the girl’s bare shoulder and breast, covered her with a blanket, then followed Rohana and Alida out of the room. Alida stumbled, almost fell against the door; Rohana caught and steadied her on her feet. She said, “Go and rest, Alida. And I thank you for Jaelle’s sake.”
Magda’s mind was whirling. It was not illusion! That terrible, festering wound, like a great open, oozing sore . . . and now, as she covered Jaelle with her nightgown, it had not even needed a bandage, but was clean and almost healed. There was also her own arm- it looked like a scar a year old. And somehow, with the aid of the blue jewel, this had all been done through the powers of the mind. Psi power. 1 never believed in it, not really. But I saw it___