Ayn's Healing

Chapter 14 - Ayn

I haven't seen Kari for days. Last evening I heard him walking out on the terrasse, so I assume he is feeling better. This pleases my core, which has regained some sort of balance since Xander allowed me to heal his warriors after trainings.

Yesterday was my first session. Offering the healing touch to wolves who tear through each other's muscles and tendons with gusto gives meaning to the hard work Sybille had mentioned. Plus, it was mass exposure therapy for me.

When the first males shifted, I almost threw up, thrashed around as I was by the anxiety waves that ran through me. By the time the twentieth pair had fur and blood flying around, my brain was pretty desensitized at the sight of fangs and claws, as well as to all the threatening noises the beasts were making. I only gagged slightly as I treated their injuries.

I had a nap when I returned home and then I slept through the night. It was heaven. I am very much looking forward to Monday.

This morning however I have to atone for my inadvertent border crossing from last week, by attending a crash-course with Mia in Land Core geography and permission rules.

"Hi Mia, I am all ready for you to impart border disposition knowledge to me..but before, here, for you." I say, offering her a small black vial. "It's a tincture of verveine, red raspberry leaves and red clover...with a concentration tailored to your subspecies.  Sorry it took me so long to prepare it."

"You sound so...witch doctor like" she laughs, hugging me.

"You can call it baby making juice and get to it." I say, noticing that I am starting to get used to all the touching. Probably it's because of all the shifter pups that have climbed onto me since I came here.

After one hour of studying the Shifter' Territory and the more detailed Land Core, and Eagle Rock maps, my head is spinning. Mia tells me however that we are not finished yet, because we need to discuss the Northern and Eastern Hills, but I give her my word that I will not walk two hundred miles on foot to those territories in the foreseeable future.

She agrees to spare me with the geography part,  but I do get another hour-long lecture on permissions. I never traveled beyond the territory that belonged to the Teaching Clan - officially known as Lake Twelve territory. I do know conceptually that the cross-border travel was tightly controlled post-Split by a complex and cumbersome legal framework, mainly conceived by the regular humans. As trade resumed, the laws controlling the movement of goods had been gradually relaxed. The ones related to the movement of people however, were purposefully left restrictive and complicated. Ina and I had always laughed about it and we theorized that it was a way to prevent subspecies from physically mingling, but also a way to slow down the magic people and shifter to human-controllable levels. Shifters needed to travel in human form and witches couldn't fly across borders. Also, all documents that needed to be shown were paper based. We had all the technology to make this an easy process, and biometric identification was used heavily at the borders. But on top of that, one had to carry the ominous piece of security paper with two signatures.

The one-time permissions were called green permissions and depending on the destination and the rank of the applicant, they needed to be requested in advance, sometimes ridiculously early, as was the case for the Regular Human territories. Blue permissions applied for cross-border workers and were renewable every three months.

Mia then explains something I don't know in so much detail, namely the notion of Standing Agreements.

It was maddeningly hard to find out where one needed to apply for travel papers, whether it was directly with a territory leader or whether they had put in place an office to deal with permission matters. Every few months independent groups were putting up databases of contacts, and every few hours afterwards the Land's Council was taking them down. As such, the Shifters leveraged the little autonomy they had, and had put in place a system of standing agreements. This meant that, following an yearly renewable agreement between two Alphas, pack members could move freely between territories. The security paper for the permits under the travel agreements was orange.