:So it's less of a promise to do things according to specific rules and more of a promise not to--turn away from what's important? I can see that. And I know you'll help, you're--I appreciate you a lot, I hope you know that.:

:Trust me, I know it: She nuzzles him. :You're actually quite good at remembering to say it, but I don't need to be told in words to know. And, yes, that's right. I mean, additionally you're committing to following the Laws within Valdemar, which you've studied, and the parts of it that apply specifically with Heralds and ethical Gift-usage. But the core of it is a promise to care, to try with everything you have. And you're doing that anyway: 

:Okay. The Laws at least I understand--not perfectly but well enough to work with.: Probably because they're intended as laws, and not as an inspirational guide for his conscience. :And it's a good thing to promise. I don't want to become a different person. Except by learning new things and growing up more, I guess.:

:Exactly: Yfandes cuddles up against him. :It's not a small thing to take on; I think it makes a lot of sense that you find it scary. But I'll always be here to help: 

He leans against her and strokes her mane and loves her too much for words. 

After a while, he says, :I think I can go to sleep now and wake up at a reasonable time. I should go do that.:

:You should go do that: Yfandes agrees. :Though if you're awake in the middle of the night, please do feel free to come down here. I won't mind waking up to snuggles and it's not hard for me to go back to sleep: 

:Okay. Good night.: He wonders, on his way back to his bedroom, how often Heralds sleep next to their Companions in general. He knows he's not the only one who does it, but hardly anyone ever talks about it or puts bedrolls in the stables or anything so it can't be particularly normal. He'll keep doing it when he needs to, though; better to be weird where nobody can see than sleep-deprived and incompetent in broad daylight. 

He sleeps through the night, this time, though with mildly troubling dreams about trying to read the Laws but not being able to make the words hold still on the paper.

Then Savil alerts him that the vows with Elspeth will happen in two days, which is presumably long enough for him to stress about it. Also, his Healing lessons are set up; he'll be doing the first one in the afternoon after the vows. 

Two days is definitely long enough to stress about it. He can rotate through several different flavors of stress, even: worry that he won't be able to follow through on the vows, worry that he'll stumble over them and look like an idiot, worry that he'll be overwhelmed by thoughts of Tylendel and burst into tears in front of the Queen and everybody, worry that that previous worry is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It occurs to him that he should use the calming loop. It occurs to him that doing something really important in a magically altered mental state is a bad plan and uses it a couple times in his room to make sure it doesn't make him stumble over the wording. It doesn't, which means it was probably stupid to worry that it would and he's just looking for excuses to use it because it's addictive.

Then he goes and actually gives the vows and the whole thing takes about a tenth of the time he spent worrying about it and he could have been doing something productive with a lot of that time. He should probably be learning some sort of valuable lesson from this but he isn't sure whether that lesson is "thinking about things in advance makes them go more smoothly" or "spend less time having emotions". He makes his way to the Healing lesson feeling like he's half out of reality and his body is just walking around unsupervised.

It turns out that Shavri is buddied with him for his lessons! She's delighted to see him, and goes in for a hug. 

What is this, oh right it's a hug, he should hug her back. He does that. "Heya, Shavri." It's kind of surprising that they're in lessons together since she already knows a bunch of stuff, but the teachers presumably have a plan for that, and it'll be nice to have someone he knows there.

It turns out that this is because she's teaching him! She is extremely excited about this fact. 

"All right!" she says brightly, taking him by the hand and pulling him over to a little room that seems set up for lessons rather than seeing patients. She fishes a mouse out of a wooden cage with several of them, puts it in a jar with a mesh lid. "This is Wilbur, he's for practicing Healing-Sight on. Have you used your Sight before?" 

"I figured out how to start using it but I wasn't really able to interpret what I was looking at." Shavri being his teacher is neat. And makes a lot of sense given how much she enjoys explaining things.

"That's a good place to start! I love Healing-Sight, it's the best thing ever. Why don't you start just Looking and you can ask me things?" 

"Mage-Sight is pretty great too." He stares at the mouse and opens up his Healing-Sight.

"So, there's a bunch of . . . something . . . moving around, even when the mouse isn't doing anything in particular. Does any of that correspond to breathing and heartbeat and stuff, or is it a different sort of thing?"

"Lots of different things! Should have different rhythms. The heartbeat is really fast, it should be..." She settles her own Healing-Sight on the mouse, then sends him a Mindspeech-link rhythm. It's very fast, at least five times per second. 

He sifts through the patterns until he finds the one synced up with Shavri's rhythm. "There, I see it! And what's this one?" He attempts to make an illustrative hand gesture.

That one is only around twice a second. "I think it's breathing," Shavri says, "here, you can actually feel that," and she guides his fingertip to rest against the mouse's tummy. Wilbur is surprisingly chill about being held in Shavri's hand. 

"I can. Oh, wow." Touching the mouse's fur suddenly makes him very aware that what he's looking at is a living creature, tiny and fragile and more complicated than any piece of clockwork.

"Isn't it beautiful? Hmm, there's a slower rhythm you might be able to sense, bit more irregular too – that's his guts moving. Here - it's about like this." Again, she taps out what she's Seeing to him in Mindspeech. 

"Hmmm . . . " It takes him a while, but eventually he says, "I think I see it. Can you tell just by looking whether anything is wrong, or do you have to learn what health versus sickness looks like from examples?"

"Bit of both. Some things show up as - obviously not healthy? Dark spots or places where nothing is moving. But some kinds of sickness are subtler and it'd be harder to pick out if you didn't know what baseline to expect. We'll go through lots of examples of sickness once we look at how all the bits should work when they're healthy." 

"That makes sense. I guess it's the same as with non-magically looking at people--some injuries are obvious, and then sometimes people look fine but feel awful."

"That's right! And a helpful thing about human patients, as compared to mice, is they can tell you what's bothering them, and then you can use that as a hint for where to Look." 

Once Abras has the hang of finding the basic biological rhythms in a mouse body, and then finding them on his own on a different mouse and tapping it out to Shavri so she can confirm, she'll start showing him how to 'zoom in' his Sight on particular regions or organs, like the lungs. Shavri says she can almost get in close enough to see the tiniest blood vessels that lie in between the bigger arteries and veins. She works on her Sight a lot. Abras probably can't get anything like that level of detail, yet, but Shavri gets him to look for the stomach, liver, spleen...

He can't see the tiny blood vessels or even the ones a size or two bigger than that, but he can see the organs she points at, and it gets easier with time. Almost like his eyes adjusting to darkness or to a book with very small print, but not quite the same. He also tries looking down at his own torso to see if he can identify his own organs based on what the same ones look like in a mouse.