"And the rest of you are healthy?" 

"I've been feeling unwell this week but I don't think it's related. Maybe it is."

He looks thoughtfully at her, then turns back to Ma'ar and asks him about any stomach symptoms (Ma'ar confesses to having a stomachache before after eating) and then asks his some distressingly detailed questions about his pooping habits. 

Finally he turns back to Carissa. "I suspect your difficulty is unrelated, though I could examine you as well. Your son appears to me to have an excess of lymph and a deficit of blood in his body; you see how his nailbeds and gums are paler than mine, look? And yours are quite normal. Many people are perfectly healthy on a diet of plants, but not everyone, and right now your son needs foods that will restore the blood. Eggs, meat, fish. He should eat lightly of breads and grains, and fruits, since those restore lymph, which is the opposite of what he needs." 

Master Laites frowns. "And then of course, there is the question of why he was healthy before and is sickly now, when you are well. You have been traveling, and eating and drinking at inns? Certain areas may have a miasma of disease, in the air or in the water or in the soil itself, and he may have picked up some sort of - vermin, that saps his strength from the inside. Stomachaches are suggestive of that. I can prescribe a remedy for it." 

They would appreciate it. And could he examine her as well, while he was here?

He does, though with more discretion for the physical aspect, patting her through her clothes rather than asking her to disrobe. He asks her about her symptoms, and when they began - and then, unsurprisingly, clears his throat delicately and asks when she had her last monthlies and - he can see her wedding jewelry - when did she last have, well, marital relationships with her husband. 

This part of the conversation goes completely over Ma'ar's head (this is mostly because he has no idea that 'marital relations' is a euphemism for anything pregnancy-related), and he's quiet and politely bored. 

Huh, she would've assumed that nomadic herders had less in the way of privacy norms, there. Of course, his parents have been dead a while. 

She can confirm that she and her husband share a bed frequently (and also a magic-restricting extraplanar operations building in the divine domain of Abadar, but she does not tell him that) and the timing lines up and that was one of her guesses.

He nods, satisfied. "It is too early to be certain, but for a woman of your position it is the obvious guess, and I see no indications of a more serious disease that might be causing those symptoms; my second guess would be that you are unused to so much travel. For either case I would recommend taking some time to rest." 

He proceeds to give her some surprisingly detailed dietary advice about what the College of Chirurgeons thinks that pregnant women ought to eat versus not eat, and then some practical advice, that she can pick up a ginger-root at the apothecary and cut thin slices of it to chew, it should help with the sickness, and he encourages frequent light meals rather than large well-spaced ones. 

Huh! She'll try it. And then she'll thank him and pay him out of her new pocket money and usher him out with an excuse about subsequent appointments because poor Ma'ar.

The doctor thanks her, and leaves them a note to take to the apothecary, to pick up a remedy that will cure her son of any 'vermin' he might have picked up while traveling. 

"I don't like him," Ma'ar says quietly once he's well away and out of Thoughtsensing range. "I guess he seems clever, but - he kept poking me." 

"I'm sorry," she says. "I meant to explain to you what I hoped to get out of that and ask if it was all right with you before he arrived. I can explain now, if you'd like, but it was less important than you feeling safe here and I think you are owed an apology for being put on the spot like that. He was very pokey."

"You were - worried something was very wrong with me, and you wanted someone who's studied healing to check? Except they don't have anyone with magic healing so he had to poke." 

"I was a little bit worried about that, because I feel very helpless here - I have a bit of magic healing but only a bit and when I use it I'll never get more, so I wanted to know if you were bleeding in your head or anything that'd mean I should use it now and not later - and I wanted someone to look at me, because I was a little worried I'd caught some disease when I arrived here, somehow - but also I was just very curious whether their doctors are very good. We don't need it for injury, in Cheliax, but we don't have anything for disease, and disease kills lots of people - Velgarth has more but they're still limited by who has Gifts --and if they really had a good way of studying medicine and the body without Gifts then that'd be really important to know about, for the project of saving everybody, and I was excited about that. I don't know if I've really learned very much about that. He does seem to know some things."

"He probably has books that he didn't show you. You could steal them?"

"I try not to steal things. But maybe."

"Huh, why not?" He shrugs. "It'd be stupid for me to try, I'd get caught, but I figure you have enough magic not to." 

"It hurts people. And I can say my being alive is more important because I'm going to fix everything, and that's even kind of true, I'm certainly not giving them my money, but -

- there's a concept in my world that the gods use, called Law, it's - the tendency to be predictable to others in the world in such a fashion that they can cooperate with you, and know what cooperating with you means. And Law is very complicated and doesn't necessarily mean following all the local laws, but usually you want to pick something - some conception of how you will behave, under lots of circumstances, so that people can know what it'll mean, to be on your side, and I follow Iomedae so I've mostly adopted hers -

- you can make up your own, you don't have to have an existing one, but if you make up your own you are making up a deep and thorough conception of what it means for you to be an entity embedded in a world with other entities, and acting on it consistently, and people mostly can't do that from scratch, and they end up with incomplete or contradictory conceptions. I haven't tried making my own.

Anyway, nearly all of them prohibit or mostly prohibit stealing. Iomedae's says that many things are all right when they are directly and specifically necessary for your objectives, but they're not all right as a default or as a habit, or as things you do in any circumstances other than when it's the clear best way to get done something that has to be done. If I had to steal a magic teleporting key that'd take us to Urtho, I'd do that. But not - stealing spending money so I don't have to pawn my wedding ring so I have it later because maybe later I'll need it - not that kind of thing, not in the Iomedaen conception of what Law is. And Iomedae can't see us here but I follow Her because I think She's pretty smart, not specifically because She gives me healing magic in exchange."

Ma'ar listens intently, expression serious, furrowing his brow every so often. It's a weird sideways way to think, but - it holds together into a picture, mostly, when he manages to get his head shoved around to see things from that angle. 

"I don't know Iomedae but I think you're pretty smart," he says after a long pause to think. "And you're powerful and I - want to be predictable to you so that you want to cooperate with me. Does...that mean I should also not steal anything unless I really really really have to?" 

"I think so. Until you are bigger and have a whole theory of why you'll do everything you do, and can explain it to me, and then I'll be able to cooperate with you even if it's different than mine and has more stealing in it."

He's frowning. "Are you - trying to do this all the time? Or only with powerful people who you want to want to cooperate with you." 

"- well, in my world, Law is a force that everyone can see and that applies to everyone and anyone who is Lawful is probably someone you can cooperate with if you understand what exactly they're using. In this world - I think I'm mostly not trying to cooperate with these people, exactly, but - if they did know I was a priest of Iomedae I wouldn't want them to have a terribly wrong impression about the kinds of things her priests will do. Because Iomedae can try to cooperate with more of them."

"Huh."

"...You said things to him that weren't true. The doctor." 

"Yes. Also to the people running the inn, I've told them we're here looking for my nephew."

"Would you have not done that if they knew who Iomedae was and that you're being her priest and cooperating with her."