"Is that, like, a percentage of income?"

Baron Tortellis doesn't know anything about economics but he knows when someone is trying to get one over on him. "It is a sum of money you owe annually to me, as the lord of these lands."

"Oh. We don't have any money and won't at any point have any money. We do all the healing for free. We are not able to pay any taxes. We will heal all babies anyone brings to us, though."

"I see. I'll have to think about that."

"Okay."

"You will be expected to obey the laws of Sadvak and of Porthmos Prefecture and of Taldor."

"We heal babies. We don't do other things, except sometimes explain to people that we heal babies or make sure the site is enabling us to save babies."

"Well, it seems certainly possible to pursue the aims of your order while respecting the law."

"Okay."

He does not want to stay the night because these people are probably fairies. "Urgent business calls me away." The urgent business of not getting ensnared by fairies. "Thank you for speaking with me."

"Come back if you have a sick baby."

Yeah he's going to go very far away and make someone responsible for keeping an eye out and seeing if the fairies eat the whole village.

Cleery does a little dance. "Who is the goat? I am the goat."

"You're the goat?"

"It stands for Greatest Of All Time. Man, I always get imprisoned or murdered by the local governments. Always. This might be the first time they've correctly gone 'these people are weird as fuck and I'm gonna leave them alone' and I am the Greatest Of All Time."

"I think it's very brave of you to be here even though you could be murdered."

"If you've never been murdered by cops you're not pissing off cops enough. ...or you're indestructible. I guess it could also be that."

Word spreads slowly. On the one hand, they're obviously some kind of horrible evil thing. On the other hand, it's not as if desperate parents have not for thousands of years made terrible bargains to keep their children alive. And also the children do keep being alive, without any apparent horrible curses. The town starts attracting travellers. Savos lets people sleep in his barn for a bit of food or coin. When the next spring's rains come, the boats that make their way down the river bring word that the fairies out near Got Hill heal babies.

Some people come with babies with complex problems that require long courses of treatment. Some people come with older children, and are turned away. (Various splinter groups of Gandlun's Mercy have had vicious debates about the age cutoff, but Gandlun's Mercy Neonatal does only babies.) Some people try to abandon their babies with the fairies. Some people want help with infertility. 

Savos builds another barn. 

When the archmage Naima, the other person who heals babies, stops by Sardis one year and three months after Gandlun's Mercy Neonatal Hospital set up upriver,  there are notably fewer babies in need of her powers. Still a lot of babies, not everyone can afford the river trip and not everyone trusts the fairies and not all babies will survive a week, but - it's the kind of thing one might notice, if one keeps obsessive statistics on baby mortality. 

The archmage Naima's time is absurdly valuable, so all aspects of her operations that can possibly be handled by someone else are handled by someone else. Her secretary blocks out a day for the Porthmos region several months in advance. She speaks to Naima's Oppara liaison, who assigns a junior cleric to head up the river and make announcements and arrangements in Elsekulp, Kazuhn City, Karakuru, and Sardis. This cleric is also tasked with learning about and recording any local medicines and healing practices, which produces several pages of notes about the healing bathhouses of Karakuru, and a handful of scattered sentences about local clerics with odd specialties, beliefs about magic charms with healing properties, a fairly stale unicorn sighting in the Border Wood, and some fairies north of Sardis that are said to heal exclusively babies.

Other people deliver notices to the outlying villages that the archmage Naima will arrive, and what it means, in broad terms, that the archmage Naima will arrive. For ten gold an old person not ready to die can become young again. They will probably change their species and their sex, and will certainly change their face. It will also cure cancer and any chronic health issues, although it might also give you new ones. For one gold (for half that, for children under ten), you can be regenerated, and grow back a limb or awful scarring or your teeth, unless you're very strong, in which case it doesn't always work. These services aren't of much use to babies, so even though Naima can also lend strength to the sick to allow them to recover, it doesn't come up as much on these trips to outlying areas; you really need regular doses of the regenerative hex to massively decrease infant mortality, although one-off instances do make a temporary dent in it. 

On the appointed day, Naima touches almost seven thousand people. It's lower than she'd hoped for, but she hopes that more people will come the next time she visits, As always, she is followed by her secretary, and by five apprentices who furiously record as much information on people's ailments as possible. Her secretary arranges for follow-up statistics to be taken of deaths in the weeks to come, to help them know how much of a dent the one-off instances make in those. The initial statistics are carried home by the apprentices. The followup statistics, which are always spotty, arrive from Sardis more than three months later by boat. Naima reads them, at least in the sense that she spends a spell on absorbing the information, but she doesn't spend time chewing on the implications of the numbers, having absorbed the statistics for a dozen other towns in the same instant. She's already forgotten the note about the fairies near Sardis, which she dismissed as unimportant the moment she read it. Even a nice fairy, which she'll begrudgingly admit might exist, isn't a particularly revolutionary finding. Nice fairies don't scale, and Naima doesn't want to interact with them because Naima really dislikes fairies. 

So the statistics sit in a drawer with the others, one copy at the hospital and one copy in Naima's house, until Hamideh - the only one of Naima's senior apprentices who still bothers with going over tapping statistics, a now sixteen-year-old girl who only speaks Kelish fluently, and only rarely uses it to talk to anyone - gets tired of working on encyclopedia sections and procrastinates by going over the numbers for the Porthmos region.

Utilization was much lower for infants than for other age groups in Sardis. Even in outlying towns, it's usually higher. The month of followup statistics she has also shows low infant mortality, and no particular increase over time. Mortality for older children is high - Sardis is a fairly miserable town, from the description, and many children are employed in the local mines. Chronic poisoning levels were notably high, probably from the ore processing. Few people, especially men, seem to reach old age, judging from the death statistics she has. But the infants are doing well. And they're doing well in Karakuru, the other nearby settlement Naima visited, even though Hamideh doesn't see why a medicinal hot spring would work better on an infant than an adult. The effect is stronger in Sardis, anyway.

A month is not enough time to be sure, of course. Most such oddities in the numbers are just that people who haven't had Naima looking right over their shoulder are bad at recording deaths, and most of the remaining ones are odd luck, so the numbers disappear if you go and collect more of them. But it's odd to see two towns four days away from each other where mortality goes noticeably up at age five, even though the mining accidents don't appear in the numbers until age ten or eleven.

Babies near Sardis and Karakuru on the river Porthmos are markedly more likely to survive than in other areas of Taldor, even though older children near Sardis are unusually likely to die from poisoning and workplace accidents due to mining, writes Hamideh. Notes on the region discuss the healing hot springs of Karakuru, and a legend about fairies who heal infants near the village of Gol Hill. The effect looks strong enough to be worth investigating.

Naima absolutely doesn't read every memo she gets, but she does read every memo she gets from Hamideh; it's the only way that Hamideh feels remotely comfortable saying anything. She checks the numbers herself - magically, again, but this time she thinks about them. 

One year and nine months after Gandlun's Mercy Neonatal Hospital begins operation, Naima decides to spend a couple hours in the town of Karakuru, asking a handful of the bathhouse owners about whether the hot springs are known to have any particularly strong effect on infants or pregnant women.

- AH YOUR ARCHAMGESHIP WHY I AM HONORED TO SEE YOU

Why does everybody do that. Not that it isn't sort of gratifying when she's trying to get people to do things they would otherwise be disinclined to, but she really feels that wanting to hear about the health benefits of a bathhouse is a pretty normal thing to want from someone who runs a bathhouse.

"Yes, yes. I don't mean to take up your evening, I'm just interested in the healing properties of the water here."

"The springs are exceedingly healthy! Not finer springs in the duchy! If you would patronize us it would be an honor to serve you -"

No, see, she personally is really about as healthy as it's possible to be. Also she doesn't go to public bathhouses. - if she says that they are going to throw out everyone currently in this bathhouse. Why can't people just skip to the part where they talk about medicine.

She lets the poor man go on for a minute and then thanks him and pays him a gold piece for his time.

At the bathhouse that's as geographically far away from this one as possible while still being in Karakuru, she changes her face and her clothes and represents herself as a scholar who is collecting information about the healing springs of Karakuru for the records of the Archmage Naima's hospital, which likes to collect records about that sort of thing. 

She can get six opinions pretty fast, ranging from "yep, excellent hot springs we have here" and attempts to get her to go their brother's, to flat denials of the hot springs doing anything whatsoever and long descriptions of what you actually need to do to make pregnancy go well (special herbal rub, sells for two sestarii out back) to a long explanation of how they were blessed by a saint two hundred years ago and (an interjection from someone else who happens to be around) how this PROVES a vitally important theological point against those heretical dynokessites. 

Have the springs been known to heal illnesses? Poisonings? Deformities? Who uses the bathhouses, are children allowed in? And if so, do people actually bring children to them regularly? Do they allow actively sick people in? How much tourism do they get, and from how far away, is it common for people from as far away as Sardis or Kazuhn City to visit for them? How much tourism do they get from Oppara? How much does it cost, and where's the cheapest place? Are there places one can access the fountains without paying?