Discharged & Off-Duty: A Cozy Healer LitRPG

The road thawed. Now everyone downriver can walk to his door.

For two winters, the only people at the Cardwell Bottom clinic were the people who could reach it. Then the weir road opened, the carts started running both ways inside a day, and the yard began filling before the sun cleared the forge roof - a laundress from four miles down, a dyer off the ford landing, a withy-cutter who has stood in the mill race to his knee his whole working life. They all carry the same grey tracery across the backs of their hands. They all draw off the same water.

Dean Kestrel can open three of them a day. Not for want of strength - the open takes three seconds and the sitting afterward takes two hours, and there are only so many hours in a day. The Charter counts everything in the clinic and credits none of this: greyhand is a condition it does not recognise. The Registry has just taken the practice's only instrument back north with an apology and no replacement, so the measuring goes on by hand, on ruled sheets, in an eighteen-year-old apprentice's big round print.

And the queue is longer today than it was yesterday. Somewhere in it is an old man who was born in this town, who got up before light to come down, and who will go home on the same cart he arrived on.

A cozy healer LitRPG of small-town medicine, quiet competence and a System that counts late. The Frontier Clinic is a complete trilogy, and this is Book 3.