The Power of Kindness

In Thornvale, power isn't earned. It's given. A mother gives strength to her child. A village shares its strength with the young reeve who holds the ford. Once a year, every tenant kneels on the green and gives to the lord who swears to keep them safe. Nell Hartley has been a district nurse in Yorkshire for thirty-one years. At the end of a long shift, at a red light in the rain, a tired voice asks if she will come and help a valley that is dying. She says what she always says. Course I will, love. She wakes in a ditch beside a goblin with a broken arm. She knows nothing of this world's magic. But she knows how to set a bone, and when the goblin gives her a tenth of a point of his strength for it, she learns the first rule of the Open Hand: every gift is given on a word, and a broken word sends it home. Within weeks the valley is giving her more than it gives its lord. She has a ruined fever-house on a hill, a goblin who wants a kitchen with a door that shuts, and a stonemason with a cough he swears is only dust. Lord Vane can't kill her. The valley would give even more in a martyr's name. So he sets out to make her break her word. The Power of Kindness is Book 1 of The Nurse Nell Chronicles: a LitRPG with game boxes, six stats and a Standing that climbs from Stranger to Crowned, where a nurse's promises are the strongest and most dangerous things she owns.