Healer Thesa was worried; Dirk’s recovery was not as rapid. He was still unconscious the next day, and it was some time before she and the other Healers diagnosed the problem as a relapse of his pneumonia coupled with incredible psychic strain. She had charge of his case; her old friend Devan had charge of Talia’s, though they shared every germ of expertise they had on both cases. Dirk had inadvertently brought the bottle Talia had drunk the argonel out of with her; and the traces of it within the bottle told Devan what it was they had to fight besides her terrible injuries. Within a day or two he and Thesa decided between them that they had done all they possibly could for both of the patients under the primitive conditions of the encampment. They decided that while it was dangerous to move them, it was far more dangerous to leave them there. There might be warfare waged there at any moment, and they both badly needed the expert touch of the teachers at the Healer’s Collegium.

Yet there was no time to spare—and assuredly no Heralds to spare—to move them back to the capital. Instead, after a hasty conference, Thesa and her colleague decided to take the patients a few miles up the road, and install them in the stone-walled home of the Lord Holder, who gladly gave up his dwelling to the Queen—and was equally glad to move himself and his family well out of the way of possible combat.

The Queen had called for all the Healers of the Collegium that could be spared. The Lord Holder’s residence was more than half fortress; it was readily defensible at need. The Healers were installed there as soon as they arrived with Thesa organizing them as soon as Dirk began showing signs of improvement. Thesa knew with grim certainty that although they had only Talia and Dirk to treat now, if there should be war, they would have other patients, and soon.

Elspeth spent most of her time there; her mother had asked her—asked her, and not ordered her, a sign that Selenay trusted her good sense and was tacitly acknowledging that she was becoming adult—to stay with the Healers and some other of the officials of the Court who began arriving as she called them.

“But—” Elspeth began to protest, until the haunted expression in her mother’s eyes stopped her. “Never mind. What do you want me to do?”