By the time they’d reached their goal, his breath was rattling in his chest and there was little doubt of what ailed him. The Healers isolated him and ran everyone else off, and there was very little that anyone could do about it.

Talia had turned ashen when he’d collapsed, and had left her dinner uneaten, waiting for Kris’ return.

Kris finally reappeared, to be engulfed by everyone who’d been present, demanding to know what the Healers had said.

“They tell me he has pneumonia, and it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better,” he replied, his voice carrying easily across from the doorway to the bench where Talia sat. “And they won’t let anyone see him for at least a day or two.”

Talia made a little noise like a strangled sob, stood quickly, and pushed blindly away from the table. The knot of people surrounding Kris had blocked the door nearest her; she stumbled against benches twice as she fled to the door opposite and to her room. She ran all the way down the corridors of the Collegium and through the double doors leading to the Herald’s Wing. She hurled herself up the darkened spiral staircase of the tower that held her room, pushed the door open and flung herself down on the couch in the outer room of her suite, sobbing with a lost despair she hadn’t felt since that awful moment in the Waystation....

She hadn’t closed the door behind her in her flight, and wasn’t in much shape to pay attention to sounds around her. She only realized that she was not alone when she heard someone settle beside her, and somehow knew it was Keren and Sherrill.

She tried to get herself back under control, but Keren’s first words, spoken in a tone of such deep and unmistakable love that Talia hardly believed her ears, completely undid her.

“Little centaur, dearheart, what cause tha’ greeting?”

Keren had slipped into the dialect of her home, something she only did on the rarest of occasions, and then mostly with her twin or her lifemate—moments of profound intimacy.

That broke down the last of her reserve, and she turned with gratitude into Keren’s arms and wept bitterly on her ready shoulder.

“Everything’s gone wrong!” she sobbed, “Elspeth isn’t talking to me anymore, and I know there’s something going on—something she doesn’t want either Selenay or me to know about—but I can’t find out what! And Dirk—and Kris—we fought, and now they won’t talk to me either and—and—now Dirk’s sick, and I can’t bear it! Oh, gods, I’m a total failure!”