After she passed him the bowl and ascertained he wouldn’t give himself second-degree burns, she distracted herself from the unbearable awkwardness by scribbling notes. What was wrong with her? Where had her professionalism gone? Hal Cavendish was handsome, assuming one enjoyed the wasting sort of beauty of a dying rose. A completely neutral, observable statement of fact. There. Now she’d thought the unthinkable, she could purge it from her system. It would rise to bother her no longer.

Wren lifted her eyes back to him. “Let me know when you’re ready.”

“I’m ready.”

She snorted at the pain in his voice. “It’s healing, not torture. There’s a small difference.”

Hal gave her a doubtful look as he handed her his empty bowl. She set it aside; then, shifting forward in her seat, she placed her hands on his chest and let her magic flow into his body. While he didn’t say anything about it, he didn’t need to. His clenched jaw and rigid posture spoke volumes.

“It’ll make it easier for both of us if you relax, you know,” Wren said. “If I really wanted you dead, Lowry would already be promenading in his mourning colors. You wanted my help. I’m helping.”

“Fine.”

To her surprise, he did try. As his muscles slackened and his blood pressure lowered, her magic flowed more easily through his fola. Her awareness spread through his system within minutes, but what she found dismayed her. His condition had deteriorated overnight, as if she hadn’t healed him at all.

It wasn’t possible. No disease could be so aggressive.

She took even breaths to keep herself grounded. No good work arose from frustration, she reminded herself, even as she wanted to scream at the prospect of redoing everything from last night. Mother Heloise’s admonitions still rattled in her head.

Patience, Sister Wren.

It was the refrain of her training, constant and relentless.

You must be patient. In the lab, where she would burn through supplies of herbs testing remedy after remedy. In the infirmary, where Heloise would tut with disapproval when Wren left a faint, ridged scar on one of her Sisters’ arms. On the battlefield, where her outpourings of energy would leave grievous wounds healed but her hands numb for days. The human body could only withstand so much. Time was the greatest healer of them all.

Despite the familiar numbness creeping into her fingers, Wren didn’t have time. She couldn’t be patient. If she couldn’t treat the worst of his symptoms in the next two weeks, he would die en route to Danu, and she would be tried for desertion.