She meant smelly. He’d scarcely stirred out of the room for three days, and when he did, he spoke to no one and returned to his bed as soon as he could. Davvie, the hunter’s apprentice, had been bringing him meals and then taking them away again. At first, he’d been in too much pain to be hungry. And now he was too despondent to eat.

“Davvie said he thought you were feeling better.”

“I’m not.” Couldn’t she just go away? He didn’t want to talk to her, didn’t want to confide his problems to anyone. Davvie was bad enough, with his pestering, prying questions and his voluntary biography of his own unremarkable life. At fifteen years old, how could the boy imagine he had done anything that could possibly interest anyone other than himself? All of the boy’s meandering stories seemed to be leading up to some point that Sedric couldn’t grasp and the boy couldn’t seem to make. He suspected that Carson was using the boy to spy on him. He’d woken twice to find the hunter sitting quietly beside his bed. And once, he’d struggled out of a nightmare and opened his eyes to that other hunter, Jess, crouched on the floor nearby. Why all three of them were so fascinated with him, he didn’t know. Not unless they had guessed his secret.

At least he could order the boy out of his room and he obeyed. He doubted that tactic would work on Alise, but abruptly decided to try it. “Just go away, Alise. When I feel well enough to deal with people, I’ll come out.”

Instead, Alise came into the room and sat down on his shoe trunk. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be alone so much, especially when we still don’t know what made you so ill.” Her fingers tangled in her lap like writhing serpents. He looked away from them.

“Carson said it was something I ate. Or drank.”

“That makes sense, except that we’ve all had the same food and drink that you’ve had, and no one else was affected.”

There was one drink she hadn’t shared. He pushed the thought aside. Don’t think about anything that could incriminate you, or bring those alien thoughts back into your mind.