“Your man will not tell them anything, my Lord,” the servant replied. “And they tell me there is nothing wrong with him that their powers can heal. They suggested medicines. This young man can compound those.”

The man with his head in his hands moaned, and said something in a foreign tongue.

“What’s he saying?” Bear hissed.

“He’s saying something about eyes,” the servant whispered back, as the man in gold and black glared at Bear, looking him up and down with contempt. “The eyes, the eyes, always watching! That’s about all he’s said for the last three days.”

“The eyes,” Lena murmured. “Something about that sounds familiar.”

“Well, you think about it while I look at this fellow.” Paying no attention to how the apparent leader glared at him, Bear walked up to the man on the couch and forced him to sit up and take his hands away from his face. He peered in both eyes, together and separately, checked him for a fever, and then got out some instruments from his case and began doing other things with the help of the servant, who translated.

“Mags, would you get out the mortar and pestle, and start grinding up those herbs I brought with me? Lena, you keep them all separate in those dishes that are with the mortar and pestle.” Bear was tapping the man with a little hammer, though what purpose that could serve, Mags had not a clue.

Now grinding things was no new task for Mags. He’d been put to that sort of work about the time he first remembered being in Cole Pieters’ custody. So he fished out the implements and the little packets of herbs and started grinding. He left one sprig of each intact and put it on the pile of powder he spilled out into the dish Lena held out for him.

Meanwhile the man kept glaring, while Bear asked questions in a coaxing tone of voice and the man occasionally answered with something besides “the eyes.” And Lena had her brows creased and her lips pursed in that way that Mags knew meant she was thinking very hard indeed.

Bear left off his examining and questioning when Mags finished the last of the herbs. Motioning both Mags and Lena out of the way, he began measuring things into the mortar, added a bit of liquid from a little flask he took out of the bag, then began mashing it all together with the pestle until he had a paste. Then he took bits of the paste that he carefully scooped out with the tiniest spoon Mags had ever seen, dusted his hands with what looked like flour, and began rolling the paste, scoop by scoop, into pellets. And when he had finished everything in the mortar, he began his measuring and mixing again.