“Jace doesn’t want me to leave before I’m healed, and he knows he won’t be able to stop me once I can put on my own pants.” Using her arms as a prop, she sat up, twisted sideways, and rested her feet on the stone floor. Mara stepped forward to help, but Kai waved her back, groped for, and found, her bamboo cane. She leaned into the cane, testing its strength and hers. Satisfied, she stood, though slower than she liked. “So, why did you come?”

“There has to be some secret motive?” Mara’s face betrayed no pity, only the fear Kai had seen in her few visitors’ eyes already, the fear of the healthy in the presence of the hurt. “I miss you. Gavin does, too, but he’s afraid if he visited you’d get the wrong idea. You can’t imagine the turnings in that boy’s mind. He asked me how much I knew about your family, because he wants to come visit, but he wants to bring orchids because his mother always told him to bring orchids to convalescent women, but he wants to know if you were raised traditional enough to get the reference, because he doesn’t want you to think that he’s bringing you flowers because he likes you, not that he doesn’t like you, but. You see. He thinks of conversations like a chess game, and I don’t mean that in a good way.”

Mara paced as she spoke, addressing cliff face and ocean and empty bed and her own hands, everything but Kai herself. “I’m glad you miss me,” Kai said, “but that’s not why you’re here, especially not in that dress.”

Mara stopped midstride. “I like this dress.”

“So do I, but you dress fancy when you’re scared. What of? Kevarian? The Grimwalds?”

“Of you, I guess. A bit.”

“I got hurt. It happens sometimes.”

“Hurt. People pull a muscle dancing, or break their arm rock climbing, or if they’re having a bad year they tear a tendon. That’s what hurt means. You, though. Do you even know what happened to you?”

“They read me the list. I recognized most of the words.”

“You almost died.”

“I almost a lot of things.”

“I saw Jace’s eyes when he looked into the pool as you were drowning. I didn’t think he could feel fear. Or pain. You scared him down there. I’ve only seen him look that way in prayer: awed. By you, and what you’d done.”

“Awe,” she said, tasting the word. “Awful, maybe. I tried to help, and it didn’t work. That’s all this is. If I’m lucky Jace won’t fire me.”

“I wouldn’t have done what you did.”

“That’s obvious.” Kai saw Mara flinch, and regretted her choice of words.