It felt as if his face was melting. He needed water, but couldn’t even open his eyes to find it, much less smell through his inflamed sinuses to sniff it out. So he lay on the chapelle floor, sneezing and moaning until slowly, terribly slowly, the agony subsided to painful yet bearable tingling. He opened his swollen eyes.

Thank Byen, he could see. And yet something seemed to be missing. He stared down the steps at the trees below. The color was off or . . . no. He sniffed. Sniffed again. Inhaled a deep searching breath. He couldn’t smell the trees, or anything else. Noriago was right: his sense of smell was gone.

Yenni sat rigid as a rod in bed, staring in numb disbelief at the runes on her palms. Was she awake? Or was this a dream?

Her father’s rune was almost as strong as the day he had drawn it there.

Yenni traced a finger over the rune, registering the sensation. As her shock wore off bright joy built within her until she sprang up with a whoop, jumping and dancing on her mattress. Oh praises upon praises to those most holy! The week prior she had at last received a letter updating her on life at home. And though her mother found the concept of the wither-rot highly strange, she assured Yenni she would find a delicate way to pass the information on to the Healers’ Guild.. Since then, nothing.

Until this.

Yenni didn’t question the suddenness of her father’s healing. She only cared that he was well, that she would see him again. Surely all would be explained in her next correspondence from home.

It was with a bounce in her step that she dressed and prepared for her first class of the day, runelore. That morning she decided to leave the front half of her hair in its relatively neat row of braids, which she had done curving on a slight angle. She let out the back, tying it into a high puff, which she moisturized with the coconut and shi-shi root oil from Diedre. Yenni turned this way and that, frowning at her reflection. She couldn’t seem to get the shape of her puff right through finger-combing alone. She opened the drawer of her vanity to get her long pick comb, another present from Diedre. It was very useful for working out the tangles in her hair. But as she opened the drawer she froze. In the corner, sparkling in the light of sunrise, was the necklace from Weysh.

Yenni picked it up and sighed, her mood dampened. It was a hurtful thing she’d said to him, she knew, and untrue besides. The sensory memory of his lips whispered across hers. He was not nobody. Not to her.