Selly. In the infirmary. Was she injured? Surely she wasn’t… dead.

“You go,” Nic said, her decisive tone cutting through his rising panic. “I’ll send for your parents and will be right behind you.”

He focused on her. His parents, yes. They would want to know. “Thank you.”

“Go,” she said firmly.

He went, running down the big stairs in great strides, turning to the south wing and racing to the space that, instead of the ballroom in the mirroring north wing, had been subdivided into offices for the various in-house wizards. Asa had been the first to claim his space—a smaller set of interconnected rooms for him to see patients, along with a larger room to serve as an infirmary—but he wasn’t the last. Other wizards, including Alise, he noted as he ran past, already had their names on office doors.

The outer rooms of Asa’s offices were empty, though with more furniture than when he’d been there a few days before. They were more than filled, however, with Selly’s familiar screaming. He raced through to the infirmary. The room bordered the back of the house, the same view as their bedroom balcony, with a view of the long lawn that sloped to the river. Recently the lawn had been submerged, along with the rest of the south wing, but a few days of sunshine had the grasses growing tall outside the long row of windows admitting the bright morning sunlight.

Two of the injured from the encounter with the swamp monster were ensconced in beds along one wall, sitting up and watching the scene with great interest. They blanched when they saw him, avoiding his gaze. He’d fired the two wizards who’d just had to poke the pit, and everyone else involved, especially and including Jadren, had been thoroughly reprimanded. He had no time for them, however, his gaze entirely on a bed near the windows, where a thrashing and shrieking Selly fought Asa, Laryn, and Rat. They were attempting to tie her to the bed frame, with little success. Despite the odds and Selly’s too-thin, bony frame, she was gaining on them, fighting with near supernatural strength.

Grimly, Gabriel wondered how the Convocation subdued such wildness. House Hanneil psychic control? He didn’t want to know. He reached Selly, taking her thrashing head forcibly in his hands, holding her still and making her look at him. “Selly,” he said loudly enough for her to hear, but keeping his tone calming. “Seliah, it’s me. Shh. You’re safe. You’re home.” His voice broke a little on the word “home.”

Selly stared at him with feral eyes that held no recognition. Her long hair snarled and caked with mud, she was filthy and emaciated, looking bonier than even two days before. Screaming as if he were a monster, she shrank away, trying to escape him, fighting even harder.

“She needs to be contained for me to work on her,” Asa told him in clipped tones as he held down one wrist. Laryn was fighting to contain the other hand, while Rat sat on Selly’s frantically kicking legs, the slight man bouncing with her furious gyrations. “She’s dangerously dehydrated, on top of being malnourished. We need to get some water and broth in her.”