The doctor was gazing at her again, clearly impressed or at least informed. He knew who she was. “Oh, she’s got people in the city,” he said softly. “She’s Anton Solvano’s daughter.”

“Who?”

He shook his head. “Never mind.”

She drifted off again as they began to examine her, though she had the impression they badly wanted her to stay awake and talk to them. It seemed like minutes later, but was probably hours, that she woke to find Sereva in the room, speaking in a calm voice with the physician. “How soon can I take her home?” Sereva was asking. “How soon can I get her to a doctor?”

“Hela, I am a doctor,” was the edged response.

“I mean—I’m sorry—but I’d rather have my own doctor see her.”

“Have as many doctors see her as you’d like. She has a concussion, a sprained wrist, a twisted ankle, a possible broken rib, and she is about the luckiest woman in the city. I don’t want her moved for twenty-four hours, because I don’t like the way she keeps passing out, but after that, if she’s no worse, you can take her to any medical facility you choose. But she’s not leaving here tonight.”

“But—” Sereva looked around fearfully, as if afraid to find mold growing on the walls and insects feeding on the patients. “But she can’t stay here.”

“I assure you, my staff and I are fully capable of setting the broken bones and monitoring the pulse rates of even the most select heiress of the Higher Hundred,” the doctor replied in an icy voice. “And judging by the vaccination scar she has on her left arm, she’s spent some time in a gulden clinic before this. That’s a shot they only give in Geldricht, for a fever you can’t catch here. I don’t think Anton Solvano’s daughter will suffer at my hands.”

It was the longest, most direct speech Kit remembered hearing from a gulden addressing a difficult indigo, and it made her appreciate the doctor even more. She wanted to say so to Sereva but she couldn’t make the muscles of her mouth work. It was too much trouble; she went back to sleep.

When she woke, it was somewhere past midnight, and Sereva was sleeping in a chair by her bed. Kit was a mass of aches and bruises. Her brain seemed to be holding its breath inside her skull, trying to puff itself up so large that it burst through the bone. The whole left side of her body throbbed in time with her heartbeat; her arm was cocooned in something soft and clumsy. Her head hurt so much that it was hard to think clearly, but at least her thoughts felt as if they could be forced into some kind of order.