Lysander's heart sank. He had thought he'd been doing well enough. He had even dared hope, once in a while, that he was getting better, for the nightmares came much less often now and he recovered from them more quickly when they did.

He now walked about London on without incident, for the most part. If this woman, a total stranger, took one look at him and knew that he was broken, he was clearly far from well.

"My sister asked. Find our brother."

She blinked her storm-sky eyes slowly at him for a long moment. "You have siblings."

"Seven."

Something crossed her expression. Longing? He was watching her very carefully, he realized. Watching her every reaction, when for so long he had avoided even meeting the gaze of anyone not immediately related to him. She riveted his attention to a degree he had not experienced in a very long time.

A fresh spike of pain startled him, driving into his skull like a red-hot nails. He flinched and squeezed his head between his hands, clenching his eyes shut. The spikes of light behind his lids flashed like sparked gunpowder.

"Hmm. I suppose that is enough talk for now. A bit of laudanum, I think, Mr. Bing. He is now out of danger of losing consciousness too deeply. I shouldn't think it will do him any harm."

The gravely voice, full of concern. "I'll not leave this room with you in it."

"Very well." The woman let out a sigh, and Lysander heard the scuff of her slipper and the rustle of her skirts as she stood.

"Don't — want it." He'd been kept under the fog of it in the military hospital, subduing his agitation so deeply that they'd not even been able to learn his name for weeks. His family had thought him dead while he languished there in a spiraling opiate dream.

"Well," she said with a hint of asperity, "I don't want a sprained wrist but we must endure, must we not? Just a very little, for the ache in your head. I do insist upon it."

Lysander tried to sit up. I must go. The words couldn't hack their way past the searing ache in his head.

"If you rest, you may get up in the morning," she told him briskly. "Until then, you will stay right where you are."

Lysander swallowed his protest against that tone of command. Even the man Bing shifted to when so ordered. After escorting the lady out, he was back with a tiny vial in mere moments and watched carefully while Lysander tipped it back with no more protest. The man clearly meant to make his lady's will happen no matter what Lysander's opinion of it might be.

"Listen to the missus, lad. You can't go anywhere until someone manages to catch that nervy horse of yours, anyway."