Settled in.

And watched.

84

The Nil

Queen Ophelia

Northwestern Border of the Veil of The Enchantments

WODELL

Ophelia stood at the side of the cot, staring down at her friend.

Melisse was deathly pale, and even unconscious, looked in pain.

Ophelia’s mouth tightened.

“A word, Your Grace,” a voice murmured.

She turned her head and looked up to the Go’Doan priest who may have saved Melisse’s life.

G’Liam, probably named William by his parents.

He was the priest who gave her daughter the medication Ophelia now took to help battle the pain and fatigue of the illness that was slowly draining her life away.

It had taken some days for it to start working, but it did.

The sickness ate at her still, she felt it.

But she could now function with much more energy, and much less misery.

She inclined her head to the man, moved out of the tent and several feet away.

She saw her lieutenants, Julia and Lucinda close.

Agnes was supervising the lining up of the Go’Doan bodies that had fallen to the Nadirii in battle the night before so whichever ones could be identified by whoever might wish to claim them would.

Also, the corralling of the prisoners which they very much took and very much intended to interrogate.

“Her prognosis,” Ophelia asked when they stopped.

“Frankly, I’m surprised she’s still alive,” he answered.

His attention was then taken, and Ophelia watched in some shock as his face softened with affection and his chin dipped to something over her shoulder.

She looked that way to see a Go’Ella, one of the acolytes of the Go’Doan, though this one not wearing the sheers of that caste, but instead, the same kind of apparel, though not see-through, and a lovely shade of pale pink, not white.

The woman ducked into the tent.

She was pretty, as many of the Go’Ella were.

She also had a certain serenity about her, which few of the Go’Ella had.

“My chosen one, Saira,” Liam explained. “And if I see the changes in the Go’Doan I wish to make, she will be my wife.”

At her age, there was little that surprised Ophelia.

But that did.

“I teach her what I know. She assists in my work,” he continued astounding her. “You can trust her. She is very good at what she does, has much knowledge and experience. And if she had not been at my side helping me work on your sister, all would have been lost.”

“She is a Go’Ella,” Ophelia pointed out.

Aversion shifted through his expression before he replied, “She was and perhaps officially she still is. I have five other women who work for me, and officially they still are too, even if they are not.”

Ophelia’s brows shot up. “Who work for you?”

“Administratively, in what I do for the Education Ministry of the Go’Doan. Or as nurses in the work I do at the hospital. I do not consider them Go’Ella. I consider them colleagues.”