‘Darius received word from the leader of the Twentyfamilies of an important meeting to be held in the White Valley. When he said he would attend, I decided to come up as well, for travelling is very hard on his limbs. In that case, he said we might just as well visit Obernewtyn for the moon fair. So here we are.’

I had heard the gypsy beasthealer had been working with Kella at the Healing Centre and that they now treated beasts as well as humans. In truth it had sounded to me as if these days the Healing Centre in Sutrium was as much a teaching centre for beastspeakers who wished to learn more about healing, and for healers desiring more training. They were said to flock to the centre and vied for the chance to work there. What had begun modestly had become a very large and important centre for healing and learning. Healers and herbalists came from all over the Land as well as from Sador and the Norselands to study there and to offer their own knowledge. There was even talk of establishing a teaching library and of trying to amass a collection of Beforetime books about healing.

I could only admire Kella, who had been the moving force behind it all. Yet I still felt very ambivalent towards her because, although we had been good friends in the days when she had been a healer at Obernewtyn, and even after when she had gone to live with Domick in Sutrium, her failure to visit the renegade coercer when he had been dying on the west coast, or at least to come and say a word at his burial, had seemed to me unforgivably callous.

It was this that prevented me from greeting Kella with the warmth shown by the others, but not wanting to draw attention to my coolness, I spoke a few words of welcome from a distance. Kella nodded to me, but from the look in her eyes I knew she sensed my real feelings.

There had been something evasive in her expression that made me wonder if she now regretted how she had behaved. This did nothing to soften my heart towards her. Indeed, as 1 watched her smiling sweetly at Rushton and greeting Grufyyd and Louis with hugs, something in me hardened at the memory of her indifference to Domick, whose suffering at the end of his life had been truly horrible.

My mind was suddenly full of visions of the young man who had been yet another victim of Ariel’s hatred of me. It was not Kella’s fault that Domick’s strangeness and coldness and rejections had driven them apart, but they had once loved one another fiercely enough to defy the unspoken rules of their respective guilds, and I could not understand how she could refuse to come to him at the end. After all, what had happened to him had been our fault – all of us at Obernewtyn, including her – and even as he was dying, he had spoken of her with love and longing.