I reached out impulsively to hug her and at first she was so startled that she stiffened, but then she softened and rested her head against my shoulder and we sat like that for a long while. But when I felt her empathy tickling at my senses I drew back hastily, saying I wanted to look at the twins and asking if she would come too.

She shook her head, her expression darkening. ‘I can’t look at them again so soon, but I will try to reach them again later when Darius wakes,’ she promised. I remembered suddenly how she had nearly killed herself trying to save people after one of the plagues that had struck the Land before Domick sent her away and wondered how I had ever imagined that she would have callously and knowingly turned her back on a suffering man, let alone one whom she had loved.

I bade her dry her tears and have a few hours’ rest. We would talk again later. She gave me a tremulous, grateful smile and said Darius had told her the same thing.

‘Where is he?’ I asked.

‘He is in the Healer guildmaster’s chamber. I gave him a tisane and he fell asleep when Okan was massaging him. We did not want to wake him, just to shift him to a different chamber, for he sleeps ill at the best of times. He is determined to try his own Talents on the twins before he goes down to the White Valley,’ Kella said, but there was little hope in her voice.

I went to the twins’ chamber, thinking it was an ugly thing to imagine Kella confessing her love to Darius at the very time Domick had been suffering so dreadfully, yet she had not known it and nor had he. Roland was in the twins’ chamber and I saw by the bowls on a tray that he had been supervising the coercion of nourishment to the twins. There was no sign of the coercer who had worked with him, but Roland looked weary and discouraged. I did not blame him, for feeding unconscious patients was tedious and messy. I thought with regret of the way in which the machines in the Beforetime complex at Oldhaven had fed Domick and given him medicines through tubes attached to little hollow needles. Roland and I had actually discussed the possibility of sending the twins to Oldhaven soon after I returned from Sador, but Jak, who knew best how to operate the healing computermachines, was far away in Sador, and it was unlikely that Angina would survive such a journey. We had debated sending Miky alone, but somehow none of us felt it would serve either of the twins to separate them, an irony considering what Angina had asked of me.