Belatedly I noticed that someone had entered the room, or perhaps they had been there all along and I had been too intent on the twins to notice. The person leaned over Miky’s unconscious body and I wondered if it was Hannay. I had not had the chance to speak to him since his return from the lowlands.

He reached out and held his hand above Miky at exactly the place where the silver-white cord ran from her body to her detached spirit-form. It must be a coincidence that he placed his hand into her spirit cord, for he could not possibly see it. Then something in the proportions of the dark form struck me, and I understood that it was not Hannay I was watching, but Darius.

Then I saw something astonishing: a bright spring-green pulse of light flowed from his hand into the link and up it. Realising it had not been chance that made him hold his hand in exactly that place, I followed the light as it moved along the link and into Miky’s spirit-form. Immediately the sickly green spreading about the base of the cord flushed to violet blue.

Was this the secret of Darius’s healing powers, I wondered incredulously? And yet what was it that I had seen, a pulse of spirit energy dispensed by the beasthealer to Miky’s spirit?

Suddenly I remembered that the ship fish Ari-noor and Ari-roth had given me the gift of ohrana, which they had defined as spirit energy, and which had kept me warm through hours of being towed along in the freezing waves. It was not something I had ever seen any other beast or human do, but I had no doubt that this was what Darius was doing.

Fascinated, I watched another pulse of green flow from the beasthealer’s hand up the link to the discol-oured place in Miky’s aura, but even as a new area of violet flowered, another patch of healthy colour was drawn into the lavender link, which glowed brighter than ever. Yet there was no change in the dull colours of Angina’s spirit.

Was it possible that the energy being drained from Miky was not going to her brother but to the link between them? If I was right, then no matter how much energy Darius poured into Miky, it would only be drawn into the link and serve to bind the pair more tightly. It would not actually help to heal either of the twins. And how long could Darius go on doing what he was doing? I knew from my experience with the ship fish that the energy a spirit could gift was finite.