Sometime in the night he turned and, twisting my hair about his hands and saying the name Nirala over and over, began kissing my brand, my eyes, my cheek. “I am Elsha, lord!” I whispered fiercely. He drew back, and in the darkness I heard him sigh. Then he pulled me near to him again, and lay very still.

I thought he grieved, and I put my arms around him and held him, and he wept silently, his beard soft and rough on my brand. After a while he fell asleep, and so did I. And in the morning when I woke he was still sleeping peacefully, his breathing steady and slow, and he was warm.

All the next day he improved. I overheard him tell Teraj, while Teraj washed him, that last night he had dreamed of the world in Quelled myths, and had never felt so warm, so healed. Teraj, who did not know where I had slept, said that dreams were things of power, and that our own minds held the answers to our pain. “Even warmth is a state of mind,” he said to the Firelord, and I marvelled that I had known that intuitively.

By mid-afternoon my lord was sitting in a fur-covered chair near the fire, sipping hot broth I had prepared for him, holding the cup in his own hands. Shimer sat at his feet, croaking a Quelled song to him. I shook out his sleeping furs, and was going to put them over a stool by the fire to warm them, when I heard shouts outside, and a woman’s scream. I dropped the furs and ran to the door.

Some people had come in through the secret pass, carrying a woman wrapped in a blanket. Teraj was with them. I heard her scream again, and knew she had been injured. I went back inside. I put some water on the fire to heat, and got out his box of cotton bandages and the instruments he used for surgery. He had told me of the things he did to clean up injuries and, though they horrified me and the instruments he had were terrifying, I knew that it was all for healing, and for good. But as I got them ready for him now, my heart went out to the harsha they were for, and for everything she would suffer before she could be healed.

A man came in, saw that I had prepared Teraj’s things, and thanked me. “Teraj said he would like your help,” he said “The woman is badly injured, her abdomen pierced by a fractured beam when the mine collapsed. Teraj wants you to calm her while he operates.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t bear to see agony.”

“Go, Elsha,” said the Firelord, from his chair. “If he needs you, you must go. He does not often ask for help.”