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“I’ll need it.”
    “There are four men—”
    “I can
do
this. Just—water. Food.”
    His shadow was still for a moment, but he was silent. Everything they said or did now—every single thing—would be watched by
all
of the Tha’alani, no matter where they were, no matter how young or how old, how strong or how weak. All of the Tha’alani who watched would see, and what they saw would become part of the Tha’alaan, the living memory of the entire race; Tha’alani children four hundred years from now could search the Tha’alaan and see the events of this day through the eyes of these witnesses.
    And for once in her life, Kaylin was determined to make a good impression.
    Severn knew; he wasn’t an idiot. He knew that humans—her kind, and his—had done this damage. He knew how important it was to the city that humans be seen to
undo
it. She didn’t even hear him go.

    It was hard.
    It was harder than destroying walls that were solid stone, harder than killing a man. Healing always was. It was harder than saving infants who were trapped in a womb; harder, even, than holding their mothers when shock and loss of blood threatened their lives.
    Harder than saving a child in the Foundling Hall.
    But she had done all of that.
    She felt the shape of their bodies and the beat—erratic and labored—of their hearts. She heard their thoughts, not as thoughts, but as memories, almost inseparable from her own. She felt their injuries, the broken bones, the old scars from—falling out of a tree? She even snorted. These weren’t men who got caught out in bar brawls.
    They weren’t men who were accustomed to war of any kind.
    She could save them. She could see where infection had taken its toll, eating into flesh and muscle. Two men. If she wanted them to live, she couldn’t use any more power than was absolutely necessary. No miracles, not yet. No obvious miracles.
    But the subtle ones were the only ones that counted.
    The bones that would knit on their own, she left; the ones that wouldn’t mend properly, she fixed. She tried not to
see
what had caused the breaks, but gave up quickly. That took too much effort, too much energy.
    When she lifted her hands from their faces, she felt the touch of their stalks, clinging briefly to her skin. She told them to sleep.
    She heard Ybelline’s voice. Felt Severn’s hands under her arms, shoring her up as she stood and wobbled. She didn’t brush him off, didn’t try. She let him carry some of her weight as she approached the last two men, their stretchers like pale bruises on the ground.
    She felt grass beneath her knees as she crushed it, folding too quickly to the ground. Righting herself, which really meant letting Severn pick her up, she reached out to touch them.
    Shuddered.
    They didn’t
wear
helmets. And the most obvious weapon they had—in the eyes of humans, of anyone outside—were their stalks. One man’s were broken. Just…broken. There were no bones in the stalks themselves—but even muscle and tendon could be crushed out of shape, smeared against a skull that was also fractured badly. Bones don’t hurt. The stalks—there were nerves there, so many nerves.
    Gritting her teeth, she said, “Ybelline—I think this is going to hurt him. I think he’ll—”
    Ybelline knelt in her shadow, knowing which of the two Kaylin meant. She reached out, caught the man’s bruised hands (two fingers broken), and held them fast. Leaning, she bent over his face, and her own stalks, whole, unbruised, reached out to stroke the sides of his face, his cheeks, his jaw. “Do it,” she said softly.
    Kaylin nodded.
    Here, too, she reached out with her power, with the power that had come the day the marks had appeared on her arms and legs. Words burned on the inside of her thighs, where no one could see them. They burned up and down the length of her arms, and flared on the back of her neck.
    She didn’t care.
    It’s very important that no one know of this,
Marcus said, in