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memory.
It’s important that you do not reveal your power to anyone. Do you understand, Kaylin?
    Get stuffed,
she told him.
    He fell silent, memory closing its windows. What she had actually said? More polite, longer, a promise of secrecy.
    It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, now, but this: healing those horribly damaged stalks.
    The man woke when she’d knit bone and brain into something like its former shape; she had known he would. He screamed, once, when she started on his stalks. The scream cut out in the middle, and silence eradicated its echoes.

    The last man shouldn’t have been alive. He had taken a single clean wound to one side of the heart, and he had bled so much. Kaylin felt magic in him, around him, when she touched his chest. She let it be, and concentrated, though it was much, much harder now.
    But it didn’t matter, for he was the last. The three would live, and the fourth—damn it—he’d live too. She felt her lips cracking as she spoke. Her hands were shaking too much to keep steady; she didn’t even bother to try.
    Just this one, she thought. Just this one, and I’ll be good. I’ll be good for months. I’ll be good for-bloody-ever. Just this.

    “She’s awake,” someone said. A young someone. Either that or a very skinny midget with a very high voice. Kaylin winced and managed to lift an eyelid. She regretted it almost instantly. There was just too much damn
light.
    “She’s speaking!” the child said. He said it
loudly.
    Kaylin opened her eyes—both of them—and winced again, lifting her hands to her face. Getting up was almost out of the question.
    “You’re awake, aren’t you?” The child spoke slowly, his Elantran deliberate.
    “I’m awake,” she answered. She could see his eyes—they were brown, and they were wide. His stalks were flapping in the nonexistent breeze.
    “I’m supposed to tell Ybelline you’re awake. When you’re awake.”
    “She must trust you a lot,” Kaylin managed.
    The child—boy? Girl?—beamed. “I’m going to grow up to be castelord!”
    “It’s a very hard job,” Kaylin replied, wanting him to take his smile and play somewhere else. Feeling bad about it, too. There wasn’t much you could feel that couldn’t be made worse by a solid dose of guilt.
    “It’s an
Important
job.”
    “That too. Are my friends still here?”
    “Yes!”
    “Good. Um, where am I?”
    “In the home of Ybelline Rabon’alani,” Severn said, his voice drifting in from an archway that she could barely see. “It’s…more crowded than it was the last time we were here.”
    “I’d noticed.” She tried to sit up. Gave up halfway through.
    “I brought water, and food. Ybelline had you carried here when you collapsed.” He glanced at the child as he made his way to Kaylin. “I would have waited,” he said, “but Rennick wished to speak with Ybelline—and her advisors, as he calls them—and I thought it best to…translate. She asked Ellis to watch over you.”
    “Ellis?”
    Severn glanced pointedly at the back—well, top, really—of the child’s head. “He joined us when we were on the way here, and there wasn’t much that could be done to convince him it wasn’t safe. You’re known here,” he added, with a slight smile. “And Ybelline knew you were concerned about the absence of the children.”
    Kaylin did not nod. It would have hurt too much. But she did manage a feeble smile. “Where did the—the others go?”
    “The Tha’alani guards that were injured are in the longhouse. Two of them are awake, two of them are sleeping. None of them are now in danger. The Tha’alani doctors are quite surprised.”
    She winced. “It’s not as if they’ll tell anyone.”
    “It’s not the Tha’alani that I’m worried about.”
    “Then who? Oh. Rennick.”
    “Ellis, come and hold this waterskin for Kaylin. You can feed her anything she’ll eat,” he added. He bent down quickly and kissed her forehead. “Well done, Kaylin,” he said softly.