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his hand, trying not to look at the medal, now that he had an inkling of what it bore. Just in time, he realized that Tiernan was still watching, awed even by Queron’s reaction thus far; and he signalled with an impatient gesture that Tiernan should leave.
    The monk backed out without demur, quietly closing the door through the screen before padding off through another door that probably led to the sacristy. Only when Queron was certain he was alone did he allow himself to look at the medallion again.
    Rhys Thuryn’s Healer’s medallion. This time, the arms and badge were uppermost, but that did not change the foreboding now lurking all around Queron’s consciousness. Nor would further delay soften the medal’s message.
    Drawing a deep, centering breath as he laid his hand over the silver, Queron closed his eyes and triggered the spell set there. It was even worse than he had dreamed. Briefly, he sensed the psychic signatures imprinted there at the time Rhys received it—Dom Emrys and another, unknown to Queron.
    But then, all the psychic impact of Rhys’ death—plus the slaughter at Trurill and the slaying of Alister Cullen and Jebediah—came punching through any resistance he might have tried to raise, relentless in all the detail he must know, in order to survive.
    Evaine nibbled at the end of her quill and glanced aside as the infant sleeping in the basket at her elbow stirred. The list she had been working on all afternoon was mostly complete—well, it was a good working draft—but she wished again that Rhys were here to help her. She missed him more and more with every day that passed.
    God, what a splendid team they had made! Looking across the table to the chair that once had been his, she could almost see him gazing back at her, the amber eyes a little amused at her acclaim, the fingers of one tapered Healer’s hand lifting in a light-hearted gesture of self-deprecation. The scholar’s training and the eye for detail had been hers—and the skill with languages—but it was he who had brought that unique gift of intuitive logic, that knack that often cut through layers of artifice that might have taken her weeks or even months to fathom. Sifting through the ancient records on her list would have been a joy, with Rhys at her side.
    But Rhys was not at her side; nor would he ever be again, except in her dreams. The little daughter beginning to squirm and coo in the basket would never know her father, for he had died a week before her birth. Though he had been among the greatest Healers of his age, Rhys Thuryn had died for no better reason than any of the others they had laid away last night in the Michaeline chapel, fated never to see the daughter who, like his younger son, bore the sacred gift of Healing. Nor, in his final moments, had his gift been able to save him .
    He had not even looked dead, Evaine recalled, angrily casting down her quill and turning tear-brimmed eyes to the dome of dull amethyst above her head, trying not to remember. Preserved under a stasis spell set shortly after he died, he might merely have been asleep—though he had been dead for a fortnight by the time she actually saw his body. Not a mark or wound had he borne upon him—only a faint indentation at the back of his skull, padded by the wiry, reddish hair—surely not enough to kill a man such as he!
    But it had killed him—had killed his body, at any rate, though Rhys himself no longer resided there. That some eternal part of him still survived elsewhere was a firm cornerstone of her belief, too profoundly affirmed by what her father had told her of others’ passing ever to be questioned. The body was a temple of the soul during life, but no more than an empty shell, once the soul passed on.
    Still, she had loved the body as well as the soul and the brilliant mind it housed; so before consigning that body to its cold and lonely tomb, she had covered him tenderly