Chapter 194: Second Opinion

(Elizabeth Aurelius POV)

Master Valerian Alzette came to my room early in the afternoon. He had slept for exactly two hours first, because Healer Sorel had told him to.

I had heard about that from three different people before he reached my door. Halden is a small fort, and the arrival of the best healer in the kingdom is not a quiet event, even when the best healer in the kingdom goes straight to bed.

Sorel came in with him. She stood at the foot of my bed with her records under her arm, and he stood at the side of it, and neither of them looked as though they were competing for the space.

"Your Highness," he said. "I’m the visiting specialist. Healer Sorel remains your physician. I’m here to give a second opinion and to help her with what comes after."

"I know who you are," I said. "You taught Lord Vortex."

"I tried."

I was propped against three pillows, as I had been for most of three days. My left arm was in its sling. My hands lay where Sorel had ordered them kept, on top of the blanket, where she could see whether they were doing anything.

"Before you begin," I said, "I’d like to hear what’s in my record."

He didn’t look at Sorel for permission, and he didn’t look surprised. He simply opened the record and read it to me, all of it, in a plain voice, as one reads minutes back to the people who were in the meeting.

Most of it I knew. Some of it I knew differently. My blood loss had been written down as Sorel’s estimate, and the estimate was larger than I had let myself imagine. The sentence about my channels ended with whether any of it will stay cannot yet be determined, which was exactly what Sorel had told me to my face, written down.

And near the end, in Sorel’s hand: Something else present. Not strain. Not the bond, as far as can be seen. Unidentified.

"Thank you," I said, when he had finished. "Go on."

He examined me as Alash examines a wound, as though it were the only thing in the room.

He pinched the tip of my finger white and watched the colour come back. He laid two fingers against the inside of my wrist and sent a thread of his mana in, and I felt my own rise to meet it, as it had for Sorel, and run up my arm toward my core and back.

He held it there much longer than Sorel had.

"Your blood," he said eventually. "It’s coming back. Your hands are warm because you’re lying down and drinking what you’re given. If you stood up now and walked to the window, you’d find out how much of it is still missing."

"I’m aware it’s still missing."

"Good. Keep being aware of it."

He moved the thread toward my shoulder.

"The shoulder’s closed well. The joint is stiff. I’d expect the arm to come back slowly, and to be clumsy for a while, but I can’t promise you how much of it, or when. The ribs are knitting. They’ll hurt when you breathe deeply. Breathe deeply anyway."

"And my channels?"

He was quiet for a moment.

"Overdrawn, palm to shoulder," he said. "Better than the record says, a little. I can’t tell you how much of that is the hour you had and how much is your own body. The hour has been over for three days. What’s left is mostly ordinary recovery, and something faster than ordinary that I don’t yet understand."

"The thing all five of us have."

"Yes."

"And the other thing. In the record. Something else."

He took his time answering. I liked him a good deal for that.

"I find something I can’t account for too," he said. "The bond’s hour of faster recovery is long over, and it can’t explain what I’m finding now. And this isn’t strain." He took his fingers away. "I can’t tell you what it is. I can’t tell you where it sits. I can’t tell you whether it’s new, or whether it has been there a long time and nobody ever looked this closely."

"Always there?"

"I have no earlier examination of you at this depth to compare it with. Nobody has." He said it as plainly as the rest. "So I won’t guess."

Sorel wrote. He waited until she had finished.

"Your core is stable," he said. "That’s good news, and I’d like you to hold on to it. Your channels aren’t ready to carry it. So: no riding. No cultivation. None of your four elements, not a spark of any of them, not to see whether you still can. You stay in this bed until Healer Sorel says otherwise, and when she does, you’ll stand up slowly and sit down again the moment the room moves."

"For how long?"

"Longer than you’d like," said Valerian. "I won’t give you a day, because I’d be inventing it."

Sorel had refused me a date for three days. It was oddly steadying to hear a second healer refuse for the same reason.

He was gathering his things when I spoke again.

"Who are you seeing next?"

"Lord Vortex."

"Not last?"

"He’d prefer last."

"He would," I said. "When you’ve finished with him, I’d like to see him. Alone."

Master Valerian looked at me for a moment, and I had the odd impression of being measured for something other than my blood.

"After his examination," he said. "I’ll send him."

***

(Alash Vortex POV)

I had hoped Elizabeth would take longer.

She is the First Princess of the kingdom, and her examination had a royal assignment attached to it, and I had been privately confident it would take most of the afternoon. It took less than an hour.

Valerian came back into the infirmary, washed his hands in Sorel’s basin, and looked at me.

"Bed," he said.

I was already on one. I had been on it since the morning, which I felt deserved some credit.

"Lying down," he said. "Shirt off."

He put his palm flat against my breastbone, over the place where the pull lived, and left it there.

"Describe it."

"It’s a pull."

"Describe it properly."

I thought about it. I had described it properly, to myself, every morning for three days. I had never once said it out loud.

"It’s behind the breastbone, a little left of centre. It’s there all the time, but quietly. It pulls harder when I climb stairs, and when I’m tired, and for a few seconds when I sit up too fast. It’s smaller than it was at the ridge. It’s bigger than it was the morning before the ridge."

"That’s a description," said Valerian, and sent the thread in.

He read me for a long time. Sorel stood at the foot of the bed with her records and didn’t interrupt him, and I lay there and looked at the ceiling, which was whitewashed, and had a crack in it shaped like the coast south of the capital. I’d had the morning to learn it.

"Your channels were always generous for your core," he said at last. "You had more road than you had traffic. I spent five years being annoyed by how much room you had to grow into."

"I remember."

"You haven’t got it now. The traffic’s caught up with the road, and passed it. Same as the others." He moved the thread. "The strain is healing. It would heal faster if you stopped holding your breath every time it pulls."

"I don’t do that."

"You did it twice while you were describing it."

I hadn’t noticed. I didn’t say so.

"No Barrier," he said. "Not the pane, and not anything else you’re tempted to call by a different name. The Headmaster’s order stands. Nothing beyond ordinary Healing without Healer Sorel’s say, and I’m not going to ask her to give it."

"Yes."

He took his hand away. I sat up, slowly, because he was watching.

"How is Elizabeth?" I said.

"Her Highness is my patient," said Valerian, "and you’ll hear what she chooses to tell you. She’s asked to see you."

That stopped me for a moment.

"What about Sophie’s frost? Sorel’s notes say it comes up on cups, but this morning there was frost on the window frame outside her door as well, about this high. I passed it on my way down. That means it’s travelling further from her hands than it was on the first day, and..."

I stopped, because both of them were looking at me.

"Go on," said Sorel. "That’s useful."

I went on. I told them about the window frame, and the hour Daphne’s wrappings had been changed and how long it had been since, and how James had started keeping his left hand closed again when he thought nobody was looking, which he had done once before, in a training hall, and which I had not liked then either.

Valerian wrote it all down.

When I had finished, he looked at the page, and then at me.

"You know their charts better than you know your own," he said.

It wasn’t praise. I could tell, because he didn’t sound pleased.

***

He saw the other three in the afternoon, one at a time, in the small room at the end of the infirmary where Sorel had hung a sheet across the doorway. I stayed on my bed, because I had been told to and because I had promised myself, at some point between the crack in the ceiling and the coast of the south, that I would try it.

I didn’t hear much through the sheet. I didn’t try to.

James was first. He was behind the sheet for a long time, and when he came out he sat down on the end of the bed beside mine and looked at his left hand.

"He made me hold it out flat," he said. "For a whole minute. Do you know how long a minute is?"

"Sixty seconds."

"It’s longer than that." He closed the hand. "He says probably as well. Same as Lena. He says nobody’s allowed to say permanent in front of me until I’m thirty, and that if anybody does, I’m to send them to him."

"That sounds like him."

"He says if I use Space before he says I can, I won’t need to wait until thirty to find out." James looked at the sheet, and then at the floor. "I’m not going to."

"I know."

"I’m telling you anyway," said James, "so somebody’s heard me say it."

Sophie went in next. Twice during her examination I saw frost creep out along the edge of the sheet at floor level, white and quick, and stop, and go back.

I heard Valerian’s voice once, quite clearly, because he had raised it a little.

"That isn’t disobedience, Lady Trohan. That’s your body doing what you trained it to do, without you. We’ll teach it to wait for you again."

Sophie said something I didn’t catch, and he answered, more quietly. I caught longer than you’d like, which seemed to be what he was telling everyone today.

She came out talking.

"He’s terrifying," she said, to me, to Sorel, and to the room in general. "I like him. He didn’t confiscate anything. He said the frost isn’t my fault and I’m not to apologise for it, and I said I wasn’t apologising, and he said I’d apologised four times since I sat down, and I counted, and it was five." She sat down on James’s bed, on top of James’s feet. "He’s very good at counting."

Daphne went in last, and wasn’t long.

She came out with fresh wrappings on both wrists and her face doing nothing at all. On her way past my bed she stopped.

"I told him about the other thing," she said. "That there is one."

I waited.

"I said I’d talk to him about it properly when I’d decided what to say. He said that was fine, and he’d look after my wrists until then." She considered that. "He meant it."

Then she went and sat by the door.

Valerian came out after her and sat down at Sorel’s table, and the two of them talked for a while in low voices over five records.

I watched him write. He wrote five separate lists, one at the top of each record, in the small careful hand I had last seen at the bottom of my own training schedules. I couldn’t read them from where I was. I could see their shapes, though. They were five different lengths, and none of them looked like any of the others.

Once, Sorel said something about the five of them together, and Valerian shook his head.

"Same rank," he said. "Five different bodies. When they’re cleared to start anything at all, nobody gets the same exercises because they went up on the same afternoon."

Before he left the table, Valerian wrote one more sheet, sealed it, and gave it to a runner for the relay. I caught enough of it to know what it was: a request to the western command to let him go east with us, rather than hand five patients like these to someone who had never examined them.

I looked at the four of them: James with his hand closed, Sophie still sitting on his feet, Daphne in her chair by the door, and Elizabeth in her room, in a bed she was not allowed to leave. I had been thinking of us as one problem for three days.

We weren’t. I should have known that. I was the one who had been reading their charts.