The healer by the door kept smiling at the boy like this was still a fever.
Rigel did not look at her.
He looked at Pell's mouth.
The child's lips were chapped.
The words that had come out of them were not.
"What formula," Rigel said.
Pell swung his feet again.
Tap.
Tap.
Third-bell rhythm, patient as a clerk.
"The one you took off the adventurer and put back together," he said.
"Black metal. Inner marks. It hurts less than the old kind. That's why you like it."
Mesterica's wrist flexed under Rigel's hand.
He did not let her draw.
Not in a ward with one door and a woman who still thought she was nursing a woodcutter's son.
Cynthia stepped sideways, cutting the line to the window without making it look like a guard change.
Her blade had stopped humming.
That was worse.
It meant she was listening with the rest of her.
"Who told you that," Rigel asked.
Pell blinked.
For a blink he was nine.
Then the thing behind the eyes finished blinking for him.
