The only thing is, she said her premonition involved me. I don’t like the sound of that. . . .
Darian interrupted her worrisome thoughts. “Now, would you like to hear what we’ve been finding out, since it seems that you’re going to be involved?”
Keisha nodded, and when Darian was done, she remained silent, thinking everything he’d told her over carefully. “This Summer Fever,” she ventured. “I don’t like the sound of it. It sounds more dangerous than the barbarians.”
“Why?” he asked, puzzled.
“They’ve had a few years to get used to it - I’ve never heard of anything like it down here,” she told him, feeling a little chill in her heart. “If it got loose here, it could go through us like a wildfire.”
“We have Healers,” he objected. “Surely they can do something first.”
“You have to know what you’re up against, how it works, before you can fight it,” she pointed out. “Otherwise it’s like fighting an enemy blindfolded. Sure, you can flail around with a sword and hope you hit something, but you’re more likely to get hit yourself first.”
He winced. “I see your point.”
“That’s not all that bothers me, but it’s the main thing,” she continued, wondering if he would understand how she felt. “I think you aren’t going to like this, but I think we have to help them.”
As he’d described the children with their withered limbs, she’d felt that old familiar tug, that insistent call to do something. The only difference was, now she had the tools to act on that call.
“What do you mean by that?” Darian asked sharply.
“I mean, I’m a Healer now, in everything but the robes. It’s part of the vow. I have to help where there’s need, and you can’t deny that these people need help!” She watched him closely, begging with her eyes for his understanding. “Don’t you see? That’s why Healers are what we are. We don’t take sides, we just help, no matter what!”
She watched strong emotions flit over his expression, watched him fight down an immediate retort and give his anger a little time to cool. “I know it sounds crazy, even disloyal, but you can ask any of the others, and they’ll tell you the same,” she said softly.
“I don’t doubt you,” he said brusquely, “But I think it’s madness.” He smiled crookedly. “Maybe that’s why I’m not a Healer. Still. . . you did say that in order to deal with this sickness, you have to know what it is you’re fighting and how to combat it, right?”
She nodded.
“And I’ve never heard of a fever or a plague that would stay politely in one place or attack only certain people - no matter what some priests would claim. So if you’re going to be able to battle it when it finally decides to jump to our side, I’d rather you did your flailing around on patients that aren’t Tayledras or Valdemaran.” He turned his hands palm-upward and shrugged. “Chauvinistic of me, but there it is.”
“It’s a point,” she agreed, relieved that he had conceded the potential conflict. She already had the germ of an idea in her head, but for it to succeed, she would need him. She stood up. “First things first, though. Let’s go see if Captain Kero left anything of Shandi. I want to know more about this premonition of hers than she told me on the ride.”
They spotted Shandi, sans Companion, walking toward them through the camp as they returned to the cave Keisha was glad that the Herald-Captain hadn’t significantly damaged her sister; in fact, Shandi was remarkably composed for someone who had just faced the redoubtable Kerowyn on the wrong side of a situation.
Nevertheless, she was clearly glad to see Keisha and Danan, and equally glad to be taken off to Darian’s campsite. “Whew!” she said, collapsing on Darian’s bedroll and stretching out flat, both eyes closed. “I’ve faced off against Cap’n Kerowyn with a weapon, and I never wanted to do that again, but getting a dressing-down from her is a hundred times worse!” She opened one eye and looked up at both of them. “Whose bed am I taking up anyway? Yours? You’re Darian, the half-Hawkbrother, I presume?”
“Right on both counts,” Darian said, his mind still clearly elsewhere, but his tone quite cool and unimpressed with Shandi’s casual attitude. “And I presume that the Herald-Captain has informed you just how dangerous this situation is that you’ve casually barged into without so much as a ‘by your leave’?”
Keisha was astonished; she had never heard a young man take that tone with her sister! They usually couldn’t keep themselves from near-servility, but Darian had just done a little dressing-down himself, had come within a hair of sounding angry with her, quite as if she were his little sister and not Keisha’s! There was no doubt that the comment was intended as a rebuke, and Keisha hadn’t ever heard a young man rebuke her sister since Shandi had turned ten!
Shandi sat straight up, also taken aback by Darian’s tone. “She did,” she replied, nettled. “She also gave me leave to remain, on the basis of my premonition and the Collegium’s acceptance of it, as long as I understood I was under her orders, absolutely and without exception or excuses.”
Darian leveled a look at the Trainee that was just as severe as Kerowyn would have wanted. “She means it, and we’ll back it,” he told her flatly. “If you’re ordered out of here, you will go, even if I have to knock you out and tie you onto that Companion of yours. And don’t think you can hide somewhere if you’re ordered out either; you can’t hide from the eyes of our birds or the noses of our kyree, no matter where you go or how cleverly you think you can conceal yourself.”
“I’ve no intention of disobeying orders!” Shandi snapped back, eyes flashing and her temper beginning to show. Keisha stepped in before it turned into a quarrel.
“I’ve got to know more about this premonition,” she said earnestly. “You didn’t give me anything to make any kind of judgment on.”
“I don’t have that much myself,” Shandi replied in irritation, still annoyed with Darian and giving him a dagger-laden glare. “All I got was a few flashes and a feeling - a flash of me, one of you, one of him, though I didn’t know who he was at the time, and a very, very strong feeling that I had to be where the Captain was, so strong that I was halfway to Companion’s Field to get Karles before I came to my senses. That’s it.”
“That’s all?” Darian asked incredulously. “And on that basis the Collegium gave you leave to come to a battle zone? Are they crazed?”
“So far I’ve had a grand total of four days of training in my Gift,” Shandi said tartly. “It’s not exactly under my control, all right? I have to make do with what I get. It was good enough for the Senior Herald at the Collegium.”
“Now why am I so certain that the Senior Herald at the Collegium didn’t even know that we’d contacted the barbarians yet?” Darian shook his head in disbelief, but didn’t challenge her any further, which made Keisha grateful. Shandi didn’t lose her temper often - at least, the Shandi she knew didn’t - but when she did, the results were often spectacular. At the moment, that was one spectacle she’d prefer not to witness.