DRAKENFELL — MASTER HEALER’S OFFICE

“I feel fine,” Gav insisted. “Just a bit strange.”

Rook: Mate.

“Sit down,” Alaric said without looking up from his desk, where he was writing something in a leather journal with the unhurried penmanship of a man who prioritized documentation over his patient’s comfort and whose prioritization was a lifestyle choice.

“I don’t need to sit down. I need you to clear me so I can leave.”

“And I need you to sit down so I can determine whether clearing you will kill you or merely inconvenience me with paperwork when you collapse in a corridor. Sit.”

Gavriel sat. The sitting was reluctant. The chair was cold. The healer’s quarters smelled like dried herbs and judgment, and the judgment was Alaric’s primary diagnostic tool.

Alaric Kestrel turned from his desk and looked at Gavriel the way a man looks at a puzzle he didn’t ask for and doesn’t intend to enjoy. His eyes were clinical. His expression was the expression of a healer whose bedside manner had been recalled by the manufacturer at birth and never reissued.

“You were in a coma for days. You woke up without supervision. You left your room without clearance. You attended a training session instead of reporting to me, which is protocol you are aware of and chose to ignore.” He tilted his head. “How am I doing so far?”

“Thorough.”

“I am always thorough. It is the only quality that makes this job tolerable.” Alaric pulled a chair opposite Gavriel and sat. “Symptoms.”

“I told you. I feel fine. Just a bit strange.”

“Define ’strange’ with more than two words or I will define it for you and you will like my definition less.”

Gavriel exhaled. “Sore. Full-body soreness. Came on suddenly about an hour ago. And some… nerves. In my chest. Like anxiety but off.”

“Off how?”

“Like it’s coming from somewhere else.”

Rook: Mate.

Alaric’s eyes narrowed by a fraction.

“Different is one word for it.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Your energy signature is different.”

“Different how?”

Alaric leaned back. Crossed one leg over the other. Steepled his fingers. He clearly was deciding how much of the interesting to share and how much to keep for his own intellectual entertainment.

“When you went into the coma, your energy signature was Gavriel Sterling. Standard Gamma. Unremarkable.” He paused. “The signature I am reading now is Gavriel Sterling plus something else. The ’something else’ is the part I am going to need more than two sentences to explain, and you are going to need more than zero patience to hear.”

“Just clear me and we can both go on our merry way,” Gavriel sighed.

Alaric stared at him. The stare was the stare of a man who had been told to go on his merry way and whose way had never once in his entire career been merry and whose face was communicating that the suggestion was personally offensive.

“I don’t do merry, Sterling. Merry is village idiots, and I am neither, though some days this job makes a compelling case for the latter.”

“Alaric.”

“Gavriel.”

“Clear me.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because ’a bit strange’ is the medical equivalent of a man telling me his house is ’a bit on fire.’ It communicates urgency while deliberately obscuring scale. I need scale, Sterling. Scale requires tests.”

“I don’t want tests. I want clearance.”

“Those are sequential, not interchangeable. One produces the other. You are currently attempting to skip to the end of a process that has a middle, and the middle is where I determine whether your body is functioning or performing a convincing impression of functioning. There is a difference and the difference is my entire profession.”

Gavriel opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

“How long are these tests going to take?”

“Longer if you keep talking.”

The door opened.

Hyran Thornfell walked in carrying a leather satchel and the specific energy of a mage who had been summoned from something more interesting and whose summoning had better justify the interruption. His eyes swept the room once: Alaric at his desk, Gavriel in the chair, the general atmosphere of mutual antagonism that the two of them generated whenever they occupied the same space.

Gavriel looked at Hyran. Looked at Alaric. Looked back at Hyran.

“What is he doing here?”

“I wanted a second opinion,” Alaric said, already writing in his journal.

“A second opinion on what? You haven’t given me a first opinion.”

“The first opinion is that your energy signature is anomalous. The second opinion is Hyran confirming the anomaly so I am confident the anomaly is real and my equipment is functioning correctly. This is called due diligence. Healers perform it. Patients endure it.”

Hyran set his satchel on Alaric’s desk and looked at Gavriel with the assessing gaze of a mage cataloguing a specimen.

“Good to see you too,” Hyran said flatly. “You look terrible.”

“Thank you.”

Hyran opened his satchel and produced a series of instruments that looked like they belonged in an alchemist’s fever dream. Crystal rods, a copper disc etched with runes, a vial of something that glowed faintly purple, and a tuning fork made of a metal Gavriel couldn’t identify.

“What the hell is that?”

“Hold still,” Hyran snapped, not answering.

“I am holding still.”

“You are holding still while talking. Hold still while quiet. The difference matters.”

Gavriel held still while quiet. The holding and the quiet cost him equal effort.

Hyran passed the copper disc over Gavriel’s chest. The runes on the disc flickered, illuminating in sequence, each one producing a faint hum that varied in pitch. Hyran tilted his head. Passed the disc again. The runes flickered in a different pattern.

Behind him, Alaric was running his own scan. The pale gold glow of diagnostic magic emanating from his palm, tracing the contours of Gavriel’s body without touching him, reading the map of energy signatures that every wolf carried and every mage could interpret.

“Is this medically necessary? Or are you two making me your lab rat?”

“If you talk, we have to start over,” Alaric said.

Two professionals. Two methodologies. Both of them circling the same subject with the focused, silent attention of men who had found something they were choosing to examine before they named.

Rook: We let them. They play with their toys and are less grumpy.

Hyran struck the tuning fork against the copper disc. The sound was strange. Low, resonant, carrying a vibration that Gavriel could feel in his teeth. Hyran held the vibrating fork near Gavriel’s left shoulder, then his chest, then his right shoulder.

The fork’s pitch changed over the left shoulder. Distinctly. The vibration climbed two full tones and held.

Hyran’s face did nothing. His face was trained to do nothing during examinations because diagnostic expressions influenced patients and influenced patients produced unreliable data. His face was a wall.