Darian rubbed at his face with both hands, coping with the thoughts that Kelvren’s innocent commentary had dredged up. He murmured a thanks to the gryphon, who responded by bumping him affectionately with a wing, then assuming another lounging position. Darian’s thoughts stayed on his parents’ fate. They could not have been lost in the Pelagiris this long - not even for a year. Blind, deaf, dumb and limbless they could find their way back to Errold’s Grove by orienteering. They had been that good.
But if his parents
They had to have been caught in a Change-Circle.
And if they had survived that experience, there was no telling what might have happened to them. What they might have become.
Or where they were.
His duties to his homeland, his adopted people, his friends and his mentor had been fulfilled, and then some. It was more than time for him to use his own tracking skills and resolve, and find out what he could about the past.
“Iwant to visit the Sanctuary,” Anda abruptly declared, just as Keisha set her plate and cup down and joined the little group around the table he shared with Shandi and Darian. Shandi smiled at her sister and shrugged slightly; Darian kept eating. “How do I go about doing that?”
“Catch a disease?” Darian offered.
Anda was looking at Darian, but it was Keisha who answered seriously, ignoring her breakfast for the moment to shoot Darian a look of disdain. The meal was too hot to dig into immediately anyway; she might as well deal with Anda. She wasn’t at all certain that he had learned the lesson of impatience.
“I suppose I can take you there,” she said. “When do you want to go?” She already knew the answer, of course. Anda had been running at full speed since the moment he arrived, and not even the exhausting welcome- week had kept him from what he saw as his duty to integrate himself into the life of Vale, village, and tribe.
“Today, if possible.” Anda had taken a frugal breakfast of fruit and bread; Keisha wondered how he could accomplish so much on so little food. Her heartiest meal was breakfast. “Are there any new patients there at the moment?”
“There are always new patients there,” Keisha sighed, but with envy rather than weariness. “Except in the dead of winter, the Sanctuary gets a new group roughly every fortnight. If what you want to see is Northerners fresh from the wilds and tired to the bone, that’s exactly what you’re going to get.” She took an experimental bite of her own breakfast of stuffed mushrooms; they were cool enough to eat, and she didn’t want them to grow cold. She gave Darian a glance; he took the hint, and picked up where she left off.
“The Ghost Cat people sent up a couple of messengers to the tribes they were related to,” Darian explained, fully aware of how irritable morning hunger made Keisha. His meal was all made up of things that wouldn’t be spoiled by getting cold, and he had no problem talking around bites of food. “Those tribes have been spreading the word that there’s a place of Healing down here, but they are being careful the word doesn’t get to tribes like Blood Bear - those were the barbarians that overran Errold’s Grove. Either we were lucky or very careful. Those tribes seem to have gotten a lot of strange diseases out of the Change-Circles up north.”
“We were careful,” Anda said, after swallowing the last of his own breakfast. “After the scholars at Haven figured out the pattern for where the Circles would pop up, people were told. No one went near them until they’d been checked over. Sometimes they were sterilized by fire, if need be.”
“But things still got away,” Darian pointed out. “Animals, insects, some creatures we never could identify. We know that - and it happened here in Valdemar. My parents hunted all kinds of bizarre things that came out of those Circles. I’d have to say we were lucky, Anda; we could have ended up with the Summer Fever and Wasting Sickness as readily as Ghost Cat did. And - bless poor Justyn, but he would have been the first to admit to this - the Healer we had at the time wouldn’t have had the power to cure it.”
