After all this time, two years wouldn’t make any difference, he repeated to himself. Five, even ten wouldn’t make any difference.
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 weren’t dead - then there was only one other thing that could have happened to prevent them from returning to him.
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.
Nine
“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. If he’s going to the Sanctuary, though, I’m going along.
“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.
He’s almost done with his breakfast, anyway. If I don’t get something to eat soon, I’m going to start tearing out throats.
“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.”
“But he would have the power to call those who did,” Anda said firmly. “Furthermore, those he called would know the right steps to take, not only to cure the disease, but how to keep it from spreading further. Keisha, when can we go to the Sanctuary? Will this be an overnight trip?”
Keisha hastily swallowed the last of her mushrooms. “Overnight, yes, but longer than that, no, and we won’t have to pack anything. But I think we ought to go first to Ghost Cat so they can explain how they deal with the pilgrims. They are the ones who are most involved, after all. You ought to see how this is benefitting all of us, not just the Northerners. If we leave now, we can go there, then to the Sanctuary, then be back by nightfall tomorrow.”
“Then I’m ready.” Anda stood up. “Shandi?”
“Ready enough.” Shandi followed her Senior’s example. “Karles says he and Eran will meet us at the Vale entrance. He’ll have Tyrsell send a dyheli for Keisha.”
Keisha could have allowed the two Heralds to go on their own; there was no reason why she had to come along. One of the dyheli at the Ghost Cat enclave could readily guide them to the Sanctuary without Keisha’s help.
She didn’t want to do that. She didn’t want to take the chance that there was some serious illness, even a plague in the early stages, at the Sanctuary. Anda was perfectly confident in the abilities of the Sanctuary Healers to deal with such a thing, but the Sanctuary Healers would not be paying a great deal of attention to the healthy Heralds. All of their interest was bound up in their current patients, and it might not occur to them that the Heralds were exposing themselves to danger.
She, above all, knew just how focused Healers could be; when dealing with an incipient crisis, they concentrated on the problem in front of them to the exclusion of all else. Whatever ills were being treated at the Sanctuary, Keisha would be there to note the symptoms and the cure - and if Shandi or Anda, or both, showed any signs of illness, she would be able to treat them before either of them sickened too far. She would have the sense to get them isolated and keep them from the rest of the Vale; with the help of the hertasi (who could not catch human illnesses) she could get them through whatever they caught.