I stayed in the Healers’ Hall for three weeks. Mak would visit every day, and somehow, he arranged it with all three of my professors that I could attend class virtually. They recorded the lectures, and Mak and I would watch them together the next morning. My arm healed so rapidly that fifteen different healers made a point of stopping by my room to see the results.

I…tolerated…that. Only because I know what it means for our people. The hope so many healers have lived with for so long, their prayers in vain to the goddess for this very thing.

I couldn’t do it—the torture of watching my charges die while I stood helplessly. 

The Woald line has been given two healers—Iahanna and Cayri—now. They are the first Woald healers to have been born in over five hundred years. Theo’s sister Bronwen is another, though she is a Sebastos by family name. Woalds do not have healers born. It is just known.

A painkiller alone is remarkable. Something they are likening to human antibiotics is a miracle. 

One that many praised the goddess for.

Me, I’m not so sure how I feel about the goddess. She got so involved in a nasty fight with the Lupoiux wolf god five thousand years ago that they practically destroyed our people as we were then. It’s written down in the Woald Family Journals. 

Journals that the Equa of the Woald keep locked in our vault, hidden under the fountain in the private courtyard I’d shown Mickey just a few weeks ago.

I have been meaning to ask if I can read them someday soon. For my history of families research project I’m required to do.

Class is about the only thing I can focus on right now.

Otherwise, I’ll get caught up in worrying—there are demons out to kill me, after all. 

Mak said it ties into what happened before. With Olietus Black and that stupid arrow that nearly took off my head that night.

Theo came by. To apologize for being wrong in what he had seen. He’d said he has been inundated by visions of our people lately. And he misinterpreted the one about me. That there had been a strange cloud surrounding it that had obscured what it actually meant. Or twisted it, as if someone knew he was looking, seeing, and wanted to throw him off somehow.

Well, there are few beings that could have been. Fates, maybe? The goddess herself? I’m not sure I believe him, honestly.

It is just too far-fetched to be believed.

He’d seemed sincere. As long as I have known the male—my entire life—you would think I’d know him well enough to evaluate when he is being truthful.

Still…I’m not so sure that I do believe that.

No one knows what the demon meant by queen, either. 

Everyone assumes it means Kindara Jareth, Cormac’s sister and the First Healer of our people. Did you know she’s bonded with the High Demon King now? He is good friends with the Tanisses.

Her own Rajni was murdered by Mickey Taniss’s grandfather.

Kindara has mated that demon king. 

I’ve not seen him, but he’s in the building somewhere.

I don’t want to meet him, or his brother—who is also here somewhere, I’ve heard—ever. 

I don’t ever want to see a demon again.

Demons mean nothing but trouble. I don’t know why one would have come for me. That is an answer no one really has.

I’m being discharged from the Healers’ Hall tomorrow. But I’m not going home. I’m being assigned a suite. In Theo’s wing. Where I can supposedly be watched over and kept safe. 

Kellis is staying with me. 

I just worry that this will never end. Will I ever get to go home again?

I…have a feeling I never will.