“Both The Terafin and Adam were seated beside one of Levec’s patients who happened to be awake. They apparently disappeared as soon as the patient suffered a relapse.”
“Apparently?”
“They disappeared,” Torvan said.
“You saw them vanish?”
“No, ATerafin—”
“Finch. Call me Finch while the door is closed. If I hear ATerafin one more time today I’ll scream.”
Torvan nodded. He did not, however, use her name. “They were present by the bedside, and then they were not. There was no blood, no injury, and no obvious use of magic; believe that the magi would have noticed the latter.”
“The magi waiting in the outer office,” Finch said softly. “Are they the mages who were present in the healerie?”
“Two of them. The third was sent from the Order. We are, fortunately, blessed with the presence of the House Mage.” Teller’s grimace made clear how mixed he thought that blessing was. The presence of the House Mage—a pipe-smoking and insouciant Meralonne at his finest—had done little to calm the magi who did arrive in Teller’s office. Meralonne made clear that he thought their presence in the Terafin manse superfluous and entirely unnecessary.
Since they were mages, and since they wore medallions that indicated relative seniority within the Order, voices were raised, and hundreds of words spoken. Most of these went unheard by any but the person speaking them, and they clashed the way slightly worried men with more pride than common sense frequently did.
“Barston didn’t enjoy it,” Teller admitted, “but Meralonne distracted the magi by offending them all the moment he opened his mouth.”
“Meralonne wasn’t in the outer office when I arrived.”
“No. When the man with the salt-and-pepper beard started to crackle—and I mean that literally—his two companions suggested that this was a matter for the guildmaster; Meralonne agreed and left. Instantly.”
“. . . Which none of our other visitors have the power to do.”
“Yes. They’re waiting for her here.”
For the next four hours, Finch and Teller had dealt with Jay’s utter absence, her inexplicable disappearance, from the Houses of Healing. The fact that every person stricken by the sleeping sickness had, one by one, woken, signified little. They remembered nothing of their dreams—if indeed they dreamed at all—but that, Adam had said, was not unusual.
Word of her disappearance had, of course, traveled, although they’d done what they could to minimize its spread. At the top of hour two, Marrick joined the magi in the outer office, and within half an hour, Elonne and Rymark joined him. At the top of the third hour, Sigurne Mellifas arrived, looking grim and haggard. She was allowed into the office, Meralonne by her side. Haerrad could not be far behind.
But Jay beat him—thank all the gods—by about ten minutes. She appeared in the open door of the right-kin’s office.
Finch was halfway across the room before she remembered that Jay was now The Terafin, and no one hugged The Terafin or cried on her shoulder with relief. Not when the door was open and the magi were stewing and the senior members of the House Council bore witness.
The Terafin, in this case, offered a curt apology for her delayed return—to her House Council. To Sigurne and Meralonne she offered a formal nod.
“Terafin,” Sigurne said, tendering her a bow. She glanced at Meralonne, who failed to notice. “Apologies for our unnecessary presence; there was some concern, but it was clearly misplaced.”
“House Terafin appreciates your presence, but as you note, it is unnecessary.”
The mages were more easily dismissed than the House Council; Haerrad arrived a few minutes after a page had been sent to escort them to their waiting carriage. The House Council did not receive a more detailed explanation of Jay’s absence, but the lack of detail and its resultant questions had taken another three quarters of an hour, after which, Finch was starving.
If Ellerson was not present, the Terafin Household Staff was, and food was arranged. Jay hadn’t eaten either. She accompanied Finch and Teller to the West Wing, and joined them. Over the meal, with the Chosen who had lost her in attendance, she had explained more fully both her sudden absence and her return. The return, Finch understood. The absence made her uneasy, because Jay didn’t understand it herself.
In the end, it was not far off morning when Finch had at last crawled off to bed, and it was not far off the same morning—from the other side—when she crawled, with far less enthusiasm, out of the same bed, put her entire appearance into the hands of the maid, and