The light didn't kill him. I want to set that down plainly, because for the length of three heartbeats in that flooded white room I was entirely certain it had, and the relief of being wrong sat strangely alongside everything else I'd just failed to hear.
Nana had him stable by the time the first grey light came up over the east wing, the tremor gone out of his hands, the hairline cracks of blue-white light faded back under his skin until nothing showed but an ordinary man asleep, exhausted past waking. She wouldn't let me stay past checking his pulse a second time with my own hand, and she wouldn't answer, when I asked, how long he might sleep, only that whatever had happened to him had cost him more than a night's rest was going to fix.
"He got three words further than he ever has before," I told her, because someone needed to hear it out loud and she was the only person in the room. "It wants you. That's as far as it let him get."
"Wants you to do what, my lord?"
