“You want to leave here, right?” Serenity figured he’d better ask. He was pretty sure what the answer was, but sometimes he was wrong.

Helen nodded slightly, shivering. “Yes.”

“Then stay with me.” He was about to head out of the room when a nasty thought occurred to him. “You haven’t given any vows or signed a contract, have you?”

Helen shook her head. “They have a big ceremony for that. I don’t qualify. You have to be able to recite the full Eternal Book.”

Serenity nodded. “Good. Then this should work. I don’t think I can get everyone out immediately, but I should be able to get you out.” He felt a little guilty that he was going to leave others behind and take Helen simply because she was more useful, but at the same time he knew he couldn’t save everyone. Usefulness was important; he needed to understand Lykandeon better.

Speaking of which, there was a question he’d been meaning to ask. “When you started, you said he was born to a saktiin sect. Do you know what saktiin means?”

Serenity wasn’t about to say Lykandeon’s name in one of his churches and potentially draw his attention.

It might be important to know if it was a group of people affected by the saktiin plague or a group of people that rejected improving their Tier; from the context, Serenity was guessing the second option. It would still be better to know.

It was interesting that Lykandeon came from Zon. Several things in the tale matched up if that were true, but it still gave Serenity a cold feeling. He was still missing something he needed to know, he just didn’t know what it was.

He was at least beginning to get an idea for what the deity’s actual portfolio was. It was strange; that generally wasn’t hard to tell. Tek’s was in her name, for goodness sake! Helios meant sun, so his was obvious as well. Even the Sterath gods used epithets rather than meaningless names.

It was something to talk to Tek about, but he’d do that once he was no longer in Lykandeon’s temple.

Serenity opened the door he’d stopped in front of; the two guides were waiting outside. “We’re ready to go.”

“We?” Acolyte Deek caught the word immediately.

Serenity nodded. “Helen Laos is coming with me. She’s one of my people and she isn’t sworn to your church.”

“The novice?” Acolyte Tinar was, as usual, a step behind.

Serenity shook his head and watched for Acolyte Deek’s reaction; he was the important one of the two. “A novice would have sworn an oath. She hasn’t. She’s not a novice, she’s just here; she wants to go home, so that’s what I’m going to help her with.”

Acolyte Deek raised his eyebrows and looked at Helen. “You did not swear to become a novice? I heard that all of you did.”

Helen shrugged. “Maybe some did, but I don’t know how. How can you swear to something in a language you don’t understand?”

Acolyte Deek nodded. “A fair question. Altenaka koyeva sorenos klessin toboroya…”

He was clearly casting a spell. Serenity watched the spellform and tried to see the mana type being used. He couldn’t tell for certain which flavor it was, but it had a general feel of divination, more of a question than one of the standard mana types. There was a hint of something almost like Ita’s connection affinity and a stain that felt very much like the holy energy of the priest Serenity disrupted in Djen’s prison.

It was clearly mostly coming from Acolyte Deek, however, and Serenity could see that the acolyte was far stronger than he’d pretended, probably low Tier Four, though Serenity was still less than confident he was correctly assigning Tiers; everything felt weaker than it should.

It was probably because he was a dragon; it was throwing his sense of scale off.

Either way, Serenity strongly suspected Deek wasn’t just an acolyte. It explained why he had two guides and Tinar did all of the actual guiding; Deek wasn’t there as a guide but as a guard or perhaps watcher. There was a good chance he was a higher rank, as well, though he was clearly weaker than the priest Serenity saw on Zon.

Serenity watched and waited for Deek to finish his spell. It didn’t seem harmful.

There was a flash of light; it didn’t bother Serenity, but he noticed that both Helen and Tinar flinched. Acolyte Deek nodded with a smile. “You are correct; you were never even asked to swear. I cannot hold you here without an oath if you wish to leave.”

He turned to Serenity and his smile turned slightly predatory. “Do you take responsibility for her?”

That sounded like a trap. Serenity didn’t have a way around it other than leaving Helen here, unfortunately, so he’d just have to answer carefully. “She was kidnapped; I want to give her the opportunity to return home.”

Acolyte Deek nodded again. “I will be reporting this when we return to the Visitors’ Palace.” He didn’t say anything more, but he grabbed Acolyte Tinar’s arm and turned him towards the entrance they’d come in from before heading out. It was clear that he was saying it was time to leave.

---

If there was one truth Blaze had learned in his long life, it was that there were never enough healers.

As much as anything, he knew that was because you could always heal more than you did.

Most healers were relatively good at healing the easy things, the things that the body could heal without magic - cuts, scrapes, bruises, even broken bones. Things like burns and poison were more difficult, but as long as the person wasn’t too injured they were still commonly treatable.

If you were a healer for a mercenary group, that was probably all you needed - and mercenaries paid their healers well. Even with that, most mercenaries didn’t have as many healers as they wanted. Most healers stayed back at a central location instead of heading out to the fight. This made sense when you didn’t have enough healers, but it also meant that some people died because they couldn’t get help in time.

Blaze had been to many places where even civilians only had healing that was little more than basic repair. Midwives were common, of course, but often that was all the civilians had that mercenaries didn’t. In a large enough mercenary company, there would usually be a midwife anyway, traveling with the support personnel.

He’d never been anywhere with only Tier Three or below healers that expected the level of care that Earth had. Blaze was more experienced than most Tier Fours, but even he’d learned a few things from his students.

He liked to think they’d learned even more from him.

Lyka was not an exception to the rule. When he’d talked to the guard and mentioned that he was a Tier Four primary healer and bored, the guard was happy to let him visit some of the aid stations. He’d also brought in a rather cute child - a niece, probably - with a mishealed broken arm. It was easy enough to fix; ever since then, he was able to leave the suite whenever he wanted.

Sure, they called themselves acolytes, but Blaze knew a guard when he saw one. These were guards. Polite guards, but that didn’t mean he could leave without their permission unless he snuck out, and the only one of them that could really do that was Ekari.

That was a real surprise; Blaze hadn’t expected the by-the-book Administrator to be assassin-trained. She wouldn’t admit it, but that was what it added up to.

Blaze wouldn’t have admitted it either if he had the training. He didn’t admit his past or his ability to quickcast; those were probably just as dangerous.

Sillon, Kerr, and Rissa usually ended up stuck in the Visitors’ Palace. Blaze wasn’t certain what Ekari did, but he usually took Ita to the various nearby aid stations; about half the time, they were followed but the guards usually left after an hour or two. He’d managed to get Rissa out a few times, since she was also a healer of sorts, but when he did the guards always stuck around and paid more attention. That was counterproductive, so he usually went without her.

She needed to stay at the Visitors’ Palace to greet the High Priestess anyway. None of them wanted it to get out that they were leaving the Palace “without permission”.

Blaze enjoyed the healing and was definitely bored being stuck in the Visitors’ Palace with nothing better to do than practice fighting with Sillon and Kerr, but neither of those were the reason he was still heading out to the aid stations.

The real reason was Ita. She’d asked him if he could get her outside regularly, so he’d come up with a plan.

She wasn’t a healer; in fact, in order to get her out of the Palace, they’d had to pretend that she was a pet instead of a sapient person. Strangely enough, Ita didn’t seem to mind. Blaze did, but it was difficult to argue that she should be unhappy when Ita looked at him and simply said “It is necessary; I am Shameless and this is my duty.”

He was pretty sure the term Shameless didn’t translate properly. He also had no idea what she was doing, but it was undeniable that she was doing something; he could see her mana moving all the time when they were outside; it moved the most when she was “playing”, but even when she curled up near the entrance and let people pet her, it moved.

Blaze was glad that few people were truly skilled with mana at the Tier Two and Three of most of the Lykans; even the few priest-healers that were Tier Four or Five didn’t seem to notice. That level of mana motion was severely unusual in a pet, as was the fact that Ita was Tier Three.

It was like they were blind to the fact that she could be anything else.

A tenday after Serenity arrived on Lyka, Ita hopped into the aid station while Blaze was still working. She tapped him on the arm, so he laid his hand on her head. Outwardly, he spoke to keep up the illusion that she was just a pet. “Ita, you know not to disturb me while I’m working. Let’s get you back outside and settled down.”

Blaze felt it as Ita established the connection that would let them speak silently.

It was a workaround for when they needed more than the few prearranged signals; they could have arranged more, but it was easy enough to touch his “pet”. :Finish up and get ready to leave. There will be many acolytes here soon. If you stay, you will have to help and we will be here for too long.:

Blaze pushed his Intent back at her; he couldn’t quite manage words over the connection, but he knew she’d understand. :I’m a healer. If you’re expecting a disaster, I should stay.:

Ita lifted her head and knocked her snout against Blaze’s wrist. :Don’t be stupid. Not being caught is more important. One healer isn’t going to make much of a difference and I don’t even know if it’s going to start here.:

Blaze frowned. :Didn’t you just say that there would be acolytes here soon, and that they’d keep me here to help?:

:That’s if it starts here. Which is likely,: Ita admitted. :We can talk when we get back to the Palace. For now, hurry.:

Ita pulled her head away from him and hopped back outside. It was obvious that she didn’t want to discuss it anymore and Blaze still didn’t know what she’d done. What could she possibly have done that could potentially bring acolytes to an aid station, probably injured, in large numbers? Whatever it was, she’d been working on it for weeks, but she wasn’t willing to say anything.

Blaze shook his head and turned back to the patient he’d been examining before Ita’s interruption. He’d need to make this fast; she was the reason he was here, not the healing, even if it had started to feel otherwise. “I’m sorry about that. You know how pets can be.”

The young woman with a missing tongue nodded. Blaze wondered what her story was, but as with most things here he’d decided it was better not to ask; his job was to properly heal these old injuries that the lower-Tier less skilled healers couldn’t touch.