"Oh, Jath," she whispered, huge eyes still brimming with tears. "You're a miracle, love."

"I?" He swallowed. "I was burned. Wasn't I?"

"Yes." The single word was barely audible, and she nodded. "Their healer came. He?" It was her turn to swallow hard. "You were dying, Jath. I knew you were. But he gave you back to me. He touched you, just touched you, and the burns healed. Like the gods themselves had reached down to make you whole again."

The swamp and even her face wavered in his awareness. No Talent could do something like that. Even the most Talented Healers were limited mostly to healing minds which had been shattered, or encouraging the body to heal itself more effectively. They could work wonders enough, but none that came close to this.

The shiver began in his bones, and he turned his head almost involuntarily to stare at the man who stood watching them. Just watching. Not threatening, not intruding. Their officer looked like an ordinary man, they looked ordinary, and yet …

"I don't understand." He brought his gaze back to Shaylar. "If they could do this for me, why haven't they healed you? Or," he added, his voice turning harsh and bitter, "The men we shot to pieces?"

"I don't know." She shook her head. "None of it makes sense. But these people, Jath, they're not like us. Not at all. I think their Healers are more … more energy-limited than ours are." It was obvious to him that she was searching for words, trying to explain something which had puzzled her just as much as it did him. "I don't think they encourage the body to heal; I think they make it heal. When their Healer was working on you, you glowed, and there was this tremendous sense of energy, of power, coming from somewhere. I think they can do things our Healers could never even imagine, but they can only do so much of it before they … exhaust themselves. And they only have one real Healer, so I think they must be rationing the healing he can do, using it for the most critical cases."

"Or the ones with valuable information," he said bitterly before he could stop himself.

"That's probably part of it," she said unflinchingly, "but I don't think that's all of it. They put you first in line because you were the worst hurt of all."

Doubt flickered in his eyes, and she shook her head.

"I mean it, Jath. The woman with them, Gadrial, she's some kind of Healer, too, but not a very strong one. Or not by these people's standards, anyway. She wasn't strong enough to heal either of us, but …" Shaylar bit her lip. "Without her, you would have died before their real Healer ever got to you."

Her voice had dropped to a terrible whisper, and his blood ran cold. Yes, his memories were brutal enough to believe that. He didn't need the inexplicably broken marriage bond to sense her deep anguish, the horror of her belief that he was already dead still burning in her memory, and his mind flinched like a frightened animal from the vision of her all alone among their enemies.

"It's all right," he whispered raggedly, pulling her close again. "It's all right, I'm still with you."

But even as he cradled his shaken wife, his gaze sought and found the girl?Gadrial?who stood a few feet from the officer. She wasn't Uromathian, no matter what she looked like. It took a real effort to dismiss his preconceived notions, to remind himself that she wouldn't think like a Uromathian or hold the same opinions, attitudes, biases, or customs. And he owed her his life. For a Faltharian, life-debt was a serious business, entailing obligations, formal courtesies, reciprocal bonds of protection, none of which she would understand.

And none of which he particularly relished.

He would owe the other, stronger Healer, as well, he realized, wherever he or she might be. That didn't make him any happier, he admitted. And meanwhile, Gadrial was watching him, her expression uncertain. When he met her gaze, she gave him a tentative smile. Very sweet, very human. Very … normal.

Another shiver touched his impossibly healed back, which, he realized for the first time, was bare. Startled, he glanced down and discovered that his entire shirt was missing. Momentary disorientation swept over him as he found himself kneeling on the ground beside his wife, shirtless, just beginning to realize that he had absolutely no idea where he was, or how far he and Shaylar were from the site of that hideous battle, or how much time had passed. The totality of his ignorance appalled him, and he looked back into Shaylar's worried eyes and frowned as something important nibbled at the edges of his scattered thoughts. Then he had it.

"Shaylar? Where are the others?"

Her composure crumbled. She began to cry again?helplessly, this time, softly and hopelessly, shaking her head in mute grief?and horror sent ice crystals through Jathmar's blood.

"No one?" he whispered. "Nobody else? Just us?"

She nodded, still unable to speak. Her struggle to hold herself together, to stop herself from falling to pieces, broke Jathmar's heart again. He drew her close, held her while she trembled, and he realized their bond wasn't gone, so much as wounded. Too badly wounded to function properly, but not so badly he couldn't feel her grief, her sorrow and despair.

"I'm sorry," he groaned. "I'm sorry I dragged you out here, into this?"

"No!" She looked up swiftly and shook her head with startling violence. "Don't say that! It isn't true!"

She was right, but at the moment, that was a frail defense against his own crushing sense of responsibility and guilt. His awareness of his complete inability to protect her.

It was painfully evident they were prisoners, but how did their captors treat prisoners of war? They must have some sort of procedures to deal with captured enemy personnel, and a further thought chilled him. Would these people think he and Shaylar were soldiers? Even he knew soldiers and civilians received different treatment from the military during armed conflicts. It had been a long time since any major Sharonian nation had gone to war, but even on Sharona there was the occasional border dispute, the "incident" when a patrol from one side wandered across the other side's frontier, the "brushfire" conflict between ancient and implacable enemies. And there'd been more than enough violent conflict in Sharona's pre-portal history to make such procedures necessary.

But how in the multiverse could he convince these people he and his wife were only civilians, when they'd killed so many genuine soldiers and wounded so many others? If Company-Captain Halifu sent real troops after them, these people would get a taste of what Sharonian soldiers could do, but would that help him and Shaylar? If the crossbows he'd seen were the best individual weapons their soldiers had, if they'd never before even seen what rifles and pistols could do, would they believe that ordinary civilians carried such weapons, even in the wilderness?

The memory of that frantic, dreadful fight replayed itself once more in jagged, terrifying flashes, but one thing was clear to him. It was only their artillery?that terrifying, unexplainable artillery?which had turned the tide against Ghartoun chan Hagrahyl's survey crew. As severely outnumbered as they'd been, they'd still been more than holding their own until the fireballs erupted among them.

No wonder those crossbowmen were so twitchy.

He'd already seen evidence that the regular troopers were poised on a hairtrigger where he was concerned, but how would their commanding officer behave toward him and Shaylar? If anyone hurt Shaylar, he'd …

Jathmar bit his lip. He couldn't do that. Couldn't even defend his own wife. If he tried, he'd wind up dead, and Shaylar would be at the mercy of his killers. His pain and self-blame doubled?tripled?but wallowing in misery accomplished nothing, so he dragged his attention back to the present.