The afternoon was hot for the season.
Frostina had decided this was relevant to the brewing process and had been explaining it to Theron for twenty minutes with the particular persistence of someone who had recently discovered an opinion and intended to fully express it.
Theron had been ignoring her with the particular efficiency of a dwarf who had been ignoring unwanted input for several centuries and had refined the technique.
I was standing between them because standing between them was the only thing preventing Frostina from leaning over the fermentation vat to demonstrate her point physically.
"The temperature is controlled." I said to Frostina. "That's the entire point of the temperature controls."
"I'm saying the ambient heat affects the-"
"It doesn't." I said. "The rune equation accounts for ambient variation. That's what the equation is for."
"I'm just saying that in my experience-"
"Frostina." I said.
She looked at me.
"Step back from the vat." I said.
She stepped back from the vat with the expression of someone stepping back under protest.
Theron continued what he had been doing without acknowledging that any of this had occurred.
"Brother Leigh."
I turned.
Torra was at the brewery entrance.
He was supporting a man with both hands, the man's arm over his shoulders, Torra taking considerably more of the weight than his size suggested he should be able to manage.
The man was large, broad-shouldered under the damage, wearing what had once been traveling clothes and was now the record of several weeks of very bad circumstances. Wounds across his arms and side, some closed badly, some not closed at all, the edges of the worst ones showing the particular discoloration of infection that had been running too long without treatment.
And something else.
Demonic miasma. Thin but present, curling around the man's body the way contamination curled around things that had been in proximity to demon-touched spaces for extended periods. Not possession. Not active. Just residue, the kind that accumulated on anything that had spent enough time in demon-occupied territory.
"Step away from him." I said to Torra.
Torra looked up at me.
"He needs help." He said.
"I can see that." I said. "Step away from him."
Torra looked at the man. At me. Back at the man.
"Can you help him?" He said.
I looked at the miasma.
Passive. Old. The man himself wasn't a vector, just carrying contamination the way clothes carried smoke, present on the surface rather than in the core.
"Step away first." I said.
Torra stepped to the side but did not go far. The particular positioning of someone complying with the letter of an instruction while keeping himself available for the spirit of it.
The man was barely standing on his own. His eyes were open but the focus in them was the focus of someone operating on the last margin of what the body could sustain.
I pressed both hands against him and ran the healing mana through.
The festering wounds closed first, the infection pulling back as the mana found it, the rot reversing in a way that required more sustained output than a clean wound. The older damage underneath, the bruising deep in the tissue, the cracked ribs that had been moving wrong for days. I worked through it in order, the same sequence I always used, most critical to least.
The contamination last. I pulled it off the surface the way I pulled contamination from the soil, finding it and routing it out, the mana doing the work of distinguishing between what belonged to the man and what had settled on him from outside.
He stood straight when it was done.
He took a full breath. Then another.
His eyes focused.
I looked at his face.
I knew him.
Not well. I had seen him at a distance, after Crescentine Fleur's staged death on the northern border of Branklore, and once before that across a battlefield. The King of Winterly.
The man who had ridden to the battlefield personally to confirm that the Hero of Medalline was dead. Who had stood over the clone I had made and been satisfied with what he saw.
One of the kings who had planned the ambush.
The illusion on my face showed him nothing he could recognize. He looked at me the way he looked at everyone in Eryndor, as a stranger in a place he had arrived at with nothing.
He went to his knees.
"I need to speak with the ruler of this settlement." He said. His voice was steadier than it had any right to be given what his body had been through twenty minutes ago. The composure of someone who had been a king long enough that it sat in the voice even when everything else was gone. "Please."
I looked at him.
"You're looking at him." I said.
He looked up.
"You're the mayor." He said.
"Yes." I said.
He held my gaze with the direct assessment of a man taking measure of something important.
"I am Aldren of Winterly." He said. "My kingdom has fallen. I am asking for your help to take it back."
I looked at him for a moment.
Then I looked at Torra.
"Go find Elder Elka." I said. "Tell her there's a guest for dinner."
Torra went.
I looked back at the king on the ground.
"Get up." I said. "We'll talk."