Sairis's POV
When Sairis woke up, he noticed two things at once.
The first was that he was not in his own bed.
The mattress beneath him was firmer than what he was used to and the pillow did not sit quite right. The ceiling above him was not the ceiling he had been looking at for the past several weeks.
The second was the smell.
Herbs, several of them, hitting his nose at the same time, causing him to feel nauseous. Some were sharp and some mild and one that he could not identify but that sat at the back of his throat in a way that was not unpleasant.
He groaned and turned his head slowly to look around the room.
The royal infirmary. He was still in the royal infirmary.
He remembered the argument in the infirmary. The struggling, the pulling against Loreen's hold, the way his body had simply stopped cooperating with him.
And Ardent had stood there the entire time, calm and pleasant, burning that candle on the table without saying a word about what it was doing.
