The road to recovery is fraught with perils mostly the result of the man doing the recovering being a lousy patient. 'Uncooperative' is a kind word for his irritable attitude, and one can only assume that either the attending physician is being promised vast sums of money or a masochist. A distant third is the possibility of being just precisely that professional.

The wounds are cleaned, stitched (again - he's pitifully grateful for the nausea's passing), and healing; the physician watches closely for signs of an infection, but so far he seems to have been spared that, at least. This doesn't make it any less uncomfortably painful, and sleep comes fitfully at best. It's an altogether unpleasant experience and Martel spends much of it flat on his stomach, 'resting', partially because the physician threatened him with further bodily harm if he does anything now to rupture his stitches again.

Onelle's messenger ought to have found Candice by now, and since discovering that the Duchess sent word to his wife the thought has occurred to Martel that he's probably going to be in trouble when she compares one note to the other.

After the initial time spent drifting in and out of consciousness as the antidote began moving through his blood-stream, Martel spends a lot of time sincerely wishing he was still in that state over constantly bursting the stitches in his back when he's messily ill into the tin bucket by the bed. Nitral's personal physician stays with him through most of it, at least until he's able to go more than an hour or so without tearing his back open again retching. The cold sweat is almost worse and by the end of the week he's relatively sure that he's actually lost weight; there is a certain irony in his having been poisoned trying to protect the Duke, he thinks, and tries to be a good patient.

(He fails, mostly, but the physician is patient - and well-compensated for his patience.)

Onelle, Nitral's wife, brings him books to read and occasionally keeps him company simply out of, he thinks, gratitude. She's the one who brings him the paper and ink that he asks for, and who appraises him ahead of time that Koleika is taking the men ahead to Wenos to firmly discourage any more assassination attempts. She's also the one who pens the short note to Candice about Martel's condition ('incoherent' at time of writing), but the note he writes himself when he has the strength to master the spell needed to send it will probably reach his wife first.

I'll be late. Nothing to worry about. -M.

The problem that Martel doesn't consider is that Candice presumably knows him well enough to realize there is something to worry about if he feels obliged to tell her that there isn't. Sparhawk, too, gets one of these terse missives after it occurs to him that his brother may have been awaiting a response to his announcement that he'd made it back to their world.

Poisoned, irony of ironies. More details later. Don't do anything stupid. -M.

Onelle's messenger will reach Valdis a week after Martel's brief, ominous note. Martel endures the confinement and bedrest with poor grace, resting his chin on his folded arms and glaring at the wall that refuses to be intimidated by his pale, trembling irritation with the world.