The good that came of the following days was that I did not miss any other meetings.
The bad was that each meeting seemed more strained than the last.
Only Beta Tyler spoke to the King, and only through the door grate at the entrance of the King’s Chambers– as if partaking in some clandestine deal.
It would have been laughable had the news not been so bleak. Even with only Beta Tyler speaking to us, there was an air of mounting panic he carried with him from the lower level.
But each report was more or less the same: the disease was spreading. The sick were getting sicker.
“My Beta,” I would chime in anxiously at the end of his reports.
“Your friends are well, my lady,” he would affirm, before grimness set in again.
I had never seen Beta Tyler so on edge; he con
