Valerius crushed the letter in his fist before I could ask what it meant.
"Later," he said, when I opened my mouth to press him. "Right now, I need my healers and I need them in the eastern barracks, immediately."
Whatever Garrick's words had cost him, he buried it, and I followed him through corridors still thick with smoke and the metallic tang of blood.
The eastern barracks had been converted into a makeshift infirmary, cots lined in uneven rows beneath flickering torchlight, healers moving between them with the particular, controlled panic of people losing a battle they didn't yet understand. I counted eleven wounded soldiers at a glance. Three of them weren't moving at all.
"Report," Valerius barked, and a gray-haired healer I recognized from Prince Christian's sickroom hurried ov
