Free Saint Camber by Katherine Kurtz

looking tired but content as she tucked the last of the blankets around her sleeping father’s form.
    â€œI’ve seen him this way before, Rhys. I’m sure he’ll be fine in the morning.”
    â€œDon’t tell me you’ve worked with him on these kinds of things before,” Rhys said, checking his patient’s pulse again while he peered briefly beneath a slack eyelid.
    â€œOn occasion,” Evaine admitted. “Don’t you approve?”
    â€œYou know I wouldn’t dream of interfering, even if I didn’t approve,” Rhys replied with a grin, sitting back wearily on the edge of the bed as he watched his wife rummage in the purse at her waist. “I know how important your work with your father is to you—as important, perhaps, as my healing call is to me. Besides, I know that you take reasonable precautions.”
    â€œWe try,” she said with a droll smile.
    Pulling out a small black suede leather pouch, she dropped to her knees beside the bed and began undoing the thongs which bound the end closed. When she dumped the contents on the bed, eight polished cubes came tumbling out, four white and four black. She glanced up at him as she began sorting them.
    â€œWill you work the wards with me?”
    â€œOf course.”
    Slipping to his knees beside her, he watched as she arranged the cubes in the necessary pattern: the four white ones in a square, all of them touching; the black ones at the four corners of the square so formed, each near but not in contact with its closest white neighbor.
    â€œGo ahead and start,” Evaine said in a low voice. “These are mine. You shouldn’t have any trouble centering in.”
    With a nod, Rhys drew a deep breath and laid the fingertips of his right hand lightly on all four white cubes, closing his eyes briefly while he found the balance point with these particular cubes. Then he withdrew all but his index finger, to touch the cube in the upper left-hand corner of the white square.
    â€œPrime,” he said softly.
    The touched cube began to glow with a ghostly, opalescent light.
    â€œSeconde.” He touched the cube to the right of the first one, and it, too, began to glow.
    â€œTierce.” The cube below the first cube came to life.
    â€œQuarte.” As the last white cube lit, the four seemed to form a single square of milky light.
    Rhys sighed and sat back on his haunches, watching serenely as Evaine drew a deep breath and brought her finger down on the first black cube. The glowing white square reflected off her hand and cast a mellow, moonlike glow on her calm face.
    â€œQuinte.”
    Her low voice seemed to chime deep in the cube, which shone now with the iridescence of an ebon butterfly wing.
    â€œSixte.”
    The second cube, at the upper right, lit with the same quiet fire.
    â€œSeptime. Octave.”
    As the last two black cubes were activated in rapid succession, Rhys came up on his knees again and picked up Prime, extending his empty left hand under his right arm to lie easily on the blanket. Evaine laid her left hand in Rhys’s, then picked up Quinte and brought it toward his Prime. So joined, hand to hand, they also joined the two cubes, pouring in defensive energy as together they spoke the union nomen:
    â€œPrimus!”
    A minute click vibrated through both their fingers as the two cubes touched and fused; and then they were holding a single, oblong rectoid which gleamed with a metallic brightness. Evaine laid it on the blanket and picked up Sixte as Rhys took Seconde. She closed her eyes as they brought Sixte and Seconde together:
    â€œSecundus!”
    Camber stirred a little in his sleep, perhaps unconsciously sensing the power being raised at his side, but he quickly settled down again as his daughter and son-in-law brought Septime and Tierce to:
    â€œTertius!”
    Finally, “Quartus” was formed of Quarte and Octave. Of the four silvery oblongs now lying