Free Brightly Burning by Mercedes Lackey Page B

man’s aged face to see warm blue eyes, half-hidden in wrinkles, regarding him with compassion.
    The old man was speaking, he realized vaguely, but not to him.
    â€œâ€”not an illness. My guess would be dazzle-headaches, though they don’t usually come with fever like this.” The old man was saying. Then he noticed Lan’s open eyes, and he passed his hand over his bald head. “Ah, awake are you? How do you feel?”
    â€œAwful,” Lan croaked. The pain hadn’t abated one bit, and the light hurt his eyes.
    The old man nodded, helping him sit up enough that he could drink a potion he recognized by its taste. “Send him home, Master Keileth, until this attack’s passed. That’s all we can do for such things once they’re well started like this one. I’ll take him home in my carriage, talk with his parents, and leave another medicine at his house that should help prevent them in the future.”
    Master Keileth gave a sigh that was half exasperation and half relief. As the pain potion took hold, the Healer helped Lan to his feet and got him out the door, down the stairs in the chill air, and into the carriage. He was amazingly strong for such a wizened old fellow. Once there, safely outside the walls of the school, Lan’s relief was so profound that the medicine worked even faster and Lan let himself fall into induced slumber. His last coherent thought was that Master Keileth was undoubtedly annoyed at the inconvenience of having a pupil pass out in his school, but probably relieved that he couldn’t be held responsible.
    Nor would he have to refund all that tuition money.

    HE roused when they arrived at the house, and the servants brought him up to his room with a great deal of unnecessary fuss. Three of them descended on the carriage—the housekeeper and two of the manservants. The housekeeper directed the operation like a shrill-voiced general as the two manservants each draped an arm over their shoulders, and with Lan dangling between them, took him up the stairs and dropped him onto his bed, where he sat, blinking owlishly, too fogged to think of what to do next. The manservants stripped him to his skin and threw a nightshirt over him, then bundled him into bed with brisk and impersonal efficiency.
    His mother was home already, for some reason, and followed them up, right behind the old Healer. When Lan was settled into bed, she faced the Healer with a tight-lipped expression, waiting for an explanation. The Healer was not at all cowed by her, which Lan thought was incredibly brave of him.
    â€œMadam, your son is not seriously ill,” he began, “although I can tell you that what he suffers from is not in the least feigned. And although his pain is in his head, so to speak, it is not in his mind.”
    I’d better . . . try to stay awake for this, Lan thought. Neither the Healer nor his mother paid any attention to him, but that was hardly an unusual occurrence. They conducted their conversation over his head, as he fought the medicine to try and listen.
    But struggle as he might, his eyelids closed on their own, and all he managed was to hear a few words of the Healer’s explanation.
    â€œ. . . often come on in adolescence . . . not common, no, but not abnormal . . . girls more often than boys . . . stress, upset . . .”
    It was on that last word that the medicine overcame Lan’s determination to stay awake, and he lost his hold on consciousness.
    He slept, woke in darkness to gulp down more medicine to kill the pain, and slept again. He woke again and repeated the dose, as much to avoid having to talk with anyone as to numb his head. If he was asleep, no one would bother him, and right now, he didn’t want to have to explain himself.
    But by the next evening, the time for the inevitable interview with his mother arrived.
    He woke clearheaded, though apprehensive, for at some point during his slumbers, he had managed to form