The Vedona Academy chief healer I'd consulted with had warned me that there would be no shortcuts, and he'd been right.
I'd told him that I was gathering information for someone with no access to proper medical care, which was true in every word and false in every implication. Arlen had no access to an expert on the soldiers' affliction because my parents wanted his condition to remain classified, and they'd only allowed the royal physician to treat him for the physical aspects of his injury.
The healer had given me a long, sober list accompanied by an equally sober warning.
His words had been, "Expect to go backward as often as forward. Do not mistake a good week for a cure, and do not mistake a bad day for failure."
I'd written it all down and memorized it.
The first few days had been wretched. I'd asked Arlen to do nothing harder than breathe slowly and tell me what was in the room, and he'd looked at me as though I'd asked him to address the council. The eldest son of Catonia, the soldier who'd thrown himself at a grenade, being coached by his little brother to count the things he could see. He'd refused. He'd raged.
The embarrassing aspect of it had nearly ended the whole thing before it began.
What had saved it was telling him the truth, that this was the discipline they drilled into warriors, that the healer who'd taught it to me treated men who'd seen worse than either of us and called them the bravest he knew, that mastering a terror was one of the hardest fights a man could face and that it was courageous and honorable. Recasting my instructions as training rather than coddling an invalid had done the trick, and Arlen had started to cooperate.
I learned an important lesson in those initial difficult days. Pride could be used as a lever once I figured out which way to pull.
That was a fortnight ago, and we were on our third week, crawling up the steep mountain of what Arlen still had to overcome, and for the past few days, we'd been doing it down in Grandmother's rose garden.
Getting him there had been a battle of its own, and not because I needed to carry him down. A lift had been installed in our grandmother's wing when she'd become infirm and could nolonger handle the stairs but refused to move to a ground-level apartment.
That was probably the main reason Arlen had been moved here. That and the garden, which had turned out to be the best medicine so far.
It was safe, walled on every side, a single guard on the wall above and the gate locked, and it was also open to the sky, and it smelled of our grandmother's roses, which brought memories of simpler days when we'd come here as boys to spend time with her, sitting at her feet while she told us the most outlandish stories, and we'd gobbled them up. There was no place in the palace where Arlen's body remembered being happier and more contented than here.
Balert wheeled him out to the old stone bench where she used to sit, and I pulled a garden chair around to sit knee to knee with my brother in the morning sun.
"Breathe with me," I said. "You know the count."
In for four, hold, out for six, slow enough that the body couldn't keep its panic stoked. He breathed with me without complaint now, which was no small triumph.
The healer had been clear about why it mattered. A frightened body breathed fast and shallow, telling the mind there was cause for fear. Slow breathing told it the opposite. By reversing the process and mastering the breathing, the rest of the body got the signal that it was okay to calm down.
I hadn't known that it was possible to talk to the body through breathing when it refused to hear anything else, and at the beginning, I thought it was just as ridiculous as Arlen said it was, but we both had learned that it was an effective technique. Each morning, we breathed together until he settled and his shoulders released their tightness.
"Good," I said when we were done. "Now. Tell me five things you can see."
"This is the part I feel like a fool doing."
"I know but humor me."
"The roses. The wall. The guard's stupid hat." A grudging quirk at the corner of his mouth. "Your unconvincing beard. The bench."
"Four you can hear."
He listened. "Birds. The fountain. Balert fidgeting with his pocket watch. The wind."
"Your hearing is getting much better if you can hear all that."
"It is," he admitted. "I wish I could say the same about my legs."
I didn't respond, because he was right, and there was nothing I could say that wouldn't sound hollow, so I continued with the routine.
The healer's list said to have the man feel his feet pressed flat to the floor, the oldest anchor there was, but I had to change the instructions to fit my brother, so I'd built him a different set of anchors out of the parts of him that worked. His hands, the fabric of his pants, the cold stone of the bench, the big wheels of his chair.
"What do you feel?"
"The stone. Cold. The chair." He turned his thumb against the worn wood. "The fine fabric of my pants that I can only feel with my hands. The buttons of my coat. The roses if I can reach them."
