...n style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Arial;">Two brawny bullies pummeled him. They believed they pummeled him. A runty corporal grew paler and paler.

Eventually, they killed him. And they believed it, too.

His body taken away from the school in the dead of night in a cart.

They even believed they lifted him by hands and feet and flung his apparently murdered corpse in the river so it should carry him away.

After they and the cart rattled away, the healer tentatively stood himself up in the forest outside lower Magusford. That twinge in his shoulders, again. He sighed. This was a young man’s game.