If Verdant needed the comfort of a woman, to rest his head on, to wrap his arms around, to have her gently pat the ills away from his body, he would have smiled, and respected it. He would have been filled with warmth and happiness for the fact that his retainer – and his friend, as Oliver well considered him to be – had found that which he needed. The cure to himself.
For Oliver, though… He could not forgive it. If he had been allowed to move, and to solve, and to continually play, he might have been fine, but now, collapsed in the snow, with nothing but a brick wall of mystery to plague him, along with the statue of his old teacher, he found himself broken. He could feel the playful Claudia standing next to him, though she was not as alarmed as he. She delighted in the slowing of their game, and all that it pointed to, but Oliver was not sure that he could handle it.
