"I hope so," she said, but she frowned nevertheless. "Of course, it's hard to make a cure for a disease when you don't know it's cause. You're mostly just treating the symptoms."

Which sometimes meant only delaying the inevitable.

There was a reason, a very, very good reason, why Ariadne had never considered a career in healing. She just didn't have the heart for it. She couldn't bear the idea of only easing someone's suffering before they died.

It wasn't enough.