"No," Ben answered firmly and immediately. He had some experience grieving a loved one, since he'd lost both of his parents when he was still hardly even a man, and he knew how dangerous and nonproductive that sort of thinking could be. "Would she have done anything differently if you hadn't been there? If she didn't want to call the healers, she wouldn't have called them. And who knows whether they would've been able to do anything, anyway," he said, shaking his head.

He waited a moment, hoping that she would take his words to heart. Life had hardly been easy for Melody recently, and the last thing she needed was to sink in to depression while she blamed herself for something that was unequivocally not her fault. "She's probably glad you were there," he said after a long moment. "So she had someone with her."