Liala lay in the hay and tried to stop the fleas biting. Bryn said they were tasting new blood and that was why they wouldn't leave her alone. It was dry in the woolshed but that didn't compensate for the fleas. Nor did it make the wound in her shoulder feel any better.
They had tramped through soggy moorland to keep their rendezvous with the doctor. He had driven out onto the moors in an old van. It was clean inside but hardly a satisfactory place to perform surgery. Removing her implant had been relatively easy. A single cut was all that was needed. The doctor threw it outside and Liala zapped it with her ray gun.
A computer, somewhere in the palace, would have recorded that contact with the princess had been lost and an alert would have been sent to a senior guardian. Liala hoped that the guardians were occupied with the full moon festivities and wouldn't get involved until late the next day.
The removal of Bryn's implant was not as straightforward and had caused him a lot of discomfort. Liala wasn't sure if that was because it was located in a part of his body that caused embarrassment or because of the pain. She was inclined to think it was embarrassment because he hardly flinched when the doctor removed a piece of shrapnel that was embedded his leg.
It was not the romantic scene she had imagined. The sergeant was outside on sentry duty. Allain was fiddling with an old fashioned radio and the commander was sitting on a stool with one eye on the door and the other on Balduur.
The doctor had examined Balduur and declared him free of implants and a genuine member of the human race. That had cleared him of earlier suspicions that he came from the palace and was a spy troll planted by the guardians in a complicated scheme to infiltrate Plaid Koerno.
The little man had done his best to convince them that he was a trained warrior who would soon learn how to use their weapons if they told him how they worked. His offer to join Plaid Koerno and help fight the trolls was rejected as was his request to go outside and find a sheep for them to eat.
No one understood him when he said they should have decapitated the trolls they killed. He complained that instead of burying the heads in the marshes, where they would not decay, they had made a point of destroying them. Allain tried to explain that the trolls had implants in their brains and the implants continued to send information to a computer in the palace after the trolls were dead. Balduur couldn't understand what he was talking about and went into a corner and sulked.