“Fergus,” Cathal said under his breath. “My friend since he was little more than a boy. Close as my brother or closer, in his way.” His father would have called that folly, to so value a creature who’d live perhaps a quarter of his life.
His father wasn’t there.
“What ails him?”
There was sympathy in her voice, but Cathal was used to sympathy. He seized on the other thing he heard: the curiosity, the eagerness that saidhere might be a job to do.
“Look closely.” Cathal picked up the candle in one hand, cupping the other around the flame. It burned almost against his skin, a friendly little creature and a relief here. “Look at his jaw. The sides of his neck.”
He moved the candle closer and heard Sophia gasp.Good eyes,he thought,and quick reasoning.She’d seen the translucence at the edge of Fergus’s skin, how first the color left and then one could see the pillows through the faintest haze. “God’s teeth!” she said, barely keeping her voice down in her shock.
“Touch him. At the edge. He won’t feel it,” Cathal said with a certainly he’d have given anything not to feel.
Gingerly, she did, and drew her hand back almost at once, staring back and forth between it, Fergus, and Cathal. Although her mouth had fallen open from the start, for a few minutes she got nothing out of it. Only after working her jaw did she manage, “It…my finger went through him. He’s…dissolving?”
“You’re the scholar.”
Sophia caught her breath. “You wish me to cure him.”
“Iwish,” he whispered with a faint twist of a smile as he remembered her speech earlier, “him cured. Our bargain would be that you try until you determine that you can’t.”
“And you’d believe me if I said so?”
“I’ll weigh the evidence.”
She took another look at Fergus, bending closer this time, sniffing the air above him, and frowning. “I’ve seen nothing like this in my life, nor heard of it in any accounts,” she said, and then straightened and looked at Cathal. “But someone once said as much of any malady, did they not? And I did speak of discovery. I will do my best.”
“Thank you,” he said almost tonelessly. Like Sithaeg, he couldn’t let himself hope. He took her hand to lead her back out of the room.
This time, she resisted.
“I’ll need to make an examination,” she said when Cathal turned to her, “and I’ll need to know how this came about.”
“Tomorrow,” he said.
Three
“Well, how did things fall out?”
Alice had always known how to pick her time. Right now, it was first thing in the morning, just when Sophia was bent over the basin splashing cold water on her face. She grunted her first response.
“I’m sorry, I thought I was asking a human being.”
“Nobody human is as awake as you are at this hour,” said Sophia, moving aside to let her friend wash. They’d managed to get the room to themselves—and a finer room than most people gave to travelers, with bright tapestries on the walls and thick rugs on the floor—so she spoke freely while she dressed. “He said yes. But we’re staying on.”
She explained the situation to Alice in a few quick sentences, struck as she talked by how littlesheknew of the details. It had been late when she and Sir Cathal had reached their agreement, and Sophia had been glad enough to put off further discussion. Now, under Alice’s shrewd gaze, she wondered how much more there was to find out, and how dire the situation might truly be. Putting up her hair, she fumbled with the pins.
“Oh, come here,” said Alice, holding out her hands. As she’d done a hundred times before, she dressed Sophia’s hair with a quick efficiency that bordered on painful. “It’s as well,” she said, after an assortment of thoughtful sounds. “I didn’t much like the idea of going right back again when we’ve just got here. Best you wait until spring before you finish up, if you ask me.”
“It might well be longer,” said Sophia. “And that’s if I succeed at all.”
“Have more faith in yourself. I don’t mind anyway. This seems like a well-kept place, for all its lord’s surliness. Plenty of food, decent cooking, and no fleas. I don’t know how they managethat.”
“Hmm,” said Sophia. Now that she thought of it, she didn’t notice even one of the itchy bites that usually accompanied a stay anywhere remotely warm, and the room was quite comfortable in that regard. A fire had been roaring away in the fireplace since before she’d woken—and she hadn’t noticed anyone coming in to build it. “Magic?”
“Then more people should be sorcerers. Why don’t you do this sort of thing?”
“Because there’s no elixir that’ll let me start fires from my bed. Not that I know of. Whatever magic Sir Cathal…or his family…knows might be different.”
