At one point she passed Mungan inside the bailey, his plaid laid aside as he split a length of wood clean through with a sharp crack. He barked an order to the lads stacking the split wood, directing them toward cottages where whole families lay sick.
He straightened as she approached, wiping his brow with the back of his hand, his gaze falling on her in a studious way.
“Ye’re tireless, lass,” he said. “Though I reckon ye’ll drop on yer face if ye dinna take a wee bit of time for yourself.”
Claire paused beside him, brushing hair away from her face. “Like you, Mungan, I’ll stop when the fever does.”
He gave a short grunt of agreement, then spat into the dirt. “Comes every few winters, nae usually this early, though aye, sometimes in summer, too. Nothin’ strange about it. Folk fall, some rise again, some nae. Lost two brothers that way when I was a lad. Was nearly gone m’self.” He shrugged. “Just the way o’ things.”
The captain’s voice was mild, perennially hoarse but steady, the sound of a man who had seen too many crises to let one undo him.
Claire paused at that, unsettled. “Where I come from, Mungan, this is all preventable. Fevers rarely kill people, rarely make them this sick, in fact. ”
Mungan cocked a brow. “And where is that, lass? Where ye come from?”
“Far, far away,” Claire said vaguely, and quickly changed the subject. “I cannot stress to you enough—to everyone—how important the handwashing is. With soap if they have it, or ash if they don’t. Mairi said it cuts grease, so it might cut sickness, too. We’ve got to stop it from spreading further.”
“Aye, I’ll pass it on,” he agreed evenly. “I’ll use my stern voice.”
Claire grinned. “Thank you, Mungan.”
Indeed, thank God for Mungan. The people of Caeravorn were pleased for her help, she was sure of that, but anything she said or suggested that was foreign to them, that didn’t make sense to their medieval way of thinking, they resisted with force. But they listened to Mungan, as if every single one of them were soldiers, under his authority.
“Ye canna do more than what ye’ve done,” he said. “Aye, some’ll die on yer watch, lass, that just is. But I’ll tell ye this: we’re better off wi’ ye at the fore. In years past, wi’ the sweating sickness, we lost folk faster and in greater number. Here now, only auld Donal’s gone, and that’s a mercy compared to what I’ve seen.”
Mungan’s words sank in, his perspective valued greatly. If he’d seen worse—faster deaths, more bodies—then maybe what she was doing did matter. Maybe the hours she’d poured into feeding, cooling, coaxing them through one breath after another were actually making a difference, something she’d questioned almost every hour of the last thirty-six.
That thought was enough to hold onto. Enough to remind her to keep pushing herself, no matter how badly her legs shook or how heavy her eyelids felt.
And yet, by the time dusk bled across the courtyard that evening, Claire struggled even to climb the stairs, her limbs heavy, as though her bones had been replaced with lead. As fatigue pressed down so hard, she did wonder how long she could keep it up. What if she collapsed? What if she caught the fever herself?
If she died here—would she die everywhere? Was there still a body in her own time, lying insensible in a hospital bed, surrounded by family in some sterile ICU? Or had shesimply...been erased? The logic tangled in her head until she gave up, muttering aloud, “Doesn’t matter. Either way, I’m dead.”
The thought should have terrified her. Instead, she was simply too tired to worry about it.
The door to Ciaran’s chamber made no sound as she pushed it open and stepped inside. The air was heavy and damp, and tinged with the acrid bite of vinegar steeping in a bowl. That, and the same in the flu house, had been Mòrag’s idea. The old retainer swore it was both cleanser and purifier. Though Claire had her doubts she did vaguely recall reading in some historical mystery aboutFour Thieves Vinegar, a mix of vinegar, rosemary, sage, and garlic, said to have protected grave robbers from plague. Invented fiction or purely folklore, nothing more, she assumed. From a medical standpoint, she knew vinegar couldn’t cure fever or infection. Still, it did no harm. A vinegar-soaked cloth might feel cool on the skin, maybe it would help with hygiene, maybe even lower temperature a little through evaporation. For now, she was willing to try anything.
The fire in the hearth had burned low, casting an orange wash across the bed.
He lay as she had left him, stripped to his drawers, the blankets pushed down to his hips, his chest bare and glistening. His breath came shallow but even, maybe even more even, more regular, than when she’d been here this afternoon.. For a moment she simply stood there, her throat tightening as she stared at him. He looked nothing like the man who had so easily intimidated her with his scowls, and at the moment, nothing like that silent but confident figure that had come to her after her car accident. And yet even now, undone by sickness, nearly unrecognizable, there was something in him that pulled her, something that made her ache for him to wake, to speak, to shout or curse even, anything to say he would survive this.
She rolled her sleeves, her exhaustion forgotten. “All right,” she whispered. “I’m back, Ciaran. It’s just you and me now.”
She washed her hands and returned to the bed, laying her hand over his forehead for the umpteenth time. Still hot, she judged, but possibly not as searing as earlier or yesterday. She checked his pulse, steady but slow, and then took a fresh cloth and dipped it in the vinegar water, wringing it out before she opened it up over his bare chest.
A low sound slipped from him, half sigh, half groan, though his eyes did not open.
“No whining,” she said, simply to speak, to disturb the often unnerving silence. Adopting the high-pitched voice of her grandmother, which Claire and her brother and sister used to imitate because it had always sounded rather more like a over-dramatic character or cartoon voice, Claire admonished, “I’ll simply not have it.”
She worked methodically, laying cool cloths over the entire upper half of his body. She let them sit until his flesh warmed them and then removed them one by one before repeating the process. She changed the water in the bowl, propped him higher on the pillows, and shifted the blankets so his lower body stayed covered while his chest and shoulders stayed cool. All the while she kept talking, because the silence pressed too heavy otherwise, and since he wasn’t offering conversation, she made do with her own.
“I know Mungan said old Donal probably wouldn’t have lived another year, even if he hadn’t gotten sick,” she murmured, smoothing a damp cloth across his collarbone, “but I still feel terrible.” She dipped the cloth back into the basin, wrung it out, and went on, “I like to think that in my career at the hospital, I never became immune to death—I hope I haven’t. I’m still affected every time we lose a patient. But as you might imagine,”she added dryly, glancing at his closed eyes as if he were following along, “some deaths resound louder than others.”
She laid the cloth flat over his ribs, spreading it out until there were no wrinkles against his taut flesh. “Back at the hospital, there was a team. Different shifts, a whole roster of doctors from different departments. Here, I feel it’s all on me. I’m not sharing responsibility—honestly, I don’t even count Diarmad anymore, and you and I are going to talk about him when you wake.” Her mouth tightened as she wiped along the line of his shoulder. “He’s incompetent, Ciaran. The more I see, the more sure I am. God, it drives me crazy, wondering how many Kerr soldiers have died because of him.”
She rambled on, laying down and lifting up cloths, one after another, her gaze continually returning to his face, watching for any reaction, any sign that he was hearing her, that he wasn’t as insensible as he appeared.
After almost an hour, she covered him once more with fresh linen cloths, then slid her arm under his head to feed him broth and willow bark tea. When that was done, and now cross-eyed with fatigue, Claire slumped into the chair at his bedside, scrubbing a hand over her face. She’d slept here the night before and would likely do so again, too worried to leave him overnight. Folding her arms across the mattress, she rested her head there, her cheek pillowed against her hands, and let herself drift.
