“Tomorrow,” Niel said quietly. “Maybe. Not yet.” He still felt weak. He was not ready for the ordeal of talking to an Ashbrin. Niel wasn't going to ransom Bradhan, for all he knew the Ashbrin knight was a good friend of his brother Corin's. Bradhan's fate was to die on Niel's sword. But Niel wanted to hear the man admit what he knew first, and apologize for it. Surely the Ashbrin family was aware of what Niel had endured. Surely they had sheltered Hannes, and kept his secrets. Niel felt a need to know, and to understand, but it would not be an easy conversation for him. “What else?”
“Nothing,” Kerr said with a shrug. “They haven’t moved, on the other side of the wall. We’ve worked out a schedule, for the cooking and the laundry and such, now that we’re without the servants.”
“Good to know you don’t need me.”
“Feel welcome to take sick more often. The lady scarcely left your side.”
“I wasn’t sick, I was…” Niel started, but Kerr only raised an eyebrow, and he trailed off in a mutter.
He didn’t summon Ayla for lunch. She’d done fine getting her own food in the days he’d been ill, and he could no longer pretend their meals were a necessity. Not when she’d had two day’s worth of chances to kill him while he lay completely vulnerable. He didn't need to haunt her any more than he already had. The fact that she didn’t appear at his door with more tea and food was proof enough to Niel that she needed a break from caring for him.
For supper Bode and three other men had made a sort of deflated, burnt barley bread and a large vat of soggy root vegetables with what he charitably thought had once been a ham, or at least something that, in a vague sense,resembleda ham.
“Has Lady Blackfell eaten?” Niel asked as he frowned down at the bowl in his hands, standing in the middle of the kitchen. His legs trembled slightly, and he wished he could take one of the kitchen stools, but feared for the men to know how weak he still was.
“Haven’t seen her today,” Bode answered, sawing one of the bread loaves into slices as a charcoal crust flaked off it.
“And when are you on the cooking schedule next?”
“Uh, a week, I think,” Bode answered, tossing the slices of bread into a basket and reaching for the next loaf.
“See to it that you arenot,” Niel instructed firmly.
She still hadn’t arrived by the time he finished.
Hoping he wasn’t overstepping his bounds, he climbed to her bedchamber. While normally he could have trekked up the Kettalist with little complaint, now just the winding stairs of castle Blackfell made his muscles ache.
He knocked on her door and waited. There was no answer.
“Lady Blackfell?” He cracked the door open. It was dark inside the room, and frigid, no fire burning. The shutters were open tothe snowy wind. He frowned, and wondered where else she’d be if not in her room—the solar, perhaps?
He was pulling the door closed when he heard a soft cough from the dark bed. The sound turned his blood to ice. Ill. She'd taken ill.
Niel threw the door open and crossed to the bed, his heart in his throat as his eyes made out the shape of her body in the dark. In a fit of fever she’d knocked most of the blankets off the bed. Now she shivered under only a thin covering.
If she hadn’t coughed. If he hadn’t heard her…
“Luck and Mercy,” Niel said, as he grabbed the blanket off the ground to pull back over her. She needed warmth, needed a fire. Medicine. Why the fuck hadn’t anyone lit a fire for her? Why in Mercy’s name was she lying alone, unattended? The pitcher beside her bed was as dry as the hearth was cold. “Ayla, answer. Can you hear me?”
Because the servants were gone, he realized. Andhehad not checked on her. She’d tended him, and he’d abandoned her in return. He hadn't seen her since the night before. How long had she lain unattended in the cold?
She didn’t answer him, or stir. He pulled the blanket over her and realized only then that the sheets were damp from her sweat, turned icy-cold by the winter air.
She was freezing to death.
His first instinct was that he had to warm the room—close the wooden shutters, build the fire, pack the bed with heated stones. His second was that she needed dry sheets, not ones she’d sweated through, and the lord’s bedchamber had a glass window instead of one open to the elements. Neil had been in there before supper, and had only banked the fire. The room would be warmer than hers. And it was the better of the two rooms, the hearth and bed both larger.
Faster to carry her there than to make her warm here.
“Forgive me,” Niel said, and reached beneath her to gather the woman into his arms. She was dressed only in the simple woolen shift she must have worn beneath her usual gowns, and her head lolled against his chest as he cradled her to him. Turning, legs still aching and threatening to give out from the remnants of his own illness, Niel carried her as quickly as he dared down the stairs and to his room.
He could feel her dress was damp with fever sweat. Curse it. By the torchlight in the hall he could see her lips were pale, blue-gray. Niel felt as though each breath stabbed shards of glass into his heart, desperation clawing into him. Cademond had died of the grippe, which meant it was capable of killing.
But not her. He would not let it.
He burst into his room and set her carefully not on the bed, but on the heavy furs before the fire. Crouching over her, he quickly stoked the banked red embers back into a blaze, until the hearth roared and spat golden sparks, sap crackling and fissures of the dried wood steaming.
“It isn’t right, putting you on the floor. But the fire seemed a better bet than the bed to get you warm,” he said, taking another log and feeding it to the already rampant blaze.
