“I’ll carry you. You needn’t be awake at all.”
“Tomorrow,” she said, and let her eyes fall closed. “I heard you, you know. All of it. You’re quite dramatic.”
“Dramatic? No, I do not think so,” he muttered.
“I survived the last three years,” Ayla whispered. “I’m not going to die from a simple grippe.”
“Good. I’ll hold you to that.”
Her hand reached towards the side table for the cup of water. Watching her fumble for it, he reached over and nudged it into her grip without touching her. Ayla struggled upright, but did not ask for help, so he let her do it herself, and watched as she lifted the cup and drained it dry.
“And I do not hate you,” she added. Her wetted lips glistened in the firelight.
“Even better. What can I do for you, my lady?”
“Sleep,” she told him, and set the cup back on the counter. He refilled it for her, then went to build the fire back up. For a moment he stared at the chair beside the bed, then gave up and spread his body over the furs before the hearth instead. Sleep came quickly. She was going to live.
He did move her, the next day, when the sun was up. He changed her bedsheets himself, and closed the shutters against the wind, and built the fire up in the hearth of her smallchamber. He warmed the bed with coals in a pan, and then carried her upstairs, still wearing his braies and oversized shirt, to her own room, where he tucked hot wrapped stones around her. She was no stronger than she’d been before, and no more conscious. He didn’t know how to care for someone, not really, but he remembered what she had done, and tried to do the same: clean clothes left beside her, so she could dress herself, which she did. A wet cloth on the forehead when she sweated. Tea and broth and porridge, which he tasted first, not for poison but to make sure Bode had not cooked it, which would be near as bad.
His heart hurt, just to look at her. He went from begging her to live to instead pleading for her comfort, no longer worried she’d make it but fretting nonetheless. Hers was a small room, and he felt like he was right on top of her; a nuisance she would surely rather do without. He looked out the window now and then, at the enemy army camped there, and begged the sun not to burn bright enough to melt away the snows until she was healed. If combat came, he would have to leave her side. He did not want to do that.
By the third day of her illness Ayla was fully conscious, but still subdued and bed-ridden. He moved her stack of books within easy reach of her hands.
“Are you hungry?” Niel asked. “Can I fetch you anything else?”
She stared straight ahead for a long moment, not at him but at the wall. Dark shadows ringed her gray eyes. She’d pinned her oily hair up since she was not yet strong enough to wash it.
“My marriage cloak.”
“Your marriage cloak,” he echoed, in disbelief, certain he must have misheard.
“It should be in his wardrobe. Can you bring it?”
He wanted to argue, to tell her that no matter how poorly she felt her marriage was nothing to take comfort in. The thought she might be missing the man who’d hurt her made his jawtighten until his teeth ached. But he nodded sharply, and went to find the damned thing, more miserable with every step he took.
The marriage cloaks most noble women made for their husbands were as elaborately decorated as tapestries. The one his somewhat-wife had sent to him had stitches so small he could barely make them out, an elaborate artwork of the Aronthian phoenix and the Mount Eyron red dragon tangling together. Lady Blackfell’s, when he found it, was instead decorated with patches, each embroidered in a different style as if they’d been stitched by different hands, and then tacked messily on by the same clumsy-handed seamstress.
He crumpled it up in his hands. Then he sighed heavily and forced himself to fold it neatly.
“Here,” Niel said when he returned, a little more sharply than he meant to. “Your cloak, Lady Blackfell.”
“I don’t wish to be called that,” she said. She made no move to take the cloak from him. “The title is his by birth, and mine only by marriage.”
“Lady Ayla, then.” He continued to hold it out to her.
“Throw that into the fire,” Ayla said. “I want to watch it burn.”
He let out a sharp breath, almost a laugh, and grinned involuntarily. Niel did not hesitate. He stuffed the cloak in on the side of the hearth, half-over a log, so as to not smother the fire entirely.
“I knew I was miserable,” she said quietly. “But I forgot what it felt like to not be under his thumb. To not be afraid every moment of every day. Even when he left, to go to court or such, he still felt… here. Even if this all ends badly, I can no longer pretend there is any future in which I could go back to being his wife.”
“I know what you mean,” was all Niel could say.
An acrid, unpleasant smell, like burning hair, began to fill the room. Niel took a breath through his mouth, unwilling to pull the cloak from the fire.
“Can you open the window?” Ayla asked him.
He got up to do as she asked. Reaching across the window seat, he pushed the shutter wide and let white, cold light spill inside, bringing a crisp breeze. The world outside was blanketed in another snowfall. He could see his men on the castle wall below them, clearing the walkway so sentries could stand guard.
