The First Night
Aunt Petunis arrived before the healers had finished with him. The chamber overlooked one of the inner courtyards, though the windows showed little beyond drifting snow and distant lantern light. Inside, the air smelled of heated water, clean linen, and blood not yet fully washed away.
The healers moved around the bed in low, careful silence, stripping away what remained of his armor and binding the worst of the wounds. I stood near the bedside and watched them work. Every time one of them touched him I had to resist the childish, unreasonable urge to tell them they were being too rough.
He should not have been here like this. He should have been whole. Cold and impossible, not half senseless with fever and covered in wounds and blood.
One of the healers folded the last piece of broken leather aside and bent over the long tear that ran across his abdomen. Another pressed clean cloth against a bite near his ribs, where the flesh around the wound had darkened despite everything they had already done.
Petunis’s hand touched my arm lightly. “You cannot remain in here all night.”
I did not look at her.
“You are with child,” she continued when I gave no answer. “If the corruption takes him, he may not know you. He may not know himself. I will not have you standing at his bedside if that happens.”
The words should have frightened me. They did, perhaps, somewhere beneath the larger feeling that had been moving through me since the moment I saw him collapse at the foot of the throne.
“He crossed half the world for me,” I said. “I am not leaving because he has a fever.”
“That is not a fever and you know it.”
Still I did not move. The eldest of the healers had lifted Colsar’s arm now, examining the swelling around a bite that looked deep enough to have taken flesh with it. Even cleaned, his body bore the long, merciless proof of what the journey had cost him. Bruises shadowed one side of his throat. Several cuts across his shoulder had begun to close and then torn open again. The wounds along his flank had that ugly, inflamed look I had learned to hate in the throne room when the guard captain described what the undead left behind in living blood.
Petunis followed my silence for a moment before speaking again, this time more softly.
“If he worsens, the men outside this chamber have orders to keep him here. They will do what is necessary.”
I turned then. “What exactly does that mean?”
Her expression did not change. “It means what you think it means.”
The answer sat between us for only a second before I looked away from her and back to the bed. One of the healers drew the blanket higher over Colsar’s legs. Another adjusted the cloth laid across his forehead and then stepped back at last, his work finished for the moment.
“He is not lost yet,” the eldest healer said carefully, perhaps because he had heard enough of our exchange to know where my thoughts had gone. “His body is fighting. More fiercely than I would have expected.”
That should have reassured me, yet something in his tone left too much room for what he was not saying.
Petunis heard it too. “And if it stops?” she asked.
The healer lowered his eyes briefly to the bed before answering. “Then there will be little more we can do.”
The room seemed to grow very still after that.
I looked down at Colsar. Without the armor and blood, without the frenzy of the throne room and the violence of his entrance, he looked younger and older at once. Younger because unconsciousness had stripped the hardness from his face, leaving behind the shape of the man I had first met before either of us understood what we would become to one another. Older because there was something worn into him now that had not been there before, as though winter and distance had marked him in places no hand could bandage.
Aunt Petunis exhaled slowly. “You may remain until they finish,” she said. “After that, I expect you to think like a queen and not a grieving wife.”
The attempt at sternness came too late to matter. I barely heard it. The healers resumed their work for a little while longer, tightening bandages, changing cloths, drawing a clean shirt over him, and speaking to one another in quiet voices about fever, infection, and the strange resilience of his body. When they were satisfied there was nothing more to be done for the night, they gathered their instruments and bowed their way out one by one.
Petunis lingered longest, as though still hoping I might change my mind and leave with her, but when she saw that I would not, she said only, “If he worsens, call for them at once,” and closed the door behind her.
After that the chamber belonged only to us. The silence changed when everyone else had gone. It no longer felt like the tense stillness of a room under instruction. It felt private. Too private, perhaps, for the force of what had been waiting in me all evening.
I moved into the chair beside the bed and sat down at last. Months of waiting had left me with too many versions of this moment. In some of them he had returned at once and found me before I set foot in Alarna. In others he never came at all, and I was left making peace with whatever was kinder, believing him dead or believing myself forgotten. I had spent too many nights walking the wards with my hood drawn low, pressing my hands to old magic and trying to leave tiny seams in the barrier only he might cross, telling myself that if he lived, if he knew, if he could, he would come.
He had come. Not with a fleet, or an army, or the grand certainty my more foolish fantasies sometimes granted him, but with torn flesh, darkened bites, fever, and enough stubbornness to break open the throne room doors rather than be hidden from me in some cell below the palace.
The thought undid me more thoroughly than anything else had. I reached for his hand. His skin burned. That was the first thing I felt, and then beneath the heat I felt the familiar weight of his hand in mine and nearly bowed over it, because the simple reality of him was suddenly too much. I had missed him with an ache that had gone far past loneliness and become part of the texture of my days.
