I wanted to tell him about Alarna, Petunis, and everything that had shifted while he was gone. I wanted to tell him about the way Teorin had turned every certainty in my life into something stranger. I wanted to tell him how often I had gone to the wards, how often I had imagined his hand against my stomach and the expression he might wear when he finally understood.
My other hand moved there now almost without thought.
The children had been quiet for most of the evening. Perhaps the chaos had unsettled them as much as it unsettled me. Perhaps I only wanted to believe that they knew something of what had happened in the throne room when they had first felt their father so close.
As if in answer, a small movement pressed beneath my palm. I went still. The feeling came again, insistent in a way that made my throat tighten. I sat there with one hand in his and the other spread over the children, and all at once the distance between the three of us felt impossibly thin. He lay before me burningwith fever. They moved beneath my skin as though restless with it.
My eyes returned to his face. He had not woken, yet something in him had changed in the last few minutes. His breathing had grown less even. A line had appeared between his brows as though the fever were drawing him deeper into some struggle I could not see.
The children moved again.
The thought that followed was not reasoning exactly. It did not arrive in words or logic. It came the way instinct sometimes comes, quiet and complete. I thought of what Aunt Jularin had told me.Intunar.They knew him. Not in the human sense, not with thought or memory, but with the unarguable recognition of blood. Whatever lived in them already belonged partly to him, and whatever belonged to him was failing before my eyes.
I looked at the bandages across his ribs, the dark marks seeping slowly through the linen, and then at my own wrist. There are moments when the body chooses before the mind has caught up to it. By the time I reached into the sleeve of my gown for the small blade I carried, I already knew I would not stop.
The cut across my wrist was shallow, enough to draw blood but no more. It welled quickly, dark in the lamplight, slipping down over my skin in a thin warm line.
For an instant I hesitated, not because I doubted the choice, but because of what it meant. This was not medicine. It was something else entirely. It was me, sitting alone beside the man I loved and asking my own blood to do what the healers could not. Then I slipped an arm beneath his shoulders and lifted him carefully.
His weight came against me with a familiarity that made my eyes burn. I held my wrist to his mouth and waited. Nothing happened at first.
Then his lips parted. The first swallow was weak enough that I almost thought I had imagined it. The second was not. His body responded in ways so immediate that they felt indecent to watch. Tension that had held him too rigid eased by degrees beneath my hand. The heat in his skin remained, but it no longer climbed with the same terrible urgency. One of the wounds at his shoulder, visible where the shirt had fallen away from the bandage, began to close at the edges while I stared.
Relief came so violently I nearly laughed.
I did not stop. The night passed in long, strange intervals. Whenever his breathing changed for the worse, I gave him more. Whenever the fever receded, I sat back and watched him, palm pressed to my stomach, waiting. The children moved now and then as though reminding me they were there, small secret witnesses to everything.
By dawn I was lightheaded enough that the room seemed too bright. I had wrapped my wrist with a strip of linen torn from one of the cloths on the table, though it did little to hide what I had done. My limbs felt heavy. Even so, I refused to leave the chair beside his bed.
When he woke, it was quietly. One moment I was watching the thin gray light gather at the windows, and the next his fingers were moving against mine.
I looked down at once.
His eyes were open and fixed on me with a lucidity so complete that I nearly cried from relief. For several seconds he said nothing. Neither did I. He only looked at me with that same searching intensity he had worn in the throne room, and I could see him taking in the chamber, the linens, the bandages, the dawn, and finally me.
“You look terrible,” he said.
The roughness of his voice could not hide the tenderness beneath it.
I laughed despite myself, and the laugh turned brittle halfway through. “I sat up all night waiting for you to decide whether to live.”
His hand tightened on mine. “And you still found the energy to insult me.”
“I would hate to let illness make you sentimental.”
A faint answer touched his mouth, but it did not last. His attention had already shifted. He looked at my face more carefully, then lower, and I knew the instant he saw the bandage at my wrist.
He pushed himself up too quickly. Pain crossed his features, though he ignored it almost at once and reached for my arm. “What did you do?”
“You should not be sitting up.”
“What did you do?”
There was enough force in the question that I knew evasion would only make him angry. I let him draw my hand closer and watched the understanding work its way through him.
“Asharin.”
“You were dying.”
