He stares at me. The fire paints his face in gold and shadow, picks out the rough texture of his skin, the gray threading through his dark hair, the lines around his eyes that speak of years and hard use.
“You unsettle me,” he says finally. “More than anyone I've met.”
My chest tightens. I look at the fire instead of at him.
“Try to sleep,” I say instead. “I'll keep watch.”
He sleeps.
Not peacefully. His breathing slowly deepens, his massive frame gradually relaxing against the wall. His face changes in sleep, loses some of its careful composure. He looks younger. Sadder.
I feed the fire and watch him. That's the deal. I watch, he sleeps, and if anything starts, I'm here. I try not to think about the way his hand felt on my wrist.
An hour passes. Maybe two. His breathing changes.
I'm across the room when I feel it — a flare of heat that has no source, a sudden flush along my own skin that makes me press my hand to my forehead. I'm not feverish. But something is wrong.
I'm beside him in three steps. His skin is scorching. The fever that was smoldering all day has caught and is blazing now, his body burning through itself. Sweat darkens the collar of hisarmor and slicks his temples. His breathing has gone fast and shallow.
“Kovren.” I tap his cheek. His eyes open, gold-edged, unfocused. “Stay with me.”
He mutters something. Not words I recognize. His hand comes up, groping for something, and I catch it before it connects with my shoulder.
I work. Strip the bandages, check the wounds — the infection is pushing back again, hot and angry around the stitches. I use the last of my alcohol, all of it, wiping the wounds clean while he shudders under my hands. The herbs I have left are the wrong ones for this. Poultice ingredients, not fever fighters. I use them anyway, packing the wounds and hoping his body does the rest.
His temperature keeps climbing.
I need cold water. There's a stream outside, I heard it when we arrived. I grab the pot from beside the hearth and go out into the dark, fill it from the icy runoff, come back. Soak strips of cloth and lay them across his forehead, his neck, the pulse points at his wrists. The cloth steams against his skin. I soak them again.
I do this for hours. Fill the pot, soak the cloths, lay them down, wait for them to go hot, do it again. My coat is soaked from the stream and from the water I've spilled, but I can't stop to deal with that. His body is a furnace, and the fire is the only thing keeping the room above freezing and I am running out of things to try.
Somewhere past midnight, the fever breaks.
Not gently. He seizes once, a full-body shudder that rattles the wall behind him, and then the heat starts to drain. I feel it go — first through the cloths, which stop steaming, then through his skin, which drops from scorching to merely hot. His breathing deepens. Evens. The gold at the edges of his eyes fades.
He sleeps. Proper sleep, not the fevered half-consciousness of the past hours.
I sit back. My hands are shaking now, which they didn't do during any of it. My coat is soaked. My herb supply is gone. My alcohol is gone. The fire has burned down to embers because I was too busy to feed it.
I'm freezing.
Something lands beside me, heavy and warm.
I startle, but it's just his cloak. Massive, rough-woven, smelling of woodsmoke and something wild I can't name. He's not touching me. He laid it beside me, close enough that I could pull it around myself. Not on me. Not quite.
I look up. He's still across the room, still in his corner, but his eyes are open. Aware. Watching me in the low light.
“You were cold,” he says. Like that explains everything.
“I thought you were sleeping.”
“I was.” He settles back, closes his eyes. “I woke up when your teeth started chattering. Even unconscious, the oath knows when you need something.”
“The oath?”
“Mm.”
“So you didn't choose to give me your cloak. The magic made you.”
