Iwatched Little John guide Baron away. I wanted him to stay. I wanted him to turn back, ignore Little John, sit beside me again, and take my hand like he had before. I wanted his steady voice and his ridiculous overprotective fussing. But I couldn’t find the words to call him back, so I lay there in silence while he disappeared through the doorway, and the empty place beside my bed seemed to grow larger the moment he was gone.
Peter kept his eyes narrowed at the open door until Baron and Little John faded from view into the surrounding forest.
“Sorry about that,” he said pompously. “Some men just don’t know when they aren’t wanted anymore.”
The irony of Peter being the one to say that almost made me laugh. I needed to have a blunt conversation with him soon. I knew that. Peter deserved honesty, especially after the mistake I had made at the tournament. But I did not have the strength for heavy emotions, explanations, apologies, or the awful look he would undoubtedly give me when I told him I would never feel for him what he wanted me to feel.
Peter dabbed more cream onto my middle, and I stared past him at the wall. I felt as though I had used up all my energytalking to Baron and had no words left for anyone else. It didn’t seem like Peter minded the silence. He was engrossed in tending to my wounds, his face set in a serious concentration that made him look older than he was.
A few minutes later, Sybil flitted into the hut and examined Peter’s work. Her mouth pressed into a thin line and she murmured something too low for me to hear, then pulled him outside to converse in whispers.
I could only catch a few garbled phrases floating through the door.
“Blood.”
“Get worse.”
“Fever.”
I took a mental inventory of my situation. I couldn’t get up by myself. Even moving my hand hurt. I had no idea what looked terrible enough to concern Sybil so deeply. She had witnessed horrible injuries on a multitude of occasions. If anyone was accustomed to blood, wounds, and fevers, it was Sybil.
But I had been drinking the bitter concoction she brewed every time she brought it to me. I was able to talk and think well enough. Didn’t that mean I would get better? Surely I would have a longer-than-normal recovery time, but that was only to be expected. A few weeks, and I would be good as new.
Sybil was an excellent healer. I was in capable hands. I scanned the forest line through the open door for any sign of Baron and Little John’s return, but they weren’t there, so I stared up at the thatched roof instead.
A spider crawled along one of the wooden beams and began to spin a web. I watched it for what felt like an hour. Ever since being injured, time had behaved strangely. Sometimes hours passed in great gallops, disappearing before I knew they had gone. Other times, minutes dragged by with agonizing slowness.
When Sybil and Peter came back into the hut, they both looked gravely serious. I looked from one face to the other but Peter avoided my gaze. Sybil, however, looked me straight in the eye and got directly to the point.
“Laurel,” she began crisply, “I need to know what happened.”
“I fell.”
“Onto what?”
I swallowed. “An iron trellis.”
I felt ridiculous saying it aloud. I had survived prison, soldiers, raids, cliffs, and castle escapes, only to be nearly defeated by some artistic contraption meant to support flowers.
“Arustyiron trellis?” Sybil asked shrewdly.
“Probably. It was dark and I didn’t pay attention.” I thought hard, searching my memory. I had seen the trellis before when I took the ground-level chamber pots outside to be emptied into the moat. I remembered the reddish-brown crust that had covered parts of the iron. “Yes,” I decided. “Very rusty.”
Sybil nodded, as though her worst suspicions had been confirmed. “I thought as much.”
I had never seen Sybil hesitate before giving information to a patient.
“I’m going to be all right, aren’t I?” I asked.
“Laurel,” she said calmly, “you have blood poisoning. It gets progressively worse. You’re already weak, and you’re developing the fever. You’ll likely become weaker and disoriented. Eventually you’ll slip into a coma and…” She stopped, but she didn’t need to finish. I could guess the rest, even if it made all the air vanish from my lungs.
I was going to die.
No, that was impossible. I would recover. I always did. I’d been injured before, plenty of times. I couldn’t even count the number of times I’d been cornered, trapped, or outnumbered,and yet I had always found a way out. There had to be some kind of mistake.
An elaborate prank, perhaps. This must be some kind of sick joke. Any moment now, someone would burst into the hut laughing. I stared hard at Sybil, hoping to find any kind of amusement there, but there was only pity and sadness. In the corner of the hut, Peter dug the toe of his boot into the packed dirt floor and refused to look at me.
“Is there any chance of recovery?” I asked. “I’m still young and healthy.”
