Saving the Immortal

Chapter Twenty: Fevered

I do not remember much of what followed, save fragments — voices distant and distorted, the sensation of heat and cold trading places within my own skin without any warning, my body caught in a struggle I could not properly comprehend even as it consumed me entirely.

Ruselon told me of it later, once I had recovered enough to hear the account without it frightening me further.

He said I had fallen into delirium within the hour, my skin pale as candle wax despite the fever burning beneath it, my head tossing against the pillows while unintelligible fragments of speech spilled from me — words he could not fully make out, though he confessed some of them had sounded, unmistakably, like my mother's name, and others like his own.

He did not enjoy watching it.

He told me that much plainly, later, when the worst of it had passed — that he had sat beside that bed through the long hours of my fever with a helplessness he had rarely permitted himself to feel about anything, watching the woman who had slapped him in fury only hours earlier now unable to recognize him at all.

Word spread quickly through the palace, as such things always do, and within the day the entire royal family had gathered in the antechamber outside our quarters, awaiting news with an anxiety that surprised even Ruselon, given how little regard most of them had shown me since my arrival.

The king himself came.

Ruselon told me this with a particular quiet astonishment, as though he still could not quite credit it even having witnessed it firsthand — his father, who had humiliated him so thoroughly in that throne room only days earlier, standing at the foot of my bed with an expression Ruselon had never once seen him wear.

"She spoke against me rather fiercely," the king had apparently said, watching me toss fitfully beneath the covers. "I confess I did not expect to find myself concerned for her recovery."

"Nor did I expect you to be," Ruselon had said, unable to entirely disguise the bitterness in his own voice.

Caspian and Fennick came as well, their wives trailing behind with expressions considerably less confident than they had shown in the garden days earlier. Even Marrow appeared at the doorway, though he did not enter, lingering instead at the threshold with a guilt Ruselon told me he had never once witnessed on his younger brother's face before that day.

I mumbled through most of it, apparently.

Words without proper shape, fragments of fear and memory tangled together in whatever fevered landscape my mind had retreated into. I called for my mother, more than once. I called, too, for Ruselon — his name emerging clearly enough, he said, that it had startled every person gathered in that room into a silence none of them had expected to feel.

He did not leave my side through any of it.

He held my hand through the worst of the fever's grip, pressed cool cloths against my forehead when the heat grew unbearable, and blamed himself, entirely and without mercy, for every hour that I remained lost within that delirium.

"I should never have teased you so cruelly," he told me later, once I had woken properly and the fever had finally begun to break. "I knew you were unwell after the lake. I should have seen it plainly rather than provoking you toward an argument that cost you what strength you had left to fight this properly."

"You could not have known," I said, though my voice remained weak, the fever's aftermath still heavy upon me.

"I should have known," he said, his voice carrying a guilt I had not yet heard from him, considerably deeper than anything the courtyard or the throne room had produced. "I have spent my entire existence being told I bring ruin to everything I touch. And here you lay, burning with fever, having very nearly drowned only the day before, and I spent that same morning walking gardens with a woman who meant nothing to me at all, entirely blind to what was happening beneath my own roof."

"Ruselon—"

"I am sorry," he said, his voice quiet now, stripped entirely of the teasing confidence I had grown accustomed to. "For all of it. I do not know how to properly atone for what my carelessness nearly cost you."

I reached for his hand, weak as I still was, and found it already waiting for mine, as it seemed always to be whenever I needed it most.

"You are here now," I said quietly. "That is atonement enough."

He held my hand tightly, his dark eyes — that particular shade of blue I had come to look for so eagerly — carrying a vulnerability I had not yet seen from him, not even in the depths of his recurring nightmare.

"I thought," he said finally, his voice barely above a whisper, "that I might lose you. And I found, in that fear, that I did not know how I would continue existing at all, should such a thing come to pass."

I said nothing.

But I held his hand a little tighter, and understood, lying there weak and fever-worn in that great bed, that whatever this had become between us had grown into something far too significant for either of us to properly name just yet.