Where Heaven Bleeds

Chapter Ten

She smelled it before she saw it.

Not illness in the ordinary sense, she could detect illness the way other creatures detected rain, something in the air that changed quality before any visible sign. She had been noticing the change in Aldric for four days, cataloging the data without quite permitting herself to assign it its correct interpretation. There is a slight tension around his eyes in the mornings. The careful way he breathed when he thought no one was watching. The fact that three days ago, he had paused at the top of the stairs for a beat too long before continuing, and his hand had been on the wall.

She found him in the barn at midnight.

He was sitting against the wall with his knees drawn up and his head back, and his eyes closed, and when she pushed the door open, he said, without looking: "Go back inside, Seraphel."

"No."

"It's cold."

"I do not experience cold the way you do." She crossed the barn and crouched before him and put her hands on him. His face. His temples. His throat.

He let her.

The warmth was instinctive and an immediate response to what she found in the low fever. The beginnings are in the lymph nodes. The subtle wrongness she had learned to associate with the earliest stage of the plague.

"How long?" she said.

He opened his eyes. They were dark in the lantern light, very tired, with the expression of a man who has been carrying something alone and has just been relieved of it.

"I noticed the swelling four days ago," he said. "The fever went on and off for two days."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

He didn't answer immediately, which was his own kind of answer. "Because you can't cure me," he said at last. "You told me the first night you can slow it; you cannot stop it. If you slow it in me, you're using Grace that could go to someone with a better chance." He met her eyes. "I've done the mathematics. I've been doing them for four days."

"The mathematics are wrong," she said.

"Are they."

"They assume your life is worth less than other lives. That assumption is" She felt something move in her chest. "That assumption is incorrect."

"Seraphel"

"Be quiet."

He went quiet.

She kept her hands on him and pushed as much warmth into him as she could, not the careful, rationed amounts she had been giving to the village, but something fuller, driven by something that was not protocol. The fever receded. The swelling eased.

She could not stop it. The plague was now possibly survivable if the body was strong and care was consistent. But not curable. Not by her. Not by anyone.

"I will slow it," she said. "Every day. As long as I am here."

"And when you're not?"

"You are strong. The body remembers strength. We will give it every possible advantage." She sat back, her hands dropping from his face. "Do not hide this from me again."

"Seraphel." He caught one of her hands before she could pull it away. Not holding, just stopping. "Why does it matter to you? I mean that genuinely. What do you feel when?"

She looked at their hands. His scarred and calloused and warm. Hers, luminous and warming.

"I am beginning to understand that myself," she said. "Give me time."

He released her hand. "That's the one thing we're both a bit short on."

"Yes," she said. "I know."

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