THE COSTLY MISTAKE

Six Cots

Chapter 2 — Six Cots

The fever moved fast and left almost no warning. A patient would come in complaining of tired joints and a dry throat, and within two days their skin would take on the gray, waxen look I’d only seen twice before in fifteen years of practice — both times in villages that lost more than half their population before anyone found the cause.

I didn’t tell anyone that yet. Panic kills faster than most fevers.

My days fell into a rhythm I hadn’t expected, given how the first one had ended. Up before dawn to check on the overnight cases, a rotation through the sickroom’s six cots — soon eight, then eleven by the end of the first week — mixing tinctures from a supply kit that hadn’t been designed for an outbreak this size, and falling into bed each night too exhausted to think clearly about the man whose hall I was sleeping under.

That exhaustion didn’t stop me from noticing him watching, though. Roman came through the sickroom most evenings, ostensibly checking on his people, and every visit ended the same way — a brief, controlled exchange about patient counts and supply needs, nothing personal, nothing that acknowledged the five years sitting between every sentence like a third person in the room.

“You’re running low on feverfew,” he said, on the sixth evening, standing at the doorway rather than coming fully inside, the way he had every visit since that first one. “I’ve sent a rider to Millrow for more, but it’ll be three days before it arrives.”

“Three days is a long time for the cases I’ve got now.”

“I’m aware.” Something tightened in his jaw. “It’s the fastest I can manage without stripping the eastern watch, and I’m not willing to do that with Blackwood scouts already testing our border twice this week.”

I looked up from the tincture I was mixing. “Twice?”

“That’s not your concern.”

“Everything inside this territory is my concern right now, whether either of us likes it.” I set the mortar down harder than necessary. “If Blackwood’s circling because your borders look weak, and my patients are dying because I don’t have supplies, those two problems aren’t actually separate, Roman. They’re the same problem wearing different faces.”

He didn’t answer immediately, and for a moment something in his expression shifted into the version of him I remembered from before everything — thoughtful, weighing an argument on its merits rather than simply asserting authority over it. It didn’t last.

“I’ll see what I can move up,” he said, finally, and left before I could press further.

It was the man from that first day, the lean, watchful one, who cornered me an hour later in the supply corridor.

“Silas Vance.” He introduced himself with a small, formal nod, the kind of politeness that felt performed rather than warm. “Roman’s Beta. I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced.”

“Mara Fenwick.” The lie came easier than it should have, five days into rebuilding it as a habit.

“Mm.” Something in his expression suggested he wasn’t entirely convinced by the name, though he didn’t push it. “I wanted to thank you personally, for coming. Whatever brought you to us, the pack needed a healer of your caliber badly. I’ve heard good things about your work in Millrow.”

“Word travels.”

“It does, in border territories.” He studied me for a beat too long, the same unsettling attention I’d noticed from across the sickroom that first day. “You have quite a reputation for someone who’s only been practicing five years. Most healers your age are still apprenticing.”

“I trained young.”

“Evidently.” He smiled, thin and unreadable, and something about the exchange left an uneasy residue I couldn’t fully name. “Well. I won’t keep you from your work. The pack is grateful, Mara. However this ends, I want you to know that.”

He left before I could ask what he meant by however this ends, and I stood alone in that corridor a long moment, some old, half-buried instinct prickling at the back of my neck that I hadn’t felt in five years of careful, quiet anonymity.

I told myself it was nothing. Exhaustion, probably, and old paranoia resurfacing now that I was standing on Ashford land again after so long spent making sure I never had to.

I went back to my patients. Cot four had spiked a fever overnight, and cot seven’s breathing had gone shallow enough to worry me, and there wasn’t room, in the narrow, exhausting reality of eleven sick people relying on one healer with dwindling supplies, to spend much more time wondering about a Beta’s strange choice of words.

It would be four more days before I understood exactly how much that choice of words should have worried me.