Maren #2
“My body has terrible instincts.” I probe the edge of the wound, checking for heat, for swelling, for the telltale signs of infection spreading. “Already established.”
“That's not what I...” He stops. Breathes out, slow and controlled.
I don't look up. I keep working. Apply fresh herbs, rewrap the bandage, tie it off. His eyes track my hands the whole time, that strange fixed attention that should probably unnerve me and doesn't.
When I finish, I sit back on my heels and look at him.
“What?”
“Nothing.” But his gaze stays on my hands for another moment before it drops to my wrist.
His hand moves. Slow, deliberate, like he's fighting himself with every inch. It hovers in the air between us for a moment, trembling slightly. Then it settles, feather-light, against the back of my wrist.
I go still.
The heat from his hand seeps into my wrist. Rough, that bark-like texture, but gentle. So gentle it doesn't make sense. His fingers could snap my wrist without effort. Instead, they rest there, barely touching.
“I haven't touched someone like this in a very long time,” he says. His voice has gone quiet. Almost wondering. “Without hurting them. Without wanting to hurt them.”
“Do you want to hurt me?”
“No.” The word comes out raw. “That's the strangest part. I don't want to hurt you at all.”
His thumb shifts against my wrist, a small motion, barely perceptible, and I feel it everywhere.
My breath catches. I don't let myself look at his face.
He pulls back. His hands retreat to his sides. The distance returns. But I can still feel it. The ghost of heat on my skin where his fingers rested.
“You should sleep for a while,” I say, because I need to say something, need to fill the silence before it fills me. “Real sleep. Not that creepy statue thing you did last night.”
“I don't sleep near others.”
“So you’ve mentioned. Why?”
He's quiet for a long moment. The fire crackles. Wind moves through the holes in the roof.
“When I sleep, I dream. And when I dream...” He stops. Starts again. “The rage doesn't always stay contained. Sometimes I wake up and I'm not where I was. Sometimes there's blood.”
I should be afraid. Should feel the cold crawl of fear at the base of my spine, hearing him describe waking up covered in blood he doesn't remember spilling.
I think about his hand on my wrist. That feather-light touch. The wonder in his voice when he said he didn't want to hurt me.
“What if I stayed awake?” I ask. “Watched you. Woke you up if anything started?”
He looks at me like I've offered to walk into a fire for him.
“You would trust me that much?”
“You're oath-bound to protect me, right? So if the rage comes, it'll have to fight the oath first. And meanwhile, I'll be talking very loudly and possibly throwing things at your head.” I shrug. “Worth a try.”
“You're insane.”
“Probably. But you need sleep, or you're going to collapse, and then I'll have to drag your nine-foot unconscious body to the next village by myself. So really, this is practical self-interest.”
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 his armor 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.”
A pause. When he speaks again, his voice is lower. Rougher. “I chose. The oath just made it louder.”
He doesn't say anything else. His breathing evens out again, sliding back toward sleep.
I pull his cloak around me. It's huge, big enough to wrap around me twice, warm from his body heat. I burrow into it and think about what he said.
He wanted to.
He keeps saying things like that. Keeps cracking open these small windows into whatever's under the monster and the warnings and the distance.
I press my face into the rough wool of his cloak and breathe in. Woodsmoke, something wild, the heat of him still trapped in the fibers. I catch myself doing it and stop.
I check him one more time. Breathing deep, even. Skin warm but not scorching. Fever broken, not just pausing. The wounds are holding. There's nothing left for me to do tonight that would help him, and a healer running on nothing is a liability, not a resource.
I close my eyes. Just for a while. He's stable. I'll know if that changes.
I jerk awake once, some hours later, hand already reaching. But he's exactly where I left him, breathing slow, face slack with deep sleep. I burrow down deeper into his cloak.
Still breathing. Still quiet.
I don't fight sleep again.
In the morning, he's awake before me, sitting exactly where I left him, watching me in the pale dawn light. The cloak is still wrapped around my shoulders.
“You didn't leave,” he says.
“Nowhere better to be.”
“You could have. While I slept. Could have put miles between us before I woke.”
“Could have.” I stretch, feel my spine crack in protest. “Didn't want to.”
He goes still. “Want?”
I realize what I said. Want, not need. Want, not logic. I could take it back, rephrase it, make it practical again.
I don't.
“The cloak helped,” I say instead. “Thank you.”
His expression shifts. That ghost-smile again, barely there, but warmer than before. “You needed it.”
“Mm. And you wanted to give it.”
He doesn't deny it. Just watches me with those amber eyes, and I watch him back, and something settles between us that wasn't there before. Not trust, exactly. Not yet. But the space where trust might grow.
I check his wounds before we leave. The infection has retreated — my alcohol and herbs didn't die in vain. His skin is still warmer than it should be, but the scorching heat from last night is gone. The fever isn't broken, exactly. More like beaten back. Smoldering instead of blazing.
It'll come back if I can't resupply. I need alcohol, willow bark, clean cloth. I need a village.
“There's a settlement ahead,” he says, watching me repack. “Gorvani. We can resupply there.”
“Lead the way.”
We step out into the morning. The mist is rising, the world soft and gray around the edges. He walks closer than yesterday. I don't mention it.
I pull his cloak tighter around my shoulders and follow him into the fog.