35. Laurel
LAUREL
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 energy talking 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.
“A rusty iron 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.”
Sybil was quiet for a moment. “It’s theoretically possible, but I don’t know of anyone who has survived an infection this severe. Cuts by themselves can be mended, but once the infection enters the blood like it has with you…”
She didn’t finish that sentence either.
“How long?” I asked. “How long do I have?”
Sybil’s face tightened. “I’d guess between three days and a week.”
I caught my breath. So soon? Father would never get here in time. Tears burned behind my eyes, and I blinked hard to hold them back. Father would want to know. He would want to be with me, even if it broke him. He had nearly died of grief when Mother passed away.
“I’d like to be alone,” I whispered.
Peter left immediately but Sybil lingered long enough to bend and wrap me in a careful hug, avoiding my injuries as best she could.
“You holler for me any time you need me, day or night. I’ll bring you something for the pain as soon as I can so you don’t have to suffer.
” I nodded, though I could not speak, then she left and closed the door behind her.
I was dying.
I stared up at the spider above my head and couldn’t stop the tears from falling down my face.
That spider up there would go on living, completely unaware that directly beneath it, a person was slowly and painfully wasting away.
It would finish its web and catch flies.
It would crawl along the beams and live its small, ordinary life while mine came apart underneath it.
How many breaths did I have left? How many more times would my heart beat before it stopped? I didn’t know what happened after death. Would my consciousness, my soul, go to heaven? Or would I simply cease to exist? If there was a heaven, perhaps Mother would be there.
But far from reassuring me, the thought made my tears fall faster.
As much as I wanted to see my mother again, I didn’t want to die.
I didn’t want some slow, painful ending in a hut while everyone I loved stood nearby, unable to save me.
I wanted to live. I wanted a future. I wanted to know whether Father and King Richard made it safely back to England.
I wanted to grow old and tell outrageous stories to grandchildren who would never believe half of them.
I wanted to make a difference in the world, not become another sad tale people told around cookfires.
I wanted Baron. The thought broke through everything else. I wanted him beside me.
My heart skipped strangely, and panic tore through me. Was that part of my impending death? Was that how it began? Was death already creeping closer while I lay there crying beneath a spider’s web?
What would happen if I simply refused to die?
What if I decided to stubbornly live on and cheat death?
I still had too much life in me to give up now.
I slowly kicked off my blanket and struggled to sit and managed to roll onto my side.
Pain exploded through me, but I staunchly refused to acknowledge it. I would live. I chose life.
With a trembling arm, I raised myself onto my elbow and tried to block out the searing pain flaring across my body. I would walk it off. That was all. I just needed to get up and prove I could still move. Sybil would realize she’d been wrong.
With immense effort, I swung my legs over the side of the straw tick. By then, sweat drenched my skin, and I dragged air into my lungs in heavy gasps. I would live. I couldn’t die now.
I was afraid of death.
The admission came with such force that my breath hitched. I was afraid. I clung to the side table and tried to heave myself onto my feet but my legs wouldn’t support me. They buckled at once, and I collapsed to the floor where I lay, shaking. I was useless…useless and dying.
Then I broke down and sobbed.