Chapter 18 #2
Oswin looked at her again, his eyes softening just a fraction.
"Ye’ll ken it by the heat first. His skin will go past warm to something else.
A dry, burning quality that feels like a hearth gone wild.
His breathing will change, faster, shallower.
His color will flush." He paused, his voice dropping. "Ye’ll ken."
"And then."
"Cool water. Clean linen. Keep him still if he wakes fevered, because a man waking in a fever daesnae ken where he is or who has him, and he’ll fight ye.
" He looked at her hands, noting the way they rested in her lap, motionless.
"Talk to him. Loud and clear. His name first, then yers. Give him a voice to find in the dark."
She nodded once, the motion sharp and final. She was storing the instructions away, locking them into the same place she kept the memory of the dagger and the smoke.
"And the arm," Oswin said.
She looked down at her sleeve. She had forgotten about the arm. The cut from Callum's blade had dried into a long, rust-colored stripe against the white linen of her gown.
"It needs cleaning."
"Later."
Oswin looked at her for a moment. He didn't argue further; he simply reached into the supply shelf and held out a folded strip of clean, white linen. "At least bind it. Ye’re nae useful to him if ye bleed out and go down as well."
She took the linen, the fabric cool against her palm. "Thank ye, Oswin."
He nodded and stepped back, retreating into the shadows of the room and giving her the table.
Giving her the man.
She cleaned the wound herself, her movements slow and reverent.
She had learned much from the healers at Kinlochaline, but more than that, she trusted the desperate love in her own fingers more than the skill of a stranger.
She wrapped the linen, neither too tight nor too loose, and when she finally straightened, she noticed for the first time that her own arm had been weeping red since the alley. It had dried in a long, rusty stripe against her sleeve.
She ignored it. It didn't matter. Only the man on the table mattered.
She pulled a heavy chair to his side and sat, her eyes fixed on his face. He was pale. Not the healthy paleness of the winter mist, but the specific, ghost-white of a body that had bled out its strength.
His breathing was slow.
Too slow.
She reached out, covered his hand with hers, and squeezed before she whispered, “If ye die on me, Ivar, I will find yer spirit wherever ye are and make ye regret it!”
The room was a hollow of silence, smelling of tallow and sharp herbs. Outside, the harbor was still a hive of noise. The creak of timber, the distant hiss of water on fire, but inside this room, time had stopped.
Torvald came to her side, his presence a stabilizing weight.
"Go," she whispered, not looking up. "They need ye out there."
"Aye." He lingered for a moment. "Dinnae worry. He’s harder tae kill than ye think, Matilda."
"I ken that."
"Aye," Torvald said softly. "I thought ye might." He touched her shoulder, a brief brotherly comfort, and left her alone in the amber glow where she held Ivar’s hand. She didn't count the minutes. She didn't have to.
She was still there when the fever finally struck in the dead hours of the night. A creeping, predatory heat moved up his arm and flushed his face. She changed the linens with tireless hands, bringing fresh water herself. She was pressing a cool cloth to his jaw when his eyes suddenly snapped open.
There was no gentle surfacing. He woke with the violent, total alertness of a warrior who had spent his life in the shadow of a blade. His hand shot out like a strike, catching her wrist before she could recoil. He surged upward, his left arm bracing against the table.
"Matilda." his voice was a raw, unrecognizable rasp. "They’ve got her... the passage..."
"Ivar," she said calmly, but when he tried to get up, she threw her weight against his chest, her hands flat against the heat of his skin.
He had no strength to truly fight her, but the sheer, fevered desperation of his movement nearly threw her.
"Ivar, stop! Look at me!" She said a little louder now, still trying not to scare him.
His eyes were glassy, burning with a light that wasn't there. He was looking past her, his mind trapped in the smoke and the blood of the alley.
"Look at me!" She took his face in her hands, forcing his gaze to find hers. She wasn't gentle. She was firm, the same way he had been with her in the storage room when her world was falling apart. "I am right here. Look at me, ye stubborn man!"
Something in his gaze shifted. The glassiness shattered.
"Matilda." It was different this time. A gasp of breath filled with relief.
"Aye." She kept her hands on his face, her thumbs stroking his cheekbones. "I'm here. Ye’re in Duart. Ye have a hole in yer side and a fever in yer blood, and if ye try to rise again, I will personally hold ye down."
His eyes finally focused, truly focused.
He looked at her. He looked at the dried blood on her sleeve, his mind filing the detail away even through the haze of pain.
"The men," he wheezed. "The passage."
"Dealt with. Torvald has the harbor." She held his gaze with a steady, unyielding fire. "It’s done, Ivar. We’re safe."
He stared at her for an eternal moment. His hand was still wrapped around her wrist, his grip no longer a strike, but a desperate anchor. She didn't pull away.
"Ye’re stayin'," he said, and for the first time, it sounded like a plea.
"Aye." She didn't add fluff or give him excuses. She gave him the only truth that mattered.
He fell quiet.
The fever burned high, red spots on his cheeks, and his eyes were still too bright, but they were his eyes. Sharp, present, and fixed on her like she was the only thing in the world worth seeing.
His grip loosened, his fingers sliding down until his thumb moved in a slow, agonizingly deliberate circle across the pulse point of her wrist.
"Ye’re bleedin'," he whispered.
"It’s naethin'."
A ghost of a smile touched the corner of his mouth, exhausted, dry, and entirely him.
"Aye," he murmured. "That’s what I said."
"Lay still."
"Matilda."
"I said lay still.”
He obeyed.
She pressed the cool cloth back to his brow and felt the tension slowly bleed out of him, the way the tide retreats from the shore. His hand remained open on the table, his fingers loosely twined with hers.
She stayed.
She didn't move as the amber light of the candles began to flicker and die. Then came the first, pale grey of the dawn. She sat in the silence and watched him breathe, thinking of a man who had walked into a wall of smoke just to find her.
She was still there when the sun touched the floor, and for the first time in eight years, she realized the dark hadn’t mattered.
She had everything she needed right there.