Chapter 23 The Grippe
The Grippe
He spun in and out of fever. His body ached, sweat, flushed, shivered.
His throat burned; the cough woke him in the middle of the night.
Then the middle of the day. Then a hand on his forehead woke him, a damp cloth dragging across his burning skin.
He woke drenched in sweat and found a clean change of clothes within reach of his hands.
Woke and found a mug of cooled willowbark tea.
Woke and found a pitcher of water. A bowl of broth.
Woke and heard Ayla’s voice, humming a northern song he’d known his whole life.
Reached for her, like he was swimming through thick honey and could barely move, and she was the surface, the light, the air.
Touched nothing. Let his hand fall back down to the bed and tumbled down into the dark, fevered abyss of his nightmares, where every face was Sir Hannes of Ashbrin's and every fist was his brother’s.
Every time he woke his cup was full, his fire burning hot.
The blankets on top of him changed, but not the sheet beneath him.
He migrated to the other side of the bed, shivering, and wondered if it was poison after all, for his head felt like it was wrapped in layers of wool, and he was starving, but he did not want to eat.
Mercy. She could have killed him. Easily. A hundred times. Or even simply left his body to its own devices. And yet she did not.
And then it became a little easier, his sleep less restless, his waking hours more lucid. It had been two days, Niel thought, or maybe three, but they had been brutal. The only reason he knew Corin had not taken the castle was that Niel was still alive and sleeping in the lord’s bedchamber.
She came once more. He wasn’t in bed this time, but standing, though tentatively, his legs still weak, one hand on the wall.
He wasn’t sure where he was going yet, only that if he could stand, he was going to.
Before this he’d had to crawl if he wanted the latrine. Standing on two legs was a revelation.
“You lived,” she said, pausing in the doorway with a mug in her hands and a soft smile on her pink lips.
“In large part, I expect, due to you.”
“Not at all. I only checked on you a few times.”
“Ah.”
He didn't believe that. She colored every memory he had of his illness. Hadn’t he even seen her, sitting in the corner chair and reading a book?
Hadn’t she been there every time he woke?
He’d heard Kerr and Larkin’s voices, at one point, distantly, and Ayla answering them, firm, guarding his door as he’d asked her to do.
“Do you feel much better?”
“I feel as though I’m alive,” he told her, suddenly oddly shy, as if she’d seen inside him. “But still as weak as a foal. It would still be a good time to poison me, if you were planning on it.”
“Don’t sound hopeful,” she said, but she didn’t flinch at the suggestion. In fact, she looked less frightened of him than she ever had. “Well, if you can stay out of bed for a time, I’ll change the sheets.”
“I cannot ask you to do that.”
“Someone has to. A little work won’t kill me. I wasn’t born noble, Lord Niel.”
He wetted his lips, and found himself leaning against the wall, his legs trembling with a weakness he hoped she did not notice.
It was the oddest thing. Normally, he didn’t want his weakness seen because he knew it would make him a target again; knew what it meant to be preyed upon.
But for some reason, with Ayla, it was faint embarrassment that made him wonder how pitiful he’d looked in bed, and whether she still saw him as a man now that she’d seen him fevered and shuddering.
“No title. Just Niel. Please,” he said quietly.
Ayla blinked and slowly nodded.
“Well. Niel. I’ll bring water, too. In case you’d like to wash up.”
She was as good as her word, and he thanked the stars she left him alone to wash, and wasn’t there to watch as he crawled along the floor back to the bed, his energy completely spent.
He fell back into another fevered dream, but did not sweat.
When he finally woke, only a little of the weakness remained.
It was mid-morning of the next day, judging by the angle of the shadows out the window.
Ayla was not there. And he was desperately hungry for real food.
He brushed his hair, which was knotted but clean after last night’s washing, and shaved the itchy beginnings of a beard away, and put his boots on for the first time in days.
His swords and knives were as familiar as limbs, but he stared at the armor for a long while, then left it, not yet feeling up to the extra weight.
The fire in the sitting room was out, and had been for some time. It felt odd to walk the halls of the castle, not knowing what had happened in his absence.
Kerr was in the kitchen, slicing an apple with a beltknife while a huge pot of stew bubbled over the fire.
“Is that good to eat?” Niel asked, his stomach growling.
Kerr glanced over his shoulder, apple slice dangling from his mouth, and jumped from his chair.
“My lord. You’re awake.”
“No need to talk about it,” Niel said awkwardly. “I see the castle hasn’t fallen.”
“It’s been blessedly quiet,” Kerr admitted.
“Anything of note?” He wandered to the stew, led by his nose, and located a bowl. Sitting opposite Kerr, he hesitated for a moment, then dug his spoon in. His own men weren’t going to poison him. And after the last few days… he didn’t think Ayla was, either.
“The grippe took Cademond.”
“Badly?” Niel asked.
There was a moment’s awkward silence, Kerr’s face grim.
“Yes, badly. I mean that he died. Just before noon yesterday.”
“Fuck,” Niel frowned down at the soup, then forced himself to meet Kerr’s eyes. “Anyone else—?”
“No. He’d never really recovered.”
Both men sat in silence for a long moment. The soldier had been in poor health since the forced march Niel had taken them on through the Kettalist’s early blizzards. If he’d retreated sooner from Ironcliff, Cademond would be alive, and many other men besides. Niel had failed them.
But if he'd been smarter, he wouldn’t be here. In Blackfell. With Ayla.
The guilt was heavy and sour, despite that fact.
“It snowed. A lot,” Kerr said, breaking the silence.
“Nearly up to the waist. Too much for the fuckers to trouble us, I guess. They must be having fun in those tents. We spent all of yesterday shoveling. A handful of others are ill now, but none so severely. Larkin’s better, finally, and he says your Ashbrin knight is healing, too—oh.
And one of the kitchen servants must have had the castle keys all along. ”
Niel, chewing a piece of smoked beef, raised an eyebrow.
“We found it in here, the day they left,” Kerr added.
Niel followed the point of Kerr’s finger to the stack of plates against a far wall. He sighed, doubting very much it was the servants who’d left it there. Not that she’d ever admit to it.
He really ought to stop letting Ayla surprise him, but she seemed quite good at it.
“Armory’s nice, now that we can get in there. We’ve got a few hundred more arrows to work with. Some swords you might like to take a look at,” Kerr continued.
“He’s in the dungeon, then?” The vegetables in the stew were a little under cooked, but still edible.
“Aye. You want to talk to him now?”
“Tomorrow,” Niel said quietly. “Maybe. Not yet.” He still felt weak.
He was not ready for the ordeal of talking to an Ashbrin.
Niel wasn't going to ransom Bradhan, for all he knew the Ashbrin knight was a good friend of his brother Corin's.
Bradhan's fate was to die on Niel's sword.
But Niel wanted to hear the man admit what he knew first, and apologize for it.
Surely the Ashbrin family was aware of what Niel had endured.
Surely they had sheltered Hannes, and kept his secrets.
Niel felt a need to know, and to understand, but it would not be an easy conversation for him. “What else?”
“Nothing,” Kerr said with a shrug. “They haven’t moved, on the other side of the wall. We’ve worked out a schedule, for the cooking and the laundry and such, now that we’re without the servants.”
“Good to know you don’t need me.”
“Feel welcome to take sick more often. The lady scarcely left your side.”
“I wasn’t sick, I was…” Niel started, but Kerr only raised an eyebrow, and he trailed off in a mutter.
He didn’t summon Ayla for lunch. She’d done fine getting her own food in the days he’d been ill, and he could no longer pretend their meals were a necessity.
Not when she’d had two day’s worth of chances to kill him while he lay completely vulnerable.
He didn't need to haunt her any more than he already had. The fact that she didn’t appear at his door with more tea and food was proof enough to Niel that she needed a break from caring for him.
For supper Bode and three other men had made a sort of deflated, burnt barley bread and a large vat of soggy root vegetables with what he charitably thought had once been a ham, or at least something that, in a vague sense, resembled a ham.
“Has Lady Blackfell eaten?” Niel asked as he frowned down at the bowl in his hands, standing in the middle of the kitchen. His legs trembled slightly, and he wished he could take one of the kitchen stools, but feared for the men to know how weak he still was.
“Haven’t seen her today,” Bode answered, sawing one of the bread loaves into slices as a charcoal crust flaked off it.
“And when are you on the cooking schedule next?”
“Uh, a week, I think,” Bode answered, tossing the slices of bread into a basket and reaching for the next loaf.
“See to it that you are not,” Niel instructed firmly.
She still hadn’t arrived by the time he finished.
Hoping he wasn’t overstepping his bounds, he climbed to her bedchamber. While normally he could have trekked up the Kettalist with little complaint, now just the winding stairs of castle Blackfell made his muscles ache.
He knocked on her door and waited. There was no answer.
“Lady Blackfell?” He cracked the door open. It was dark inside the room, and frigid, no fire burning. The shutters were open to the snowy wind. He frowned, and wondered where else she’d be if not in her room—the solar, perhaps?
He was pulling the door closed when he heard a soft cough from the dark bed. The sound turned his blood to ice. Ill. She'd taken ill.
Niel threw the door open and crossed to the bed, his heart in his throat as his eyes made out the shape of her body in the dark. In a fit of fever she’d knocked most of the blankets off the bed. Now she shivered under only a thin covering.
If she hadn’t coughed. If he hadn’t heard her…
“Luck and Mercy,” Niel said, as he grabbed the blanket off the ground to pull back over her.
She needed warmth, needed a fire. Medicine.
Why the fuck hadn’t anyone lit a fire for her?
Why in Mercy’s name was she lying alone, unattended?
The pitcher beside her bed was as dry as the hearth was cold. “Ayla, answer. Can you hear me?”
Because the servants were gone, he realized. And he had not checked on her. She’d tended him, and he’d abandoned her in return. He hadn't seen her since the night before. How long had she lain unattended in the cold?
She didn’t answer him, or stir. He pulled the blanket over her and realized only then that the sheets were damp from her sweat, turned icy-cold by the winter air.
She was freezing to death.
His first instinct was that he had to warm the room—close the wooden shutters, build the fire, pack the bed with heated stones.
His second was that she needed dry sheets, not ones she’d sweated through, and the lord’s bedchamber had a glass window instead of one open to the elements.
Neil had been in there before supper, and had only banked the fire.
The room would be warmer than hers. And it was the better of the two rooms, the hearth and bed both larger.
Faster to carry her there than to make her warm here.
“Forgive me,” Niel said, and reached beneath her to gather the woman into his arms. She was dressed only in the simple woolen shift she must have worn beneath her usual gowns, and her head lolled against his chest as he cradled her to him.
Turning, legs still aching and threatening to give out from the remnants of his own illness, Niel carried her as quickly as he dared down the stairs and to his room.
He could feel her dress was damp with fever sweat.
Curse it. By the torchlight in the hall he could see her lips were pale, blue-gray.
Niel felt as though each breath stabbed shards of glass into his heart, desperation clawing into him.
Cademond had died of the grippe, which meant it was capable of killing.
But not her. He would not let it.
He burst into his room and set her carefully not on the bed, but on the heavy furs before the fire. Crouching over her, he quickly stoked the banked red embers back into a blaze, until the hearth roared and spat golden sparks, sap crackling and fissures of the dried wood steaming.
“It isn’t right, putting you on the floor. But the fire seemed a better bet than the bed to get you warm,” he said, taking another log and feeding it to the already rampant blaze.
Sitting back on his heels, Niel studied her helplessly.
After a moment he grabbed a blanket from the bed and tucked it around her, pulling it tight to her body.
She stirred when he pressed the blanket against the side of her hips, and he froze, staring at her face for signs she was waking. But Ayla settled again.
If he had only checked on her earlier in the day. He should have gone to her when he woke. She was sick, he was certain, only because she’d tended to him. And it would be on him if she… but no; he couldn’t think about that.
Cademund had already been weak. Ayla had been strong, young, healthy. She’d be fine.
“You have to get better,” he told her quietly, his voice barely a breath. “There’s no choice, Ayla. I only just came to know you.”
He did not walk to the hall. He ran, and burst out of the doorway with his hands gripping so tight to the frame it might have splintered beneath him.
“Is anyone ware?” he called.
“Aye,” a voice called from around the hall. “Lordship?” the soldier’s head poked around the edge of the hall.
“Find Larkin,” Niel snapped. “Send him up. Now.”