Chapter 9 #2
They guide him out of the pool, and dry him off.
Someone dabs oil on his sternum, on his forehead.
Someone else walks around him with a thurible in hand, sending smoke into the air, floral and green, thick enough to choke him.
They clothe him in a blue robe and leave his feet bare.
They give him a cup of water to drink, and it tastes like mint.
His head is heavy. He expects Nyx to mock him when he has trouble walking, but she doesn’t. She just takes his elbow and guides him toward the door.
“You’re all right,” she says. “One step after another.”
He feels a pulse of fear, but it’s far away, somehow. They walk toward the stairs together, and down a hallway, and another hallway. The lanterns catch his eye, smear together, glitter at the corners. Nyx ushers him through a set of double doors, and then he’s in a church.
It’s not really a church, but it feels like one. Holy. The floor is stone; the walls are wood. A light source glows between the gaps in the wood; he can’t identify it.
In the center of the room are two chairs facing each other. He knows one of them is for him.
He moves toward it, and he’s aware there are other people at the edges of the space, that one of them is Kesia, that another one is Ranos, but that doesn’t seem important anymore. He sits. The fear that was just a prickle a moment before seizes him like a fist.
A man steps forward, into the moonlight, and sits down across from Theren. He wears blue and copper. He takes down his hood, and Theren sees that he’s young, his cheeks rough with a beard, and there’s a tattoo on his throat that looks familiar. His skin is light brown.
“Nisov is my name,” he says to Theren. “And I’m a priest of the Fever.”
There’s movement in the room—-people making the sign of the Fever over their mouths. Ranos. Maybe Kesia. Theren clamps his mouth shut, an instinct.
“I know you’re not foolish enough to think you can stop breathing the same air as me,” Nisov says gently. “Your path is set. You can either move along it, or be dragged down it. But time doesn’t run backward, and neither can you.”
Theren fights the haze in his mind, fights to think this through. Surrounded by Talusar. Surrounded by wilderness.
“The Fever is your birthright,” Nisov says. “You are Talusar, and until this day you were a child, untested by the world. After it, you will be an adult, or you will cease to be. It’s not for us to predict.”
Nisov leans forward, so close that his face is just inches away from Theren’s. Theren is too dull--minded to pull away, though he knows Nisov’s closeness is a strategy: get as much of the Fever airborne as possible.
“The Fever always kills,” Nisov says. “To be infected with it is to face death. Some surrender, and some withdraw. But to face death is to change.”
There’s something about this that settles inside Theren like an anchor. He wants to change. He wants to become a person who wouldn’t run away from an oath seconds after swearing it. He wants to be someone who wouldn’t have fled the Talusar.
He wants to be anything other than Rava Vidar’s “Coward Knight.”
“You must welcome this change,” Nisov says, and he puts a hand on Theren’s knee. “There’s no other way.”
All of Theren’s life has been about avoiding this.
Cedre Station is a quarantine zone because the Cedrae don’t believe in acceptable losses.
They believe all they can do in the face of the Fever is fight to save as many people as possible.
Yet here he is, unnecessarily breathing the same air as someone who can pass on this virus, who may already have done so.
Nisov is right—-he can’t go back. It’s too late now.
“Some people choose a holy kiss,” Nisov says. “Though it’s not a requirement.”
Theren wants to laugh; he wants to scream. But he also wants this to be done, and done thoroughly. So he nods.
He nods, and Nisov angles his mouth over Theren’s and kisses him, gently. A simple press of his lips, but Theren’s fate is now sealed, for better or for worse.
“I believe you can survive this,” Nisov says as he pulls away.
The descent into fever goes in stages.
First is the warmth. It hits him in the late morning, when the sun is high.
The others are back from their own rituals, dressed in blue like him, smelling of anointing oil and smoke like him.
They’re all sleeping on their own thin mattresses, which are arranged in a row on the floor in the bare room where they’ll all die.
At first, Theren thinks the room is getting warmer from the heat of the sun. He sweats through his shirt, through his socks. Then he looks at the bowl of water in the corner of the room, with the cloths folded next to it, and realizes: this is how it starts. The Talusar know.
He wets one of the cloths and lays it across the back of his neck.
By the time the others wake up, sweaty and confused, he’s already moved on to chills. His body shakes, and he ignores it, fetching water for the others.
“Gee, thanks,” Fenn says, as Theren passes him a wet washcloth. “Coward.”
“Leave him alone,” Lisia says. She’s leaning against the wall, her eyes closed, the wet cloth on her forehead.
Fenn asks him, “Do you know what happens next? Did they tell you?”
“What happens next,” Theren says, “is we die.”
Next come the aches. For him, the pain is just enough to make him restless.
For the others, it’s agony. They whimper and moan, sweat and pace. Contorting. It’s a few hours before he realizes it’s the elixir in their blood causing all the pain. His mother told him it was agonizing when the Fever devoured elixir.
When he turned sixteen, his mother made him promise he wouldn’t get Imbued until after he took his oath. Was she already planning to betray Cedre then?
The blue--robed attendants from the baths come in to check on them after a while. They watch the other Knights pace and weep, mutter to each other about how far along they are. When they reach Theren, the old woman looks down at him and clicks her tongue.
“He’ll be dead soon,” she says. “You can see it in his eyes.”
It’s almost a comfort.
That night, he starts to hallucinate.
He wakes to his mother sitting at the end of his bed, looking up at the stars, at the glow of Cedre Station. Moonlight glints on her teeth. He only knows it’s not really her because of what she’s wearing—-her Cedrae clothes, a crisp white shirt and blue stone earrings.
“I thought I had prepared you to act,” Kesia says. “I thought my instruction would foster bravery in you. But I suppose you can never know what someone is made of until they’re tested.”
Kesia’s eyes flash with anger, and she lunges at Theren, seizing her son’s shoulder and pinning him to the mattress. She digs her thumb into the wound there, and says, “You have been tested. You have been revealed.”
Theren bites down on his fist to keep from screaming.
Kesia soon morphs into Zuza, who skips from Knight to Knight, as if she’s checking on them, laying a hand on Maeve’s damp chest as she thrashes on the ground, peering into Lisia’s ear as she chews on her own fist. Fenn tosses and turns, moaning.
Zuza says, “Serves him right. Hope he dies.” She pauses, and laughs. “I guess you’re all going to die. But I hope it takes, for him.”
“Don’t say that,” Theren replies.
“Why not?” She grins. “I mean it.”
On the bed next to him, Maeve turns over. She’s shaking so hard her teeth keep chattering.
Maeve says, “Theren. You’re hallucinating.”
“I know,” Theren says. “But she shouldn’t say that.”
“I tried to make it work. I tried for so long. But I was lonely,” Kesia says.
She’s not wearing Cedrae clothes this time.
She’s in the clothes Theren saw earlier, black pants tucked into boots.
Hair pulled back. She has her head on the mattress next to Theren’s, her body mirroring his.
Their hands are right next to each other.
“I thought it would be different there, on Cedre Station,” Kesia says.
“I thought I would be freer there. But I was lonely, instead. And then, when the other Knights came of age . . . I saw how they lived. How the Sword just used them as props in a political game—-like someone who teaches a wild animal a trick and wants you to be impressed, not with the wolf, but with the man. I didn’t want you to be her wolf. So I started to pursue other options.”
“I’ll never understand,” he says, “no matter how many times you explain.”
“Listen.” She lays a hand on his cheek, and he wonders, not for the first time, if she’s actually here.
“Rava won’t just release you, any of you.
She can’t execute you once you survive the Fever—-it’s against Talusar law.
But she can find an excuse to lock you in the Crucible.
That’s a prison—-and a fighting arena. You’ll never survive it.
None of you. So when you wake up, you have to pretend something has changed.
Pretend you’ve forgiven me, so you can go with me.
You can hate me all you like after that, as long as you do it. Understand?”
She seems so real.
“I’m about to die,” he says. Her hand feels cold, and then warm.
“It’s all right. I was dead once,” Kesia says. “I came back. So will you.”
“Maybe.”
“Theren,” Fenn says. “Shut up.”
“You’ll talk to them, too,” Theren says. “You’ll see.”
He never finds out whether she’s real or not. Because soon after that, his heart stops, and that’s all.