Page 49 of Heart of Winter
“We thought he would die, once, when I was ten,” she said, and the furrow between Erik’s brows deepened. “But he didn’t. I’m sure he won’t. We’ll make him comfortable, and the fever will run its course, like it always does.”
He looked unconvinced.
Revna moved around the bed to stand beside her brother; laid a hand on his shoulder. “It’ll be fine, Erik,” she said in a low, soothing voice. “I’ve already sent for Olaf – no one handles fever better, you know that. We’ll have him back on his feet and being impertinent in no time.”
Erik stared at Oliver’s face, still touching him, stricken.
Revna turned her head and caught Tessa’s gaze. Something hard flickered there, like a warning, and Tessa was taken aback by it.
Revna turned back to her brother, hand tightening on his shoulder, and Tessa remembered the calluses – the evidence of sword work. This was a woman who would protect her family from any threat.
Tessa wanted to tell her that they were on the same side – on the side of relatives with much to lose. But for now, she kept silent.
~*~
After a thorough examination, Olaf pronounced the patient as exhibiting the classic signs of marsh fever. He carefully spooned feverfew tea down Oliver’s throat, applied cool compresses to his forehead, throat, and chest, and left them with a list of instructions that Tessa took with a capable-looking nod. He promised to be back soon to check on him, but, upon his parting, advised them that there wasn’t a great deal any of them could do aside from work to keep his fever down and ensure he stayed hydrated with water, broth, and honey.
Tessa transformed immediately, from shy, retiring girl – though Revna was certain that was simply her good manners taking the fore most of the time – to a brisk, efficient nurse. A maid – Thyra – with some physician’s training came to assist, and things seemed to be well in hand. Revna was worried for Oliver, for she’d grown quite fond of him, and his cousin, but she knew that only patience would get any of them through the fight that lay ahead – the fight Oliver must wage with his own body.
It was Erik that gave her the most worry.
It took more effort than it should have to tow him from the room. In the hallway, Revna looped her arm through his, locked her fingers around his wrist, and pulled him unresisting down to his study. He walked along beside her, but without his usual purposeful stride, the one that always left her picking up her skirts and hustling to match. This evening, he came along docile as a lamb, and when she finally let go of him, with the study door shut and holding the world at bay, she turned to him already knowing what she’d find on his face.
It was worse than anticipated, though. That withdrawn, faraway stare, the glazed eyes, the lax jaw.
“Erik.” She took both his large, rough hands into her own, where they lay limp and unresisting as dead things. “Erik, it isn’t the same. It isn’t the same at all.”
She’d been only a baby when their eldest brother, Herleif, died of a sudden, terrible fever, and so she hadn’t been there with Arne and Erik when they’d stood outside the closed chamber door and begged to be allowed to see their brother. Hadn’t caught a glimpse of a flushed-red face tossing on a pillow, nor heard the low, pained moans that had been the last sounds he’d uttered, but she knew that was where Erik walked now, in the past with ghosts. There were so many of them, and she knew that Oliver, pink and sweating and unconscious, looked bound to join them.
His gaze shifted, restless and unseeing, over the room before landing on their hands, and then shifting to her face. It cleared, then, and his jaw tightened, and his hands came alive in her grip. “No, it’s not,” he ground out, savagely – too savagely, a harsh cover for his inner turmoil. “That was my brother, and this is just some soft, foreign stranger.” He twisted out of her grip, and stalked across the room toward the sideboard, and the decanters there.
Revna sighed and settled into one of the chairs by the fire. Tossed another log onto the dwindling stack and watched it send a shower of sparks up the chimney. She heard wine being poured – a more than generous portion of it. “You might be older than me, but that doesn’t make you wiser. Don’t play him off as a ‘soft, foreign stranger,’ at least not in front of me.”
The decanter thumped down heavily, followed by the sure tread of his boots. A goblet appeared in front of her, and she took it with brows lifted in surprise. “Thanks.”
He grunted a response and braced a hand against the mantelpiece, gaze fixed on the fire, brow furrowed. He sipped his wine and didn’t comment on her statement.
She wasn’t going to let him avoid it that easily. “What I meant,” she said, “is that Herleif’s fever was sudden, and overwhelming, and came with a host of other complications. He had scarlet fever – it was not a chronic, recurring condition like Oliver’s. He may not be built like all you great oxen here, but he’s otherwise strong, and healthy. He’s pulled through this many times before, and there’s no reason to think that he won’t now.”
He slanted her a dark look.
“Don’t pretend indifference. You were the portrait of a prince in a fairytale just now, carrying him that way.”
His gaze dropped again, a muscle in his jaw pulsing as he swallowed. His hand tightened on the mantel, rings scraping at the wood.
“Erik.” She softened her voice. “I know you. I know that under that cloak of dignity and responsibility, under all your grief and anger, that you are still my wild, sweet brother. Rune reminds me so much of you, sometimes–”
“Rev.” It was a warning.
One she ignored. “I’ve seen the way you look at him. It doesn’t matter if he’s soft, or foreign, or strange, you are utterly charmed.” She sat forward. “When you look at him, the years and the worry melt off your face.”
He turned toward her, and it broke her heart to see that, beneath his veneer of bristling aggression, he was frightened – not just for Oliver’s health, she didn’t think, but for his own heart. His own sense of equilibrium. “I am a king. It’s my job to worry. I am all that stands between Aeretoll and the wilds of the Waste, and the hatred of the South.I” – he jabbed a finger roughly at his own chest – “am the great wall that keeps both sides safe from one another. And walls do notcareabout fairytales.”
“Yes, you’re a wall. A bloody thick one. But you’re a man, too, and you deserve to want things for yourself.”
He grimaced and faced away. “I am duty-bound.”
“To never love? To never laugh? Erik, in the short time that he’s been here, you’ve smiled more than you have in–”
