Page 32 of Fallen
“Don’t get too close,” Fenella warned. “They’ve developed coughs as well.”
Craeg set his jaw. Fenella’s words weren’t making him feel any better—yet he’d never been one to shy away from unpleasant tasks, and so he ducked his head and entered the tent.
A single brazier lit the cramped interior, although the fug of peat-smoke couldn’t mask the sour odor of illness.
Two figures lay either side of the brazier, their bodies covered with blankets.
Craeg’s gaze swept from the face of one man to the other. They were both awake, both staring at him with fever-bright eyes, their faces taut with fear and pain.
“I’m sorry, Craeg,” one of them, the youngest of the two, croaked. “We didn’t mean to … but I fear we’ve brought the sickness here.”
“Ye have had contact with it at Dunan?” Craeg asked, fighting the urge to retreat from the tent.
“Aye,” the man rasped. “I served in the Dunan Guard … but when some of the other warriors fell ill, I panicked.”
Craeg went still. “Ye served MacKinnon?”
The man nodded. “Long have I wanted to join ye … to help the folk of this land rise up against him. With the sickness rife in Dunan, I took my chance.”
Craeg held the man’s desperate gaze, not sure whether to be angry, flattered, or exasperated. Right now, he felt all three emotions. After a pause, he shifted his attention to the second man in the tent. He was a hulking fellow, the sort that would have been useful in a fight, if he hadn’t been so ill.
“Are ye from the Dunan Guard as well?” he asked.
The man shook his head. “I’m a weaponsmith,” he said, his weak voice at odds with his powerful frame. “I lost my family to the sickness … and when it didn’t touch me, I thought that perhaps God had spared me.” The man halted before taking in a labored breath. “It seems I was wrong.”
Stepping out of the tent, Craeg sucked in a deep breath. He was grateful for the steadying aroma of burning sage, and that Fenella and Gunn were both waiting outside for him. Gunn had an arm around Fenella’s shoulders, and the pair of them wore somber expressions. Craeg’s breathing slowed. God knew how much contact these two had already had with the sick men.
They might be infected … and so might I now.
A prickly feeling rose up within Craeg then. Gunn and Fenella had been with him from the beginning. They were family to him.
“Does anyone recover from the plague?” Craeg finally asked, dreading the answer.
Gunn shrugged, his expression unusually helpless. Next to him, Fenella’s full lips flattened. “From what I hear, it spares some folk,” she replied, a husky edge to her voice … but few who develop the sickness appear to live through it.”
Bile stung the back of Craeg’s throat.Not what I was hoping to hear.
Inhaling deeply once more, Craeg shoved the slithering chill of fear aside; it was the last thing he needed now. Instead, he had to look for a solution. Perhaps there was some way these men could be cured. They needed a healer—a skilled one.
Coira. He didn’t like the idea of putting her at risk, yet without her skills, these men would most certainly die.
Craeg raked a hand through his hair and met Gunn’s eye. “Get Farlan … he’s the fastest rider amongst us. I need him to deliver a message to Kilbride.”
Coira straightened up, her gaze traveling over the girl’s slender form, to her flushed face. Lying upon a stuffed straw pallet, the girl wore nothing but a sleeveless shift. “My belly hurts terribly,” the lass groaned. “Make the pain go away, Sister.”
Coira’s breathing grew shallow, her chest tightening as she met the girl’s panicked gaze. She was only eight winters old; she didn’t understand what was happening to her. “I shall give ye some hemlock juice,” Coira murmured. “Hopefully, it will ease yer pain a little.”
The lass favored her with a tremulous, grateful smile, and Coira’s throat started to ache in response. Hemlock juice would only dull the pain, but it would not provide a cure.
It had only taken Coira a few moments alone with this girl and her mother, who was also poorly, to ascertain that the scourge had reached them. Both mother and daughter were at early stages, for there were no signs of swellings at the armpit or groin—the ‘plague boils’ that were said to form on the skin as the illness progressed. However, they both had a hacking cough, stomach pains and chills, and they were both horribly weak.
Also, Coira had noted that they had inflamed flea bites upon their arms, a sign that both mystified and confused her.
A few feet away, the mother started to cough, the sound muffled by the bundle of cloth she now pressed against her mouth. Coira had insisted they both did that, the moment she entered the dwelling.
She knew little about this illness, although she realized that most healers would try to fight it by bleeding the patient and rubbing certain herbs upon the skin. Coira—like her mother before her—wasn’t an advocate of bleeding. In her view, it merely weakened the patient.
With little news of the plague to aid her, she was forced to use her intuition now. Her mother had been a gifted herb-wife. She’d once told Coira that many illnesses were passed from one person to another by bodily fluid, or by breathing in the same tainted air as the afflicted.
