by S E Wendel
“Unbelievable,” Ennis said through chattering teeth. “W-we build this w-wall for defense a-and wh-what levels us? Damn p-plague. There’s no hon-honor dying this w-way.”
Lora glared at her. “You’re not going to die.”
Ennis scowled back. “Aren’t I?”
“No.”
The convulsions lasted through the afternoon, sweat oozing from Ennis’s skin. She stayed coherent most of the day. She was stronger than many of the others, and for those first hours, Lora clung to hope.
In the night, the rambling started, her teeth rattling in her mouth as she shivered, though she was hot to the touch.
Irina moved from their bedroom to Renata’s for fear she too would sicken.
“You’ll watch her?” Irina asked as she and Renata stood just beyond the open threshold of the room.
Lora gripped Irina’s arm in reassurance. “She’ll be well tended.”
“It’s from all that time in the town,” said Renata, almost spitting the words.
“She’s done what she could to help them, Sister, as we all have,” Lora said, trying to keep her voice above a hiss.
But Renata’s eyes held no compassion, only stared down cold and hollow and soulless. She moved away without another sound, like a wraith.
Irina lingered, her eyes glassy as they searched Ennis’s body for some small sign of hope. Lora wished Ennis could see it, for surely then they could reconcile. Love could never truly die once it had found its way into one’s heart. At least, that’s what she told herself. She repeated that over and over again as she watched Ennis, her slick body outlined in the feeble moonlight that crept into their room.
By morning, Lora could feel the heat radiating from Ennis without having to touch her. The air was fiercely hot, their small window providing no relief as the heat invaded, refusing to leave. The days seemed only to get hotter, and autumn was little more than a dream.
Lora herself felt feverish in the heat, and as she walked the lower hallway, she told anyone she saw to get water, to bathe the sick, to drench them if need be, to force water down their throats. If the plague, fever, or heat hadn’t killed them, thirst would.
“But you said—”
“The fever will burn the plague out, but this damn heat will burn them,” Lora snapped at Sister Jessamin. She tried to stifle her annoyance; she needed to be at the well, drawing water. She needed to be with Ennis.
Those healthy enough in the Haven followed her out to the well, where they drew buckets and buckets of water. And when the pails ran out, women went into town to fetch more. For her part, Lora trudged upstairs with her load, back to the last bedroom on the left.
She pulled Ennis up to sitting and began unbuttoning her dress. Sometimes Ennis sat there complacently, other times she fought her, clawing at the air and at Lora.
“Come on, just a little bit longer, then you can lie down again.”
Ennis finally lay back, naked. The lumps were engorged now, and a new one had sprouted just below her right ear, running almost the whole length of her neck. Her teeth continued to chatter, the gums bleeding.
After she tipped the bucket to Ennis’s mouth and made her drink long draughts, she ran a cloth over her sweating, shaking body, up and down, up and down.
“Lora, I didn’t know you were here.”
She found Ennis’s bleary eyes opened to mere slits, looking at her through a fog.
“Of course I am.”
“When did you come up to the Keep?”
Lora swallowed hard. “Just this morning.”
“But you waited until night to see me?” A crooked smile overtook her mouth. “You were planning with Father, weren’t you?”
“I can’t keep anything from you, can I?”
Ennis shook her head against the pillow. “You’re both horrible liars.”
“So are you.”
“’S true I s’pose.” She waved her arm, as if dismissing the topic, but her arm seemed heavy, leaden, and barely left the straw mattress.
She was mostly silent throughout the afternoon, but as evening fell, she grasped at the air, calling out for Lora.
“I’m here, Ennis, I’m right here,” she said, crawling across the floor to her.
Ennis clawed at her arm, nails digging into Lora’s flesh.
“Where is he? Lora, where is he?”
“Who, love? Where’s who?”
She howled and shook her head wildly. “Have they killed him?”
“No, they haven’t. No one would dare.”
Ennis seemed calmed by the words, and she slumped back against her pallet and was quiet again.
Lora slipped from the room when Ennis seemed settled and padded down the stairs. The Haven was as quiet as it could be full of fever madness.
She answered a knock at the front door and a woman stepped in, bearing a limp girl in her arms. The mother was tearstained, and Lora led her into the front hall, where the candles would afford her a better look at the girl. Lora’s heart sank to realize it was one of the first girls, one of the hunting party. There had been hope when her lumps eventually sunk and the fever cooled, but now, almost two sennights later, Lora knew the fever had come at a price.
It had burned her mind. Lora could see it in her half-starved features and chapped lips.
Violent sobs wracked the woman as Lora tried in the fewest words possible to explain that, if the girl hadn’t woken yet, she wouldn’t. This would be kinder than letting her starve. And so each of them took a side of a pillow and held it down against the girl’s lifeless face, stealing the last of her breaths.
It didn’t take long; the girl didn’t struggle. Lora kept her gaze on the mother, breaking a little when the narrow chest stopped rising. An inhuman wail clawed its way from the mother’s throat, and Lora wanted to join her.
Her heart was full, and in those long, dark hours she understood why some called it the most tender of muscles.
When she returned to Ennis, Lora set about soaking a thin sheet in the bucket before covering her with it from neck to toe. Her body shivered beneath the wet shroud, but Lora only tucked it beneath her before easing herself down onto her own pallet. Pulling off her dress and settling for a thin shift, Lora leaned back against the wall and watched.
Ennis talked now and again, but it was only single words that made little sense. Lora let them lull her to sleep, and between then and dawn she snatched a few hours of rest. Her name woke her with a start.
“Lora?”
She lurched up. “I’m here.”
With apparent effort, Ennis lifted her hand from the straw, and Lora hurried to grasp it in her own and squeeze it, as if that alone would keep her friend alive.
“I want you to promise me…”
“Anything you want.”
Ennis’s parched lips parted, but little more than a gurgle came out. Lora cradled her head in her hand as she lifted it to the bucket, and Ennis drained the contents.
“Promise me,” she said again.
“Promise you what?”
“I-if I die—”
“Ennis, don’t be dramatic,” she said with a shaky laugh she didn’t feel. “You’re not going to die.”
She just shook her head. “If I die, can you bury me facing north?”
Lora’s eyes slammed shut against the tears that sprang from the very dregs of her soul, and she forbade herself from shedding them. Forbade herself from giving in.
“I promise,” she whispered. “But you have to promise me something. You fight. Damn it all, you’re a Courtnay. Act like one and fight it.”
A frown creased Ennis’s wet brow. “I’m the Courtnay,” she said. “I’m supposed to order people about.”
“Well, you can’t do that from here,” Lora told her.
“Mm.”
The quiet that settled over them unnerved Lora, and she shook Ennis’s shoulder. “Come on now, talk with me a while. I’ve come all this way to visit you.”
“You’re good to visit,” En
nis said finally. Her eyes opened a crack. “I was thinking this morning—thinking that—it’s good you’ve come because I—will you tell him something?”
“Who, love? Your father?”
“No,” she said, frowning again. “Manek. Will you tell him?”
“Tell him what?”
“Tell him I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” She shook her again when Ennis wouldn’t answer. “Ennis, what are you sorry for?”
“I’m sorry we couldn’t meet some other way,” she said after a moment. “If we had, I think…” But she fell deeper into her fever, her shoulders and mouth slackening, and Lora buried her face in her hands.
As the morning lengthened, Lora could hear the women scratching at the ground, overcome with a feral hunger, looking for any morsel Mithria could provide. With almost all those in Rising either dying or tending to the dying, work had ceased. Gardens lay bare, the harvest rotting in the fields.
When rain came in the afternoon, it wasn’t sent from Ceralia to cleanse. The rain pounded on rooves and made a river of mud through the center of town that ran so high it seeped beneath doors and stained all underfoot. It filled the pits, bodies floating up and over the berm. The smell of mud and putrid flesh clung to Lora’s nose.
After the rain stopped, the sound of many hands pounding the front door drew Lora out of her exhausted stupor. She waited for someone to answer, but the pounding only grew louder. Finally, she headed down herself.
She found the Haven eerily still. No one walked back and forth between rooms. When she came upon the front hall, the whole floor covered in bodies, some sleeping, some dead, she spotted Renata in a sliver of space before the hearth.
“Can’t you hear them, Sister?”
Renata’s head slanted towards her, registering the sound of her voice, but she didn’t look up from the fire. “There’s nothing we can do.”
“We can offer comfort at least.”
“And who will comfort us?”
“Haven’t you taken vows to find comfort in the Mother? Pray to her now and get on with the duties you swore to do.”
“She doesn’t come to me. She’s abandoned us.”
“That doesn’t mean we abandon them,” Lora insisted. “The gods will do as they please. When they turn away, then we must take care of each other.”
“You’re very strong in your convictions.”
“One of us must be.”
Renata rounded on her then, eyes flashing. “They’re Lowland dogs, Lora.”
“You’re wrong,” she said, and turned to the front door.
A group of a dozen women and girls stood there, some supporting others, all with a wild, pleading look in their pale faces.
“We haven’t any more room here,” she said. “But if one of you would offer your house, we can set up there.”
Lora followed the women to one of the larger houses in the square where she set about organizing the house to care for more victims.
Only in the evening could Lora return to the Haven, and she nearly tripped through the threshold. Exhaustion settled heavily on her shoulders, but she was determined to see those patients who had shown promising signs. She was rewarded to find three of them through the worst of it, and one woman looked to have come through the fever with her mind still intact.
Satisfied, she climbed the steps on her way to the bedroom. As she walked down the hall, she spied a figure sitting before the open door to the last room.
“She’s gotten worse,” Irina said without looking up.
Flying into the room, Lora slapped her hands against Ennis’s face and felt the fever, still burning hot. She was completely still, no shivering, shaking, or chattering teeth. It was consuming her.
She emptied the remaining bucket water over Ennis, drenching her, the sheet, and the straw. Shaking Ennis’s shoulders, she wailed, “How dare you? You’re supposed to fight it!”
Pausing only long enough to shout at Irina to get more water, Lora raced back down the stairs with her bucket. She nearly slipped in the mud as she ran through the gates, flung open with no one strong enough to close them again. She didn’t stop until she reached the banks of the swollen river.
Scraping the bucket along the grass, she cleared it away so she could scoop handfuls of cold river mud into the bucket. Her fingernails were black with earth, her shift soiled up to the knee before she finished. It took effort to lift the heavy bucket, and her pace back to Rising felt torturously slow, but she wouldn’t stop, couldn’t stop. She wouldn’t lose Ennis, her friend, her sister. For all the times she wanted to shove an old sock in Ennis’s mouth, she was still all she had left in the world, of her life before.
Up the stairs she went again, down the hall, to the little bedroom where Ennis lay, still as death. Throwing the soaked sheet away, Lora piled handfuls of mud onto Ennis’s belly before spreading it around, coating her in layers of wet earth. She took heart when Ennis twitched at the sudden cold and applied more, covering all of her, even the tip of her nose.
“There are others who need your skills, Lora.”
Renata’s toneless voice made Lora jump, her muddy hands hovering over Ennis’s shins. The Lady Sister stood imperiously in the doorway, an eyebrow cocked in obvious distaste.
“You mustn’t forget them,” Renata said.
Lora’s eyes flicked up to the Sister and another kind of heat made her heart beat fast. “I won’t, Sister. But there are some beyond saving. Ennis isn’t one of them.”
“Maybe not yet,” said Renata, though her gaze took in Ennis’s mud-caked body and seemed unconvinced. “But everyone’s time comes, sooner or later. It is Ennis’s time.”
“And has the Mother told you this?” Lora spat. “I thought she wasn’t speaking to you. I thought you didn’t want me to help anymore Lowland dogs.”
“You are overwrought,” Renata said through pursed lips. “Rest. In a different room. There’s nothing you can do for Ennis now.”
“I’m not leaving her.”
“Lora, you are valuable to this Haven. I know you’re immune, but exhaustion is a dangerous bedfellow.”
“I’m not leaving her!” Lora said again. “You may wish to see Ennis dead and buried, but I swear to you now, I’ll not have it! She just needs more time—she should have more time.” Her voice cracked and tears slid down her face, but still she glared at Renata. “She’s my friend and all I have left. I’d trade anything, anyone for her life, so don’t you dare tell me to leave her now.”
“Don’t be cruel, Lora. One life isn’t worth more than another.”
“I don’t believe that,” she said, glowering at the Sister so that she would have no doubt who she wished to trade for Ennis.
Lifting her chin, Renata left without another word, and Lora turned back to the mud.
When she finished, she plunged her own face into a bucket of water Irina had left and drank greedily. She made Ennis drink the rest before collapsing onto her pallet, soiled shift and all.
That night she slept, relishing her deadened senses. Nothing woke her, not the moans of the dying nor the cries of those watching.
She dreamed a goddess came to their room that night, her flowing chestnut hair windswept and strewn with leaves. Her eyes were clear like morning dew, and the air around her smelled of freshly tilled earth. With a gentle smile, the goddess touched a soft hand to Lora’s forehead and she dreamed no more, just slept deeply with a soothing promise buoying her spirit.
Her eyes fluttered open. Soft morning light slanted in through the window, warming her shoulder. She blinked, wondering what had woken her. Her body ached, and without argument her head sank back onto her pillow.
“Lora?”
She sat straight up, eyes flying open. She beheld Ennis propped up on her elbows, looking down the length of her naked body, caked in hardened mud up to her temples.
“Why am I naked?”
Lora’s loud sob echoed in the room.
Ennis tried to smile, mud flaking o
ff her cheeks. “Don’t look at me like that. I wouldn’t leave you.”
She lunged into Ennis’s arms, burying her face against her neck. She couldn’t battle back the sobs anymore, and so the women wept, wrapped in each other’s arms. Her heart ached to hear the breath filling Ennis’s lungs. But there was also a sore spot on that tender muscle, right at its center, for Lora somehow knew what she would find downstairs. And when she finally braved the lower hallway, she found the four women who had been recovering all dead, their lifeless faces frozen in smiles as if they too had seen a goddess in the night.
Thirty-Eight
For thirty days and thirty nights, Ean could feel nothing but the suffering. It invaded all his senses, stealing his breath, his very thoughts, and rent a hole in him that would never be filled. After those first days, Ean began naming all his sufferings. The throbbing in his head was grief; the heat in his limbs was anger; the prickling along his skin was pain. But worst of all was that hole in his heart, black and fathomless. It pained Ean so much that he could not name it, could not even think of it for fear of losing himself to it. When the nameless thing grew too much to bear, Ean went to his Father and demanded, “What is this?” “It is despair, Ean. You will find it the heaviest burden of all.”
—from Sufferings of the Lost Son
Even the fire was subdued, crackling weakly and clinging to meager life as it ate away at the damp twigs. His chin resting in his palm, Adren Dunstan watched that little fire flicker, knowing it could never light all the dark corners of Dannawey’s inky great hall.
A sharp intake of breath drew his attention, and he looked across the table at Arion Morn. The man looked twenty years older than he truly was, deep lines running beneath his eyes. Adren even thought he saw silvery hairs near Morn’s temples. Morn still hadn’t touched the small meal his wife had put in front of him hours before, the meat long since gone cold and flavorless and the thin gravy broth gelatinous. Instead, he sat with his hands balled into fists on either side of the plate, staring at yet not really seeing the graying mutton.