by Taylor Hobbs
She had been willing to defend herself and attack those who meant to do her harm. Charlotte would have killed the soldiers who threatened her mother without a second thought. She was willing to do anything for Henry to get him out of prison. But to premeditate the slaughter of others who had done nothing malicious—Charlotte could not wrap her head around it. Innocents were always the true victims of war. Most people cared not for politics, wanting to be left to their business and their families. That was not a crime to die for.
Charlotte pictured Robin on the throne, having achieved the very goal that the rebels worked toward for over twenty years. Nothing would change within the country but the man who wore the crown. Robin wanted power for the sake of power, hidden behind the gauze of revolutionary thinking. That was not a good enough reason, in Charlotte’s opinion, to cause upheaval and massacre in Algonia. The cost of a rebel victory was too high for her to stomach.
Fawkes hated killing, but he hid it under the guise of apathy and disinterest in politics. He killed only when necessary, and Charlotte just couldn’t see Fawkes joining the fanatics and helping to plan murder on a massive scale. But how much of a leap was it, really, to go from using the brewing civil war for his own financial gain, and joining up with the cause? The reason handed itself over to Fawkes in the form of his dead wife, and rage now blinded him to reason. There was no point in arguing with his decision now, because nothing rational she said would reach him.
“You are right to be angry. There is nothing in the world to take away the pain you feel right now. I only ask that you sit and rest, just for a while,” she said.
Fawkes shook his head. “There is no time. We have to reach Robin and his people.” He moved to stagger back to Ghost, but Charlotte spoke up. “I can’t go any further right now,” she told him, realizing that his concern for her well-being was the only thing that could permeate his single-minded grief. Truth be told, she could probably have pushed herself a bit more before she dropped, but Fawkes didn’t have to know that. Her mentor’s stubbornness was going to get him killed, and she wasn’t above being overly dramatic to prevent it.
Fawkes sighed. “I think we have put a safe enough distance.” He looked longingly back toward the direction they had come, the direction of the castle. “What will they do with her body?” he wondered aloud. Then his knees buckled, and he pitched into Charlotte’s arms. He clung to her and sobbed, finally giving into his grief. Charlotte cried for his pain, wishing she could ease some of it and take the burden off of him. She cried for the unfairness of it all, for both her own lost innocence and Fawkes’. For all the people in the town who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. For her brother’s future, and the choices he had made. For the violence that seemed to follow Charlotte wherever she went. And for the fact that there was no good choice, no clear side to choose, in the war that had erupted.
Where do we go from here?
Chapter Seventeen
Charlotte awoke with Fawkes still in her arms, his body shivering while his hair dripped with sweat. His eyes stayed closed as she disentangled from him and then rolled him onto his back so she could get a better look at his shoulder in the pre-dawn light.
Pulling the neck of his shirt down, she let out a hiss. The wound had been reopened more times than she could count, and now it looked worse than ever. The flesh was angry and ragged, and Charlotte could feel the heat rising from it as her fingers danced over his skin. Fawkes groaned and mumbled unintelligibly. His body reeked of sickness, and Charlotte was at an utter loss.
Insecurity taunted her. Josephine would know how to heal him. Fawkes’ wife still haunted Charlotte, even more now that the woman had died a second time. Well, I’m alive and she’s dead. She chose to die. I chose to live. Measuring myself against her does nothing useful, she told herself. Charlotte’s determination sprung her body into action.
Leaving Fawkes wrapped up in as many extra blankets as she could find from Ghost’s saddlebags, Charlotte scoped out the area, searching for enough dry firewood to keep a blaze burning for hours. She then busied herself stripping the damp outer layers of bark. Water would not be an issue, as there was plenty of snowfall to melt to keep Fawkes hydrated. No new snow had fallen, though, and Charlotte wondered if their trail from the castle was obvious enough to lead any unwanted visitors to their makeshift campsite.
Her meager knowledge of medicinal plants did not prove helpful while surrounded by the wet, cold winter. She couldn’t identify anything useful under the blanket of white.
Charlotte briefly considered returning to Desmund’s cave, the one place she had felt truly safe since leaving her old home. He would know what to do to help Fawkes. The old man had done it before, when the Cloaked Shadow appeared outside his dwelling, barely alive and with a neck wound that would have killed a lesser man.
Desmund would have the tools, books, and facilities to restore Fawkes, but instinct told her that Fawkes wouldn’t survive that journey. They were weeks outside of and too many miles from the border. There was nothing surrounding them, except if Charlotte chose to return to a burnt and ravaged Numencaster. But physicians there would be plenty busy with their own people, and an outsider with a fever and an infected wound would be considered a lost cause.
The only viable option was to try to break Fawkes’ fever herself. In order to break his dangerously high temperature, Charlotte needed to stop the infection from spreading.
Once the fire was roaring, the last worry on Charlotte’s mind was attracting attention. Fawkes had grown worse in mere hours, and they were running out of time. She could not afford to be cautious anymore. He was delirious, alternating between shouting at ghosts and sobbing quietly to himself. He thrashed naked in his bedroll, chapped lips white amidst his red face.
Stripping Fawkes had been clinical rather than sexual, with Charlotte fighting back tears when she saw how many scars crisscrossed his body underneath fresh bruises and welts. Though she knew her own body looked no better underneath her clothes, it was something else to see the extent of their ordeal written out on the skin of a person she loved. Fawkes was weaker than she had ever seen him, in both body and mind. It was no wonder that the infection chose this time to pounce.
He called out to Josephine many times, which Charlotte expected. She focused on trying to make him more comfortable while keeping his head and limbs from flailing and injuring himself. During a particularly bad spasm, Charlotte could not hold Fawkes down with her arm strength alone. Without thinking, she straddled herself over him, her careful weight keeping him flat on the earth.
“Charlotte!” he cried, eyes still rolled back, but startling her half to death. “Charlotte, Charlotte,” he whimpered.
Hearing her name on desperate lips, Charlotte finally conceded that waiting any longer might kill Fawkes even faster than what she needed to do. She steeled her resolve while waiting for Fawkes to calm down underneath her. The shock and pain she was about to impart on a fragile body was something she hadn’t wanted to resort to, but there was no other choice.
Carefully climbing off of him, she pulled the knife from her boot and thrust the blade into the glowing coals. Waiting until the metal glowed red-hot, she removed the smoking knife by wrapping Fawkes’ discarded tunic around the hilt.
When Fawkes had been shot in the back, the arrow had gone almost completely through his shoulder. The head lodged itself in the front, in the thick muscle that roped between his chest and arm. Fawkes was forced to push the arrow through all the way before breaking the head off and pulling out the shaft. Charlotte needed to address both sides of the wound in order for her plan to work. She decided, after much consideration, that it would be better to turn Fawkes over and start with his back. Plus, it might be easier if she didn’t have to watch the agony on his face as she administered her primitive doctoring.
Charlotte returned the blade to the fire with a hiss before gently turning Fawkes onto his stomach. The wound looked better from the back than at the front. She would
seal it up on this end before tackling the infected flesh on his chest.
“This is going to hurt,” she whispered to him. “But I have to do it. It’s the only way to save you. I know right now you probably don’t want to be saved, but it’s in my hands. And I’m selfish. I don’t want you to die. For this to work, you need to fight the poison in your blood.”
Charlotte reached back into the fire and pulled the knife out. Steam rose from the red-hot blade and dispersed into the cold air. She swallowed audibly and braced herself for the scent of burning flesh. Lining up the tip of the knife with the jagged hole of his wound, Charlotte plunged it into his back.
Fawkes howled and bucked his head back, which Charlotte dodged to avoid a head-cracking collision. She held on and kept the blade inserted in the wound as it burned away the rotted flesh, sealing off the hemorrhaging veins on the inside. Without warning, she yanked it back out and thrust it back into the fire to reheat.
Beneath her, Fawkes whimpered, but lay still, as if his involuntary movements had cost him too much strength. Charlotte was thankful she didn’t have to see his face. She needed to close off the surface of his wound, too, and had to lay the blade flat against his skin.
It was so much worse than plunging the knife inside, because she had to watch as the metal burned off the festering skin and blistered instantly. Fawkes cried out before twitching and falling silent, unconsciousness carrying him away from the ungodly pain. If I work quickly, I can flip him over and fix the hole in his chest before he wakes back up.
Teeth gritted with determination, she did the same doctoring to his chest as she had done on his back. She moved efficiently, without the slightest tremor in her hands. The infected flesh was worse on the front, requiring more than two cauterizations both internally and externally. Though his skin was now black and blistering, Charlotte preferred it to the dangerous, angry red it had been before.
Wishing she had freshly-laundered linens to bandage him up, Charlotte settled on ripping up the cleanest looking fabric she could find from their gear. She rubbed and packed fresh snow into the wound first to help with the swelling. Fawkes started to stir with regained awareness at the icy contact, so Charlotte hurriedly wrapped the strips of fabric tightly from under his armpit, across his chest, and around his back.
“It’s all done,” she murmured, stroking sweaty hair back from his forehead. Her method of treatment was one of last resort, and she knew that Fawkes’ recovery would be fighting against all the odds. She had done the best she could, and she hoped with everything she had that it would be enough.
She stayed up by his side all day and into the night, battling against her own exhaustion. She watched him obsessively for any sign of improvement but found none. She poured as much water past his lips as she dared, but most of it ended up trickling down his chin. Fawkes seemed to stay the same, not getting any worse, but at the same time not healing like he needed to. He cried out in more feverish dreams, and Charlotte gave up trying to make sense of his ramblings.
Fawkes was caught in a state of limbo, with death and life pulling at him on either side. Josephine was on one side, and on the other, Charlotte refused to let him leave the land of the living. She needed to remind Fawkes why he should stay, to fight against the temptation to exchange pain for peace. Touch and love would remind him of what he would be giving up if he gave into the infection.
Charlotte stripped off her clothes, shivering in the freezing night air. Grabbing fistfuls of snow, she scrubbed the grime off of her body as best she could, the snow bath leaving her skin pink and fresh. Goosebumps pricked her body as she pulled back Fawkes’ blankets and settled in next to him, skin to skin. Her breathing was slow and even, and she felt his rapidly pounding heartbeat decrease just a fraction. The hitch that had been in his breath for two days disappeared as he relaxed into Charlotte. She clutched him, willing him to stay with her. “I love you. Be strong. I love you. Be strong,” she repeated, until she drifted off to sleep.
When Charlotte awoke and felt Fawkes’ skin on hers, she thought for a terrifying moment that he had died in his sleep. His skin felt so much colder than what she had grown used to, and it took the feel of his chest rising up and down for her to realize that his fever had broken.
He slept soundly in her embrace, without thrashing or fever dreams. Charlotte pulled back from him and deftly loosened one of his bandages to peek at the wound underneath. It seemed to be scabbing over the way it was supposed to, without a halo of infection surrounding it.
“I can feel that.” A hoarse voice interrupted her prodding. Fawkes eased from his side onto his back, and fixed Charlotte with a clear-eyed stare.
“Welcome back,” she said.
“It’s good to be back.”
“How do you feel?”
“Like I was dragged over hot coals.”
“You’re pretty close to the truth. Are you in pain?”
“My shoulder feels like it was pulled off my body and then reattached. Other than that, very weak.”
Charlotte propped her head up onto her palm. “Do you think you can take some food and water?”
Fawkes licked his papery lips. “How long was I out for?”
“Over two days.” Charlotte’s revelation caused a jolt of surprise through Fawkes’ body, and then a wince of pain crossed his face.
“I don’t remember what was real and what was a dream,” he confessed. “Did anyone come across us while I was unconscious?”
“Not yet,” Charlotte reassured him. Her relief at seeing Fawkes alive and on the mend was tainted by the anxiety that had been rolling inside of her while they had been sitting ducks. It was nothing short of a miracle that no search parties had stumbled upon them. A thin layer of fresh snowfall had fallen a few hours ago, covering their tracks, but she was sure that the king’s men were widening their search.
Fortunately, no one in the castle had seen Charlotte and Fawkes, and the discovery of Josephine’s suicide didn’t point to them. The king was hunting for the rebels who attacked his city, not the Cloaked Shadow. But the king had lost his strongest advantage, and without his seer, he was leading the charge blind. Charlotte needed to feel out Fawkes’ mindset, to see how he was coping, and to find out if he was still set on revenge against the crown. However, that was a discussion that could not be held on an empty stomach and would have to wait until after she prepared their breakfast.
Suddenly aware that both she and Fawkes were naked under the same blankets, she wondered how to disentangle herself from an uncomfortable situation. I’ve done nothing wrong, she told herself. He did the same for me. Only the first time it happened, they had both been clothed.
But as everything else lay bare and exposed between them, no secrets, shame, or hidden parts of themselves, it was almost appropriate that they were naked. Every other boundary had been crossed during their time together, so why should she feel ashamed about being seen without her clothes? If there was anyone in the world she was actually comfortable with seeing her naked, it was the man she trusted with her life. He knew her body, how she moved, every muscle. They had just awoken together, skin to skin, a rebirth as Fawkes decided to live. For Charlotte, that was more intimate than anything she had ever shared.
With that in mind, she started to maneuver out from the heavy weight and warmth that enveloped her, bracing for the snap of cold air that would hinder her as she struggled to put on clothes.
“Where are you going?” Fawkes asked, just as she pulled back the blankets.
“You need to eat to build your strength. We can’t stay here much longer—”
Fawkes interrupted her escape and pulled her back to him. Gently resting his forehead to hers, he stared straight into her eyes. “Thank you, for saving me.” This wasn’t the same man who, in a fevered frenzy, sobbed and vowed revenge; whose grief over reuniting with his wife only to have her die again consumed him. Something had happened to Fawkes while he dreamed, something that healed his mind and soul at the same time his bod
y recovered.
“What happened to you?” Charlotte whispered.
“Josephine,” he said, never taking his eyes from Charlotte. “As I lay between life and death, she came and spoke to me. She showed me what our life would have been like, another reality, one in which we were happy. And it was wonderful. I lived my whole life with her in an entirely different future. When it was over, she kissed me and left, and I felt complete. She gave me peace. And I understood that somewhere else, she and I had lived our lives without tragedy, and another version of myself was content. Part of me wanted to stay, but I did not quite fit. It was not right. I realized I belonged here, now, that I needed to be here with you.”
Charlotte was pretty sure her heart stopped beating, as she willed him to continue his explanation.
“I cannot explain it,” he went on. “Josephine’s death feels like it happened long ago, and I mourned her and loved her in another time. A part of myself is alive with her in that other world, and this part of me belongs here with you. I do not need to carry her with me anymore in this life.”
Charlotte tried to wrap her head around what Fawkes said, but his ramblings confused her more than reassured her. She pulled her forehead away from him, unwilling to believe what he said was true and that he had come to terms with Josephine’s death. Part of her waited for the fall out, for the slap in the face that would come when Fawkes realized that he couldn’t be with Charlotte and instead drowned himself in guilt again. Unwilling to risk her own heart in case he was still delirious, she simply stared at him and said, “Okay.”
But she had to admit, Fawkes really did seem changed, like a weight had been lifted from him. There were no traces of the Cloaked Shadow within him as Charlotte scrutinized his smile. He actually smiled at her. Maybe the fever damaged his brain.