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The first sign that something is wrong is when Palamedes wakes to find Camilla turned away from him instead of curled into the crook of his neck. The second is that, as far as he can tell, she’s still asleep.
He sits up as slowly and quietly as he can, his eyes tracing the rise of his wife’s shoulder, the shell-like curls of her fists where they’re bunched beneath her chin. Her face is angled into the pillow, her breath coming in short, stuffy wheezes. He’s halfway to brushing the hair from her face when he thinks better of it and he slips from the bed instead, disquiet growing when she doesn’t stir even slightly. He shoves his glasses onto his face, stuffs his feet into his slippers, and pads out to the kitchen.
He fixes his gaze on the stovetop to keep it from darting away every few seconds: to the bedroom door, to the porch that overlooks their backyard, to the empty places Camilla should be. The water heats in agonising increments, each tiny bubble ballooning for what feels like an aeon before it detaches itself from the bottom of the pot and floats to the water’s surface. Knots of worry simmer and bubble in his stomach the exact same way. Palamedes does his best to breathe through them but they swell and swell, pushing up through his chest to cluster in his throat, where he swallows them back down and starts the whole process afresh.
A handful of agonising minutes pass. The water boils. He pours it into the waiting teacups, leaving Camilla’s to brew for twice as long as his own, the way she likes it. He trains his eyes on the miniature kitchen hourglass, but his ears cannot be so easily dissuaded; they remain pricked for any slight sound, any shift of movement from the direction of the bedroom.
They catch nothing.
By the time he lifts the strainer from Camilla’s cup of tea, the concern roiling through him is bordering dangerously close to outright alarm.
“Cam?”
He places the cup on her beside table, whispers her name again as he lays a hand tentatively across her forehead. Her skin is dry and hot, sun-blanched paper beneath his fingertips.
“Cam? I brought you some tea.”
Camilla makes a squawking mewl and rolls onto her back with her eyes screwed shut. A monstrous fist, cold as ice and hard as bedrock, closes around Palamedes’ heart.
“Dear one, what is it, what’s wrong?”
“Throat hurts,” she mumbles, her voice low and thick with more than just sleep. His mind immediately begins a sprint through all the maladies a suddenly painful throat might indicate, careening from one to the next until it runs smack-first into the most obvious: Camilla told him last week that a volunteer at the settlement offices had been fretting over something they kept calling dreaded ague, which she’d eventually worked out was simple flu.
He perches on the edge of the bed and leans low over her, listening for the light rattle in her breath that will prove him right. Her eyes remain tightly closed, puffy and pink along the seam of her eyelids. She can’t be properly awake yet — she’d never dare admit it to pain if she were — so he tugs the tangle of blankets smooth and tucks them gently around her, as though she’s just getting into bed rather than due to rise from it.
Camilla shifts beneath his touch, swallowing with a miserably pinched frown that pierces him through. Carefully, he nestles two fingers against her pulse-point. Her heartbeat rushes toward them, too fast beneath her swollen lymph glands.
Trying very hard not to jostle the bed, Palamedes climbs to his feet again.
“Wait here.”
He realises, as he strides down the hall, how foolish that must have sounded; Camilla is so lethargic she probably can’t even sit up.
The fist in his chest squeezes again. He quickens his pace.
Despite his fears — or perhaps in spite of them — she is sitting by the time he returns, propped up against a short tower of pillows. Her eyes are heavy-lidded but alert enough to glower at the medicine box he’s carrying. Palamedes sits it down to the left of the teacup and casts his eyes over her in dismay. Her symptoms are already worsening: there are high spots of colour in her cheeks, her rapid pulse is clearly visible in the crease of her carotid, and her face is glistening with a sheen of sweat that, under normal circumstances, might send his own heart-rate up a notch. Under these, it sends it racketing sky-high with panic.
Trying to ignore everything except her eyes, which are glued balefully to his face, he draws in a deep lungful of air.
“There’s tea for you here.” He nods to the cup at her elbow. “Try to drink some?”
“Don’t want any.”
Her words are hoarse, laced with that stubborn undertone she adopts on the rare occasions she’s decided to pick a fight. He keeps his own light, burying a sudden and all-encompassing urge to fold her up in his arms. Cam, when she’s well, will submit to his whims of affection with a fond roll of her eyes and a half-voiced mutter. Cam, unwell, will push him away and then sulk for hours that he drove her to it.
“Alright, I’ll bring you water instead.”
“Don’t need to bring me anything. M’getting up in a minute.”
She sinks deeper into the pillows, all evidence to the contrary; her eyes slip shut as she coughs and takes another wretched, snuffly breath. Palamedes silently curses himself for not grabbing the stethoscope while he was rummaging in the bathroom cabinet.
“Cam, I don’t know if it’s escaped your notice,” he sits gingerly on the edge of the bed and lays a hand lightly over one of her own, “but you’re not well. You need fluids.” He risks leaning closer, reaches up to press his other hand to her forehead, which elicits a faint scowl. “And antipyretics.”
“I know how to treat a cold, Warden,” she replies, and then — proving that she absolutely does not — shoves listlessly at the covers and attempts to swing her legs around him and out of bed. “I just need to get moving.”
“You need to rest!”
“What time is it?”
He glances to the antique clockwork strapped to his wrist, a gift from his father after they’d first settled here. “Just past eight.”
“There you go. I just spent nine hours resting.”
“You spent nine hours incubating a virus, more like. Camilla, enough. Lie there and rest, go back to sleep if you can, but I forbid you to get out of that bed.”
Camilla turns the full force of her glare on him for ten seconds, then slumps back against her nest of pillows. “I had things to do today,” she says irritably, plucking at the blankets. “The secondment papers.”
”They can wait.” He pulls a slim foil strip from the medicine box and holds it out for her inspection. “Can you swallow these, or should I get water for the soluble ones?”
“They’re fine.”
He pops two of the micro-tablets from their blister seals before she can argue that she only needs one and passes them to her with the cup of tea. While she sips it, squinting suspiciously at the tablets in her palm, Palamedes wanders to the far corner of the room, divests the armchair of the various jackets, belts, and books which adorn it, and drags it over to the side of the bed. He retrieves his latest book from his own bedside table and flops into the chair just as Camilla swallows the first of the tablets.
Her eyes flicker to his. He quietly straightens his glasses, then opens the book.
“Oh, fine,” she huffs and swallows the second tablet.
Palamedes smiles, leans back in the chair, and begins to read.
His eyes start drifting back to her before he reaches the end of the first paragraph. He gathers his concentration, forcing himself to finish the entire page before he allows himself a quick glance upwards. Camilla’s still sitting there, watching him, the cup cradled between her hands. He does the same again, then a third time, until it becomes a sort of guessing game, What’s Cam Doing Now? Three pages: she’s shuffled down the bed a touch. Four pages: her head is lolling back against the pillows. Five: she’s drumming her fingers idly across the tops of her thighs.
Six: her eyes are closed.
At the end of the eleventh page, he looks up and finds that her breathing, although still laboured, has settled back into the calm and regular rhythm of sleep.
She dozes fitfully throughout the morning, never quite long enough to for him to convince himself it’s doing her any good. The first time she cracks her eyelids, he puts his book aside and dashes to the kitchen to get her cold water. She’s asleep again by the time he returns with the glass. When she stirs for the second time, she only takes a few sips before asking for more tea instead. She drinks half the cup too obligingly, asks if she can get up yet, and then — when he gently shakes his head — rolls onto her side to scowl at the opposite wall.
She’s by no means what he can call an amenable patient, and as he sits in the dark, still bedroom, Palamedes’ thoughts go wandering through their shared sickrooms, scrapes, bruises, and bandages. Although Cam’s had her fair share of injuries, and has borne them all with stoic resignation, she’s almost never been ill. There’s something about viruses — their random nature, he thinks, or the fact that they’re wholly outside her control — which turns her from the world’s most patient and self-sacrificing cavalier into a bratty nursery child. She refuses food; complains the pillows are too high; complains the pillows are too low; complains that she’s bored; complains that her muscles will atrophy if she doesn’t at least get up and stretch; and finally, petulant and red-eyed from her swollen sinuses, complains that everything aches and the anodynes do nothing.
He listens to her complaints, nodding when he’s expected to. He adjusts the pillows; readjusts the pillows. He reminds himself that when his vaccines didn’t take and he’d come down with the spotting sickness twice in the space of six months, he’d complained longer and more loudly about everything. Halfway through the morning, he brings her a dish of frozen sherbet, opining that it can’t possibly count as food since it doesn’t have anything resembling nutritional value. The ball of stress and tension lodged in his chest eases as she pokes at it, then dissipates entirely when she finishes the bowl and asks if there’s any more.
There are three squat tubs of it in the freezer, a full weekend’s worth of work. He promises them all to her.
On one of his trips to the kitchen, he flings open the pantry doors and studies the shelf of tea jars. There are at least a dozen lined up, their contents and uses declared in neat, flowing script. Several are herbal blends that the elderly woman next door pressed upon him one day with the ominous promise that they’d be “very useful in the flu season”.
He brews one in a large pot, mint and nettle, and carries a fresh cup into the bedroom. His eyes mark each of Camilla’s strained swallows, each sigh between sips, and he finds himself hoping with the sort of ferocity reserved for Eighth House prayer that there won’t be a flu season — she’s so miserable that even a flu day is more than he can bear for her.
He’s in the kitchen making a third herbal infusion when she appears in the doorway, fringe plastered to her face, pyjamas rumpled beyond recognition.
“Please,” she says, before he can open his mouth. “Please, I’m sick of that room.”
And she looks so desperate, walking the tightrope between cursing and crying, that he drops the tea things immediately.
“Of course,” he murmurs, hurrying to her side.
Relief, pure and obvious, floods through her: the taut line of her shoulders softens and her eyelids flutter half-closed. He reaches for her hand. A better liar would be able to pretend that the comfort is purely for her sake; Palamedes knows only too well that his instinctive movement is as selfish as it is selfless. Camilla — blessed, wretched, the perfect cavalier to the last — spares him his introspection. Before he can so much as brush her hand with his, she’s flung her arms around his waist. She clutches him like a children’s toy, her forehead bowed against his shoulder.
“Oh, Cam,” he whispers through the ache in his chest. His hand settles over the space between her shoulder blades, trailing up and down in time with her wheezing breaths. “You’re okay. You’ll be okay. It’ll pass.”
The red ball of the sun is shining through the living room windows, completing its daily slide towards the horizon. Palamedes unwinds his arms from Camilla and takes her hand instead, leading her to the sofa where she can watch the light play over the fat, scattered clouds. He tucks all of the cushions behind her, settles her against them, and returns to finish the tea.
When he carries the two steaming cups through to the living room, he finds Camilla stretched out along the full length of the the sofa with a book balanced on her stomach. She scrambles to make room for him as he sits their tea on the low table, curling her legs upwards; he gently pulls them straight again, positioning them across his lap, and reaches for the book.
“Want me to read to you?”
Camilla shakes her head. “Tell me about something.”
“Like what?”
She shrugs. “Anything. Your choice.”
For a split second, he’s back in their shuck, gangly teenage limbs tangled into her own; he’s in their bed in the Warden’s quarters, their bodies pressed against each other despite the boundless space around them. It’s the middle of the night — it’s the earliest hours of morning — and they’re talking, still talking, telling each other about everything, about nothing, about anything just to hear one another’s voice in the darkness.
Palamedes’ eyes sweep the room and land on the book she’s holding, something gold-lettered with an ocean on the cover.
“I started watching the history recordings,” he begins, “about the evolution of this System. Did you know they’re still finding new planets, even now? There’s one at the outer edge that has two suns and is so unstable its crust erupts magma constantly. And there’s a gas giant, four times as big as the largest from home. It orbits its host star so quickly that the year is over in thirty standard hours. Its atmosphere has such intense pressure, it rains gemstones.”
He continues like this, walking her through the weirdest, the most wonderful, the bizarre and mundane stretches of the galaxy that houses their new home. Camilla fidgets as he speaks, shifting this way and that, pulling her knees up to her chest then stretching her legs out across his own once more. He’s just reached an anecdote about the pre-civilisation marine life of the deepest oceans when she stands, lifts her cup, and sits back down in the very corner of the sofa, crossing her legs beneath her like she’s back in a novitiate's lesson.
“Cam? Are you uncomfortable?”
“No.”
He studies her as he would a theorem, seeking out the boundaries and the cracks between them. There’s a hint of a frown playing over her forehead, the merest tightening of her eyebrows. She’s biting on the end of her tongue, and he reads that tell as easily as his own name; whatever she needs, he’ll have to find it, because she can’t bring herself to ask.
He watches her drink from the latest infusion, zinziber and lemon. She’s swallowing slightly more easily than before. Her flush has faded. There’s enough cushions around her that her back shouldn’t be paining her. She leans forward to put the cup down and he spots it: the way her arms snake back around her own belly, the rise of her knees that isn’t quite high enough to hide the search for comfort.
“It’s getting cool,” he says casually, unfolding himself from the sofa. On the opposite side of the room there’s a low storage shelf, with a light cream throw-blanket folded on top of it. He shakes it open, the folds of fabric murmuring as they tumble and spread. “You should try to stay warm.”
He sits beside her, close enough that he can drape the blanket over them both, and silently lifts his arm. Camilla doesn’t make a word of protest this time: she burrows against him, legs angled sideways and lost in the pile of cushions, cheek level with his shoulder. Palamedes lets his arm fold around her shoulders and tugs the edge of the blanket up over her kidneys, tucking it into the crease between her arm and his.
“Better?”
She nods, sniffing tiredly as she pillows her head in the dip of his clavicle. He twists a fraction, just enough to brush his lips against her forehead. Camilla stiffens in his arms.
“Don’t. I don’t want you to get this.”
“Cam, I’d have it already if I was going to get it.” He punctuates his point by tightening the arm wrapped around her, snugging her closer against him. “But if I do end up riddled with ague, you can relish telling me that you told me so.”
“And force-feed you anodynes?” she asks wryly. Palamedes laughs.
“That too.”
“How long will this last?”
He strokes his fingers lightly along her forearm and gives her the answer she already knows. “Twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”
“Hmph.” She falls silent for a moment. Her arm snakes across his stomach, hand coming to rest over his hip. Finally she adds, “Twenty-four’s enough. I’ll be fine by tomorrow.”
“If you say so, darling.”
“I will.”
“I believe you.” He presses another light kiss to her forehead, and sure enough, she doesn’t feel quite as feverish as she had earlier that afternoon. “You can do anything you set your mind to. Humour me for now, though, yes? Rest.”
Camilla lets her head drop back to his shoulder and curls her fingers into the folds of his t-shirt.
*
The first sign that something is wrong is the dull, full-body ache that shudders through him when he rolls over. The second is Cam, hazy through his sticky, gritty eyes, towering over him.
“Morning, Warden,” she says, her voice smooth and rich once more, her complexion restored.
“Nggghhh,” is all he can manage in reply, as he flings one arm up over his eyes to block out the light and swallows against the hot, sharp needles in the back of his throat.
fin.