where he was set up as a sentry against the house, and she led me right out into the field, her grip firm on my body. I could only hope the others had gathered to sing and guide us back, because I hadn't noticed them behind me.
I coughed quietly, a gentle, self-induced clearing. It by no means cleared the debris, but after another try it seemed I had at least tamed the tickle. I steadied myself with a few breaths, and then carefully engaged my vocal chords.
The song was not pretty, but I managed to voice it. Only a few times was I interrupted by coughing. Letta had let me lower to my knees, where I could use my strength for my voice rather than keeping my body up. But as I opened my eyes to the dimmer-than-usual peak of the glowing weedflowers and found myself there on my knees, exhaustion pulled me under. I finished the song, and then simply lay down in the grass, and curled up, and drifted into sleep.
T h I r t e e n –
Pale Song
The fever dreams had dispersed, but my throat remained a nest of obstruction. And now there was a new factor: contagion.
“My, minda – I think you've given it to me,” Letta lamented, resting against the doorframe the next day and holding the back of her hand to her forehead. “My head is spinning about the room, and I'm seeing strange things.”
“Rest,” I told her. “It is my turn to take care of you.” I moved to usher her into the sick room. “And don't worry, it doesn't seem deadly – just aggravating enough to hold you down. Come.”
I laid her to rest where I had only recently risen from. We had just washed the bedding, so it was fresh for her use. I tried to keep the worry off of my face as she had in the face of my limitations, but I did not know if I succeeded. I did not like seeing her like this – and I was still weak, and needed to sing, and now I had lost her support in the field and her voice from the pack. While I was marginally stronger than I had been the day before, my voice was worse. My throat had constricted – the web thickened.
But Letta was sinking too quickly into her own realm of disorientation to notice the concern tattooed into the lines of my weary face. I was glad of that – that one small thing not to worry about. I gazed at her a moment as she settled in for the spell, and then left her in peace.
The peace of unchecked, lawless fever dreams, that I knew all too well were no kind of peace at all.
*
I was taking the morning tray up to the Masters when I saw them: termites. They were spilling out of a crack in the wall at the base of the stairs, and this time, it was no feverish illusion.
It wasn't that termites were out of place by nature here – certainly not that. It was that I hadn't seen them elsewhere – not in the house, not in the city, never in any of the wreckage. Never near any of the decay. And only as I saw them now did I realize as much.
I paused, bemused, watching them flit out and trickle up and down the wall. In the strangest way, it didn't sit right with me – because in all truth, they were fitting beasties. Yet...they struck a chord, made me wonder. Their eerie absence elsewhere, as it sunk in, only made their appearance here more unorthodox.
Unable to frame them for anything out of character, though, I made an effort of dismissal, and haltingly continued on my way. One had to shake these things from their system, sometimes, because there were just no answers to be had. I could stew myself into a paranoid wreck looking for an explanation, but where would I look? The cracks in the wall? The rubble in the city? Ask the gods to explain the termites in the house?
I shook my head in ridicule, casting the creatures from my suspicions. They would have to be dealt with, that was all. They were a complication, not a sign. The things I'd seen in my fever state had me jumpy. Leery. I was spooked, and no one could blame me. I would never choose to relive what happened to me in that kitchen.
Experimentally, I