hand in front of his face, and his eyes did not follow the movement. “Mamoru, please.”
He gasped, as though breathing had become difficult for him, and his hand clenched tight, grasping at my shirt against the advent of some unseen enemy.
“No,” he moaned, low dread tainting his voice. “Don’t… It isn’t…”
In his illnesses as a child, the fever had sometimes given my lord deliriums, so that for a period of time he was entirely lost to me. There, he wandered in some land of his fevered brain’s devising where I could not follow, and therefore could not protect him.
“I am here,” I said, praying that it wasn’t me his fever had conjured, someone meant to protect him now turned against him. “It’s all right. You should have some… water.”
There was a great river that stood between our destination and us. We would have to cross it in order to reach my sister’s house, and I’d meant to tackle that obstacle when we came to it later, but now I thought that perhaps it would serve us best to try and reach it that night. Without the powders, teas, and medicines available at the palace, I was rather at a loss as to how to bring Mamoru’s fever down. With his constitution, there was no telling what lasting damage might be done to his body if he remained so hot. He burned where I touched him, through the rough homespun cloth, torn here and there.
I dared to touch his arm, where the blood had dried against the fabric, as though by covering the wound I could heal it.
“Kouje,” he gasped, and I felt my heart leap like a startled animal.
“My lord,” I murmured, too close for anyone else, even the birds, to hear. “I think we should try to get to the river.”
“The trees are moving,” he moaned, gazing at me without seeing me.
“That’s just the wind,” I said, and took him in my arms to stand us both up.
My lord was terribly thin, though he hadn’t once complained about the sparse meals we’d grown accustomed to on the road. Carrying him was like holding a bundle of sticks, already set to blazing with the illness in his blood. How long had it been since Mamoru had last been taken with fever? I couldn’t remember. The physicians had all said he’d grown out of it—once he weathered his thirteenth winter, he’d long since outlived their predictions—and indeed he’d fought capably enough in the mountain campaigns without ever falling ill.
It was enough to make me wonder—as I had never allowed myself to before—whether or not my lord’s illnesses had been entirely organic. If Iseul was capable of calling him traitor, who knew at what point he had begun to feel animosity for his brother?
I placed him on the horse, then mounted behind him so that I might catch him if he fell. The horse would never forgive me for not only depriving him of his rest, but also doubling his load, but I hoped the beast might manage to hold out a little longer. That it too might recognize its duty to Mamoru and push itself past its own natural limits, as I had tried to do.
Perhaps the horse would be more successful than I’d been.
Mamoru fell into a fitful sleep as we rode, muttering nonsense and clutching at whatever he could grasp with his small fingers, so that I found it hard to concentrate on the task at hand when I could not take my hands from the reins to comfort him. The sound of the horse’s hooves against the ground echoed loudly beneath us, our only company. The entire scene was like one from a dream.
Of course, the terrible thing about that sort of fever was that even if I could have put all my attentions to comforting him, he would likely not recognize the effort. He might not even know me.
Better, then, to head for the river, where I might at least do some good by bringing down his fever in water that ran frigid from the mountains to the sea.
It was a warm night, at least. The comfort I derived from knowing that Mamoru would have certainly taken sick from sleeping outdoors in the winter was a meager one, because if it was not the weather, then what was it? I thought again of my suspicions, dark as a shadow over my heart. If Iseul had caused Mamoru’s sickness in the past, then by now he was surely