Chapter 10: The Thaw
The fever came on the second night, just as Siora had predicted.
It started with chills that made the sturdy wooden bedframe shudder. Jared’s teeth chattered, a frantic, clicking rhythm that echoed in the small infirmary side-chamber. Clara, dozing in a chair piled with furs, jerked awake. In the guttering candlelight, his face was slick with sweat, his skin flushed an ugly, hot red.
She was on her feet before she was fully conscious, pressing the back of her hand to his forehead. The heat was alarming.
“Jared.” Her voice sounded too small.
His eyes opened, but they didn’t see her. They were glassy, fixed on some middle distance full of ghosts. “Hold the line,” he muttered, the words slurred. “To the left… reinforce the left.”
She grabbed a cloth from the basin of cool water Siora had left, wringing it out. She dabbed at his face, his neck. The touch seemed to briefly anchor him. His gaze swam toward hers.
“Princess?”
“It’s Clara.” She kept her voice low, steady. “You have a fever. Just lie still.”
He tried to shift, and a sharp gasp tore from him as the movement jarred his leg. The pain cut through the delirium, sharpening his focus. “Damn. It’s hot in here.”
“It’s not.” She folded the cloth, placed it on his forehead. He flinched at the cold, then sighed as it began to leach some of the burning away. His hand came up, fumbling, and closed over her wrist. Not to stop her. Just… holding on. His fingers were furnace-hot.
“The bolt,” he said, his voice gravelly. “Did they get it?”
“Siora did. You slept through the worst of it.” She didn’t elaborate. He didn’t need the imagery.
He nodded slowly, his eyes drifting shut. His thumb, calloused and rough, moved absently against the fragile skin of her inner wrist. A slow, circling motion. She went very still, the sensation utterly foreign. It wasn’t a caress. It was an anchor, a point of contact for a man adrift in a fever sea. But her breath hitched anyway, caught somewhere between pity and something else, something that tightened low in her stomach.
After a long minute, his grip loosened, his hand sliding back to the blanket as unconsciousness pulled him under again.
Clara sat back, her wrist tingling. She stared at his face, now smoothed by sleep, the harsh lines of pain temporarily erased. This wasn’t the imposing Captain of the Guard, the solid, unshakeable wall of a man who had carried her through a frozen hell. This was just Jared. Vulnerable. Human. And hurt because of her.
She kept the vigil, changing the cloth, forcing sips of willow-bark tea between his lips when he surfaced enough to swallow. The fortress around them was a living entity of murmured night-watches and the endless wind. Freir looked in once, his own arm neatly bandaged, saw her at her post, and nodded silently before disappearing. Kellen brought a bowl of thin broth at dawn, placing it on the stool beside her without a word. His expression was unreadable.
By the third day, the fever broke. The violent heat receded, leaving Jared wan and hollow-eyed, but lucid. The profound weakness that followed seemed to infuriate him.
“I need to get up,” he grumbled, pushing himself against the pillows as Siora checked his bandages.
“You need to not tear my stitches,” the healer retorted, not even looking up. “The muscle was sliced clean through. You put weight on that leg now, you’ll undo a week of healing in a second. You’ll be limping for a year.”
He swore, low and creative, falling back with a defeated huff. His gaze landed on Clara, who was folding clean linens by the fire. “Don’t you have a kingdom to scandalize or something?”
A surprised laugh escaped her. It felt strange on her lips. “My schedule’s remarkably clear. It turns out fleeing for your life opens up the calendar.”
A ghost of a smile touched his mouth. “Lucky you.”
His convalescence became a new kind of cage, one of enforced stillness. And Clara, with nowhere else to be and a debt she felt in her bones, became its warden.
She read to him from the few, water-stained volumes she found in the fortress’s meager library—dry military histories and epic poems about long-dead heroes. He preferred the histories. He’d close his eyes, listening, and sometimes correct a tactical detail or scoff at the glorification of a famously stupid cavalry charge.
She helped him eat, steadying the bowl when his hands trembled from fatigue. The first time she spooned broth to his lips, his jaw tightened with humiliation.
“I can do it,” he snapped, trying to take the spoon. He fumbled, splashing hot liquid on the blanket.
They both froze. Clara calmly scooped up the spill with the spoon, then offered the next one again. Her silence was more effective than an argument. He finally accepted it, his eyes avoiding hers. After that, he let her help without comment, though a stubborn blush crept up his neck every time.
The bandage changes were the worst. Siora did the first few, then pronounced the wound clean and tasked Clara with the daily ritual. “Good for you both,” the healer had said cryptically, leaving a jar of salve and fresh linen strips.
It was on the fifth day that it happened.
Jared was propped up, stripped to the waist as usual for the process. The room was cold, and goosebumps pebbled his skin across the planes of his chest and shoulders. A tapestry of old scars—a silvery slash across his ribs, a pucker near his collarbone—stood out against the pallor brought on by blood loss.
Clara worked with careful, clinical focus, her fingers nimble as she unpicked the knot. The wound was healing, the angry red edges beginning to knit together, but it was still a brutal sight. She cleaned it gently with the infused water, the smell of comfrey and thyme filling the space between them.
He was watching her face, not his leg. She could feel the weight of his gaze.
“You’re good at this,” he said quietly.
“I had a lot of practice on myself,” she answered without thinking, dipping her fingers into the cool salve.
He went still. “What?”
She realized what she’d said. It hung in the air. She’d never spoken of it to anyone. Not to Freir’s sly sympathy, not to Kellen’s analytical curiosity. She focused on applying the salve in a thin, even layer. “My brother. When he was… displeased. Or bored. He liked to be creative. Knives were too obvious. Hot wax from sealing letters. The pins from my hair. Things that wouldn’t show under sleeves, or would be mistaken for clumsiness.” Her voice was detached, as if describing the weather. “You learn to clean and bind things quickly, and quietly.”
The silence in the room was absolute, broken only by the pop of the fire.
She reached for the fresh linen. As she leaned across him to wrap the bandage around his thigh, the back of her hand brushed against the bare skin of his lower abdomen.
It was an accident. A fleeting, warm contact.
His hand shot out, fingers wrapping around her wrist. Not hard, but with a sudden, electric certainty that stopped her breath. Her eyes flew to his.
His green eyes were dark, all trace of feverish haze or lighthearted mockery gone. They held an intensity that pinned her in place—a storm of understanding, of rage not directed at her, but for her. His thumb found the same spot on her pulse point it had in his fever dream. This time, the circle he traced was deliberate. Acknowledging. Mapping the frantic beat under her skin.
She didn’t pull away. She couldn’t. The air was too thick to move through.
He saw it all then, she thought. Not just the story, but the isolated girl in the lavish rooms, tending to her own hidden wounds. The performance of cruelty she’d had to adopt just to make the real thing seem redundant. The sheer, grinding loneliness.
His gaze dropped to her lips, then back to her eyes. The heat of his hand was a brand.
Then, slowly, his grip loosened. His fingers slid away, leaving her skin cool where they’d been. He let his hand fall back to the bed.
“Finish the bandage,” he said, his voice rough. He looked away, out the narrow window at the slate-grey sky.
Her hands trembled as she completed the wrapping, tying off the end with a neat, efficient knot. She gathered the soiled linens, the jar of salve, her movements automatic.
At the door, she paused. He was still staring out the window, his profile stern.
“Jared?”
He didn’t look at her. “Hmm?”
“Thank you. For the mountain. For the bolt.”
Now he turned. The intensity was banked, but not gone. It simmered in the depths of his eyes. “You don’t thank a soldier for following orders, Clara.”
“I’m not thanking the soldier,” she said softly. “I’m thanking the man who argued with me about epic poetry yesterday. They’re not the same person.”
She left before he could reply, closing the door quietly behind her. She leaned against the cold stone of the corridor, the clean linen bundle pressed to her chest. Her heart was beating a wild, erratic rhythm against the cloth.
Inside the room, Jared stared at the closed door for a long time. Then he slowly, carefully, bent his injured leg at the knee, testing the pull of the fresh bandage and the new, searing pain of the healing muscle beneath. A pain he could understand. A pain he could manage.
He flexed his hand, the one that had held her wrist, and closed it into a fist.