"There's not a lot of space, is there? Are you sure we're not going to step on him?"
"We'll only have to be careful." Grunting with the exertion, Ginger lowered his son onto the substantial pile of quilts and pillows discarded because of the heat from beds all around the house. With Mica's help, every last one had been collected to get piled and fashioned into a suitable bed for Topaz.
There was indeed very little floorspace left after this maneuver. Birch's bedstead took up the wall across from the door and stuck out into the middle of the room, while Willow's bed did the same next to it. Both beds were small, but so was the room, and with Topaz's makeshift mattress lying on the floor at the foot of his da's bed, there was only a small square left at the foot of Willow's in which to walk. There would be no more pacing the floor for Ginger.
While Mica put the final touches on Topaz's bed, settling his single sheet across his stomach and the pillows more firmly under his head, Hemlock and Ginger went back to tending their patient. In his own bed a few paces back from them, Willow kept watch over the proceedings with eyes like shards of diamond. Much quieter than the other sick ones had been, the intensity with which he used his eyes could nevertheless be disconcerting, and it was hard to forget that Ginger's da was in the room.
Actually, Willow's transformation hadn't been so hard to deal with for his son. He didn't bite like all the cubs had, and he didn't hate like Sineult seemed to, and there had been occasions having nothing to do with sickness or Change when Ginger had felt the sharpness of the surveillance which he had to endure now. Willow could be as nice as Jessamine, but he was also a farmer, quick of eye and hand and always ready to move with the changing weather. Long before the births of his cubs, Willow had been taught by generations of farmers, human and Kindred alike, to keep a close eye on all things.
Besides, Willow was naturally stubborn.
It wasn't Willow who worried Ginger, though he had wondered now and then over the course of his da's illness whether part of his faith in the healer's ability to survive wasn't only a cub's normal belief that their parents were invincible; whether he shouldn't worry more. Then again, he was always second-guessing himself for no reason.
In any case, whether he should have or not, he wasn't agonising over Willow. He didn't even agonise over Topaz, because inside the deepest chambers of his knowing heart, something whispered that Mica was far too tenacious to let Topaz die. Only Birch left that kind of bitter anxiety roiling in him.
In truth he had nothing to base his worry for Birch on, because his husband was just as stubborn as any of their three remaining parents-in-law could claim to be. But he loved Birch, and more than that, Birch was his mate. Ginger had only met him at Oak and Sedge's wedding, yet even at that early moment he had been touched by the unimaginable need which haunts every good marriage. He could imagine living without his mate, but that was as far as he ever wanted to go.
But as Mica had said, working himself into a frenzy wasn't going to keep the worst from happening. Sitting by his husband with the cub-bearer's hot, desperately clenching hand wrapped in his own, he tried to think of happier times in the past or even better, happy times in their future.
It was very hard.
Onyx wasn't faring any better. Through first hot baths, then cooling sponge baths, and finally, when Sineult's fever had risen for hours and nothing would subdue it, submersion in chilly water that made the delirious cub-bearer wail for almost fifteen minutes before subsiding into a shiver-wracked stupor, he had tried to stay upbeat. For his husband's sake, he trusted the healing to those who knew what they were doing (namely, Jessamine) and helped as much as he could by comforting Sineult against the sickness, the treatment, and the nightmares that seemed to plague him.
It wasn't enough by half.
He found himself beginning to hate Jessamine, which was upsetting in itself. He didn't want to hate the closest thing he had to a da. Yet, weren't healers meant to help people? All Jessamine seemed to be able to do was make Sineult miserable. The medicines were bad enough: they smelled horrible, and it was obvious from the fuss Sineult put up over them that they tasted the same. The ice-water bath had been... beyond words.
And now, it was the ice chips which Jessamine had insisted on piling the half-breed's bed with. Poor Sineult's teeth clattered in loud protest of the cold; his body had descended into violent spasms of shuddering. It was true that his fever had quit rising and even slow-crawled a few degrees downward, but Onyx couldn't make himself be happy about that when Sineult remained so pale and quivering and whimpered like a lost and despairing cub.
It was dangerous, Jessamine had admitted, to submit Sineult's body to the stress of such cold right after such heat, but there was no other way. After all, it was the fever that killed. The fever was what needed to be stopped, and everything else had been tried.
Onyx was worried about his cubs, too-not only what cold and the dangerous drop in their bearer's immunity would do to them, but also what the fever had already done. Barely six months and a few weeks old-little more than halfway to their scheduled birth date-and not even kicking yet, they were still so dependant on Sineult that it was nearly scarier to think of their chances for living than it was to think of Sineult's. They hadn't even gotten a chance to name them, the depressed husband thought mournfully, one hand lingering in his caresses over the ever so slightly convex spot beneath Sineult's bedsheet.
"They're fine," Jessamine murmured. Onyx startled; he had forgotten that there was anybody else in the room.
"I-I know," he stammered, flushing red. "They're still there..."
"And they're fine."
Out of deference to the older Kindred's knowledge, Onyx dipped his head in a short nod. The words were a little comforting.
But it was too hard to really accept.
The Deathfever, it was said, didn't kill like other sicknesses. It had been named very appropriately: the damage that the infection did wasn't half so bad as what was caused by its tenacity, driving its victims' bodies to try burning it out with rising temperatures until finally, even the body itself couldn't stand the heat it had made.
Hazel and Hyssop had suffered through the fever; Beryl had lost his sight to it. Now Birch had woken to a fever of his own, one which was rising, late and fast, to the point where something would have to be done to stop it or he would die. Few of the herbs Ginger had used (many of which were strong enough to have to be used in tiny amounts and normally took care of anything) had helped at all, and none of them had made more than an inch or two of progress.
Reluctantly, Hemlock and Ginger started in on the very same remedies which Jessamine had begun on Sineult less than an hour before. First they carried him to the bathroom for a cool soak (Ginger, being several years his husband's junior and having the size to prove it, needed help), and after that, they upped the cold until Birch's teeth were chattering and his body could no longer take it without shock setting in. This sort of bath was a last resort because, in addition to the possibility of shock, the cold drew blood away from its fight against the infection and put it to work trying to keep its owner from freezing-no healer would take such a risk unless the life of the patient was in enough danger to be worth the gamble. Some lived because of the treatment; others died from it.
Even as he tended his husband, Ginger could feel his hope fading. No family could hope to pull all their sick ones back from the mouth of Death, and too many had escaped already. Someone had to die.
Didn't they?
The fever went on and on. Sineult panted like a hurt puppy, his sides heaving in short bursts, and Onyx couldn't get him to lay still for a second; even his mind wouldn't light on a decision. He cried because Onyx wasn't holding him-then he cried because it was too hot with the redhead's arms around him. All but a few of Jessamine's carefully worked elixirs got tossed up into the bowl on the floor, but Jessamine was very sure to reproduce those lucky few as many times as it was safe for Sineult to take them, or as many times as could do him any good. Once they had a scare from Sineult's panting, which made his stomach contract oddly like he was going into labour, but happily that was brief. Even if the Deathfever couldn't finish Onyx's mate, birthing unChanged most surely would, not to mention that, at half-term, the cubs would never survive.
Onyx tried his best to move on and forget it.
Under his brother's tender supervision, Topaz slept on, while in the bed above him his bearer struggled and thrashed weakly to find a spot of comfort in the heat of the waning day and of his still raging fever. Hemlock gave Birch water; Ginger gave him herbs. Both of them rubbed him up and down with the melting ice they had packed him firmlu in, making his skin redden with the chill friction and having to fight to follow his peevish, uncomfortable shifting.
The cold roused him a little bit, but just his body. His eyes remained opaque, like pieces of some fine black jewel still milky and flat with imperfections and impurities, unseeing and uncaring, although they fell on his husband's face more than a few times. He whined and fought, but even that was getting weaker and weaker.
And then, all at once it seemed, the fever began to recede. Sineult's high, flame colour faded to an acceptable, if not encouraging, paleness, and minute by minute Jessamine and Onyx were able to lift away more of the melting ice that lined the cub-bearer's bed. The wounded crying of the miserable invalid quieted and came to a total stop, and for the first time that Onyx's tired, overworked brain could clearly recall, Sineult seemed almost contented.
Ginger held his breath. Lower, and lower still the temperature of his mate's burning body fell, though he and Hemlock slowed to watch the miracle with dumb exhaustion and couldn't have made themselves help it along if they'd tried. Birch's heaved breathing slowed, and now he was so still that, for one betrayed moment, Ginger thought he had chosen the final step of his struggle to give up on.
That was when he realised that Birch was only sleeping.
Sineult fell immediately into a deep, natural sleep, and Jessamine and Onyx were so loath to wake him that they heaped a quick bed of towels on top of the wet mess they'd made of the mattress instead of fully changing the sheets. Onyx lifted him just once to let the last few be arranged between the sleeping cub-bearer and the cold, soggy remains of his sickbed, then snuggled him back in once more with a fresh sheet to keep him secure.
When Onyx slid in next to him, Jessamine only smiled a bright, weary little grin and left him to his reunion, closing the door in his wake.
