Chapter 8: Fever

The fever came on the ninth day after the surgery, three weeks after my last cup of Adelaide's tea.

It started in my teeth.

By midnight every joint in my body felt as if someone had loosened the bolts and was turning them the wrong way.

I lay in the guest bed with the blanket kicked off.

I could hear the lodge's pipes, the snow on the roof and a mouse in the wall.

I could hear Conall's heart down the hall.

He appeared in my doorway at one in the morning with a glass of water and a towel.

"Penny said this might happen," he said. "She said it's the monkshood leaving."

"Penny said it would feel like the flu."

"Does it?"

"It feels like someone's trying to pull a coat off me from the inside."

He sat on the edge of the bed. I expected him to say something kind and useless.

Instead he said, "Where does it hurt most?"

"My back. My jaw." I pulled in a breath. "Everywhere."

He wrung out the towel in the water and laid it across my forehead.

It was cold, and I nearly cried from the relief.

"I'll stay," he said.

"You have a pack to run."

"I have a wife with a fever." He pulled a pillow off the chair and a quilt from the closet. "I'm sleeping on the floor."

"Conall, it's December. It's freezing."

"I've slept outside in worse."

He made a bed beside mine.

He lay down on it with his boots off and his arm under his head.

For a while neither of us spoke.

"Tell me what you remember about the fire," he said into the dark. "Before Adelaide."

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