The Eunuch Who Guards the Crown Prince's Bed novel · Chapter 20 of 24
Chapter 20: Fever
For three nights Seok-woo burned with fever.
He remembered it only in pieces.
A cold cloth on his forehead.
The medicine woman bent over his side with a needle, saying in her flat quiet voice that the blade had missed the lung by a finger.
The Lady beside her holding the lamp, her long pale face gone fierce.
Yeon-hwa's voice, scolding someone.
Bae's voice, thin and cheerful from another mat, telling a boy that arrows were nothing to a man who had cooked for a garrison.
And always, between the pieces, a hand.
An inky hand with a cloth in it, coming back and back.
On the third night he woke to a lamp turned low and the quiet of a house where no one was afraid.
He was lying on his right side on the sleeping mat in the Hall of Quiet Dawn.
He had a bandage around his ribs and a clean shirt on.
Someone had combed his hair.
Hyeon sat against the wall with a book open on his knee.
He had not read a line of it, Seok-woo thought.
His eyes were closed and his head tipped back against the plaster.
His hand lay on the mat beside Seok-woo's wrist, with the fingers just touching.
He had gone thin.
The bruise on his cheek had turned yellow.
Seok-woo watched him for a long time.
His body, which for three days had been nothing but a furnace and an ache, woke up one piece at a time.
"Hyeon."
Hyeon's eyes opened.
He did not move.
For the space of a breath he simply looked.
Then he was on his knees beside the mat with both hands on Seok-woo's face.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of The Eunuch Who Guards the Crown Prince's Bed are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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