The next morning, he woke without any sense of life in his limbs. He felt cold, despite the morning sun and radiance from hot ashes. There was a sharp pain in his chest. “I don’t feel so well.”
The young woman crouched over him. She put a hand on his forehead, and against his cheek. Her fingers were cool and pleasant feeling. The huge, sharp-toothed horse peered down at him too, sniffing and snuffling quietly.
“Fever?” said the woman.
“Yes. Hurm. There’s a sickness in his lungs. The cold must have let it in. I can smell it.”
“What does it smell like?”
“Like a living demon. Like fungus and slime on rocks. It’s in the tissue between lung and ribs. Could kill him if it gets worse. I’ve seen this sort of illness kill folks.”
“We can’t ride today then?”
“Hur. Hrm. Not if you want him to live.”
Then there was a silence between them. Lying on the ground, feeling helpless, he could feel it weighing on him just as each breath seemed to weigh on him. A murky washed-out feeling was seeping through him now. He experienced a moment of wondering if what he saw and heard were real. Then he wondered if they were going to leave him in the woods. Now that he was more trouble than he was worth. Somehow, this didn’t frighten him. It all seemed so distant now. The trees and the burst of birdsong in the canopy. The woman and her horse. It was unreal.
He shut his eyes tight and listened to the sound of his own rattling breath and the birds squabling.
After a long seeming pause, she spoke. “I saw some willow down by the stream. There’s some grassy turf about too. I can cut withies and make a little shelter. We should have made sure he was dried out properly last night.” She knelt down next to him again. “Child? Can you hear me?”
He nodded.
“I’m not one much for the healer’s ways. And besides, such magic wouldn’t do you any good, I suppose.”
“Because I’m slippery,” he managed to say.
“Yes. But there’s more than one way to deal with a sickness.”
He looked at her, in the eyes. “You’re not… you’re not going to leave me?”
“Why would we do that?”
“You are in a hurry. You said so.”
She laughed. It was a strange, mirthless laugh. There was a hollowness and some pain in that laugh. “The world isn’t worth saving if it can’t be saved one kindness at a time.”
He didn’t understand, but he nodded all the same. Within an hour he was shivering and coughing up hard red-brown flecks of phlegm from his lungs. His skin turned shiny and flushed, and he felt angry points on his cheeks, red-feeling and patchy. At the same time, he felt increasingly cold. Deep, bone-soaking cold ran all the way through him. Every time the young woman came back and brushed her hand on his forehead, she said, “He’s burning like a fire.” It made no sense to him. He felt as if his was gradually turning to ice.
Over the span of an hour, a pile of cut willow branches appeared near the campfire. What the young woman did next was surprising and intriguing, even through a fevered muss. She took the pieces of willow and pleached them carefully and skilfully until she had the frame of a little house. It was only tall enough to kneel inside, but it had walls and a roof, and the struts were solidly driven into the ground. Then she laid ferns all over it and used a small trowel from her saddlebag to cut turf and lay that across the walls and roof. When she was done she had a small but serviceable turf house. It couldn’t have taken her more than a couple hours.
“Here, get inside. Then get your clothing off and wrap up in a blanket. Some of your clothing must still be wet I reckon.”
He was too weak to protest. She helped him inside, but left him to undress himself. He might have been only a boy still, but he was old enough to be shy about taking his clothing off in front of a lady. Especially one as other-worldly seeming as Caewen.
She went away again and came back with handfuls of leaves and a few pale yellow bulbs too. “Feverfew and damselhame, marsh-tallow, myrtlefern and houndstongue. All good for fevers. Though I’m afraid the broth is going to taste like something a trolde wretched up. Sorry.”
She went to work cutting and crushing, and then brewing the herbs in a pot over a newly stoked fire. Throughout all this industrious activity he kept drifting in and out of a cold dreamless slumber. When she pulled him upright, he drank the off-green tea without protest. Though she was right. It was awful. Worse than trolde vomit, he thought. It tasted like nothing he could have imagined existed.
After the dosing of hot green broth, he was awake enough to say to her, “Thank you. I haven’t had anyone look after me like this when I’ve been sick before.” He added, feeling uncomfortable. “It’s sort of nice.” The feeling of being cared for was nice. And strange for him. It left him with an uncomfortableness mixed up with a really thorough gratitude. As he lay back down, as he started to drift off again, he asked her, without thinking, “Where did you learn all this? Who are you?”
She continued to potter beside the fire as she spoke. “As to the second question, that’s easy enough. I have told you my forename already, Caewen. How am I known more fully? Caewen of Dossel and called also Caewen Turniper.” She looked at him and smiled. “My family used to grow root veges. Turnips, mangolds, suedes and the like.” He noticed she said ‘used to’ but was too sleepy to remark on it. So close to sleep. “As to where I learned all this… let me see. There were no willows where I grew up. I learned how to make a little willow house among the Mect, in the river country south of the Snowy Mountains. Some of the herb lore I have noticed in the way plants unfurl their leaves to reach the sun, some of it I heard whispered by dead voices when I was spitting thorns out of my mouth in the tent of the Magician of the Dawn. Dapple has taught me much as well. From him I have learned–” her voice started to lose meaning. It rose and fell, but it was like the rise and fall of the wind. Wordless. Meaningless. Just a thing of noise and beauty.
He fell asleep.
The fever lasted for three days. He came close to dying that first day, but seemed to recover in the evening. Then on the second day he took a sudden turn for the worse and was close to death again by dusk. By the third day he was too weak to lift a finger. But as morning turned to afternoon, and evening, and dusk, the fever subsided. That third night he experienced the first truly restful sleep he had known since the onset of the sickness.
The next morning he woke to the sound of a wren singing somewhere in the pre-dawn darkness.
For a moment he could hear nothing else and was afraid that they really had given up on him, and decided to leave him behind after all.
But then he heard the deep whickering snore of something large and bestial.
With that sound in his thoughts, he drifted away again, slipping in and out of exhausted sleep.
This must be what family feels like, he thought.