Chương 29: Fever

Elian didn't come to morning drills, and it was that absence, more than anything else, that told Keth something was wrong before he'd even reached the barracks to check. He found his brother still in bed, blankets tangled around him, a sheen of sweat across his forehead despite the room's chill. Elian's eyes opened slowly at the sound of the door, unfocused for a moment before settling on Keth's face.

"I'm fine," he said, before Keth had asked anything at all.

"You're clearly not fine."

"I'm tired. That's different from not fine." Elian pushed himself up against the wall, wincing at the effort it took, and Keth's stomach tightened at how much that small motion seemed to cost him.

"I didn't sleep well. That's all."

"You never sleep well. This looks different." Voss appeared in the doorway behind them, drawn by the sound of voices, and one look at Elian's face was apparently enough to settle any argument before it started.

"Fetch the physician," he said, quiet, already crossing the room.

"Now, Keth. Don't wait for him to talk you out of it."

The physician arrived within the hour, the same thin, clinical man who'd once told Keth his lip would heal crooked and he'd drink from the side of his mouth for the rest of his life. He examined Elian with brisk efficiency, pressing fingers to his throat, his wrist, listening to his breathing with an ear pressed close to his chest.

"Fever," the physician said finally, straightening.

"Not unusually high. No visible infection, no wound I can find that would explain it." He glanced at Voss, something careful in his expression.

"Has he been using his Echo recently? More than usual?"

"He's been in training," Lira said, from where she'd arrived and stood near the door, arms crossed, watching with the flat, focused attention she brought to anything that broke a pattern.

"Controlled exercises. Small requests. Nothing that should produce this kind of exhaustion."

"Should isn't the same as does," the physician said.

"This type of Echoes are rare enough that I don't have much precedent to draw from. If the cost scales unpredictably — if it's borrowing more than the size of the request suggests, the way you've described to me before — then repeated small use might accumulate in ways a single large use wouldn't." Elian, still propped against the wall, managed a thin smile.

"So the answer is, nobody actually knows."

"The answer is, rest, fluids, and I'll return tomorrow to check the fever's progress." The physician packed his bag with brisk finality.

"If it climbs rather than breaks, send for me immediately, day or night. Fevers in Echo-users can behave differently than ordinary illness. I'd rather be overly cautious than not cautious enough." This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience. He left. The room settled into the particular quiet of people trying not to look as worried as they felt.

Keth stayed by the bed for most of that day, and the day after, watching his brother sleep in restless fragments, sweating through the blankets Voss changed twice without complaint. Aurelian brought food neither of them ate. Talia brought a cool cloth soaked in something she swore had mild fever-reducing properties, extracted from a plant she'd catalogued weeks earlier, and though Keth had his doubts about the science, Elian's fever did seem, marginally, easier to bear after she pressed it to his forehead.

"You don't have to sit here the whole time," Elian murmured, on the second evening, his voice thin and scratchy.

"I'm not going anywhere."

"I know."

"Then go train. Or sleep properly, in your own bed. You look worse than I feel."

"I doubt that."

"I don't." Elian's eyes, fever-bright, found his in the low candlelight.

"You've got that look you get. The one from the wing. Like you're bracing for something you can't actually stop." Keth didn't deny it, mostly because there wasn't much point.

"I don't like watching you like this."

"I don't like being watched like this. We're even." A weak, genuine smile.

"Tell me something. Anything that isn't about fevers or Echoes. I'm tired of thinking about my own body." Keth considered a moment, then told him about the dance at the tavern, the fiddle player, the dock girls who'd laughed at how quickly he'd picked up their footwork, and Elian listened with his eyes closed, a small smile staying fixed at the corner of his mouth even as exhaustion pulled him back toward sleep partway through the story.

"You should have taught me," Elian said, drowsy, barely audible.

"The dancing. Before all this."

"I still can. Once you're better."

"Promise?"

"Promise." Elian's breathing evened out into sleep before Keth finished the word, and Keth sat with him a while longer anyway, watching the rise and fall of his chest, counting it the way he'd counted Voss's chalk marks on a calendar that no longer existed.

The fever broke on the fourth day, quiet and undramatic, the way most crises in that house seemed to resolve themselves — not with any single dramatic turn, just a slow, gradual easing that only became visible in hindsight. Elian woke that morning with color back in his face, his eyes clear, his voice steadier than it had been in days.

"I think I'm actually hungry," he said, blinking at the light coming through the window, and Keth felt something in his own chest unclench so completely that he had to sit down for a moment before responding.

"That's a good sign."

"Is it? Feels like a fairly ordinary sign, honestly."

"After four days of you barely eating, ordinary feels like a miracle." The physician confirmed it that afternoon, fever fully broken, no lingering signs of infection, Elian's color and appetite both returned to something approaching normal. He offered no clearer explanation for what had caused it in the first place than he had on the first day, only a repeated caution about monitoring Echo use, about watching for patterns that might predict the next episode before it arrived.

"There will be a next episode?" Keth asked, once the physician had gone, unable to keep the question contained any longer. Voss, standing near the doorway, didn't offer false comfort.

"Possibly. Probably, if the Echo continues developing the way it has been. We don't know the shape of what we're dealing with yet, Keth. We're learning it as it happens, same as your brother is."

"That's not an answer that helps."

"No," Voss agreed.

"It isn't. But it's honest, and I'd rather give you honest than comfortable, at this point in both our lives."

Elian returned to light drills within the week, slower than before, more careful with his Echo's use, though something in his manner had shifted subtly since the fever — a new caution, a willingness to say I need to stop before Lira had to tell him to, the particular wisdom of someone who had finally felt, firsthand, exactly what the cost of his own power could demand if left unwatched.

"I don't want that to happen again," he told Keth, one evening, the two of them sitting in the yard as the light failed around them.

"Not the fever specifically. The feeling underneath it. Like something was borrowing more of me than I agreed to lend."

"Then be careful."

"I am being careful. I don't think careful is the same as safe, though. Not with this." Elian looked at his own hands, turning them over slowly, the way he did sometimes when searching for words that didn't quite exist yet.

"I think whatever this Echo actually is, it's not finished figuring out what it wants from me. And I don't know if careful is enough to keep up with wherever that ends up going." Keth didn't have an answer for that. He simply sat beside his brother in the fading light, the wall standing patient beyond the yard, and let the silence hold the weight neither of them had words enough to carry properly. End of Chapter Twenty-Nine