The compliment, admittedly, mollifies him: not, he assures himself, because it is flattery, but because it is true. He has built a house of cards, and it is fragile - more fragile, he suspects, than she realises - but it is not so fragile that one day's weakness will end it. He is a rational man, and, rationally, he knows this. Rationally, he knows that it is only one day; in his heart, he fears that one day may turn to two, and two to a week, to a month, to a year. Rotting away in a bed, without even the excuse of injury. They will whisper, as they did in his father's time, they will scheme behind his back and he will have no way to follow their plots, and in the end, he will be dead - or, worse, he will be the puppet that they tried to make him thirty years ago, the puppet he has fought against being all his life.

"One day." The firmness of it is directed at himself, as much as at her. He is not quite lucid enough, in truth, to keep himself from saying it aloud. "Two, at the most, and I will be on my feet again." His eyes meet hers, and there is a challenge in them, although it is not one he is entirely sure he can rise to: he is still perceptive enough to know some of what she is thinking, and yet feverish enough not to fully keep it to himself. "I am not a child, Cersei. This is not what will kill me. Two days, at most, and I will be myself."

And you will pay for witnessing me otherwise. Even fevered, he does not feel the need to say it. It is already said, just not in words.