reignfall | 𝔣𝔬𝔯 𝔟𝔬𝔯𝔫𝔱𝔬𝔯𝔢𝔦𝔤𝔫.

𝔣𝔬𝔯 𝔟𝔬𝔯𝔫𝔱𝔬𝔯𝔢𝔦𝔤𝔫.

In spite of all her terrible fears, it really does seem as though it was naught but the common fever, which had struck her young son. Joffrey Zarek had never known a day's suffering, however, not a lack of rest nor a hint of true hunger, and though he is but few turns away from his third nameday, encroaching upon them in the second month of the year, the disease passed by him quickly. It is the fourth day now, and his appetite was ferocious when she had broken her fast with him on honeyed bread and fruit, he was eagerly chasing a cat he had spotted right thereafter, and only during their walk in the open air did any sort of fatigue catch him. Awake he remained for the waterfalls and his spotting of a large bird of prey, though he was solidly asleep in her arms soon enough on their way back. Before she set him down in his bed, she felt his forehead for the umpteenth time, but it is as the healer had assured her: he is well once more, even the cough is gone.

Relieved, she leaves the boy to his afternoon nap, and goes again to find her husband. Gone had he been in the earliest hours of morning, as was his usual way, though it is strange that he not even been present to ignore her request to join her and their son for their morning meal, nor has she seen hide nor hair of him since.

She finds him in his study, in the end, and it does not take more than a look for her to know what has befallen him. There is a glaze to his otherwise so sharp eyes, a pallor to his skin, dark rings beneath his eyes. The lips dry and cracked, his breath the lightest rasp. "My emperor." She inclines her head, though she is trying fast to suppress a hint of mirth. "If you would excuse me for another moment?"

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Casimir grunts - which may be an acceptance of what she says, or even an appreciation of it - and settles himself back against the pillows, watching her closely as she drinks. Her expression of distaste is reassuring. The fact that she drinks it at all, more so. He does not suspect her, not truly - but he should.

Which is rather the point.

"If he is modelling himself after me, then it is as well to teach him early to listen to that nagging sense, when it comes." He wants, very much, to close his eyes. Perhaps it is because he is in his bed that his ever-present weariness abruptly feels so crushing, that it becomes an effort to hold himself up. "Better to act when there is no danger than fail to act when there is, after all."

She does not say that this way, her son is set up for a life of about as little sleep as her lord husband. It is, in general, something she avoids any mention of, like many of those little observations that have come through those ordinary parts of marriage they surely share with a thousand other couples wed. He is extraordinary, as is she, and neither of them likes to be reminded of what makes them akin to some of the rest –– still, even he cannot escape the notices and glimpses granted by casual, habitual intimacy. He rarely shows pain, exhaustion, or injury, and it is only because she has not seen him openly tired on any significant number of occasions can she pick up on it now that he sinks into the pillows for support.

She knows to ignore it.

His share of the tea, at last, is poured into a mug, and she pours another sip or two for herself – solidarity, rather than need, though she would rather claim a sore throat of her own than admit to so willing a moment of support. She brings the tray to bed, and seats herself on the edge of her own side, as if she needs rest of her own. It is not so far from the truth: her mother's death has rendered her sceptical of all health concerns, and she has been awake for more than her usual share of these nights, just to ensure that Joff was still fighting the illness, still winning his first tiny war. "I have honey as well, if your throat is aching." She puts it into the room like an afterthought.

There is a resentment in him, still, at even this small show of care - at the suggestion, the fact, that he might need it. Even so, he reaches for the cup, and even so, there is a certain comfort in the heat of it; it shows in the way that he wraps both his shaking hands around the mug, as though to draw the warmth into himself, although it scalds his fingers. His jaw is tight, aching as though he must fight to keep his teeth from chattering. He knows, if he is honest with himself, that he is not cold - but it is easiest to think of it as being cold, and not to acknowledge the sweat on his brow or the heat that must still bake from him. It is easier, still, to say to himself that he is not sick.

His eyes follow her mistrustfully as she sits. How many times has she sat there, or lain closer? And yet, weakened as he is (a little, only a little!), he cannot help but tense at her returned closeness.

"I will take honey." He makes it offhand, as she does, as though it is of no import. Honey is, he has been told since childhood, another cure-all; he has seen it used for wounds and infections both, and for strength and fitness. There is surely no harm in drinking it now - and not for sweetness, or because his throat is aching, but simply because it is a healthful thing to consume.

If she allows herself to let her eyes linger, then he would know at once that she had noted that ripple on the surface of his tea. He is shaking in a room that even she finds warm, there is sweat at his brow, and no amount of resentment he radiates can delude her into thinking him healthy – rather, it is like he is an overlarge cat who has made the mistake of trotting outside in the snow, and now will not offer her the satisfaction of admitting defeat and stepping back into the warm hall. Only he is not cat, and there will be no defeat. He is more like to leave his mug untouched and return to his study, and leave his ailment entirely untreated.

And so she must swallow any commentary, though she reckons she has, for once, thought of some excellent teasing jests.

The honey awaits them in its jar, a honey dipper and a spoon at its side. Joffrey preferred his honey to be stirred in quickly with a wooden spoon, because she would let him lick the rest of the sweet treat from it, something that reminds her more of Jaime than Casimir. He'd prefer the dignity of the correct tool, and absolutely no licking of any utensils, and so she drips the honey first into her own mug (where what little tea she had taken for her show of solidarity really did not require this amount of sweetener), and then she dips it into the tea once more, to properly add some to his mug as well. "More?"

He eyes her mistrustfully - and that, too, is more than a little catlike in its barely-veiled sidelong air - as she dribbles honey into his cup. It is not poison he fears, in this moment: he is beyond fearing that, since if she wanted to poison him, it would be altogether too late now to stop her. No, what he fears (resents, not fears, he fears nothing, not even now) is the implication that lies behind her serving him this way, unasked and without coercion, as though she thinks he needs it. As though he is an invalid, a weak and frail thing who cannot pour his own honey.

The fact that it is, in fact, true - that he would probably spill his tea if he shifted it to only one hand in order to manage the honey - does not help matters. Again, he cannot help but think of his father, shaking and palsied. Will you cut up my meat for me, too, as they did for him? Wipe the spilled wine and clean up the shit? It is the first time that it has occurred to him that she might, if only for a little while before she saw her chance to drive in the knife. This is, unaccountably, more frightening than the thought that she would leave him to fester alone.

It is only honey. It is the fever, that is all, that makes him drown so quickly in bleak and childish thoughts. In the end, it is only honey, and she is playing the part of the dutiful wife, because she knows that he will recover. If she knew he would not, she would not be so cloyingly attentive. And it is only honey in his tea.

"No more." His voice is razor-edged. He cannot help that. "Be careful. If I must spend an afternoon in bed, I do not intend to do it under furs sticky with honey."

As though she is the one likely to spill anything.

Is it mere fear of poison? He does not demand for her to taste it first, perhaps in part because he deems her cunning enough to have long-slipped the antidote beneath her tongue. Or perhaps this fear of his goes deeper, or perhaps none of this is deep at all, and she is trotting down the paths of overthinking when really, all he is would be ill, uncomfortable, and out of sorts for it.

She never makes it closer than within an inch of the truth. Deep down, she has ever presumed that if he were to fall ill, if some rot took hold of his limbs or a poisoning of the blood threatened to boil his brains in his head, then he would do as any feral animal would, and gnaw off all that is afflicted, to come out mutilated, but strong and alive – or dead.

Somehow, the fantasy of his dying fails to arouse her when he is visibly ailing.

"If I complained each time you left me sticky beneath the furs, you would have long since cut my tongue out." Yet she does not want to sleep in a patch of honey, either, and she does take care with her honey dripper, returning it most gently to its jar. For Joff, she had blown at the tea to help it cool a tad, and had shown him how to do the same, but she values her body hale and whole. Instead, she takes a sip from her own mug, where the honey near makes up for the taste of sage. "You act as though you have never suffered a cold before."

"If I meant to cut your tongue out for saying ill-advised and annoying things, you would have lost it years ago." He sounds almost like himself, in that sharp-edged mockery - except that there is an undertone to it that is more audibly raw than usual, a genuine tension that is usually absent or at least disguised. The trouble is that, in the list of ill-advised things for her to say, that last ranks fairly high. The bigger trouble is that he feels so thoroughly drained and unsteady, and it aggravates him. "I am not prone to sicknesses, and I am not prone to allowing nagging women to fuss over them. As I told you, it will pass."

Which is not to say that the tea is not welcome, nor that the honey in it fails to soothe a throat which feels tight and itchy. He takes a long drink, and does not flinch at how it burns his tongue; he is, he realises, very thirsty, and the heat of it seems to almost touch that shivering fever inside him. It does not taste good, but on the other hand, with his nose as stuffed up as it is, he can hardly taste it anyway.

"So it will. And I have not nagged you, nor have I fussed. I made you drink a cup of tea." She stands, exasperated, and stalks toward the window. Nothing, in her mind, comparable to the fretting she had done around Joffrey, which embarrasses her now that the boy is so obviously well again – and which she nonetheless might not be able to take back. It was a terrible thing to see her son unwell, and neither is it pleasant to see her husband struggle, and she tries to twist the thought until the underlying emotion is clearly, grossly different.

It should be she who makes him suffer. Yes, that is all that motivates and all that drives her here. She would not miss him, does not long for him, and does not prefer to see him at full strength.

Of course, it is now too late pretend that she cared not for a moment, for if she had not, she would have called upon the servants to do the dirty work, from the gathering of the herbs to the preparing of the tea. From the window's sill, she lifts the carafe of water that she likes to have brought for her own pleasure, the servants having been instructed to add a touch of lemon to it when available. It is sat down again rather crudely on his nightstand, the instruction now silent. The sick must drink, for any fool knows that so long as men drink and piss, they are a ways away from succumbing to the fever. "Were I concerned, I would have called upon a healer."

He lets out a sharp, scornful huff at that, his distaste curling his lip. "As well call the vultures to pick at my bones," he mutters, and takes another long drink of tea. It would seem strange to some, no doubt, that he finds her tea safer than a healer's - but he has more faith that she understands the dangers in poisoning him, and a wife cannot simply shrug and move on if her patient dies.

Besides, he has committed to this course of action now, and indecision is almost as fatal as trust.

His eyes follow her as she sets down the carafe, and he marks its position, even if he does not drink yet. He will. He is not stubborn enough to let so small an obedience dissuade him from slaking a thirst that is undeniably uncomfortable, and he knows as well as she does, in truth, that it is the best thing he can do for himself now. Still, he will finish his tea first. One fuss at a time.

She makes herself at home on her side of the bed, stretching out like a comfortable cat in a patch of sunlight, unbothered by his sick form looming beside her. That he can muster to be so displeased while more ill than she has ever seen him before is almost a fascination unto its own. Heat and frustration are radiating off of him in equal measure, though at least – at least – he is complying. He drinks his tea, that is.

With little other way to ensure that he will not get in his head to rise as soon as the tea is done and his head feels midway cleared, she supposes she must look upon an afternoon spent together, something that might be ordinary for other couples wed. Yet neither him nor her are creatures of inaction, least of all when clashing together in the way she has grown so intoxicated with, and perhaps this is what makes it so unusual. He had been abroad during the latter months of her pregnancy, when she required more rest and more comforts, and it had fallen to her brother to keep her supplied with both. In some ways, this is a first, one of them ailing and the other... present.

"If I wanted to call the vultures, I would have called upon servants. For a man who oft speaks of the challenges he conquers, you are very tempted to see me take an easy road."

"I have never yet seen you take an easy road." It is an admission, even if it is delivered in the tone of a scathing insult - a grudging acknowledgement that she has a point. That is more than he usually gives, but he will not think too much about that. Instead, he just settles back against the bedstead, raising the cup to his lips again. "And it is not my temptations that would concern me. Historically, you are the one who seems to struggle with resisting them."

It occurs to him, too, how unusual this is. It chafes already, to be lying here when there is work to be done, when the wheels of the world turn on without him. There are never enough hours in the day, even in a full and lively day; to waste them in bed is nigh-unbearable.

And yet he has (just about) sense enough to remember the ash of letters in his study fireplace, and the rising frustration of unsteady calligraphy, and he knows, no matter how he rebels against it, that he has no choice. It is a strange thing, still, to see her lying there as though she also has nothing better to do, as though she intends to watch him suffer. It sets him on edge.

He finishes off his tea in a long swig that burns the roof of his mouth in a not wholly unpleasant way, and reaches for the water carafe.

Often, her own displeasure keeps her awake and raging, perceived slights seeing her take to quill and paper, or her twisted imagination, to sow the seeds of some plot or other. Other duties she attends to during the day as she should, if not distracted by her son, or husband – or lover. Yet when her body calls her to rest, she tends to listen, knowing she will wake sharper and keener after a half hour's catnap than she would otherwise be. Mistakes happen to the over-tired and weary, and she will not be either one.

Even if he cannot imagine, she knows, the use of casual sleep during the daylight hours. The gods know he barely keeps to it at night.

"You are calling me easily tempted?" She is on the verge of reminding him that he has strayed from their marital bed and assorted – if not more frequently, that may yet be a cake she wins, but absolutely certainly with a wider variety of partners. Yet that is not what he is meant to know; he is meant to think her array of lovers as wide and varied as his own. It is for the better. She glares at him, whether for his remark alone or the tone he chose after she has so self-sacrificingly placed herself in the position of caring for him. "I believe we might have to have a few things in common."

There is a twisted kind of comfort in that glare, which is more as things should be. This is solid ground: he needles her, she rises to the bait, and all is well. He meets her look with one that is almost, if not quite, the steadily unimpressed regard he so often gives her, and raises one eyebrow.

"Is that what you believe?" he echoes her mildly, and if there is a trace of irritability still beneath the light tone, he does not think she is quite stupid enough to remark upon it. Then again, she can be bold, at times. It is one of the things he both enjoys and hates about her. "Interesting."

Temptation is, of course, a relative matter. Is it a temptation to take what is beneficial? To claim advantage when it is offered? He does not consider himself prone to temptations which are not to his advantage. He does not, for example, let himself be tempted into sentimentality.

Perhaps he misses his usual tone by a quarter of an inch, perhaps his gaze is less steady than it would be a on a day that sees him in perfect health. All facts that she is willing to ignore in order to dance their usual dance, even if it will not lead to them battling it out on their usual grounds. Even he would not be roused to any sort of mood in this state, and she has to admit, as attracted as she is to him, she can accept to wait a few days, at least until he can breathe freely again – and no longer tastes of sage.

"You cannot deny that you are a man who takes what he wants." Her own lofty tones are not hindered by sickness, nor by the indignity of benefiting from care. And of course she equates all this to temptation, the idea that what he wants must automatically be something that has, in some fashion, been tempting to him. There are a few things she could see as the sort that might be the death of him – that he one day attempts to seize something which robs him of his teeth and claws and spits him out seems among the most likely.

Though now a fever that takes root in his lungs or heart has come to be another thing to – to what? Worry about? "That is the downfall of many lesser men."

"It is the downfall of greater men." Again, a grudging admission - that there could be greater men, if of nothing else - delivered in scathing tones, as though she shows her ignorance by her words. He scoffs, and with hands whose shaking he will not admit to, pours himself a glass of water. "Lesser men are those whose downfall is in cowardice and short-sightedness, and in lesser temptations. When I fall, it will be in reaching too far and too high, but it will not be for crass temptation."

He looks down at his glass, where the water ripples with the palsied movement of his hand, and for a moment the reflected light on its surface seems to cast parts of his flushed reflection in silver. It is an effort not to throw the cup aside. But that, too, is a crass temptation. Even fevered, he will not allow ridiculous fancy to overtake his reason.

"I will not rot away for momentary pleasure." The pause has been just a little too long, and his tone lacks just a little of its usual fervency. In a lesser man, it might almost seem doubtful. "My downfall will be from greater heights."

How can she not notice the unsteadiness of his hands? Are these not signs she has been trained to look out for in a foe? Hints of weakness, of injury, of age in older men and sickness in those who are younger. Whether it is better now for her to ignore or acknowledge it boils down to the same. She knows. He knows that she knows.

"What was it that killed your father?" It cannot be something so simple as a fever, and she has not wished to hear a range of gossip about some long dead man, especially not from servants her own age, born after it had all come to pass. It seems crude to ask it now that he is sick, and perhaps that is her very point, but most of all, it seems better than to question what he deems a downfall of greatness is.

She would rather, in short, speak of his dead father, who has never been much of the latter. Rather that than to speak of anything that might kill him.

There is an undeniable tension in the moment before he answers. There is a second or two where his fever-bright eyes darken, and his mouth thins, and if he were not in such a bad state of health, it might be more than a little threatening to see how his expression clouds.

Then he smiles, as though it is nothing at all. It is a little more brittle, a little less veiled, than it might otherwise be; but it still has that insouciant offhandedness he so often shows. "Crass temptation," he answers her, easily enough, as though it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter. The man is dead. Whatever shadows may move in the corners of his fevered vision, the man is dead. And the manner of his death is no secret, least of all here: how could such a drawn-out, ugly death be kept secret from loose-lipped servants? True, most of the loose-lipped servants who served in his father's time did not survive him for very long, but that isn't the point. He is emperor, and he is not mad, and the quicksilver shift in his glass is only a trick of the light.

It isn't enough of an answer. It's enough of one for her - he doesn't owe her any answer at all - but somehow, in this moment, it isn't enough for him. He sighs, and finishes the water. It is cool, and clear, and it does not fume.

"He was a stubborn shit, I will give him that. Most syphilitic men die before they fall apart. Not Gostislav." He sets the cup aside, and does not look at her. Instead, he looks past her, at the fire, his forehead creasing just a little. "He was mad as a fish, riddled with holes inside and out. He stank, and he soiled himself, and he laughed when he did. Any brains he might have had were rotted to nothing - and by all accounts, there wasn't much to rot. He was a corpse for years before he finally did us all a favour and stopped moving around."

He looks at her again, and his smile is sharper, edged with steel. The threat that gleamed in the darkness for a moment has come to the fore in his expression, which is almost animal in its challenge. He looks half-mad himself, with the furtive violence of a beast caught in a snare. Fever and memory, it turns out, is a potent combination. "Does that clear things up for you, sweet empress? Are you satisfied?"

It had been bad to see her mother, after Tyrion had torn himself free of her. Yet she had only seen her after the Silent Sisters had done their work, so that Joanna Lannister had looked pale and sleeping. Unresponsive she had been, and so cold to her touch, but she had been spared the sight of her screaming, any hint of her agony, anything but Tyrion she had been spared. It must have been a special hell, then, for young Casimir to see his father in such a state.

In truth, it reminds her a little of the Mad King, with his long, curling toenails and the spittle running out of the corner of his mouth, eyes rolling in their sockets when another bout of his madness shook a second's sense from him.

A calm, levelled thought to have, before the fever seizes her own husband, and rises him to a feral kind of anger. Like Aerys, like with her father, and like with anyone who could do her ready and quick harm, the best defence is not to show fear, but to stay firm. "You would rather I did not understand at all."

Yet his fear makes sense now: this is not a death worth dying, and it is crass both in the way it disgusts a sane person, and in how hopeless a fight against it would be. He does not much like to lose control of anything, her dear husband, surely then to lose hold of his own body would be the worst thing of all. "You need to lie down."

"I know what I need to do!" he snaps, and for a moment there, the mask - the control - has slipped; there is something feral and frightened underneath. His lip draws back from his teeth, and he drags the furs up over himself, still sitting propped against the bedstead as he glares at her. "I am sick, Cersei, not a child. I have let you drag me from my work, be satisfied with that."

He is not a child. There is no part of him, he must believe, that is a child; least of all that furtive edge in his eyes, which he refuses to be aware of. There is no part of him that is other than the Emperor. He is the Emperor. He has complete control of himself, and a fever will not master him.

He exhales slowly, through his teeth, and his hands clench for a moment. Then he is himself again: pale, shivering, fever-sheened, but himself nonetheless, his face returned to a mask.

"I don't give a shit what you understand about it, in any case. What is there to understand? He drank too much and fucked carelessly, and in the end, carelessness killed him. It started to kill him before I was even born. I have told you before that my father was not a wise man." Has he? He really can't remember, he realises, how much he's told her about Gostislav. How much he's told anyone, for that matter. Why bother? Gostislav is a worm-eaten corpse in the crypts these thirty years, and there's no point rifling through the bones.

He wonders, faintly, if he ever told her about the silver nose. How it tarnished where it sat against supperating flesh. How it glinted like a knife in the candlelight.

Probably not. Why would he?

"If you were at least like a child about it. Your son had no trouble lying himself back down when I told him to, and see how swift he's recovered." There are numerous things she has come to expect of him: whip-sharp observations, a keen knowledge of those around him, even those he has barely met at all. Violence, yes, and no hesitation before a swift betrayal, too. And he still surprises her, whether it is by making just a sliver of space for Joffrey in the tight-woven fabric of his life or by knowing her darkest secret, and having kept it for years. And still... she had not expected, on this day or any other, to see him truly afraid.

"You have not told me much of him one way or the other." She fixes a cushion for herself to lean against, having set her cup down on the bedside table with a look of disgust for the sage brew inside. "The most you have spoken of him was before you had his portrait removed from Joff's nursery."

There is another remark on the tip of her tongue – something to do with his own faithlessness, which seems surprising now considering what killed his father. Yet this is a tender subject, and she is unwilling to bring it up now that he's revealed himself to know all there is to know of her own extramarital affair.

"My son," Casimir retorts, with a heavy edge of disdain, "is not Emperor." Yet. He must remember the yet. He must remember, too, the inevitable passage of how that yet will come to be. Joffrey is his assassin-in-waiting, the looming reminder of an end. He is glad, even so, that it will not be a fever that kills the child. It will not be a fever that kills him, either. "He has no reason not to lie down. He has no work to be dragged away from."

As though that were the point. He knows it is not the point. He knows, if he is honest with himself, that the reason he will not lie down is that he is afraid: of wasted time, of lost strength, of death that doesn't even have the decency to offer him a fight.

He is not honest with himself. He remains where he is, letting his head fall back against the heavy wood of the headboard, and looks up at the carved crest overhead. A long, slow exhale. His chest aches.

"As for Gostislav, there is no reason to say much. He was a stupid man, a bad king, and a failure, and he left no legacy to speak of. But none of it is a secret. There, now I've told you everything worth knowing about the man."

"You are not saving time, and you well know it. Fine, though, force yourself to sit and work, it is not my lungs the sickness will take fierce root in." Considering, however, that she remains seated right there... It is almost as though she does not mean to let him leave his bed so easily. Stubbornness is a trait they share, and one they each hold an abundance of. And unlike him, she feels refreshed and ready to battle this out.

She takes a stray cushion, fluffs it and places it to his side – hardly an invitation. The way he sinks against the wood weighs heavy on her chest, though, with some relief, she notes it is not so terrible a feeling as when Joffrey had coughed, or when she had touched the boy's forehead and found it scalding. It isn't nothing, either. When has she turned foolish enough to want him hale and whole?

"Had he not care for you?" Why she asks so boldly is anyone's guess, but the closest one could come to the truth might be that the notion surprises her. Her mother might have forced Jaime to vacate their shared room, but she also recalls in great detail her embrace, her voice, and the tales she'd told them both. Her father might have been ready to sell her to a foreign emperor drenched in blood, but he'd promised her when she was just a few years older than Joff that he would make her queen, and he did. He had smiled at her, when she had known the correct answer to a question he posed her. There was more than the obvious.

He gives her a look of withering scorn, which is somehow made more impactful, not less, by the slight difficulty he has keeping focus.

"He hated me." There is, in the end, remarkably little resentment in his tone. This, more than anything else he has said about his father, has the ring of a simply-stated fact - which, after all, it is. There may have been instabilities and uncertainties in his upbringing, but if there was one thing he knew he could count on as a child, it was that. "He would have smothered me in my cradle, except he was too stupid to keep any other heir. Though the sky above knows he must have fathered dozens of them." Then, as though it is only occurring to him now, "Then again, they would probably have been syphilitic halfwits, too."

Very rarely does his scorn chase her away, and very rarely has this ended well for her. Yet if she were to flee now at the sight of that glare, when he is so obviously sick – how weak would that make her? There is nothing he could throw at her, he could do to her, that she could not handle, as she so often insists. This must hold true now more than ever.

Her eyes widen just a tad at the revelation that his father truly held no love for him. It makes all the more present in her mind those moments that he has shown care for Joff, perhaps some days in spite of himself. He names him his own, she has observed him speak to the boy of matters of state he did not yet understand, and he had borne, too, the boy's insistence of sharing with them tales of his playing, more rapidly by the day in the Common Tongue and in Vasi. He had been concerned with his health, too. Not to the point of fretting, sleepless nights, the way the boy's first ever sickness had left Cersei, but... uncaring he was not. Hateful least of all. She looks as though she means to say something in response –

But what he says next has her furrow her brow. How come, if his father was so riddled with the disease, and with Casimir suspecting any bastard-brothers of his would share it... How come her husband shows no such signs at all? "How odd."

This seems more than enough voice given to her sudden urge to question his parentage, and she means to suffocate the thought at once. "All the better he is dead."

He laughs, and if the comment on his father's hate was curiously absent of bitterness, the same cannot be said of that laugh. Without the softening of conscious care, it is a bleak sound indeed.

"All the better," he echoes, a mocking agreement. One of us had to be, he thinks. And that thought is fever-tinged, and again, he thinks of the movement he imagined in the shadows, the gleam of light on metal. He wonders, for the first time in many years, whether when death comes it will wear his father's face. When the darkness does take him, will there be a glint of silver?

His laugh dies away, and he is silent, staring glassy-eyed up at the canopy. At last, slowly, he raises his head to look at her.

"Pour me more tea." Whether the sage will help, he cannot say. Nor will he allow himself to admit that he is thinking of its curative properties; it soothes his throat, that is all. He is not afraid of what will come. He has never feared death before; why would he fear it now? "Pour more tea, and put another log on the fire. I will sweat this out."

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