Page 53 of Heart of Winter
Five pairs of eyes swung toward him.
“Your majesty,” Olaf began.
“He’s not a felled log to be juggled between four people,” Erik said. “Tell me how it’s done, and then get out.”
Olaf sighed, but he conferred with his assistants, and they all slipped out.
In the quiet left by their departure, the loudest sound was the faint rasp of Oliver’s breathing, shallow and too-slow.
Olaf caught Erik’s gaze and held if for a long moment, lips pursed, brow furrowed. Erik braced himself for a rebuke, or the sort of over-stepping comment that would get a man banished for daring to speak to a king in such a way. There would be no banishment from Erik, because he would have earned whatever was said.
But, when he spoke, Olaf said, “Take off anything you don’t want to get wet. We need to get most of him in the water, and you’ll have to support his head to make sure he doesn’t slip under.” The physician’s beard twitched as he offered a faint smile. “It’s not cold enough to freeze him, laddie. But don’t come crying to me when your teeth start chattering.”
“Have I ever?” He reached for his belt buckle, and refused to feel hopeful. Not yet, not yet.
~*~
In the deepest throes of the fever, Oliver’s consciousness was only a thrum of useless energy, an itch, a burning pain in every muscle, and eyelids too heavy to lift. After, once it broke, he could recall only a low murmur of conversation around him, washing over him like the tide, and the remembered urge to comfort those who fretted over him, though speech lay beyond him. It was no different now: he was exhausted, but unable to sleep, he was in the dark, but he couldn’t force his eyes open; he sweated, and twisted, and writhed before everything stilled, and dimmed, and then there was nothing. There was…
Cold.
There was an awful, biting, breathtakingcold. It burrowed through his skin and into his bones; wrapped tight around his chest until each breath was an agony. He could feel himself shaking; could hear the ripple and splash of water as his fingers and toes twitched.
“Shh, shh. Lie still, it’s all right.” A soft, deep, familiar voice. Erik’s voice. And large hands petting over his hair, his face, his chest, warmer than the cold that gripped him, a comfort that he leaned into blindly, seeking more of it. “I’m sorry for the cold, it’s only for a little while.”
His fever dreams had never been quite so cruel. The pain and weakness and panic were always bad enough, but now, to be taunted with the impossible, to lack the strength to push back against such fantasy…his eyes burned, his tears fire-hot as they slid down his cheeks. A callused finger wiped them away with great gentleness, and he couldn’t take this, hecouldn’t.
Let me die or wake up. Please. I don’t want this sort of lie.
The voice rumbled on overhead, heedless of his suffering. “Do you think it’s working?”
“He’s moving much more,” a voice answered, rough at the edges with age, but brisk and practical. “See his eyelids twitching?”
“Yes, but his lips areblue, Olaf.”
“We can warm him plenty once the fever breaks. Give it longer. Oliver, lad, can you hear me? Can you open your eyes?”
Fingers raked through his hair; a thumb trailed along his cheek, tracing a warm tear track. Oliver drew in a breath that burned, and managed to crack his eyes open.
Blue. All he saw was blue. A dark floor, and dark walls, and dark ceiling, and blue light glancing off the bright corners of blue planes, and blue spikes, and blue shards. Ice. It was ice – a cave full of ice, and the blue light of night, studded with stars beyond the mouth of it. Another light, too, even bluer, the bright hue of a clear summer sky just before dusk; the blue of sapphires, dazzling in the noonday sun.
Erik’s hands: on his throat, on his jaw, spreading wide over his collarbones, holding him in place, shielding him.
Oliver wet his lips, tasted something acrid and sharp, and said, “What is this place?”
The blue light from within the cave swelled and brightened. There was a sound: a low roar, growing louder. An animal sound, echoing, and booming, reverberating up through the floor, grumbling inside his own chest.
“Oliver.”
Another voice, distant and blurred, said,“That is no bear.”
“What – what is it…?”
“Oliver,” Erik said, cupped his jaw, and tipped his head back. There he was, with his hair in waves around his worried face, the sapphire light glinting off the beads braided there. And his eyes, as perfect, as blue as the light that pulsed around them. Blue enough to drown in. “Can you hear me?”
Oliver’s hand seemed to weight a hundred pounds, but he lifted it, and though he didn’t understand the water that dripped from it, he managed to reach up and curl one dark braid around his finger. He tugged on it, and Erik lowered his head – down, down, until the heat of his breath fanned across Oliver’s face, so pleasant after all the cold. “I’m glad it’s you,” he told him, and felt his lips form a smile. “You’re a very good dream to have right before the end.”
Blue eyes widened. “Oliver, no–”
