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Camilla wasn’t sure which was worse: the pain, or Pyrrha.
The pain was pretty goddamn bad. Its agonizing knife’s edge had mercifully been quickly blunted by sleep, but that didn’t mean the rest of it was going anywhere. Even days after the incident, every bone, muscle, and nerve she had ached, with a deep, unrelenting thrum of pain that spiked any time she did anything too strenuous — a very wide set of actions that included (but was not limited to) moving, standing, or breathing a little too deep.
Camilla had spent enough time in her life either listening to Palamedes talk about necromantic applications in health sciences or reading up on them herself to recognize the after-effects of thanergy shock, which made sense. After all, the stunt they’d pulled at the beach to get rid of Merv Wing had most likely converted a solid third of her thalergy into thanergy in about half a second. If anything, she was probably lucky to be coherent without medical care beyond some sleep, some water, and some gruel.
Still; it didn’t mean it wasn’t a pain in the ass. Days turned into a week turned into two, and still the pain lingered, a deep bruise of an ache that stretched all the way into her teeth. It dragged her down with fatigue, slowed her reflexes, and made her unforgivably weak. Standing up too fast was a free ticket to an hour of dizziness, and her eyes kept watering under barbed spikes of pain that speared her temples at the barest hint of motion.
And yet, even with all of this, Camilla was still inclined to believe Pyrrha’s behavior was the worst thing to come out of the incident.
It wasn’t even the lectures. Camilla was used to the lectures, though she suspected Palamedes got the majority of them. Pyrrha had been trying to convince them to stop their cohabitation from the moment she’d realized they were doing it, and had never been cowed by their constant refusals.
In a way, the lectures would have been comforting. They would have meant she was talking to Camilla — to argue, sure, but still. Hell, they would have meant she was looking at Camilla.
Basically, they would have meant that she was doing anything other than what she was actually doing, which was turning away whenever she saw Cam, like she couldn’t bear to watch. They would have meant Cam wasn't catching her staring, sometimes, looking like she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to start shouting or give a eulogy. Like she’d already lost. Like Cam was already dead.
Camilla had very little doubt that any indication that she wasn’t completely recovered would only worsen the situation. And so, between Pyrrha’s preemptive grief and the pain, she chose the pain.
The good thing about Pyrrha’s quiet withdrawal was that it made it a lot easier to conceal just how shitty Cam felt. It involved a lot of gritting her teeth, and a lifetime of practice on keeping her expression neutral, but she pulled it off. She hid the headaches, and the dizziness, and the fatigue; took Nona to school, looked for intel while Pyrrha worked, and brought Nona home. She ran through drills, and kept writing reports, and made quick work of washing her shirts free from the blood-tinged, pink sweat that kept staining them. She upheld normalcy stellarly — whatever normalcy might have meant, when their lives were so goddamned weird.
Nona was another story entirely. On the one hand, it seemed impossible to conceal anything from her, what with the way she would on occasion read your deepest secret out of a shrugged shoulder. But on the other hand, Nona sometimes seemed so ingenuous, so trusting that it looked as though she’d have believed anything Cam or Pyrrha might tell her without question. It was an odd dichotomy to contend with, and unexpectedly made Cam feel a lot guiltier about her concealment than Pyrrha’s heavy silence ever could have.
But in the end, it didn’t really matter: Nona didn’t ask, and so Camilla carried on.
There was one person who would have seen through her mask immediately, and not just because he inhabited her body. Hell, he could have been inhabiting the small skeleton hand Nonagesimus had made, without eyes or nerves, and Camilla was sure he still would have managed to call her bluff right away.
Thankfully, that was an easily avoided problem: she didn’t bring Palamedes forward.
Pyrrha didn’t question it. In fact, Pyrrha had expressly warned her against switching, in a rare show of loquaciousness the day after the incident.
(Well, to be specific, Pyrrha had warned her that if Cam tried it before fully recovering, she would personally be trepanning her to supervise the sifting of her synovial fluid — since that will be the only way to stop your body from going into organ failure as a result of early cell necrosis, she’d added, arms crossed, jaw tight.)
(Same difference, though.)
Camilla had agreed not to switch with him until she normalized, though not for the reasons Pyrrha had outlined, nor the threats — something Pyrrha had seemed bitterly aware of, if her expression had been any indication.
All the same, it meant Pyrrha wasn’t pushing, or even seemingly wondering about the Warden’s absence. Even once she’d stopped looking at Camilla like she was a revenant who couldn’t work out that she’d died, she didn’t bring it up. Maybe she thought the incident had chided them, served as a warning. Maybe she thought they were switching, when she wasn’t around.
Whatever the reason for Pyrrha’s silence, it suited Camilla just fine. It gave her time to fix this, without involving the Warden.
(What she hadn’t foreseen was how difficult it would be not to call on him. Day after day, the urge had only grown stronger. It seemed silly to miss him, when he wasn’t really gone, or at least, no more than he’d already been, but she couldn’t help herself. She’d grown used to it, was the thing: to the recordings, and the letters, and the comments left in the margins of her reports; to the emptied bowls of gruel she didn’t like to eat, and the carefully dried dishes she hadn’t done; to the notes left folded in the sock drawer for her to find later, and the pens she kept finding in her pockets. To all of it.
Without those things, everything seemed too quiet. It was an oppressive kind of silence, that spiked with every uncommented research notes, with the switched off diode of the recorder, or with the glasses left untouched on the chest of drawers in the bedroom. It pressed down on her, like something tangible, a weight her shoulders couldn’t carry — or, maybe, like a small bag of bone fragments, tied to a cord worn around her neck.)
She would get better. Her thanergy would balance out, the aftereffects would fade, and then (only then) she would bring the Warden back. No one would know just how long it’d taken her, or how weak she’d been. It would be fine.
Or at least, that was the plan. Unfortunately, the Master Warden had always had a knack for throwing wrenches in any plan she came up with.
*
It all came to a head two weeks after the incident. Pyrrha was at work. Nona was at school. Cam was trying to ignore the four people who’d been following her since she’d stepped outside the building that morning.
It wasn’t easy. For all that their masks and overcoats made them relatively indistinguishable from the throngs that surrounded them, they had one major giveaway: they were too still. They moved when Camilla moved, keeping a respectable distance, staying mostly out of sight within the turbid chemical smokes of the city centre — but when she looked back, when she paused, they’d stop, and wait, and linger.
No one stopped in the city. Everyone always hurried, even if they had nowhere to go. No one wanted to suffer through the unbearably thick, toxic heat any longer than strictly necessary.
Camilla brought her hood a little lower over her face, and kept walking.
After the incident at the beach, Cam and Pyrrha had been braced for BoE to storm their apartment and drag them to the nearest cell command to explain themselves. But days had passed, and Merv Wing hadn’t shown themselves, through official channels or out. That, in and of itself, had told them everything they’d needed to know: the confrontation hadn’t been sanctioned officially on BoE’s side.
Once that had become clear, Pyrrha had insisted on bringing it up to We Suffer. The commander hadn’t seemed particularly surprised (more like exhausted), but had assured them that nothing of the sort would be happening again.
For a few days, it’d seemed like the orders were being heeded. But now…
Camilla glanced over her shoulder as she crossed over to a more trafficked area. The four figures were keeping pace. Badly concealed weaponry bulged from underneath their jackets.
We Suffer had her people’s respect, but BoE wasn’t exactly a perfectly oiled military command. If anything, Camilla was surprised it’d taken this long for some operatives to disregard the orders entirely and start trailing them again. Hopefully, anyone who had decided to go after Pyrrha was a little more skilled at staying concealed — for their sake.
She took a circuitous route around the city, without actually edging closer to the barracks she’d hoped to canvas her way around that morning. Her shadows stuck close, but didn’t make contact.
Damn it.
They’d been sufficiently cowed by We Suffer and their cell commander that they weren’t engaging her directly — but she suspected it was only a matter of time before one of them decided to show a little more initiative.
It shouldn’t have been a problem. After all, she’d been trained to handle much worse than four opponents with middling training and no subtlety. If anything, an attack in broad daylight like this might give her leverage the next time We Suffer decided to summon them.
Except.
Except pain was still dragging her down. It coiled around her bones, shortened her breath, made sweat bead at her temples. She was exhausted; sore; slow — weakened by a thanergy unbalance that refused to even out.
If they decided to try and shank her in the name of revenge or liberation, she couldn’t be sure she’d be able to hold her ground. At best, she’d be injured. At worst…
She blew out a breath and squeezed her eyes shut. Fuck. Fuck.
She couldn’t risk it.
Struggling to breathe through the frustration, Camilla swallowed her pride, straightened her shoulders against the agonizing tension in her neck, and turned to head back to the apartment.
The trip back was excruciating. It could have been because of the heat, which had somehow risen even more and made it hard to breathe. It could have been because of the detours she took to try and shake her persistent entourage, which brought her through back alleys where the air was barely breathable, and up crumbling stairs and passageways that made her legs burn.
Or maybe, it could have been because of the unbearable awareness of her own weakness — the anger at herself that made her grit her teeth, and sent her headache spiking.
Whatever it was, it didn’t do her any favors. By the time she was closing the apartment door behind her, she felt only half-conscious. She bolted it shut out of pure habit, barely hearing the snap of metal, and spun around, pressing her back against the panel in something that was half a lean and half a fall.
Her eyes closed of their own accord, in an attempt to stave off the dizziness that rocked her perception. She was sticky with sweat, her throat burned with the sting of the city’s chemical fog, and her limbs felt heavy as lead. Even her skin ached.
Slowly, agonizingly slowly, the nausea started to subside, allowing her to blink her eyes open. The room was dim, courtesy of the blackout tarp, but the noise of the city filtered in, loud and brash and alien. The air, even inside, was thick — hot and humid and so impossibly different from the Library’s cool, climate-controlled atmosphere that it felt like a different substance entirely, one that never seemed to make it all the way inside her lungs.
She’d never felt so far from home.
The realization added a new layer of nausea to the dizziness already rushing her, and she dug her fingernails into her palms, trying to feel the sting over the queasiness.
The temptation to sink to the floor and stay there until it was time to get Nona was overwhelming.
Instead, Camilla opened her eyes, pushed away from the door, and set to running through training drills.
Getting rid of her outdoors equipment was a matter of practiced minutes; getting set up on the mat of even less time. Instinct and habit guided her through the first movements of the routine, despite how shitty she felt. There was no conscious thought involved, not really — so much so, even, that it took her a solid ten minutes to realize she was following the routine she'd favoured on examination mornings, back on the Sixth. She hadn’t done so since leaving, before Canaan House.
She paused mid-lunge, heart in her throat, lungs constricting.
It had been an unconscious choice, and, in the alien atmosphere, the motions barely felt familiar at all. There was nothing in this sparse, desolate room that even remotely resembled the Spire’s clean, airy space — even the gravity felt a little heavier, though that was maybe only due to her exhaustion.
She forced the thought away, continuing through the sequence until the shortness of her breath and the ache in her limbs made any kind of reminiscing impossible.
Lunges followed squats followed pull-ups followed push-ups, and so on. She kept up with dogged determination, ignoring the way her lungs ached more with each rep, each breath tasting of too-sharp metal. Her muscles felt weak, her joints brittle — her knees cracked and her elbows popped. Her body barely seemed like her own.
She reached the end of the circuit, blinked too-pink sweat out of her eyes, and started running through it again.
By the time she was done, the walls of the room seemed to be tilting at an alarming angle, but some of the uncomfortable stiffness had been worked out of her joints, leaving her feeling marginally more like herself.
She took a swig of water and checked the time. There was a solid hour before she’d need to get Nona from school. She could have used the time for some stretches, a cooldown, or maybe to have something to eat.
The very idea made her stomach roil. With a shake of the head, she put her glass down and went to retrieve her box from behind the false back of the bathroom cabinet, bringing it back to the table.
In the faint, blue-tinged light that filtered through the cracks in the tarp, the metal looked almost black. She flipped the lid open.
Her fingers wrapped around the hilts of her knives and for the first time in what felt like weeks, Camilla took a full breath. She brought up the weapons, feeling the heft and weight of the blades, shifting her centre of gravity from one foot to the other, feeling more grounded than she had in days.
Camilla allowed herself a hint of a smile, and got to work running through her drills.
Unfortunately, the feeling didn’t last long. Maybe it was the heat, humid and tacky against her skin and inside her throat. Maybe it was her morning spent in the city, with its toxic atmosphere and harsh chemical smokes. Maybe it was her previous drills, running her dry of what little energy she’d manage to gather.
Whatever it was, Camilla only realized how badly off she was once it was too late.
She paused mid-movement, one arm thrust forward, the other held back and up — and she wobbled, until she was forced to move her right foot to compensate and keep upright. She blinked, and her vision filled with bright white spots, spiraling in a kaleidoscope of light that took her proprioception along with it for a ride. Her ears were ringing, her legs weren’t responding, and fuck but it was hot in here and—
Distantly, she heard the clatter of metal. She blinked, and her gaze fell on one of her knife, gleaming faintly on the floor.
Huh. She couldn’t remember dropping it.
The hand that had held the weapon was now braced against the wall. It was yet again something she couldn’t remember consciously doing, but it was also unquestionably a good idea. Her balance seemed precarious at best.
She leaned forward, trying to catch her breath, trying to bring the pressure in her skull back to manageable levels, trying to remember which way was up and which way was down — but sweat was dripping over her brow (her eyes stung), and her head was so heavy, and her lungs ached, and she couldn’t breathe.
She felt her grip on her remaining knife grow lax and, in a sudden burst of panicked awareness, fumbled with her fingers to keep the blade from joining its compatriot on the ground.
A sharp lance of slicing pain cut through the white noise in her head, and she straightened, looking down to find a long cut along the palm of her hand, dark blood already welling up and dripping. The knife glittered on the floor, the edge of its blade stained red, though she hadn’t heard it fall.
She forced a breath in, and out. Closed her fist. Leaned a little more into the wall. It was fine. It was all fine. She’d pushed a little too hard. That was all. In a minute, she’d get her breath back, and she’d clean everything up, and it would all be fine.
In a minute.
Just a minute.
She tried to lift her head, but found she couldn’t move her gaze away from the blood starting to seep through her fingers. It had seeped like that, once, from her arm instead of her palm, when a rapier had split skin and bone and tendon and—
And—
And Palamedes had fixed it up; he’d wrapped it, and he’d used coag drops that hurt like hell and smelled worse, and he’d been shaking while he did it—
Palamedes had—
Camilla’s vision greyed out at the edges. A wave of nausea swept over her, and she held her breath, biting her tongue, clenching her fists — fresh pain rose from her injury like dust from a sealed study, nebulous and turbulent, full of vortices and eddies.
Palamedes—
.
Camilla blinked.
She was sat on the floor, cross-legged, her back to the wall. Her heart beat slowly and evenly; the air felt warm, but not stifling. Her vision was slightly blurred, everything looking a little hazy around the edges.
She looked down. In front of her, arrayed in a neat semi-circle, were a glass of water, an unwrapped piece of hardtack, and a clean, folded handkerchief. Off to her left was the box, lid open, knives clean and tidied back in place.
She swallowed, and leaned back against the wall a little more. The hair at her temples felt tacky with dried sweat. Her feet were bare. There was an odd, warm feeling running over her lips.
Her vision cleared a little. She found that there was a page (from the back of her research notebook, no doubt) on the ground, inscribed with a familiar scrawl and three arrows. The first pointed to the glass, and said Drink. The second pointed to the crackers, and said, Eat. The last pointed to the handkerchief, and said for your nose (sorry).
She reached a hand up to her nose and found that the warmth wasn’t so much warmth as it was blood , dripping in a thin, steady flow. Automatically, she reached for the handkerchief with the other hand, pausing briefly when she realized it was bandaged, the palm wrapped in a clean, white band of gauze.
She wiped the blood off her face, balled up the handkerchief in her fist, and looked down at her lap.
On her crossed ankles rested a small recorder, its indicator light glowing a steady red. On top rested another scrap, upon which had been scrawled: when convenient.
Shit.
Bracing herself, Cam pressed the play button.
“Hi Cam,” the recording said, and Camilla winced. Even though it wasn’t his voice, she’d have known that odd blend of tart cheerfulness anywhere. The Warden had perfected it at age 14, when he’d used it to end Master Scholar Tyrel’s whole career with no more than five pointed observations on the man’s scholar thesis. It hit just as hard now.
“I’ve been trying to work out how to best formulate my query,” Palamedes continued, and his tone was acid and pointed and the most reassuring thing Camilla had heard in days. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed hearing him, even if it was only his intonations. “I’ve found this to be a surprisingly complex problem. Thankfully, I’ve had ample opportunity to think on it, while I worked to bring your blood pressure back to a sustainable level, brought you back from the brink of dehydration, and made sure that you wouldn’t bleed out all over the floor.”
Camilla let the back of her head hit the wall behind her with a dull thud. It made the throbbing in her temples spike in tandem.
“And as it happens,” Palamedes said through the speaker, wielding politeness like a rapier, “I think I’ve settled on one central interrogative, which follows.” There was a pause, and then the sound of him clearing his throat. “What the fuck is going on?”
Cam let her eyes close.
“Thank you. I’ll be looking forward to your response.” Another short pause, and then, like he’d almost forgotten: “Drink the water, please.” And the recording stopped.
Camilla took a moment.
Okay. So. Not ideal.
She definitely had not meant to call Palamedes forward — she’d in fact been working to do the precise opposite for two weeks. Even now, with her head a little clearer, she couldn’t remember doing it per se; but then again, switching with him was sometimes less of an action than it was an instinct. Maybe, as she’d lost consciousness, she’d accidentally reached for him in some way?
It made enough sense, at least. It just happened to be massively inconvenient, as, of all the situations where she would have liked to bring him back forward, this one ranked at the very bottom of the list, solely above while bleeding out from a gunshot wound and mid-walking through the fish market (the Warden hated the smell).
All the same. Voluntary or not, convenient or not, she’d done it. All she could do now was damage control.
Unfortunately, while damage control was one of her strengths, she estimated Palamedes was at a solid seven on a scale of one to ten towards losing his shit completely. That meant there was very little chance of her managing to save this one. Still; she had to try.
In a motion so practiced it had become almost instinctive, Camilla pressed the Record button.
“Warden,” she said, as neutrally as she could manage with her dried up throat and her hammer of a headache, “apologies. Practice got a little out of hand. Didn’t mean to bring you forward.” She eyed the bandage on her hand. “Thanks for the patch-up job.”
It wasn’t going to cut it, but what else could she do? With a sigh, she leaned back into the wall, closed her eyes, and pulled on the faint awareness at the back of her head, focusing on inviting it in.
.
She opened her eyes and pressed play.
“I am,” Palamedes said, pointed as a toothpick, “inside your body, Camilla. I can feel your headache. I tried to stand and almost fainted, because it turns out you’re so orthostatic it’s a miracle you can even sit up, I can’t look at food without feeling like I’m going to be sick, and I’d say you’ve only got about 60% of the required blood volume — and that’s a conservative estimate.”
Yikes.
“And so,” Palamedes concluded, his tone bringing her voice to a pitch higher than she had ever used herself, “I reiterate: what the fuck, Cam?”
Camilla opened her mouth, reaching for the record button.
“And don’t even think of telling me you’re fine.”
Camilla closed her mouth.
“And drink the water.”
The play button came back up with a soft sound.
She quietly revised her assessment from a seven to a nine out of ten.
She brought the recorder up, took a moment, and pressed record. “I’m handling it,” she said mildly, and cut the recording. Knowing full well that she was going to need it, she tried to buy a little good will by taking a generous swig of the water. She scrunched her nose at the metallic aftertaste, and blinked.
.
She was greeted by the sight of a newly-full glass set in front of her. Looked like she’d have to work a little harder for that good will.
The play button clacked under her finger. “Handling it?” Palamedes repeated, his tone so offended Camilla could picture the accompanying push-of-the-glasses-up-the-bridge-of-the-nose motion that had always gone with it. “Cam, you’re going through acute thanergy disbalancing, I’m assuming as a result of our temporary lysis.”
She was almost offended he felt the need to spell it out, but assumed it was more in the service of his rhetorical point than because he thought she didn’t know.
“It’s not something you can handle your way out of,” he continued, sounding aghast, “or at least not with intense physical exercise. With this level of unbalancing, you probably shouldn’t even be up, never mind waving knives around.”
Camilla stared at the recorder, one eyebrow up, and pressed record.
“I don’t wave, Warden.”
.
Clack. “No sass when your shirt still has blood on it, please.”
Camilla made a face, glancing down at her shirt. The collar and front were marked with faint, dried halos of bloodsweat. The right side held a long, thick streak of it, which almost looked dark blue in the faint light. It was still a little damp against her fingers — from the cut on her palm, no doubt.
The recording continued: “Why didn’t you tell me, Cam?” There was something a little brittle in his tone, that made Camilla’s shoulders tense reflexively. “I could have helped. I could have…” He trailed off into a long pause. When he spoke again, that brittleness was papered over, but not enough that she couldn’t hear it. “I’m the bloody Master Warden of the Sixth House, Cam. I’m, arguably, the foremost expert on thanergy / thalergy balancing and its applications when it pertains to the health of the human body, as you know perfectly well.”
Camilla swallowed. Of course she knew. She’d helped him become that expert, had helped him research every known and unknown corner of the field, all in the hope that he might, if not save, at least help a dying woman he’d never met.
A woman who, in the end, had died anyway, without either of them being able to do a thing about it.
“I’m not saying I could have made this go away,” he said, and the defeated cast to the words had Camilla tightening her grip on the recorder. “I’m not even saying you should have brought me forward early on, because God knows I’m making things worse from a thanergy standpoint, but you didn’t have to sit in this alone and let it get to this point.” Click.
Camilla forced a long breath. “Who says I was sitting in it alone?”
.
Clack. “There is no way in hell or out that Pyrrha would let you use knives if she knew the state you were in. With good reason, I might add. If you feel like arguing that point, I suggest looking down at your own right hand for a moment and reconsidering.”
Camilla looked down at her bandaged hand for a moment and reconsidered.
“I just — I wish you’d said something before you’d passed out and been forced to, Cam.” A pause. “If only because waking up mid-fall to the ground means I panicked and used a dampening field to slow the fall, and now your nose won’t stop bleeding.”
Absently, Camilla wiped the thin trail of blood that had started dripping down over her lips with the back of her hand. She could still taste it at the back of her throat, though, sharp and iron.
“Sorry about that, again, by the way,” he said, and Camilla had to force a deep breath through her nose.
He was trying to be neutral; trying to keep a facade, trying to use her own even tone as a shield — but it wasn’t going to work. Not because she knew her voice, but because she knew him. She knew him, and Palamedes Sextus, Master Warden of the Sixth House wasn’t just edging towards losing his grip on his own hinges — he was already there, only clinging to them by his very fingernails.
Damn it.
Camilla dug the heels of her hands into her eyes, blocking out the light. When the corresponding pressure at her temples reached critical, she released the compression, lifted her head, picked up the recorder, and said: “I didn’t see the point in making the both of us feel like crap.” which was true, though maybe only partially.
.
The back of her hand was clean, a fresh handkerchief laid neatly across her left knee. She took it and held it against her nose.
Clack. “The point,” Palamedes said scathingly, “is that you would have felt less like crap.” There was the noise of shifting fabric, and then: “Honestly, Cam, at this point, I feel like there are two options. One, you’re an idiot who can’t tell how badly off she is right now — because it’s really, really bad. It’s a tempting option, because you’d think only an idiot would realize she’s about a strong breeze away from organ failure and decide to run drills about it.”
Cam rolled her eyes.
“Only, that would also mean you are an idiot with a frankly astonishing gift for faking being smart, considering the last two decades and change. Laws of probabilities consequently make it a very unlikely option.”
It was never a good sign when the Warden started bringing up applied mathematics.
“Two,” he continued, and Cam all but felt her fingers twitch with the ghost of the counting motion Palamedes had to have done, “you’re upset with me for almost killing you and didn’t want to speak with me—”
Cam pressed record without bothering to listen to the rest of the message. “I’m not angry with you, Warden. And it was my idea as much as yours.”
.
Clack. “Then what, Cam? Why would you keep this to yourself and make it worse?”
Record. “That first hypothesis didn’t sound so implausible to me.”
.
Clack. “Cam.” There was nothing but defeat in the syllable.
Camilla closed her eyes. Damn it. Damn it.
Her finger shook a little as she pressed the record button. “I was trying to protect you, Warden.” She paused, glancing up at the cracked ceiling. Glimmers of light skidded across the plaster, reflecting off the moving cars outside. “It’s kind of my thing.”
Before she could think better of it, she stopped the recording and closed her eyes.
.
Clack. Silence. Silence. Silence.
Camilla waited in perfect stillness, breath held, blood dripping down the back of her throat.
“Cam,” Palamedes said eventually, the word so quiet that, for a heartbeat, it almost sounded like his voice. “Did it never occur to you that I might want to protect you, too?”
Camilla took a moment.
When she felt she could speak steadily, she pressed record, and said: “That’s not how it works, Warden.”
.
Clack. “Bullshit—”
Record. “Compelling rhetoric, Warden.”
.
Clack. “You know I can tell when you don’t listen to everything I say before you reply, right?”
Record. “Unconceivable, Warden.”
.
Clack. The sound of something that might be the very end of a snort. “Cam. Come on.” A pause. “Do you really believe that? That it’s how this is meant to work? You protecting me, and never the other way around?”
Camilla hesitated, her finger over the button. Record. “I knew what I was signing up for, Warden. It’s not a problem.”
.
Clack. “See, that’s funny.” He didn’t sound particularly amused. “Because I thought I knew what I was signing up for, but now I’m thinking maybe… Maybe we weren’t signing on the same proverbial dotted line at all.”
Pause. Camilla’s throat was tight, though she wasn’t sure if it came from her.
“We’re always so in sync,” Palamedes continued, sounding almost wistful. “I suppose I assumed that this, just like everything else, went without saying.” A breath. “But maybe some things do need saying, because… Because you seem to actually believe this. You seem to think you owed it to me to… what? Spare me? Shield me? Take on that pain on your own, because you thought that was your role? That you shouldn’t be, I don’t know, in pain? Weak? Is that it?”
The regretful tinge of his tone made it hard to breathe right. She did her best anyway.
Record. “I took an oath to be your Hand, Warden. That means something.”
.
Clack. “Yeah, it does.” Pause. Pause. Pause.
In the quiet of the apartment, every second seemed to stretch longer than the last.
“Camilla,” Palamedes said eventually, and if she closed her eyes, she could almost see him, sitting cross-legged in front of her, fingers steepling together over his lap, eyes lethally kind behind the shield of his spectacles. “I’m squatting in your soul. Keeping me alive is, quite literally, killing you.”
She reached for the record button.
“Camilla Hect, don’t you dare record over the rest of this,” he snapped, and she paused in mid-air. “Don’t protest. Don’t shake your head, either. It’s true. Verifiably. It’s slow, miserably slow, but it’s happening. It’s hurting you, more with every passing second.”
Record. “I told you,” Camilla said, her breathing a little too tight, “that was my choice. I gave you those rights. You didn’t need to ask.”
.
Clack. “Yeah,” he breathed, barely audible. “And right now, you don’t need to ask.”
Camilla hit pause on the recording. Only when her eyes stopped burning did she resume playing.
“One flesh, one end, Cam,” he said, as grave and honest as he’d been at thirteen, swearing the oath that bound his life to hers. “It goes both ways. It’s always gone both ways. It should go both ways.”
Record. “Warden,” Camilla said, maybe a little too sharp, “this isn’t… I don’t want repayment.” She trailed off, struggling to find the words, struggling to work out how to tell him in a way that he could understand.
She knew how much it killed him — he tried to shield her from it, sometimes, but it was who he was. He loathed the idea of consumption; of encroaching on her existence with his own, of hurting others for his own survival. It’d always been clear, even back on the Sixth — had been even more so at Canaan House, as he frowned over the Cavalier’s cot in their quarters, kept trying to walk side by side with her when she was a half step behind. It'd been clearest of all when he’d understood the requirements of the Avulsion trial. And these days, the guilt he felt over their current arrangement colored everything, a sharp aftertaste Camilla had learned to ignore.
Of course he would want to mitigate that. Of course he would want to take on her pain, when he believed himself responsible for it. That was who he was.
But it wasn’t needed.
“Warden,” she said, a little unsteadily. “This wasn’t something you asked of me. It wasn’t a duty. It isn’t a duty. It’s a choice, that I’ve made. I made it in full awareness and understanding of the consequences. You don’t have to repay that. You don’t owe me anything in return. That’s not how it works.”
.
Clack. “Is that what you think this is?” There was a pained, almost incredulous lilt to the words. “You think I want to help you as payment?”
A pause.
“Do you really think,” he said in a breath, “that there is anything I could do that would make up for what I am doing to you?”
Record. Pause. Pause.
.
Clack. “You said this was your choice,” he said, infinitely gentle, in the way he got, sometimes — glasses off, eyes soft, mouth creased in a small, sad smile. “I understand that, as much as I may dislike it. But like I said: that goes both ways. Helping you, taking on some of your pain; that’s my choice. As much as you may dislike it. I want to help you, Cam. Please just… let me. Let me make that choice.”
The Warden had always been all about choices, especially for others. It suddenly seemed exceedingly unfair to deprive him of his own.
Camilla sighed, defeated. She used an unbloodied corner of the handkerchief to wipe the drying tear tracks on her cheeks — though they weren’t her own — and pressed record.
“Does that mean you’re volunteering to handle the dishes from now on?”
.
Clack. “Hmm,” he hummed, though she could hear the suppressed laugh underneath the sound. “I don’t remember that part of the Cavalier/Necromancer oath.”
Record. “It’s in the fine print. Right before the sock darning section.”
.
Clack. “Ah yes, and after the ‘bullying one’s necromancer into doing stretches’ paragraph, no doubt.”
Camilla bit back a smile. “That was for free, actually.”
.
Clack. A laugh — short, and sounding only the slightest bit like his, but real. “And I appreciate that. Mostly.” A sigh. “I can’t fix the thanergy disbalance completely, but I think I can improve on it somewhat. If you’ll allow me.”
Cam followed the line of the bandage around her palm with her other index finger. It was a little clumsy, but full of care — and involved way more gauze than strictly necessary.
Record. “I trust you, Warden.”
.
Clack. “Thank you, Scholar.” His tone was grave — like she’d just given him the most important of tasks — like he was handling something infinitely precious and fragile.
She closed her eyes.
.
.
.
Camilla was staring at the ceiling.
She blinked, disoriented from the sudden transition from seated to lying down. It took her a moment to realize she was in bed, lying beneath fresh sheets. Her hair was damp at her temples and her hairline, as though she’d washed her face. The room was dark, the only light coming in from the cracked open door.
She came up on an elbow, bracing herself for the now familiar bout of dizziness at the shift. It came, sending the walls around her spinning, but subsided much faster than she expected.
Low voices filtered through the open door. Pyrrha’s low tones, and Nona’s rapid pace — but all at a low volume. On the bedside table, Camilla spotted a glass of water, and a folded note.
She sat up, turning so her back was against the wall, and picked it up, unfolding it along the crease. The dim light was just about enough to make out the familiar scrawl:
I’m not even sorry
Shit.
“Hect.”
Camilla glanced up to find Pyrrha standing in the doorway. She was holding a bowl of something that steamed lightly in the light of the corridor. Her expression was unreadable.
No one said anything for a little while, and then something that might have been a smile pulled at a corner of Pyrrha’s mouth. “Yeah,” she drawled, low and amused, “Sextus ratted you out.”
Camilla blinked, schooled her face into neutrality, and swung her legs to the side of the bed.
Pyrrha lifted an unimpressed eyebrow. “Don’t even think about it,” she said, and stepped inside the room, putting a spoon and the bowl down next to the glass of water. “Lie back down.”
Camilla did not lie back down.
Pyrrha took in her expression and snorted. “You know, that would be a hell of a lot more convincing if I didn’t know for a fact that you’re not actually capable of standing right now.”
Cam narrowed her eyes at her.
Pyrrha crossed her arms, painfully unimpressed.
Unfortunately for Camilla, this was a fight she couldn’t win (not with her blood pressure in the basement). Still; out of a potentially misplaced pride, she held out as long as possible, until she could physically feel herself swaying in place. Only then did she consent to lying back down, letting her head hit the pillow without bothering to hide her resentment — against Pyrrha’s smug half smile, against Palamedes’ note, and against her own blood circulation.
“That’s what I thought,” Pyrrha commented, which did not help in the least.
“I thought me and the Warden were dying anyway,” she muttered, with enough sulk that Palamedes would have laughed at her.
It was hard to tell in the dim light, but Camilla thought Pyrrha might have rolled her eyes. “Yeah,” she said, “but you’re not dead yet.” She nodded towards the bowl. “Eat that once you can sit up. And don’t even think about getting up until I tell you to.”
Camilla watched her leave the room through half-lidded eyes. She wasn’t sure what Palamedes had told Pyrrha — had even less of an idea what Pyrrha might have told Palamedes in return — but whatever it had been, she could tell it had helped. There was less tension in the line of her shoulders, and her tone had been lighter than Cam could remember hearing in days.
With a sigh, Cam resettled herself back onto the bed, her limbs already heavy as lead. Her fingers curled around the note, and, with a slow breath, she let sleep drag her down.