It began with cold.
Not the cold of the east tower's floorboards — that was an old enemy, familiar and predictable. This cold came from inside, rising upward through his bones like a tide that had been building for a long time and had finally, quietly, decided it had been patient enough.
Gerffron noticed it on a Wednesday morning in the second winter, when he stood at the crack in the boarded balcony doors and felt the world tilt very slightly, the way a ship tilts before a storm — gently, almost imperceptibly, just enough to tell you that the equilibrium you had been relying on was no longer guaranteed.
He sat down.
He had not sat down involuntarily in over a year. His body had been many things in these thirteen months — cold, hungry, bruised in memory if not in fact, pushed past the edges of comfort in ways that had ultimately only made it more disciplined. It had not, until this morning, simply refused.
He pressed the back of his hand to his forehead.
Warm. Too warm.
He thought, with the careful detachment of a man who has learned not to panic at inconvenient information: ah.
He had known it was a possibility. Thirteen months of inadequate rations, stone floors, insufficient warmth, the body's resources being poured entirely into the maintenance of mental acuity at the expense of everything else — he had known, in the abstract, that a ledger kept this long in the red would eventually demand payment.
He had simply hoped to choose the timing himself.
By noon he was sweating through the gray wool.
By dusk he could not stand without gripping the wall.
Sera arrived with the evening tray and stopped in the doorway. He heard the small sound of her intake of breath — not dramatic, not alarmed, just the precise calibration of a person who has been watching someone carefully for a long time and has just seen the thing she had been watching for.
"I'm all right," he said.
She looked at him for a moment without speaking.
She left the tray. She left the door open.
He did not have the energy to close it.
He lay down on the pallet and pulled the gray wool around him and felt the heat in his body building toward something it had no good intention of stopping at, and thought, with the last organized thought available to him before the fever began its work in earnest:
Not now. Not when I am this close to something.
The fever did not care.
By midnight the east tower was the coldest room in the world and also, simultaneously, unbearably hot, and Gerffron lay in the narrow intersection of those two impossible facts and let his body have its verdict.
He had given it everything else.
He supposed it had earned this.