He was in two places at once.
This was the fever's particular cruelty — not the heat, not the weakness, but the dissolving of the membrane between then and now, between there and here, between Deepak and Gerffron, so that both men existed simultaneously in the bed in the cedar-and-rose-water room and neither one could entirely claim the body.
He spoke.
He knew he was speaking because he could hear himself, distantly, the way you hear your own voice in a dream — present but uncontrolled, saying things that bypassed the careful architecture of self-governance he had been building for thirteen months and went instead to something older and less managed.
He spoke in the language of this world. He was grateful for that, at least — whatever kept his secrets had apparently decided that the most essential layer of protection would hold even in fever.
But the content of what he said was not entirely Gerffron's.
Sera sat with him through the worst hours. He was aware of her presence the way you are aware of a fixed point when everything else is moving — not with attention, only with the body's animal gratitude for something that does not shift.
At one point he said, very clearly, to the ceiling: "I already said I was sorry. It doesn't change what they did."
Sera wrung the cloth and replaced it on his forehead without comment.
At another point he laughed — a short, dry sound, nothing like his usual self — and said: "He's going to be taller than me. I can already tell. He's going to be insufferable about it."
The him in question was not specified.
Later he said, with a grief so unguarded it stopped Sera's hand mid-motion: "I just wanted someone to stay."
She stayed.
She did not report what he said to Lady Elowen. She did not report it to anyone. She sat in the chair beside the bed through the night and the following day and the night after that, replacing the cloth, managing his water intake with the careful patience of someone who has decided, without announcement, that this particular life is not going to end while she is watching it.
The household moved around the room in a cautious orbit.
Lady Elowen came to the doorway on the second morning and stood there for a long time without entering. She looked at the man in the bed — sweating, diminished, speaking sometimes to people who were not there — and her expression did something complicated that Sera, who was watching her carefully, could not entirely read.
She left without speaking.
The dusk guard's hum drifted under the door that evening, shapeless and wandering as always.
Gerffron, in the grip of the fever's worst hour yet, turned his face toward the sound and was quiet for the first time in hours.
Some part of him, even now, was listening for things that meant continuity.
Some part of him refused to let go.