Gorgina came on the third day.
She did not announce herself. She did not ask Sera to leave. She simply appeared in the doorway at a hour when the household was quiet — mid-afternoon, the light through the heavy curtains the particular flat gray of deep winter — and stood there with her hands at her sides and looked at the man in the bed.
Sera rose from the chair.
"Stay," Gorgina said, without looking at her.
Sera stayed.
Gorgina crossed the room and stood at the bedside and looked at Gerffron with the expression she wore when she was processing something she had not anticipated and was refusing to show that she had not anticipated it. He was thinner than she had seen him at the sentencing. Sharper in the face. The gray wool of his sleep clothes hung differently on him than the fine consort's robes had — not poorly, only with the particular honesty of a body that had been stripped of all the decorative and reduced to the structural.
She pulled the chair from the other side of the room and sat.
Sera watched her, carefully and without expression.
Gorgina picked up the cloth from the basin, wrung it without ceremony, and placed it on Gerffron's forehead with the same efficient precision she applied to everything. She was not tender. She was not performing tenderness. She was simply doing what was in front of her to do, the way she had always operated — through function, through the completion of the task at hand, feelings managed somewhere below the surface where they could not interfere.
Gerffron murmured something.
Gorgina's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.
He said it again — not words, only sound, the particular incoherence of a high fever in its third day — and then his hand moved across the blanket with the searching quality of someone reaching for something they cannot find.
Gorgina looked at his hand for a moment.
She did not take it.
But she did not move her chair back either.
"How long has he been like this?" she asked Sera.
"Three days," Sera said. "The fever peaked last night. It's lower this morning."
"Lower."
"Yes."
Gorgina was quiet. She replaced the cloth again, though it had not been long enough to warrant replacing. The motion gave her hands something to do.
She sat with him through the afternoon.
She did not speak to him. She did not speak to Sera again. She sat in the chair beside his bed with her back straight and her hands folded in her lap and watched the fever work through the body of the man she had tried very hard to make into nothing, and something moved behind her amber eyes that she would not have named for anyone in that room.
At dusk she rose.
She paused at the door.
"Keep me informed," she said to Sera. "Directly. Not through the household."
Sera nodded.
Gorgina left.
Sera looked at the empty doorway for a moment, then looked at Gerffron, then wrung the cloth again and pressed it to his forehead with her own particular brand of quiet efficiency.
Outside, the second winter deepened.
Inside, something that had been frozen for a long time was doing what all frozen things eventually do, given enough proximity to warmth.
It was, very slowly, beginning to consider thawing.