Thomas learned, over the following weeks, exactly how little of nursing had anything to do with medicine at all.
Aldith's instruction had been brisk and practical — how to change soiled linen without spreading what clung to it, how to coax water into someone too weak to ask for it, how to recognize, in the particular slackness of a face, that the fever had turned toward its ending rather than its breaking. But the actual work, once he was inside it, proved to consist overwhelmingly of something considerably simpler and considerably harder: sitting with people, hour after hour, while they suffered.
He sat with a weaver's wife named Merrild through the worst of her third night, holding a cloth to her forehead while she talked, in the disconnected way of the badly fevered, about a brother who'd drowned when she was nine. He sat with the cooper's youngest boy, seven years old and frightened past speaking, and told him every story he could remember from a childhood three hundred years and one impossible world away, changing the details as he went so the boy wouldn't hear anything that made no sense in his own.
The boy lived. Merrild did not.
Thomas was there when she went, near dawn on the fifth day, and found himself unprepared in a way none of Aldith's careful instruction had managed to warn him about — the sheer, ordinary quietness of it, a woman simply stopping mid-breath while he held her hand, no drama to it at all, only the plain and terrible fact of a person being there and then not being there.
He sat with her a long while afterward, unable, for some minutes, to make himself move at all.
"The first one always takes something out of you," Aldith said, finding him there eventually, her own exhausted face carrying no judgment. "I've buried more than I can count now, and the first still sits in me clearer than most of the ones since. A cooper's daughter, twelve years old, the winter before you ever came to this valley. I remember her face better than I remember my own mother's."
"Does it get easier?"
"No. It gets more familiar, which isn't the same thing and shouldn't be mistaken for it." She sat down heavily beside him, allowing herself, for the first time in days, a moment of genuine rest. "What gets easier is knowing what to do with the grief afterward. The first one, you carry it alone and it nearly breaks you. The tenth, you know to tell someone, and to eat something, and to sleep before you make a mistake that costs somebody else. That's not callousness, Thomas. That's simply the discipline this work demands from anyone who intends to keep doing it."
Wat proved unexpectedly gifted at the work, to nobody's greater surprise than his own. His enormous, scarred hands turned out to be gentler than any of them had anticipated, and his gruff, matter-of-fact manner — no false comfort, no pretense that things were better than they were — landed with the frightened and the dying far more effectively than softer approaches often did.
"You're going to feel worse before you feel better," Thomas heard him tell a terrified young carter one afternoon, in exactly the tone he might have used to describe a difficult weld. "That's how this one goes. It's not a sign you're finished. Drink what Aldith gives you and stop wasting strength on being frightened about tomorrow."
The carter, remarkably, seemed to find that considerably more reassuring than anything else anyone had offered him.
Victoria worked the ledgers of it — who was where, what was needed, which households had lost their earners and would need support through the winter regardless of who lived — and it was, Thomas thought, watching her move between the tents with her careful lists, exactly the right use of exactly the right person. She had never been suited to sitting still and holding hands. She was extraordinary at making certain nobody fell through a gap in the accounting.
By the fourth week the deaths had slowed, and by the sixth they had stopped entirely. Nineteen dead, out of fifty-three stricken. Aldith called it, in her flat, exhausted assessment to the council, "considerably better than Millbrook and considerably worse than I'd hoped," and refused, characteristically, to claim credit for the difference.
"The preparation mattered," she said. "The fever house mattered, the clean water mattered, the herbs mattered a little. What mattered most, I think, was having enough hands. That's the whole of it, in the end. Not cleverness. Not any single remedy. Simply enough people willing to sit in a room with something frightening and not leave."
Thomas walked home that evening with Victoria beside him, both of them filthy and exhausted past speaking, and found himself thinking of Merrild's hand going still in his own, and of the cooper's boy who had lived, and of a valley that had spent four years building exactly the kind of place where fifty people could volunteer for something terrible and simply do it.
"Nineteen," Victoria said quietly, somewhere along the lane.
"I know."
"I keep trying to make it a number I can hold properly. It won't resolve." She was crying, he realized, without any sound at all, the way she only ever did when she was too tired to maintain anything. "Thirty-four lived, Thomas. I know that's the number I'm meant to hold onto. I keep counting the nineteen instead."
"I don't think that's a failure of accounting," Thomas said. "I think that's just what it costs to have been there."
They walked the rest of the way home in silence, and slept for eleven hours, and woke to a valley that had, once again, survived something it had no business surviving as well as it had.