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The brochures for the Canaan University cavalier program had been enticingly well-designed, with lots of pictures of shiny new gymnasium equipment and words like "excellence" and "ferocity". It had billed itself as a change from every scientific research institution Cam had grown up in, which treated her preoccupation with swords as an amusing hobby. And in many ways, it had been a change.
In other ways, her life at Canaan was exactly the same as it had been since she turned eight.
"Camilla! I need saliva samples!"
Cam sighed and set down the set of bone-handled daggers she'd nearly finished cleaning. Someday she would find a university or research institution that would give her a grant to invent a way of keeping necromancers from bursting through your front door at odd hours and shouting anatomical terms at you. She was positive she could commercialize such a discovery and retire the richest swordswoman alive.
Palamedes was in the living room of their two-room apartment, which was perforce also their kitchen and laboratory. His head and shoulders were swallowed up by their cabinet of mismatched (clean) test tubes, his bag and sopping coat were on the floor, and he'd left the front door open, letting in the freezing damp autumn wind that always found its way in through the window at the end of the hall. Cam shut the door, bolted it, retrieved the bag, and wordlessly tidied off a space on Palamedes' desk so he'd have somewhere to deposit the armful of glassware he emerged with.
"Saliva samples," he said again, instead of hello, how's your day or terrible weather, isn't it.
Cam perched on the arm of the sofa, as all the chairs were taken up by books. "Yours or mine?"
"Mine. Although yours will be useful too, now that I'm thinking of it. We should swap. Do it double-blind."
Camilla obediently labeled a selection of test tubes and went hunting through the desk drawers for swabs. "Some people would take that as a lewd suggestion."
"Those people are boring. Where's Kuusi's paper on virion replication? Wasn't it in Forensic Necromancy? I tried to search for it on the way over but it wasn't coming up."
"Postmortem Society Journal, volume thirty-six," Cam said absently as she swabbed her necromancer's salivary ducts, then her own. She sealed the samples and arranged them in neat racks on the dedicated fridge shelf for micro-organisms. "What virion are we looking for, precisely?"
"Influenzavirus necromansis sextae. I'm going to name it," he said smugly.
"It's clunky."
"It's descriptive. And notate that those samples are approximately four hours after symptom onset."
Cam carefully closed the fridge and turned to look at her adept.
"What symptoms, exactly?"
He was perched in his beloved swivel chair, looking like a scarecrow dressed up to go to an academic conference. "Headache," he ticked off on his fingers, "sore throat, fatigue, malaise, incipient chills. List incubation period as three days, but that's purely a guess, we'll have to do confirmatory experiments."
Under closer scrutiny, which was to say any scrutiny at all, he looked dreadful. His color was off, his shoulders drooped in a way they usually only did after three nights of no sleep, and the eternal bags under his clear gray eyes seemed only to have deepened since this morning.
Camilla sighed and pressed the inside of her wrist to his forehead. Even still damp from the freezing rain he'd walked home through, he was several degrees too warm. "Four hours from onset and you're already febrile. At least tell me you're not going to Osseo lab this afternoon."
"Of course I am. We've only just got to the femoral tubercle --"
"Let me rephrase," Cam said, moving her hand to grip his wrist, where his pulse beat faster and threadier than usual under the skin. "Warden, you're not going to Osseo lab this afternoon."
He pulled a face at the nickname, which she pulled out when he was being particularly obtuse or intractable. "Cavaliers," he murmured, his favorite nonspecific pejorative, but even as he said it he listed forward, losing his will to sit upright. His cheek came to rest on her stomach, the arm of his glasses jabbing through her thin training shirt into her abdominal muscles. She slipped them off his overheated face and into a pocket of her jacket for safekeeping.
"Come on. Samples are incubating, in vivo and in vitro." He would probably fight her later, once he got frustrated with the buildup of work that wouldn't make sense of itself through the fog of illness. But a morning's worth of running around febrile in the rain had tired him out enough that he let himself be manhandled out of the desk chair and dumped unceremoniously (but gently) onto their bed.
From there instinct took over and he burrowed into the covers, like an unearthed phasmatodea retreating back to safety under a cool layer of dirt. "Cam," he mumbled into the pillow, "will you --"
"Yes."
"And don't forget the --"
"It's already done. Go to sleep." She rested her hand on his forehead again, very softly brushing her thumb through the fringe of his hair while she compiled a list of all the things that would have to be done soon. In just a minute. As soon as his breathing evened out into the familiar rhythms of actual sleep and not a very bad imitation.
He cracked one eye open. "You're thinking about your Admin proposal, aren't you?"
"How did you know?"
Camilla had been working for six months on a proposal to the university's administration, petitioning for a higher level of medical training to be made a mandatory part of the cavalier program. Her reasoning for this was that even though cavaliers were the ones expected to engage in physical combat, necromancers were by far the more likely to become injured or ill, and were absolutely shitty beyond belief at taking care of themselves. They would therefore need someone competent and nearby, i.e. their cavalier, to be able to do it for them.
So far the administrative board, which was mostly comprised of necromancers, had not been swayed by her extremely sound logic.
"You can write me up as a case study," Palamedes sighed. "Might as well be useful to someone." He rolled away and coughed into the blankets. Camilla, who had listened to him hack and wheeze under the influence of various exertions and ailments for most of their lives, didn't like the sound of it.
At least the routine of monitoring and mollifying a sweaty, morose, pathetic, phlegm-riddled necromancer was second nature. Once she'd satisfied herself that the apartment was stocked with an appropriate range of fluids and set out his experimentally-modified inhalers where he could reach them, she made the rounds to collect both her class notes and his for the next week or so. Then she went to the cav gym, sparred with Protesilaus for an hour to get the twitching anxiety out of her arms and shoulders, and walked back across campus in the rain to the library, where she organized all the aforementioned class notes into folders with color-coded tabs and tallied them all up in a master spreadsheet to be hung on the fridge/sample incubator.
Then she went home, checked Palamedes' breathing (adequate) and temperature (rising), and took down his vital signs on a legal pad (six hours after symptom onset, subject mood still relatively cheerful).
Three-day incubation period, he'd said. Just a guess, but more often than not a guess from Palamedes Sextus was worth its weight in prophetic knucklebones. So Camilla was not surprised when, after three days of this routine, she began to manifest mild symptoms herself; a headache that wouldn't go away, an irritating malaise ground into the fibers of her muscles, a rasp in her throat. It was nothing unmanageable. Living as she did in intimate proximity with someone whose immune system had barely functioned before grad school had flooded it with constant cortisol, this was more or less inevitable. She could handle it; she was prepared.
Being a necromancer meant living at the sufferance of a surly and uncooperative meat suit; likewise, being a cavalier meant constantly proving yourself at the peak of health. Usually the ailments that knocked Palamedes out for a week were only a mild annoyance to his cavalier. Sometimes she could keep going so well that she convinced him she wasn't sick at all.
Front door. Key in lock. Then pressure sensors, ward-runes, bolts, undone and redone. The door slipped out of her hand and slammed (fuck) with an echoing sharp bang; then the soft counterpoint of Palamedes rustling from his cave of books and blankets.
Rasping, bleary: "Cam?"
Damn him; now he'd come looking for her if she didn't answer. She gritted her teeth, grinding them against the piercing pounding sinus migraine. Hefted the shopping bags (full of heavy cans of soup and bottles of electrolyte supplements) over her shoulder. Ignored the deep, heavy, gritty ache of motion. Called, "It's just me."
She'd hoped that would be enough. That he'd go back to sleep and let her slump onto the couch unobserved to try to get a handle on things.
No such luck. More soft sounds, then a clank and clatter, and the shuffling of slippers on horrible ancient shag carpet.
She moved to intercept him. If he made it out to the front room he'd see the disarray her books and papers were in; the sheathed daggers left on the floor because she'd got too dizzy bending down to pick them up; the evidence of dissolution. And he'd fuss and worry, which was ridiculous. She was fine. She was taking care of it.
She got to the bedroom doorway before he did, but at too great a cost. The room, which had been mildly rotating, sped up into a centripedal whirl that twisted her stomach in non-Euclidean knots. The pain in her head spilled over into a ringing in her ears and a sparkling halo of static around his narrow face and bony blanket-wreathed shoulders. She went cold and clammy. It hurt to breathe.
She hardly saw his gape of alarm, didn't hear his startled, laryngitic whisper of her name. She was faced with an immediate physical dilemma, and took the dignified option: she let herself collapse onto the bed rather than crumpling to the floor.
She curled up on her side, focusing on breathing through the pain in her ribs, and not coughing, which would make it worse. Distantly she felt the mattress dip as he folded himself onto the bed beside her. "There's the other shoe dropped," he said gently. "Cam, let me look at you."
She did not want to be looked at. But arguing was useless. She rolled onto her back, grateful for the darkness in the room, the fact that he'd closed the blackout curtains and had been reading by a little pocket torch, despite the fact that he knew it was terrible for his neck and eyes. Flat on a soft surface like this, her headache was reduced to a manageable 80% of intractable agony, and she didn't feel in such imminent danger of losing all the bile her gallbladder had worked so hard to pump into her empty digestive tract. Breathing was more difficult, though, which he'd certainly notice.
He rested his palm on her forehead. Her heart jumped at the touch, and at the little static fizz of thanergy spreading along her scalp, down her face into her upper jaw. It buzzed in her throbbing sinuses, and she sneezed twice. He withdrew but tapped with two fingers on her sternum and tilted his head like he was listening to the tone of a struck bell. "No pneumonia yet," he reported, and had to stop to cough into his elbow and catch his own breath. "I think that's the thing to watch for. And dehydration. You're febrile and hypovolemic, by the way. As I'm sure you know."
She had one arm over her eyes and every intention of keeping it there. His throat was too mangled to tell his tone, and if she looked and found herself fixed with his disappointed brow-furrow, she'd only feel worse. "I'm handling it."
"And handling the samples, both our coursework, my respiratory status and our supplies. Not to mention the calls I'm sure you've been intercepting from certain officials in Administration."
"She's not worried," Cam said, which was the truth. Juno Zeta had been calling frequently, not to check on her son's health -- she'd satisfied herself that his cavalier would keep him out of mortal danger -- but to cadge Camilla's help in filling in for him on the multiple journals he helped peer-review.
"I know she's not, and I know that makes her worse. When she's worried she gets quiet." He got quiet himself for a long moment, in which Cam realized that her dizziness had subsided into a gentle swaying that was almost pleasant. She would fall asleep soon if she didn't move, and there was too much work to do for that.
Unfortunately, the bone-deep ache of fever had slowed her considerably, which meant she couldn't get up and off the bed before he noticed what she was doing.
"Cam, lay down, you'll --"
"I'll be fine," she said, and then had to move very quickly to avoid heaving bile all over his stacks of anatomical diagrams. Which she could admit was a compelling point in his favor, but didn't necessarily invalidate her argument.
When she dragged herself back from the bathroom, though, she did crawl back into the bed and kick off her shoes. She was too prosaic to struggle against the blatantly obvious, and she could do most of the rapidly-increasing backlog of urgent tasks from her phone.
He was waiting for her with the disappointed look she'd dreaded (though she sensed, oddly enough, that it wasn't directed solely at her) and a glass of a rehydration solution of his own invention (which, to his credit, did taste slightly better than the aftermath of vomiting). As she set the empty glass aside she noticed that the notepad beside the bed now sported a second column of vital signs under her initials, and that her temperature was higher than she'd thought.
She meant to tell him to remember to account for the fact that her vitals had been taken thanergetically, which would affect the final margin of error in the paper; but before she could organize the thought, she'd fallen asleep.
A shrill ringing in her ear. She woke to the crackle of lung fluid and the high-pitched gasping wheeze of air forced through constricted bronchioles. He can't breathe , she thought, and was already moving, trying to get to the inhaler beside the bed, or one of the spares in her bag or her coat or the desk, watching in her mind's eye as his lips paled and went blue from hypoxia and his intercostal muscles spasmed and his eyes rolled back --
"Cam? What are you --"
He had both hands on her shoulders, shaking her -- no, that was her, she was shaking with cold and adrenaline. He was trying to hold her still, to hold her steady. "I'm sorry," he was saying, his voice a little rough and short but fluent, not choked with strangling inflammation. "I didn't mean to wake you. I'm sorry. Lie still. Cam, please."
She did not lie still. She curled forward, cupped one hand around the back of his neck, feeling the ridges of his vertebrae guarding the fragile nerve tissue underneath, feeling the minute movements as he breathed. He was breathing fine. Her own lungs were the ones filled with fluid, her own breath coming short in wheezing gasps. She coughed, feeling like her chest was full of mud and gravel.
She felt the faint buzz of thanergy again, this time spreading from his hand on her back, moving forward into her ribcage, her lungs and interstitial places between them. Even dizzy with air hunger, she could picture perfectly what he was doing; she'd helped him come up with the procedure, and she'd seen him use it on Dulcie often enough. Massaging the intercostals, siphoning the fluid from her pleural spaces, saturating microbes with thanergy and feeding on the energy of their mass dying to clear out the cytokine debris that was threatening to choke her.
By the time he had finished, she had coughed up most of the obstruction, which was deeply unpleasant but far preferable to suffocating in her sleep.
"Deep breaths," he said, unnecessarily.
"I'm all right now," she told him. It was the closest she'd ever come to an outright lie. She was weak and cold, and felt flimsy as wet paper, like the merest pressure would tear straight through her.
She couldn't remember the last time she'd been this sick. Pain she could push through; she'd walked on sprains and worked with concussions before, though she tried to minimize those incidents since they interfered with healing and she always caught hell from Palamedes when he found out. But there was no mastering her body in this state, no pushing through. There was nothing left to push with.
"I heard you," she told him, aware that she probably wasn't making much sense, unable to hammer through the fog of the fever to achieve intelligible grammatical structure. "I thought -- I thought I heard --"
"It was my fault," he said, with inflections that made her think he wasn't referring to just this. "I didn't get to the phone in time."
Muffled in the blankets, a familiar tinny voice said, "Is everyone alive? I'll need photographic proof of you both with today's newspaper."
Palamedes dug his phone out of the covers where he'd dropped it. Searing bright in the darkness was Dulcie's face, pale and smiling, lipstick and cannula immaculate. "I take back all the harsh words I've said over the years about you two over-reacting when I cough," she said. "That was a horrible experience. Cam, darling, are you all right?"
"Fine," Cam croaked. It was a reflex more deeply ingrained than dodging an incoming knife-thrust.
"You're a terrible liar, and I love you for it. What can I do? I'll send Protesilaus over with a hundred inconvenient rosebushes, that seems to be the favored cure for all ailments. Ask any of my relatives."
"Don't you dare," Palamedes said sternly. "I won't have you or Pro catching this."
"But no objection to rosebushes? Expect them thrown through your living room window in about an hour," Dulcie said cheerfully.
There was more to their conversation, but Cam didn't hear it. With the spike of adrenaline wearing off she slumped sideways into Palamedes, automatically seeking out the familiar bony points of contact at shoulder, hip, and knee. Where an X-ray would probably show grooves worn into his skeletal structure by the press of her head and shoulder, and where he'd worn grooves on her in return.
Interlocking, inseparable. Even when he nudged her to lie back down, propped up with pillows to keep her airway clear, his fingers stayed tangled up with hers.
Old ghosts swarmed up out of cracks in the earth and the ice to invade her dreams. Her body, so eternally well-disciplined, rose up in revolt, and she had to fight her way out of the strangling covers and Palamedes' clinging to heave her guts up, though she couldn't remember the last time she'd eaten anything. The two of them took it in turns to make the arduous trip to the kitchen for electrolyte replacements and fever reducers; at least, Cam thought they'd been taking it in turns, until she managed to scrape together enough mental acuity to do some calculations and realized Palamedes had been braving the world outside the bed twice as often as she had.
"I'm four days ahead of you," he pointed out reasonably when she raised this objection. He was by no means healthy, but he was recovered enough to sit at more than a thirty degree angle without seeing spots dance before his eyes, which was farther than she'd gotten. "It only makes sense."
While she was trying to think of a good counter to this point -- not an easy task, with chills making her teeth chatter and her head pounding in time to her pulse -- another internal alarm distracted her. She'd crawled back into bed and pressed her burning face into the cool side of the pillow, like she always did. And like she always did, she'd reached for the reassuring solidity of the leather-wrapped hilt that should have been just underneath. But her fingers met only linen. There was nothing there.
"My swords --"
"I hid them," he said bluntly. Too quickly; he'd been waiting for this. "Don't look so betrayed. Your temp was 103.2 for an hour there, you were delirious. Delirium plus swords equals a bad time for all concerned."
She struggled to sit up. "But --"
"We're safe." He pressed on her shoulder, pushing her back down. The fact that he could was message enough. "Cam, we're safe, I promise. I put up wards that would make Nonagesimus feel secure enough to waltz around dressed as a ballerina."
"You don’t have the energy for wards."
"I have more energy for wards than you do to jump up and start chopping at people." He bent down and pressed a lingering kiss to her forehead. His lips were startlingly cool, which she knew meant she was still distressingly febrile. He said, "Humor me, please. As a personal favor, let me protect you for a few hours. Rest."
Despite the vague fear that churned uneasily behind her solar plexus, she managed to say, "Well, if you insist on being humored."
"Much obliged," he answered, grave and so fond that her heart nearly cracked with it.
So she humored him. She always did, sooner or later.
When she woke again after that, he was gone.
In a half-blind panic she made it as far as the door of the living room. There she had to grab onto the nearest bookcase to keep from falling to the floor in a dead faint, where she'd be no good to anyone.
Then Palamedes had her by the arm. In a feat of astonishing strength that exposed her astonishing uselessness, he towed her safely to the sofa, where she could collapse without fear of causing collateral damage. "I would like to enter this into the record, for use as exonerating evidence next time you make cutting remarks at me for studying with a migraine," he said as he sat down heavily beside her and pressed a hand to her disgustingly sweaty forehead.
"Past evidence won't exonerate you from future crimes," she croaked.
"Au contraire. I think you'll find that in the Sextus Code, written by me and ratified by the Duchess Septimus, every act of pig-headed stubbornness on your part gives me a free pass to commit one act of self-destructive necromantic genius."
Cam curled up on the sofa, trying to conserve warmth. She hadn't been so cold since they'd lived in Antarctica. "The Duchess Septimus has no legal standing."
He nudged her until she rested her head on his thigh, which was surprisingly comfortable. "When you're well, you -- Camilla Hect, Esq. -- can be the one to tell her that. She sends her love, by the way. And two dozen rose-shaped cupcakes, which she thankfully did not have thrown through the window."
He had a quilt around his shoulders like a cloak -- technically it was Cam's quilt, that Dulcie had made her for her birthday last year. It was comprised of fifty squares of fabric in different shades of gray, which was Dulcie's idea of a hilarious joke. He tugged it off and draped it over her -- if it was unbearably groan-inducing, at least it was warm -- and rooted around behind the sofa until he came up with another blanket for himself. Then he draped a corner of that one over Cam, too, presumably to stave off the hypothermia that would threaten if even a single square inch of her upper arm were left exposed.
It was hard to mock him for being fussy when she was in this state; but that didn't change the fact that he was fussy, and over-protective, and ridiculous.
And, damn him, incorrigibly clever. "Since you're here, tell me what you think of the latest draft," he said, and settled back with his slippered feet up on the coffee table and his tablet in his lap. The paper he began to read aloud was the fourteenth iteration of an excruciatingly boring report of fungal growth rates in the presence of thanergy, which differed from the thirteenth only in its comma placement and was perfectly calculated to bore her into a drifting doze.
The day slipped away like that, in a blur of mycothelial growth statistics and Petri dish classifications, interspersed with not-wholly-professional brushes of his thumb across her overheated forehead.
She must have muttered something aloud about his being fussy and ridiculous, because he snorted and said "Here, look if you don't believe me," and passed her the notepad where he'd been recording both their vital signs. His appalling handwriting aside, the data was as precise and dutiful as any darling son of the scientific method could hope for.
His temperature had been steadily falling; hers climbed. She stared at the neat double columns of numbers, watched them blur and reform into sine curves falling to opposite poles. Asymptotic representations of delirium.
"Graph a fever chart," she murmured. The phrase seemed to be stuck in her brain like a bone splinter.
He looked up from his tablet to peer quizzically at her. "That's Plath."
Of course he knew it. He remembered everything. In his dry, unmusical voice, he recited, "Diagram of mountains / graphs a fever chart, / yet astronomic fountains / exit from the heart. Nice and short, not bad for a poem, even with the grammatical liberties. Where'd you pick that up?"
"Protesilaus," she said. "I think." Dimly she remembered hearing it boom across the practice floor from the corner where Ebdoma had been trying to train a couple of rookies in the basics of parry and thrust. Something he'd wanted to teach them about rhythm. A waste of time. The real rhythm of a fight was something deeper, something that couldn't be reduced to words.
Palamedes took his spectacles off, cleaned them methodically on the tail of his beloved tattered cloud-gray bathrobe. "Tell you what I like about that poem," he said in a very casual way that was not casual at all. "It makes an interesting point on the philosophy of research, in a later stanza. Wish more poetry did that."
"Go on then," Cam said, which was what he was waiting for.
He smiled. "If you insist. It really is a good point. It goes, If you dissect a bird / to diagram the tongue, / you'll cut the chord / articulating song. / If you flay a beast / to marvel at the mane, / you'll wreck the rest / from which the fur began. And so on. Belabors the point, obviously, but that's the poet's prerogative. If you only study a process in its halted or deconstructed state, you'll never truly understand it. It has to be observed in operation."
Thick-tongued, heavy-headed, exhausted even by the effort of speech, she murmured, "Or in collapse."
"Cam," he said, sounding exasperated, but he was cut off by a knock at the door, which opened to admit one very distraught and disheveled Gideon Nav.
With his usual kindness to strays and hopeless causes, he sent her off with advice and aid for her ailing necromancer. Then he stared at the closed door for a while, his face scrunched up into a frown so deeply-carved that his spectacles slid down his nose and had to be rescued, lest they fall onto the carpet whose thick fibers would scratch the lenses all to hell.
"They'll be all right," Cam told him. She'd closed her eyes again; even their soothingly gray living room had become too bright to look at. "Gideon really cares about Harrow, God knows why. She won't let her die that easily."
"That's not what I'm worried about," he said. Then he sighed tremendously, like a bellows collapsing. When his hand landed on her forehead this time there was no buzz of thanergy, and he didn't circumspectly remove it to jot down her nearness to febrile neurological collapse. Instead he said, "You should add a communications course to your Admin proposal."
"For cavaliers?"
"And necromancers." She could tell by the cadence of his pause that he was resettling his glasses on his nose in preparation for -- something. Then he said, "Camilla Hect. You do know that your importance to me is numinous and ineradicable. It is not quantifiable by the number of attacks on my person you thwart, or how many of my obligations you keep up with while I am sloughing off my epithelial linings due to flu."
With her face turned into the outside of his leg, where she was pretty sure he couldn't see, she failed to totally suppress a smile. "Ineradicable, Warden?"
He huffed. "Oh -- you know what I mean."
She did. She always did. That was always her problem; and the reason why she knew they'd make it, in the end.