“This gives new meaning to the need for wall lamps,” he said to her. Step, lurch, step, lurch. “Damn, I’m going to have to sit down.” His voice was a ragged gasp. But if he sat down on the floor, he would never be able to get up, not without his cane and with her in his arms. So he leaned against the corridor wall, head back, took deep breaths, and tried to ignore the pain exploding past his leg into his hip.

“A few more steps . . . perhaps three, only three, and then the door will be there. I’ll turn in. Three more to get you to a dry bed.”

Pain lanced through him as if in answer.

He shoved himself away from the wall and took a step. Another lurch, a step. “That swimming is coming in handy,” he said to her, getting the words out between grunts of pain. “You’re a feather in my arms.”

Not precisely true, but good enough. Finally, he made it to the doorway, the bedchamber lit only by moonlight streaming in the window. He hobbled across the floor, managed to place her on the bed, and pulled the sheet up.

“If you’ll excuse me, my lady,” he said, the words coming in short bursts. And without further ado, he crumpled to the floor.

Some time later, he raised his head. “Have to retrieve that cane of mine,” he told her. Walking was out of the question. So he crawled, stark naked, out of the room, down the corridor, onto the wet floor of the bedchamber. Found the cane and got himself upright.

Profanity didn’t help. The pain in his leg was excruciating, so much so that even the drenched bed looked inviting. “I have to get back to her,” he said aloud. The moon was traveling across the sky. “Water. Linnet has to drink water.”

He’d saved one precious bucket, so he slung his satchel over his shoulder, put the wire handle of the lamp over his forearm, and picked up the bucket. It was too much to carry; he knew it immediately.

But it had to be done, even if a man found himself grunting every time his weak leg moved forward. If not crying out.

She lay under the sheet, as still as death. “That corridor,” he said from the door, panting. “I’ll never forget it, Linnet. It’s the inferno, hell itself. I’m afraid that I can’t make any more trips downstairs. I’m done for the night.”

Since she showed no sign of disagreeing with him, he got the lamp onto the table somehow, the satchel over to the bed. Only half the precious water remained in the bucket. “Lurching is not recommended for water carriers,” he told her, pulling her chin down slightly and dribbling some into her mouth.

“That will do for now. Ointment next,” he said, opening the satchel. “Frankly, I doubt that any of these work. But they don’t hurt, as far as I can tell. Back first.” He rolled her over and carefully applied ointment all over her rash. “Poor bottom,” he said, dabbing carefully. “Or do you prefer buttocks? I can’t remember. Now your front.”

Some time later, he scrabbled around in the satchel again and pulled out a jar. “Penders’s rose water. I’m going to clean off your throat and tongue,” he told her. His voice was rasping now. It was a messy business, not helped by the fact his patient was in a coma.

“But if you weren’t in a coma, I would be hurting you,” he told her. “I couldn’t bear that, Linnet. Not after the way I already hurt you.”

She was clean and sweet-smelling now. But she looked like a fragile baby chick. What hair she had left was standing straight up, and for some reason that made her head look large, and her neck too frail and slender to carry such a weight. Her closed eyelids were blue.

His doctor’s instinct told him what he couldn’t put into words. The patient was close to death.

He turned down the lamp, looked at her again, and finally extinguished it. Moonlight was enough . . . moonlight and the thread of her pulse.

Carefully, carefully, Piers hoisted himself onto the bed, lying on top of the sheet so he didn’t touch any open wounds. But he had to hold her, so he tucked the sheet around her neck and then wrapped an arm around her waist.

And if the sobs escaped then, if the sheet grew salty and wet, there was no one to see but the moon.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Linnet heard Piers’s voice first as a faraway trickle, like running water in a brook somewhere off in the distance. She herself was far away in a safe place, the pool near the sea. It wasn’t cold as it always had been, those mornings, but pleasantly warm, sometimes even too hot.

Still, she wanted to say good-bye to him, she really wanted to say good-bye to him.

He was her lodestone, after all. Her beating heart. And although he’d pushed her away, he would be broken when he learned of her death. She knew that.

In the last days, as she lay in that place, drifting into and out of the fever, she’d come to the certainty, the sure knowledge that he loved her. For all he said cruel things, he loved her.

And she had let him scold her out of the room and out of his life. It was just as she thought when she saw Piers for the very first time. If they were to be married, she’d have to stop him from bullying her.

If she lived, she would go back to him and make him stop. She would tell him . . . something.

She drifted off again, but when she woke his voice was closer and less melodic. Piers, melodic? That was an amusing thought. What could she be thinking? He was never melodic.

As if on cue he burst into a string of curse words that would have made her smile except she was too strangely enervated to twitch a muscle.

In truth, she didn’t seem to have the energy to open her eyes. But she’d stopped opening them lately, anyway. She was too exhausted to drink, and her eyes were sticky with dirt.

So she sank back into the water, the blue crystalline water of the pool. She was drifting down and away, her hair rippling through the water, when she heard him swearing again.

Really, she should speak to him about his profanity. It—

Then she remembered that she was dying. In a chicken coop, and Piers was nowhere close, since he’d thrown her out of the castle.

Dying . . .

He would care, dreadfully.

Then she clearly heard Piers say something about her buttocks. Bottom, she thought. But she was still trapped under the water. Though was trapped the right word? It was pleasant there. The pool was fearsomely hot sometimes, but now it was cool, and the water brushed her face like the hand of someone who loved her.

Her mother’s hand. A sudden memory came into her head of a fever, some fever she’d had as a child. Her mother’s voice, her nurse’s voice . . . her mother irritably saying, “Of course I’m not going anywhere tonight! Linnet is ill . . .”

But it wasn’t a hand touching her, it was an arm. An arm around her waist, heavy and male.

It must be Piers. She’d never been to bed with anyone else.

For a moment her mind reeled wildly between the pool, with its watery silken sheets and its drifting peace—and a bed with Piers. His arm around her, tight. The smell of him, male and a bit sweaty.

Sweaty? Piers was never sweaty.

Just like that, her face broke the surface of the pool as if she were thrust from the water by a pair of arms that threw her, threw her—

Where?

She opened her eyes. It was terribly dark, so it must be the chicken coop. But the coop . . . She sniffed again, but carefully, without moving. She had learned not to stir a muscle because of the sores on her skin.