Arthur tried not to breathe too much. It hurt to breathe.
He kept wanting to ask Gwen to stop scowling – she looked bloody terrible when she scowled, all haughty and imperious – but then he saw that she was also crying, so it felt rude to say. A thoroughly horrible man kept waking him up and poking him and making him drink things. Sometimes Gwen or Sidney would get angry if he did it for too long, and shout at him to go away. He wanted to cheer them on, but there was the whole issue of breathing to contend with. Cheering would use up an awful lot of air.
Sometimes in the middle of what felt like a long night, when he could feel darkness and pain pressing against him from all sides – when he felt like his chest was going to break under it, that no mortal body could possibly withstand it – he knew Gabriel was there, and if he squinted very, very hard, he could just about see his face, a single point of light in the black. Gabriel didn’t cry. He looked dreadful, though.
Who hurt you? Arthur wanted to ask, but every time he tried to get the words out, the darkness swallowed him.
He dreamed of golden-haired boys who kissed him hard and left him bleeding; of a murder of crows bursting from the treeline, hundreds of them flying overhead, until they blacked out the sky; of his mother, who was less a person and more a feeling, singing to him in a familiar language he didn’t understand, holding something soft and cool to his head while he sobbed and clutched at her skirts. He dreamed of Gabriel sitting on a horse, the crown on his head white-hot and burning – he tried to cry out, to warn him, but Gabriel knew and smiled sadly and did nothing as he was engulfed in flame. A hand emerged from the inferno and Arthur stepped towards him to try to grasp it, but instead Gwen appeared, and calmly slipped her hand into Gabriel’s so that they could go into the fire together, leaving him behind.
The first time Arthur truly woke up – opened his eyes and understood exactly who and where he was – he knew something was off, but couldn’t quite place it. Things began to make sense when he turned his head very slightly, ears ringing with the effort, and saw a tangle of red plaits on the pillow next to him. His head hurt. His chest hurt. It was hard to pinpoint everything else that hurt, but he knew it tallied up to be almost all of him.
‘You’re in my bed,’ he said, noticing that his voice came out strangely quiet and raspy. Gwen shifted, then turned over to look at him.
‘Correct,’ she said, frowning. She was fully clothed and pink in the cheeks.
‘Are you lost?’ Arthur said, trying to clear his throat and then closing his eyes tightly, as cruel, aimless pain shot through every part of his body, sending strange patterns of light skittering across his eyelids.
‘I thought Sidney needed a break. He’s been sitting in that chair staring at you non-stop. I don’t think he was even blinking.’ She sat upright, careful not to jostle him.
‘Your reputation will be torn asunder,’ Arthur said with great effort, opening his eyes again and watching as she slid gingerly from the bed and went to fetch him a cup of water; he tried to reach for it and realised that his hands weren’t obeying him. He didn’t understand how he could be so bone-tired when he’d only just woken up, his limbs heavy and weak. Gwen tried to press the cup to his lips but he choked and spluttered, feeling cold water slide down his neck. It wasn’t unpleasant. In fact – he could hardly feel it at all.
‘Too late for that, everyone thinks we’ve been at it all summer,’ Gwen said, giving up on the water entirely. ‘As long as I don’t walk out of here pregnant, I think I’ll be fine.’
‘Come on then,’ Arthur croaked. ‘Lift up your skirts. May as well do the whole thing properly.’ He had meant it to be a joke, but it was coming out strangely quiet and unconvincing. He couldn’t really feel his hands now, which he thought might be a bit of a concern.
‘Arthur,’ Gwen said, but it sounded as if she were talking to him from very far away. He couldn’t tell if he’d closed his eyes, or if everything had simply gone dark around him. Somewhere nearby, it sounded as if a cat might be purring. ‘Art, are you all right?’
‘They were … they gave me a message,’ he said, with no idea what he was talking about.
‘Art,’ Gwen said again, sounding quite panicked. ‘Look at me.’ He tried – nobody could say he didn’t try – but he couldn’t quite reach her any more.
Bridget didn’t try to make Arthur drink anything. She certainly didn’t climb into his bed. She sat in the chair next to it, not reading or writing or even indulging in a little humming; simply staring straight ahead as if she’d vanished to some other plane of existence, with Lucifer asleep on her lap. After five minutes of observing this through half-closed eyes Arthur was about to announce himself awake when she spoke instead.
‘You are very bad at pretending to be asleep.’
‘No I’m not,’ Arthur said, his throat dry. ‘I’ve been awake for an hour.’
‘No you haven’t,’ said Bridget, raising an eyebrow at him.
‘No,’ Arthur agreed. ‘I haven’t.’
Bridget got to her feet, displacing Lucifer. ‘I’ll fetch Sidney,’ she said, rubbing her eyes.
‘Bridget,’ Arthur said just as she reached the door. ‘Did I dream it, or did you … ? The other night Gwen was talking to me, when I was half asleep, she said you went back to the inn and – knocked some heads together.’
‘In a manner of speaking.’
‘She said you found one of the guys who did it and cracked him open like a walnut.’
‘That’s an exaggeration,’ Bridget said, opening the door and pausing. ‘He wasn’t that tough to crack. Like an egg, maybe. A really puny little egg.’
Arthur laughed and winced, and then a thought struck him.
‘They wanted to tell me something,’ he said. What they’d told him was insubstantial, already floating away from him. ‘Did he say anything?’
‘No. Do you mean they said that to you … to get you to come outside?’ Bridget said. ‘To rob you?’
‘No, it was … I don’t know what it was,’ Arthur said. He tried to reach for the thought one last time, and then almost instantly fell asleep.
Arthur only noticed that Gabriel was in the room at all because he moved so quickly trying to leave it.
‘Coward,’ he said, turning to look at him. He felt hot all over; he wondered if the shutters had been left open, if he was trapped in an unrelenting patch of afternoon sun, but then he realised far too slowly that it was, in fact, the middle of the night. That accounted for the darkness, and the quiet, and the fact that Gabriel was standing there in his nightclothes looking grim about the mouth. Lucifer was curled at the foot of the bed, seeming unconcerned.
‘You’ve got a fever,’ Gabriel said. ‘They’ve been sedating you. It seems to come and go.’
‘What’s wrong with me?’ Arthur asked, and he was irritated to hear how small and scared he sounded. He couldn’t stop shivering. It was extremely embarrassing.
‘Broken ribs. You took some very serious blows to the head, and they thought maybe your skull – but the swelling seems to have gone down. Your wrist was broken. The one you broke when we were children. The physician said he set it better this time, but it might … it might not be much use to you, broken twice. Your legs seemed to just be badly bruised. Your nose was broken, and you bled quite a lot.’ He made as if to take a step towards the bed, then thought better of it. He looked excruciatingly uncomfortable, his eyes darting from the floor to the ceiling to the door, but never landing on Arthur. ‘It was your head – at first they said you might die. And then that you might not be able to talk. Or walk. Or do anything, really. You managed to speak to Gwen and Bridget coherently a couple of weeks ago, but then – then you got that fever. They don’t know why.’
‘A couple of weeks ago?’ Arthur said, panic constricting his throat. ‘How – how long have I been here?’ Gabriel didn’t reply. In the darkness, his vision blurring and his eyes feeling strangely hot, Arthur couldn’t be entirely sure that he was still there. ‘Gabriel?’
‘It’s been a month,’ Gabriel said, and Arthur released a breath that sounded suspiciously like a sob. ‘Don’t cry,’ Gabriel said, suddenly a lot closer. He was sitting on the edge of the bed. He seemed to be holding Arthur’s hot, sweaty hand.
‘I’m not crying,’ Arthur said, but if that was true, why was his face so wet? And why was it so hard to breathe? It really was unbearably warm. His lungs were on fire. He wanted to ask Gabriel to open a window – to throw him out of the window – to throw him in the moat and let him sink to the cool, blissful bottom.
‘I’m here,’ Gabriel said quietly.
‘No, you’re not,’ Arthur said, crying in earnest now, feeling each laboured breath rattle through him until his bones hurt.
‘Yes I am,’ Gabriel said, putting a hand to Arthur’s forehead. Arthur had no idea how he was alive, with a hand that cold.
‘Don’t go,’ he muttered, closing his eyes. It felt like a spell, or a prayer; like repeating it would make it so. ‘Don’t go. Don’t go. Don’t go.’
Of all the disturbing sights the world had to offer, Sidney crying had to be the worst of them. It was so disarming that Arthur felt annoyed; how dare Sidney cry, how dare he do something so utterly unlike himself when Arthur was the only one who should be allowed to be afraid?
‘Shut up,’ he said through chattering teeth. Sidney roughly wiped the tears from his cheeks, and didn’t laugh. His eyes were bloodshot, the skin underneath them so dark it looked bruised. ‘You look like shit.’
‘You look like a skeleton,’ Sidney said, his voice hard, his eyes cast downwards. ‘You look like you’ve already been dead a week.’
‘Maybe I have,’ Arthur said, feeling a wave of nausea rush over him. He felt hollow. He had no idea when he’d last eaten; he had a vivid memory of somebody helping him to the chamber pot though, which he’d quite like to forget. ‘I don’t really want to know the answer to this question, but – did somebody cut off my hair? Do I have any … left?’
‘A bit,’ Sidney said grimly.
‘Damn it,’ Arthur said wistfully. It was only hair, but it was very nice hair.
‘I messed up,’ Sidney said quietly, still staring at his hands. ‘I really messed it all up, Art.’
‘No you didn’t,’ Arthur said mildly.
‘Don’t say that,’ Sidney said, standing up. ‘Don’t tell me what I didn’t do. I know exactly what I didn’t bloody do.’
‘You can shout at me all you want when I’m dead,’ Arthur said. Sidney kicked the chair he’d been sitting in, and it ricocheted loudly off the bed frame. ‘Ow.’
‘Shit,’ said Sidney. ‘Shit. Did I hurt you?’
‘Head,’ Arthur said, feeling pain erupt through it. ‘Can you – whatever they were sending me to sleep with, can you …’
Sidney was already striding from the room to fetch it.