"You're going to be fine," she asserts, as though I asked.
I push through the door and let it fall closed behind me. The room is still absurdly large. Someone has left fresh candles burning and a second blanket folded neatly across the bed beside a small ceramic pot of salve. I open it, test the scent, and pause. Correct herb base. Better than what I would have mixed for the shoulder.
The satchel is where it's been since I woke — on the table beside the basin. I reach into it and pull out the wrapped cloth bundle. The herbs. Still intact, still sealed, still smelling faintly of forest floor and old copper.
I reveal them carefully and lay the stems flat across the table surface. The feverroot looks healthy at first glance. Then I notice the darkness threaded through the base of the stems. Not rot. Not disease. Pattern.
I pull the fungus fragment closer to the window. The veins repeat at consistent intervals across the surface, deliberate enough that my stomach drops immediately. Nature doesn't spread like this. Someone altered it. Then, the door swings open.
No knock. He doesn't knock. It just simply opens, because it's his manor and apparently that's sufficient, and there he is filling the frame with the same preternatural stillness.
I put the fragment down, frustrated. "This is my room," my voice sounds flat and even, which I'm counting as a success.
"It is." He steps inside. His eyes move to the table — to the herbs laid out.
"You didn't knock."
"I rarely do."
"In your own rooms, certainly. This one's mine."
"I assigned it to you."
"Assigning a room to someone and owning it are different concepts. Most people learn this before they're a hundred and forty."
He surveys the table with an expression that is not quite neutral.
"Those are the samples from the attack."
"Yes."
"You've been examining them."
"Obviously."
"I asked you to leave that to?—"
"You asked me nothing. You issued instruction. In my medical experience, the person with the most relevant knowledge should be the one examining the evidence. Unless you have a working theory about transfigured moisture patterns in feverroot root systems."
He turns his head. The look he gives me is like he's choosing not to say the first three things that come to mind.
"You govern by fear," I continue, and I should stop here, but I find I don't. "You've built the whole structure of your authority around people being too afraid to question anything you do. And then you brought that same approach into a sickroom and expected it to work on me."
"I govern this territory," he declares, "because I have held it together since the beginning. Fear is efficient."
"Until it isn't."
"You disagree with the results?"
"I disagree with the premise." I stand, because this conversation requires that I'm upright for it. "People here would follow you without the fear. I've seen it."
He goes quiet.
"And you go into the forest, for a place that calls you strange and avoids your cottage and was, according to every account I've gathered, perfectly prepared to let a child die of fever rather than enter the cursed wood themselves."
"How do you know that?"
"I have hunters who talk to people." He glares at me. "They told me. And what Duskmire thinks of the woman who gathers it."
