AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He laid her on the sofa, much to Eva’s wailing cries and Maisy’s shocked expression. The children watched with wide eyes as he filled a basin with cold water, soaked a cloth, and placed it over Nyana’s burning forehead.
For a moment, he sat back on his ankles and stared. He didn’t know what to do. By the sunlight, he didn’t know what to do!
What happened to Mama? a voice asked inside his head, making him jump. Maisy stared at him expectantly as if expecting an answer.
He hesitantly ventured toward the thread connecting their consciousness, replying in his mind and hoping for an answer. Has this happened before?
She shook her head. Is she going to die?
Joel ignored the question as he placed a couple of fingers against Nyana’s wrist to check her pulse. Her heart beat quickly, thrumming within her veins like a frantic doe in flight. Next, he felt her neck and then her head.
Searing hot.
He was no healer. He didn’t know what to look for.
Magic pooled at his fingertips as he formed the golden swirls of energy into a crow. The golden bird hopped from his hand to his shoulder and to his other hand before waiting with half-flared wings.
“Go,” he murmured as he opened the window. “Find Cian. Tell him to make haste.”
The crow leaped off his hand and disappeared into the night sky with a flash of shimmering gold. Joel quickly returned to Nyana’s side and dunked another cloth into the water before cleaning the blood from her face. She looked so small. So frail. So pale.
His dear friend.
His dear wife.
When he replaced the cloth on her head for a cooler one, he scooped Eva into his arms and gently patted her back to soothe her tears. “Your mama is going to be just fine,” he reassured, mostly to himself. “She just needs some rest. As do you.”
Holding Eva in one arm and slipping his hand around Maisy’s little fingers, he took them upstairs and tucked them into bed, smoothing their hair back and kissing each forehead. Over the months of their acquaintance, he’d come to care for these girls. He loved them like his own daughters.
“Joel?” Maisy said quietly in the darkness.
He paused in the doorway. “Hmm?”
“Can we call you Papa?”
Emotion clogged his throat, making swallowing difficult. Finally, he nodded. “Of course.”
She said nothing more before he closed the door quietly and then rushed down the stairs, taking two at a time and nearly crashing into the wall at the bottom. He hurried to Nyana’s side and felt her forehead again.
Hotter than before.
He ran a hand over his chin, a familiar fear echoing in the caverns of his heart. He’d lost Nyana to Calle. And then to Liam. He refused to lose her to death, too.
Perhaps a half-hour passed before a knock at the door startled him.
Joel lurched to his feet and threw open the door, only to face a short, old man with a long, graying beard and light, dusty blue eyes. Cian carried a satchel over one shoulder, his gaze serious as he peered around him.
“Nyana?” the old man questioned in a scratchy voice. When Joel nodded and moved aside to let him in, he sighed. “I assumed as much.”
As Cian shuffled inside, Joel pulled up a chair and watched him sit before digging through the satchel. “I’ve seen to Nyana several times in the past few years.”
Needing something for his hands to do, Joel knelt beside the sofa and dabbed at a few flecks of dried blood on Nyana’s chin. “Has she been sick?”
Cian’s hands paused, his expression becoming sorrowful. “No. Liam was…a cruel spouse. I tended to her injuries. She hasn’t been the same since he beat her hard enough to lose her last child in the womb.”
Joel squeezed his eyes shut as he took Nyana’s limp hand and pressed it to his lips. He truly did not understand the extent of the horrors she’d faced. “I didn’t know that.” After taking a steadying breath, he dared to speak again. “Is this some sort of complication then?”
“I don’t know. It happened a year ago.”
