Dara's mind floated. Every now and then he'd become aware enough to try to push his way towards consciousness, but he could never quite make it and after a few seconds of effort his thoughts would drift apart again and his mind would be lost for what could have been minutes or hours.
His chest hurt and he didn't know why. Every beat of his heart came with a sharp pain that radiated outwards.
The closest he came to full consciousness were the times someone would hold him up and press a cup to his lips. He did his best to swallow, but it was hard to coordinate when his thoughts wouldn't solidify and sometimes he ended up breathing it in and being overcome by an involuntary coughing fit instead.
No matter what they put into him, though, he never stopped being hungry, never stopped being thirsty.
There was a spot on his chest and a spot on his back that itched horribly. There was something in his skin, preventing him from fully healing whatever wounds were there. He focused all of his attention on a single finger and found that he could wiggle it, and then move his hand, and then finally lift his arm and dig his fingers into the thread stitched into the skin of his chest. He felt dampness on his fingers and a sharp pain as he tore at it.
And then there were hands pushing his hand away and he grumbled as he tried, and failed, to weakly resist the restraint. There were voices that were too loud and echoey in Dara's mind for him to decipher, and then he felt the stitches being cut away and the thread sliding out of his skin. He relaxed as he drifted back away from consciousness.
A cup was pressed against Dara's lips, and this time Dara was able to lift a hand to help angle it so that he could drink more quickly without choking himself. He drained the cup of water, and then waited while the person refilled it and drank the next one as well.
"Dara?" a voice asked. Dara couldn't tell if it was familiar. Everything sounded strange to his ears.
"Mm?" he managed.
The voice said something else, but everything sounded too distorted for Dara to make out the words.
The next cup was full of soup and Dara happily drank that down as well, but he turned his head away when another was offered to him. He was still starving, but his stomach was physically full. He was worried he would throw up if he tried to add any more to the liquid sloshing around in there.
He meant to just rest long enough for his body to absorb enough of the liquid out of his stomach to make room for more soup, but when awareness returned his stomach felt empty and he was fairly sure several hours had passed.
The first thing he became aware of was pain radiating out from the centre of Maric's chest and the heat of infection taking root. Daylight streamed in through the window.
What had happened? There had been people in the bushes. Dara remembered pain and blood, probably his own, but not much else. And then... nothing. A nothing that felt like it had lasted much longer than nothings should.
Dara instinctively reached out a hand towards the wound on Maric's chest, and then inhaled sharply in unison with Maric as his hand made contact with Maric's bandaged chest and a sharp pain shot out from the point of contact.
Maric gently tucked Dara's hand away. "Dara? Are you awake?"
Dara tried to sit up, but movement felt unreasonably taxing and after a moment he gave up. "You're hurt. It's infected."
"Don't worry, Dara," Mathers said. He was sitting in a chair on the opposite side of the room. He was the only other person in there with them. "I'm aware of it and I'm doing everything I can to help him recover."
Dara made a discontented sound, but he didn't have the energy to argue.
The back of Maric's hand stroked Dara's cheek. His skin felt warm, and Dara wasn't sure if that had more to do with Maric being feverish or his own body struggling with circulation.
"How are you feeling?" Maric asked.
Dara felt cold and tired and like every single action, including breathing, consumed more energy than he had. But expressing those things served no purpose, so he couldn't be bothered. "Hungry."
"What would you like?"
"Cheese."
"Cheese?"
"Mm."
"Just cheese?"
"Mm."
"Okay," Maric said, and Mathers left the room to fulfill his request. "You almost died, you know."
Dara was silent. He wasn't sure what he did or didn't know about what had happened, but he certainly felt closer to death than he was comfortable with. Closer than he'd ever come before, even when that had specifically been his goal.
"Actually, I think technically you were dead for a little over an hour. You didn't have a pulse, you weren't breathing. But then you came back. Did you know you could do that?"
He hadn't explicitly known that, but if someone had offered to make a bet with him about it he wasn't sure which side he would have come down on. His body was capable of strange things that even he didn't fully understand, and he hadn't yet found a challenge it couldn't face. He managed a minute shake of his head.
"There was an arrow through your heart. You bled out in my arms. I really thought I'd lost you and I didn't like it one bit."
Dara wanted to say many things, but he didn't have enough energy to even figure out what they were. Instead, he leant his face against Maric's hand.
"Will you definitely be okay now, or could things still get worse again?"
Dara took a deep breath in and let it out slowly as he gathered his energy. "I'm fine." He stretched his arm out between them and pointed to Maric's chest. "That isn't."
Maric looked down at his chest as though he'd forgotten about the wound, as though he couldn't feel the pain that Dara could feel through him. "That's from the arrow that was through your heart. It only cut into me a little. I'll be fine."
But he wouldn't be fine because the infection was spreading faster than his body could fight it and it was disconcertingly close to his heart. Most people were more fragile than they could possibly comprehend when it really came down to it.
Pestering Maric about it wouldn't help anything, though. It had been cleaned and stitched and bandaged. Everything Mathers could do for him.
There was only one thing that could help him now, and that was Dara.
Mathers returned with a large wedge of cheese, and Dara got to work putting it inside of his body. He couldn't do anything for anyone until he could at least move around on his own.
He chewed on small chunks of cheese Maric broke off for him, and then when he started to feel a little more sturdy he was able to sit up to make his cheese consumption more efficient. As he gained strength Maric seemed to lose it, and by the time he was nearing cheese capacity Maric was asleep.
Mathers approached, pressed a hand against Maric's forehead, and sighed. "I'm going to go and sleep somewhere where someone can wake me up at intervals to check on Maric or else I'm going to fall asleep here and I don't know when I'll wake up on my own. I know you're probably going to go back to sleep as well, and you should do that, but if you happen to be awake and you notice any change in his condition please have someone come and get me immediately."
"Yes, sir."
Mathers looked at Dara for a long moment as he slowly nodded. "I don't understand how you survived, Dara, but I'm glad you did. We'll have to have a talk later about how your ability works so that I can do a better job of helping you if you ever happen to get this badly hurt again."
"Thank you, sir," Dara said, and he genuinely meant it, but he just wanted Mathers to leave the room already so that he could try to help Maric.
"I didn't want to say this in front of Maric, but I don't know if he's going to be okay. It was hours before he let me tend to him after he first got injured, and now his wound is infected and it's only getting worse."
"I know. I have a sense for these things, sir."
"Well, I just wanted you to know that if something does happen to him, I'll take you back to Paige. I've always respected Maric and he's always treated me far better than he's had to. I can tell he cares about you deeply, so if he's not here to protect you then I will be."
"Thank you, sir. That means more to me than you understand."
"It doesn't seem that hard to understand." Mathers stood up and sighed again. "Anyway, I'll let the two of you rest. Someone will be right outside the door if you need anything at all."
"Thank you, sir," Dara said again, and then watched Mathers until he shut the door behind himself.
He had meant it when he'd told Mathers what he'd said had meant more than he knew, because now one more fear poisoning his magic had been pushed out of Dara's mind. But there were others.
He didn't want to lose Maric. That was the biggest one. But it was a circular fear like the knife man — a threat that only existed if he failed, and therefore one he shouldn't let be the cause of his failure.
The other fear was of what would happen if he did succeed. What would Maric say when he found out the truth? What would it change between the two of them?
That one he simply had to shove down deep inside of himself and do his best to ignore. He couldn't let it hold him back or else it wouldn't matter at all because Maric would be dead. There was no reaction he could have that would hurt anywhere near as much as that.
Instead, Dara thought about the good moments they'd had together. He thought about the way they'd talked, the way Maric had listened. He thought about Maric stripping down and getting on his knees, humbling himself so that Dara wouldn't be afraid. He thought about the way Maric had protected him when he was hurt, how he'd tended to him gently and patiently as he was recovering.
Fire stirred in Dara's belly, reluctant under the weight of his fatigue but undeniably there. He rested both hands on top of the bandages covering the wound on Maric's chest and concentrated, willing the fire to rise up through his chest, down his arms, and out through his hands.
Maric drew in a breath as the heat sunk into him, but he didn't wake up. It shot through his body at Dara's direction, feeding energy into Maric's body's own natural defences and giving them direction. He commanded them like an army against the infection, hunting it down and destroying it as it attempted to spread through Maric's body. It didn't stand a chance against his power.
Dara could have stopped there. With the infection gone, he could have left the wound to heal on its own and he might not even have had to admit he had any part in Maric's recovery if that was what he chose.
But Dara knew himself well enough to have known from that start that that would never happen. When left to his own devices, he never left a job half done. Once he got started, it wasn't even a conscious decision. It was just a natural flow that didn't stop until he was interrupted or he had exhausted himself beyond his ability to function.
He needed something to cut the stitches. Mathers' saddle bag was on the floor, likely full of all sorts of tools that could get the job done, but Dara still didn't trust his legs to get him there. He patted down Maric's pants instead and found a small knife tucked into a loop in his waistband.
Dara cut the bandages free and poised himself to carefully cut out the stitches holding the wound on Maric's chest together.
That was when the door opened.
Mathers stared at Dara, mouth slightly open and a look of incomprehension on his face.
"It's okay," Dara told him, meeting his gaze. "He's going to be okay."
Mathers looked at him, really looked at him, and Dara let every bit of the facade he'd been maintaining fall away as he looked back at him. And then a look of realisation passed over Mathers' face. He knew.
Mathers took a step into the room and shut the door behind himself. "Does he know?"
Dara shook his head. "Please. I just need a little while longer. All I want is to finish this and I promise he'll be fine."
Mathers watched him for a long moment, his mind visibly ticking over. "Would you like me to remove the stitches for you?"
Dara nodded. "Please. My hands are a little shaky."
Mathers found a more appropriate knife in his saddle bag and sat down on the bed on the other side of Maric. He felt Maric's forehead and examined the wound, then looked up and met Dara's gaze. "The infection is gone?"
"Yes. I just don't want to leave this unfinished. I don't want him to be hurt anymore."
"You don't have to explain yourself to me, Dara," Mathers said as he started cutting out the stitches. "I'm not about to argue with a healer."
A healer. That was what Dara was, but it was strange to hear it again, strange to once more be granted unquestioning respect for it.
"Thank you," Dara said once the last of the stitches had been tugged out. The wound had healed enough that the skin held together without them.
Maric hadn't stirred the entire time Mathers had been working. He was in a deep sleep by this point. Although Dara had used his energy to help in the healing process, it had been Maric's own body that had ultimately done most of the work. That took a lot out of a person.
"Is there anything else you need?"
"No, just..." Dara let out a slow sigh. "Can you keep this quiet and keep everyone else away? All I want is to finish this. If anything distracts me from that goal, I don't think I'll be able to do it."
"I'm going to leave this room and I'm not going to come back unless somebody calls for me. It sounds like the two of you are going to have to have a long and difficult conversation, but I think it will be better for everyone if that happens after you've both rested." Mathers stood up from the bed. "Good luck."
Dara nodded his thanks. He was going to need it.