Jewel was welcomed to the feast by the Lord General’s heir.
The younger Kliatbatrn was just past his seventeenth winter. She had never met him before, this being her first visit to his family demesne. But he seemed like a decent young man. She could see the signs he would grow into a strength fitting of his father.
He was putting in a good effort to try and fill his father’s shoes now with Jewel as his liege. But he still smelled rank with uncertainty. Yet where he faltered his mother and two older sisters were there to assist him.
It was an excellent feast too.
They had fine winter venison, smoked in apple wood and then further cooked in a syrupy sauce from the juice of the same! It had a tartness that overcame the abundance of sugar and the lack of heavy starches or breads was even palatable for Gem’s delicate stomach.
The conversation was filled with a strained pleasantry.
But you could not deny the obvious.
The head of the house was not present.
Lord General Kliatbatrn had not even opened his eyes in days!
Jewel nodded and spoke the correct courtesies, and ate the food. Even enjoyed it after a fashion. But she could not keep herself from inquiring about her vassal and ally’s health forever.
“In winter his letters mentioned nothing of such an illness and now he won’t even wake?”
The matriarch of the household clenched her feasting knife before setting it aside. The lines in the woman’s face spoke of many years of smiling despite how heavily her eyes were now sunken from sleepless nights.
“He fell ill shortly after we received bird of your departure. It seemed perhaps a winter spirit’s touch. He had a heat to him for a few days but that quickly passed.”
Jewel mulled on that while Paul spoke up for her benefit.
“He had no wounds? No marks upon him? No ill omens?”
The heir spoke up with a strained tiredness.
“Nothing, No sign of a curse or ill feeling upon anyone in the city that matches his malady. The apothecaries and ritualists tried but by the time we realized how bad it was...”
Kliatbatrn’s wife spoke with a rawness to her tone.
“He was fine, a bit addled maybe but it kept getting worse and worse by the day.”
The son began to speak calmly at first then faster and faster.
Panic and hope warring in his sent.
“He wouldn't drink any potions by the time we called for them, before his strength began to wane we couldn't even get a drop of water past his lips. The god workers and prayers we called for could give some respite for a few days but he quickly succumbed days after being restored and now not even that helps.”
By the end of it Jewel had to turn away for the sake of the boy’s honor. His tears were pouring down his cheeks and his tone cracking.
His mother gave a suitable direction for her gaze as he attempted to control himself.
“We thought that perhaps the Countess Rochford and her Wizard could do something?”
Jewel’s family had been close knit allies with Kliatbatrn’s for generations. Her father and he had served as young knights in the wars of Viznove.
There was not even a question that she would come to their aide.
“Bring me to him at once.”
And breaking with all protocol Jewel and the Matriarch of Kliatbatrn were away and through the hallways of a fortress alike and strangely different from her own family home.
The hallways were just as wide as in Fort Rochford, but the steepness of the floors was significantly greater. Twisting up and over themselves several floors more than the tallest portion of the Rochford Keep.
Jewel did not envy the fate of a barrel or wheel of cheese that slipped free of the staff at the higher levels. There would be quite the chase to secure one so lost intact.
Such distractions and the sleepy stones within were soon past however.
The man who had been the General on land of Viznove’s armies for almost eighteen years now was before her.
That had been loyal and highest amongst the Vassals in time of war.
Ever since the death of Paul’s Father in fact.
And here she was Jewel’s neck and shoulders just barely able to make her way into the bedroom. A stagnant space filled with the familiar stink of death and sourness of a badly washed body.
She’d smelled it before in peasant’s houses where the old had perished the previous winter.
But it was half a season into spring!
Marcis?aw Kliatbatrn had sent word he was hale and well this past winter! She’d been looking forward to reminiscing and learning of his family with the man.
That a mere fifty-two days wracked such ruin upon a martial man as this?
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She sought out sorcery in the world and found not a hint of its touch. The only marks of the divine upon him lingering touches along the neck and chest. Sparse touches on his face and what she knew of sorcery both divine and earthly said these could not be the cause.
Not so light and gentle that they were.
No, this was something else.
His chest moves badly when he takes breath. His skin was sunken on his frame. His eyes are hollow and unmoving beneath his lids. He smelled of a far deeper rot to Jewel’s nose even though Gem could only taste the sourness of a body and the realities of being incapable of leaving one's bed for days on end.
His wife knelt down beside the man who seemed to struggle to even breathe.
“Marcis?aw, The Countess is here.”
There was a wheezing whistle. It was dry and watery at once. But no response. He looked so old and shrunken on that bed. Where was his armor? Little good that it had apparently done to whatever terrible force had struck him down.
“Marcis?aw... My Husband... Please.”
He did not stir. Even when his wife who held his hand between her own shook with the strength of her grip.
Jewel felt a clenching anguish in her chest. The taste of wyrmfire welling up in her throat. But it was raw and uncoordinated. The words trying to find their way over her tongue and lips more feeling than intent.
It was however not shaped clearly. There was no telling what an outburst of untamed sorcery might do to the man.
She could not risk wild sorcery here.
Not yet.
The Countess Wyrm held her tongue until she had swallowed enough fire that she could be sure it would not become an utterance of sorcery.
“My Vassal and dear ally of my house. I wish we could have met here again in fairer times.”
There was no response. No stirring of life, even in the rhythm of the world he seemed diminished. What life there was to his flesh was sparse. The uneven sound of his throat, none of it sounded right.
None of it looked right.
But Jewel stared at the breathing rotting meat that had once commanded over ten thousand men on the march.
The purpled eyes in their hollowed looking sockets.
Jewel felt her throat want to close up.
An entirely different kind of welling of wyrmfire trying to crawl up into her mouth. A far worse one.
She tapped down on that one as well. For all of a desperate, starving corpse of a thing he resembled he was not one of the empty horrors.
He breathed.
His heart beat.
He was not a hungry lifeless thing gaping with hunger.
But there was a void to the crippled shape that had once been a proud man.
His breath ceased and Jewel reached for the words that could summon her friend.
“Tsulogothulan, I have great need.”
It echoed, it reverberated into the world and shook out into the land, stone and most of all the water all around. Washing out into the far distance skipping through the world on raindrops. Jewel was not skilled enough in sorcery yet to act within one of the circles that Wizardry used for their own correspondence.
But Jewel would be heard.
It would however be too long for the immediate issue. For all the legends, Sorcery and Wizards were not completely unbound by distance.
Just clever enough to seem like it.
Jewel had called for assistance but now she had to do something about it.
It had to be clear, clean, precise, a single simple intent.
Succinct and limited as carefully as possible.
Jewel finally let her throat open. She spoke as she strived to avoid at all but the most dire need.
But if there was ever a reason for it?
The fading ember of a friend’s life was it.
“Lord Kliatbatrn”
The wyrm fire spilled from her lips. Not lighting the air, not being drawn into a forbiddance to be.
But in meaning. Naming him as the sole point of her focus.
The weight of it took root and the flesh that had already been faltering to a stop jerked.
He seized, his back arched, and his wife called out in a voice that might as well be silence as more of Jewel’s words were uttered and the world echoed them.
“Do not go gently, Breathe for a time more my friend.”
She heard his heart stutter and skip back into rhythm, she could hear how the tired, faltering muscles in his chest struggled to obey. He choked and coughed. His heart did not have a surety.
It was too gentle.
Jewel needed to force it ever so slightly more.
“Please Marcis?aw, breath and live!”
His heart’s beat swayed in and out of resonance with itself. His blood tumbled through his flesh confused. His chest was wracked with coughs and blood was on his sheets from the force of it.
“I command it.”
And then he was still. Eyes closed. Face slack. But alive.
Breathing so weakly.
Jewel turned to his wife.
The baroness had a tense fierceness on her face.
Even as she gently stroked his hand. When had that skin which Jewel had seen as so strong and firm from gripping a sword become so parchment thin?
It was just a few years ago...
Jewel stayed for a time.
The woman asked with a tired resignation.
“Should I dare to hope that was the end of it?”
The Baron of Kliatbatrn did not stir. There was no point in asking his wife to try and wake him.
He still looked so terribly sickly and weak despite his body having flared to try and rekindle its own fire at her command.
Jewel spoke softly.
“No, I am not so skilled as to dare to try more than that. Not yet. But I have called for aid. And I will hold vigil until they arrive. He will not perish on my watch.”
Something else felt like it should be said.
But Jewel didn't know what.
Neither the woman nor Jewel left the wane figure of the man on the bed that night. But Jewel’s command held well into dawn.
The third visit of her Tour was not turning out how she had expected at all.
