Chapter 431: Please Stay

Guinevere walked Landon Solveil into his chambers with his arm across her shoulders and his weight leaning into her frame.

The doors opened and the room responded.

Every surface ignited. The stone walls bloomed with light that traveled upward from the floor in waves, racing across the architecture like a current being switched on. The ceiling caught it next, veins of gold threading through the white stone in patterns that pulsed once, twice, and then held steady.

She was glowing. He was glowing. The runes on her forearms were pulsing in tandem with the ones crawling across his, white and gold threads mirroring each other in a rhythm that neither of them was controlling.

She guided him to the couch near the far wall. Lowered him gently, her hands on his shoulders, easing him down the way a person handles something breakable. His back hit the cushion and a sound left his throat that was low and strained and belonged to a body fighting itself.

His hand was in hers. He had grabbed it at some point between the staircase and the door and she had held on and neither of them had let go and she was choosing to classify that as medical support and leave it there.

She knelt in front of him. Both knees on the white glowing stone. Her hand still wrapped around his. The runes at the contact point flared brighter and the light spread up both their arms in matching spirals.

In the doorway, Blair, Damon, Beta Draven, Briggs, and Brennan stood in a loose cluster, watching a glowing woman kneel in front of a glowing king and hold his hand in a room that was performing a light show for the two of them.

Kael’s grey eyes moved from her hand to Landon’s hand to her face. Then he turned and walked out of the chambers without a word, joining the others in the corridor.

Before the door closed, the Master Healer entered, his spectacles already sliding down his nose from the pace he had been keeping. Behind him, a second figure followed. Older. Smaller. Wrapped in a robe that looked like it had been slept in and meditated in and possibly used as a blanket during a nap that lasted longer than intended.

Guinevere recognized him immediately.

The brown room. He had been in the brown room with the others. He had been asleep on the floor during something important. She could see his face in a fragment that floated loose in her memory, disconnected from context, attached to nothing except the certainty that she had seen this man before.

"Hello, dear," the old healer said with a warm smile that carried the familiarity of a greeting between people who had history. His eyes crinkled at the corners and the crinkle said he knew her and the knowing was fond.

She blinked a few times. No memory surfaced outside of the brown room. The fragment sat behind the locked door in her skull with everything else she could feel but could not reach.

"Hello," she said, returning his smile with the gracious warmth of a woman accepting that she was missing something and choosing politeness over confusion. "It is lovely to see you."

The old healer gave a gentle nod that said I know you don’t remember and that is alright and then he moved to Landon’s side.

Guinevere stayed on her knees. Her hand stayed in Landon’s. She looked up at both healers.

"King Solveil is having difficulty breathing," she began, her voice steady, her words chosen with care. "His chest is tightening in a way that makes each inhale feel insufficient. His heart rate is elevated. His palms are damp. There is a heaviness across his sternum that feels like a weight has been placed on it and the weight is growing. He also described a tingling in his hands and a sensation in his throat like the air is too thick to pull in fully. The feeling is cycling. It builds, then recedes, then builds again, and each time it builds, it climbs higher than the last."

Both healers were looking at her. The Master Healer’s spectacles had stopped sliding. The old healer’s warm eyes had sharpened by a degree that his smile did not reflect.

She did not say how she knew these things. She did not reference a matebond or the fact that every symptom she had described was echoing through her own chest in real time, a mirror held up to a body she could feel from the inside without understanding why.

The room could infer. The room was inferring.

The Master Healer left. His footsteps were quick down the corridor. He returned carrying a glass vial filled with something pale green and luminous. He uncorked it, crouched beside the couch, and tilted it to Landon’s mouth.

Landon drank. His throat worked twice. The tonic went down and his breathing eased by a fraction within the first thirty seconds. His chest stopped heaving. His jaw unclenched. The cycling sensation slowed its climb and his muscles loosened.

Guinevere felt the tonic land.

The relief traveled through whatever connected them and hit her chest like cool water on a burn. His breathing easing meant hers eased. The cycling slowed in both of them at the same rate, synchronized without explanation.

Then the burning started. It had always been there, but now that the other symptoms were gone, she could feel it better.

It bloomed beneath her ribs. Dull at first, then sharper, spreading outward from her sternum in a heat that had nothing to do with the room and everything to do with something she could feel radiating from the man whose hand she was still holding.

She looked at the old healer. "There is a burning. Beneath the sternum. It is his."

The old healer gave a small nod and placed his glowing hands against Landon’s chest.

Guinevere released Landon’s hand for the first time since the staircase and stood. She walked into his bathing chamber because she could feel the fever sitting on him like a second skin and a cool cloth was the only thing she could think to do about it.

Under any other circumstance, she would not move through someone’s private quarters so freely, let alone a king’s. But this felt like an emergency.

She returned to the couch. Knelt again. Folded the damp cloth into thirds with the quiet efficiency of a woman who had done this before and reached for his forehead.

His hand closed around her wrist.

The grip was firm. His molten eyes found hers. The gold was steadier now, the flickering less violent, the cycling slower. The tonic had taken the edge off something but the something was still there, running beneath the surface, and his eyes carried the full weight of a man holding onto a wrist because letting go of it was a concept his body had rejected.

"Please stay," he said.

The braided voice was quieter. The second tone had receded to a murmur, riding beneath his own, present but yielding. What came through was the man. A king asking a woman to stay with him in a voice that was too raw to belong to a sovereign and too honest to belong to a stranger.