Separation

When they all had to pull together? Who? The Pilatans? The companions? Which camp was she in, and who was she thinking of when she used the term “we”? Issues that she had pushed to the back of her mind came bubbling to the surface. Issues with which she didn’t wish to deal at the moment.

“Yeah, okay,” J.B. agreed, snapping her out of her reverie. “That sounds good. I’ll tell the others when I see them, but I guess I’d better be going. Till later…” The Armorer moved off and Mildred watched him go, aware that Markos was watching her. She turned and walked toward the building, trying not to meet the sec boss’s eye.

“So you will be meeting with him later?” Markos questioned as she approached.

“Is it necessary for me to answer?” she returned.

He winced at her tone. “Yes, I believe it is. Partly because of what is between us, and partly because I have larger concerns to oversee. What will you be telling him?”

“Nothing that will have any bearing on your responsibilities in either sphere,” Mildred replied. “Now, if you have no objections, the baron is expecting me.”

“I know. I have been informed.”

“Is that why you’ve personally taken this watch?”

He shook his head briefly. “I dismissed the guard so I could speak with you in some degree of privacy. Now I shall have to cover until the next watch.”

“So you don’t lose face or appear human in the eyes of the men you command?” she asked.

Markos didn’t answer.

Mildred knocked on the baron’s door and heard his feeble voice bid her to enter. She left Markos resolutely looking away from her so as not to betray any feelings.

The baron’s quarters were in almost complete darkness. One oil lamp, suspended from a bracket near the door, lit the interior and the shutters on the windows were covered with thick curtains to prevent any leakage of light. It took Mildred’s eyes awhile to adjust, during which time she made her way unsteadily and carefully across the room.

“It takes a few moments,” Barras’s healer said as she appeared from the shadows, her hand gently taking Mildred’s arm to guide her to the baron’s bedside without bumping into anything. “I am almost blind for the first minutes of duty. Thankfully there is never anything of any importance during those minutes,” she added. When Mildred was seated by the baron’s bedside, and her eyes had become accustomed to the low level of light, she was able to see that Sineta hadn’t exaggerated when she had described how ill her father had become. Barras’s eyes were wild and bloodshot, staring out into the darkness with an almost scary intensity, seemingly fixed on some distant point. It was almost as if he had swathed the room in Stygian gloom because the river and the boatman were already fixtures on his horizon. His eyes, with their hallucinatory air, had sunk even farther into his skull, which seemed to be now devoid of flesh. He had grown, if anything, thinner than the first time she had seen him, and the painkillers were no longer of any use as anesthesia. They could keep the level of pain such that he could bear it, but they no longer dulled or deadened it. His skin held a ghostly gray tinge and had started to break out all over in sores as the cancer broke through as if fighting its way out of his body and taking him over, transforming him into something alien.

“Mildred, I’m glad you came,” he said in a hoarse croak. “I fear I cannot hold on to my reason for long. Even now, it would seem that I drift in and out of this world. Sometimes it is as though my dreams become flesh, or I become a dream. I see my mother and father…my wife…they wait for me, as beautiful and noble as they were in their prime. Perhaps they will see me in that way when I finally arrive and not as I am now. Layla,” he added, trying to turn his head with a painfully slow rotation, “where are you?”

“I am here, my baron,” the healer whispered, coming close.

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