Danilo’s face suddenly looked strange, frightened. His mouth was moving but Regis could no longer hear him, floating bodiless in the sparkling darkness. The base of his skull throbbed with ballooning pain. He heard himself whisper, “I am … in your hands . . .” Then the world slid side-wise and he felt himself collapse into Danilo’s arms.
He never knew how he got there, but seconds later, it seemed, he felt searing pain all over his naked body, and found himself floating up to the chin in a great tub of boiling water. Danilo, kneeling at his side, was anxiously chafing his wrists. His head was splitting, but he could see solid objects again, and his own body was reassuringly firm. A servant was hovering around with clean garments, trying to attract Danilo’s attention long enough to get his approval of them.
Regis lay watching, too languid to do anything but accept their ministrations. He noticed that Danilo unobtrusively kept his own body between Regis and the Aldaran servant. Danilo chased the man out quickly, muttering under his breath, “I’m not going to trust any of them alone with you!”
At first the water had seemed scalding to his chilled body; now he realized it was barely warm, in fact it must have been drawn for some time, was probably a bath prepared for Danilo before he came in. Danilo was still bending over him, his face tight with worry. Suddenly Regis was filled with such intolerable anxiety that he cut off the intense, sensuous pleasure of the hot water soothing his chilled and stiffened body—eleven nights on the trail and not warm once!—and drew himself upright, hauling himself out of the hot tub, reaching for a towel to wrap himself in. Danilo knelt to dry him, saying, “I sent the servant for a healer-woman, there must be someone of that sort here. Regis, I never saw any-one faint like that before; your eyes were open but you couldn’t hear me or see me . . .”
“Threshold sickness.” Briefly he sketched in an explanation. “I’ve had a few attacks before. I’m over the worst.” I hope, he added to himself. “I doubt if the healer could do anything with this. Here, give me that, I can dress myself.” Firmly he took the towel away from Danilo. “Go and tell her not to bother, and find out if there’s anything hot to drink.”
Skeptically Danilo retreated. Regis finished drying himself and clambered into the unfamiliar clothing. His hands were shaking almost too hard to tie the knots of his tunic. What’s the matter with me, he asked himself why didn’t I want Dani to help me dress? He looked at his hands in cold shock, as if they belonged to someone else. I didn’t want him to touch me!
Even to him that sounded incongruous. They had lived together in the rough intimacy of the barracks room for months. They had been close-linked, even thinking one another’s thoughts.
This was different
Irresistibly his mind was drawn back to that night in the barracks, when he had reached out to Danilo, torn by an almost frenzied desire to share his misery, the spasm of loathing and horror with which Danilo had flung him away…..
And then, shaken and shamed and terrified, Regis knew what had prompted that touch, and why he was suddenly shy of Danilo now. The knowledge struck him motionless, his bare feet cold through the wolfskin rug on the tile floor.
To touch him. Not to comfort Dani, but to comfort his own need, his own loneliness, his own hunger….
He moved deliberately, afraid if he remained motionless another instant the threshold sickness would surge up over him again. He knelt on the wolfskin, drawing fur-lined stockings up over his knees and deliberately tying the thongs into intricate knots. On the surface of his mind he thought that fur clothing was life-saving here in the mountains. It felt wonderful.
But, relentless, the memory he had barricaded since his twelfth year burst open like a bleeding wound; the memory he had let himself lose consciousness before recovering on the northward trail: Lew’s face, alight with fire, his barriers down in the last extremity of exhaustion and pain and fear.