Free Embers by Helen Kirkman

hair were low, but clear as crystal water. "You cannot. There are too many people who need you. Look at Duda."
    She raised her head to glance across the room.
    "See?"
    She had no fear of any reaction from the heap of despair across the room because she spoke in Celtic. Her language, and yet not so. Theirs. Because they had shared it. It was what they had spoken in the night, when they had fled through the dark, when they had shared what small secret moments they had had, in love.
    She buried her face again in his hair, as though he had looked with her, as though he could hear her. As though it were not utterly and wildly mad to carry on a conversation with an unconscious man.
    "He is loyal to you and he depends on you. He would collapse into a heap of grubby rags and disintegrate without you. He does not want you to go. If he knew how, he would beg you."
    As I would.
    "Brand?" The heated body moved. As though he heard, as though he knew and would not forsake them.
    "Brand…" But it was nothing, just fever dreams. Each time his tormented body moved, each time the dry lips seemed to form words, her heart leaped. But he did not see her, could not return her words.
    The only breath of sound she had recognized had not been her name. That name had belonged to the man who had been sacrificed.
    Athelwulf.
    The. division between them was not in the power of either of them to heal.
    She touched his brow. But even her touch made him twist away from her, like someone in torture.
    like someone who was cut off, even from what would help them.
    Like someone who was alone.
    Even when he said his brother's name it was as though he warded someone away.
    She picked up the cloth, plunged it into the water, squeezed it out. Her hand shook, from exhaustion, from fear, from pity and helplessness and…soul-destroying rage. The cloth hit the wall with a smack that shocked the rag bundle on the other side of the bed out of its motionless despair.
    She did not care. Her hands sank into the heap of discarded herbs on the scrubbed wooden table, horehound and feverfew, henbane, viper's bugloss and the seeds of cleavers. And vervain. Vervain the enchantment herb that staunched bleeding, dispelled fevers and the effects of snakebite, and when it was rubbed on the body granted wishes.
    It conciliated hearts.
    There was naught it could do here. It was useless. Everything was useless: the cloth, the herbs, the whole skill of the infirmarian. Even Duda's despair was useless. Her hands tightened on crushed leaves.
    They were all powerless to fight his illness because none of them understood. It had nothing to do with the wound.
    She was the only one who knew the cause. And she was the one who could not heal it
    Because there was nothing else that could be done, she stepped into the flames with him.
    She gathered the burning body into her arms, beyond thought of whether she would damage the wound or strain the laboured breath in his lungs. She held him with a strength beyond the tiredness in her arms, The coolness of her body melded with the heat of his until it was consumed and there was only one body tormented by the same pain and the words that came spilling out of her head were the words she had most wanted to say.
    "It is me who cannot live without you. You cannot leave me. You have to remember what we said. That we would abide this together, whatever happened for right or wrong."
    She took a shaking breath. "I would share all the wrong that has happened, as much as the right I know what my blame is and I would not leave you to bear what you should not." Her voice was like a thread in the darkness, something he might not have heard had he been conscious. "I am with you…"
    Her words sped up, tumbling over one another while she held him. They whispered against his hot flesh. "I have not broken the vow we made, not truly. I might have seemed to because I could not bear the thought of what you would lose for my sake."
    Her hands fastened with desperation on