A Beginning: Part 2

The room was full of healers, hooded in heavy brown robes with gold lacing in the front. All were busy reading from large tomes, making arcane gestures and muttering proposals to each other. He pushed his way through the group huddled around the bed and knelt next to it.

Lenowe was lying quietly with her eyes close. She was absolutely beautiful, even in her present state. With large sores covering her arms and legs and her face as pale white as a corpse. Her skin seemed to cling to her bones all over her body. She hadn’t been able to eat for the past week without vomiting and she had lost most of her body weight. Kneeling beside the bed Daniel squeezed her hand and smiled deeply as her eyes opened and found their way to his. She moved her free hand to the bulge on her stomach and sighed. She was well past 8 months.

“I was wondering how long it would take you to get here..." Her voice was weak and fragile. But her smile was just as vibrant as ever. "...Is it dawn yet?”

“Just about. A fourth of an hour maybe.” He was slightly winded from his run, and a little shaken from the fright of the letter, but seeing her made it settle. He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see Kerlic. He was a brute of a man, a foot over Daniel at least, and twice his weight. He looked troubled. Turning back to his wife, he whispered into her ear, “I’ll be right back.” She smiled and faintly nodded her head. He kissed her forehead before rising.

Kerlic lead him outside the room to the hall, still empty of people. Florn looked up as they passed but said nothing. He stood when the healer said his name. “Florn, there you are. Fetch some ginger tea with rant extract.” The servant stayed only long enough to bow and was off. Just before he rounded the corner into the main hallway, which would eventually lead him to the kitchen, the healer took a step forward and called to him. “Oh, and bring me an incense kettle.” Florn made another quick bow and disappeared around the corner.

The healer nodded as if crossing things off a mental list and then turned to Daniel. “So, I imagine you read the note then.” Daniel looked to his hands but didn’t find the note. Just the goblet, empty now run his rapid dash down several hallways.
“Yes, I-I mean no, no I didn’t. I just ran here when I heard it was from you. What is the matter?”

Kearlic pulled back the hood of his robe and scratched his balding head. Daniel thought of him as his best friend. He was the smartest person he knew, and showed the most respect to him, even though Daniel never remembered the healer calling him by a proper title or bowing before talking to him. He reasoned it was the way the healer never explained things to him like he was a child, unlike nearly all his advisors and even a few of his servants. The respect you show to a king fades when the king dies. The respect you have for a friend is respect.

"My friend, that is just it. I have a band of healers sitting in the keeps library reading into strange illnesses. I have another, reviewing the scrolls from the high priests temple in Lerach, and one more with her right now as you can see, trying all manner of formula that thought provides them with. But I know not what has her in deaths grip."

Daniel turned around and stood there awkardly. He wondered what to do with his hands, what to do with his feet. He pressed the soft part of his palms to his temples and squeezed. The extra pressure felt good.

"So trapped. Kearlic please do not speak those words." He felt dizzy with all this, and his thoughts were strewn about too many episodes to be of help to him. He didn't want to say anything, or to admit to simple truth. But there were questions he had to ask and answers to be found. "Well then, to what end will it be? More importantly, when will this end come into being?" The dizziness was being replaced by nausea, and his face was becoming as pale as his wifes.

Kerlic didn't answer him, and Daniel turned to face him. "Please friend, tell me."

"Daniel, the ladys life blood is losing color, and her existence is weakening. liM is calling her, and the amount I could do for her would but prolonge the inevitable."

"When?"

"It is difficult to tell, mayhap within the hour. The setting of the sun will pass afterwards... assuredly. There has yet to be pain in her sickness, there is no reason to believe she will have it in death."

Daniel lowered his head and he caught himself laughing. He muttered the word "pain" just loud enough for the healer to hear and started mentally listing the types. "What kind of pain Kearlic? The physical entity of life that fades with existence, or the pain that is all that's left afterwards? Hanging like a pungent smell over death, inflicting sorrow on all touched. What will not be felt by my wife? What's more dangerous?"

"Daniel listen..."

"Mayhap later." Daniel's words were but a distant breath over his shoulder as he entered back into the room he had adapted as a care home for his wife. Those 8 months seemed like years now.

For a while he just stood near her bed and watched her chest rise and fall. For the thousandth time in his wedding he tried vainly to find words to express his love. He recalled the night his offspring was conceived. How he gave himself over to blind love, and his complete and utter bliss. He smiled and started to look off into deeper thought when Lenowe turned her head to him and he knelt near the bed. She smiled and a thin wisp of hair fell to her cheek. Daniel waited for her to push it back into place, and his heart ached when she didn't move. She was a perfectionist; she'd always push out of place hair back behind her ear, and in all the time he'd known her, this was the first he could remember that she didn't. He replaced it for her, and kissed her.

Daniel heard the clanking of a tray behind him, and turned to see Florn had returned with the supplies Kearlic had asked for. The healer took the tray from him and laid it on a small end table near the fire place.

"M'Lady, please sip a little of this, it will help relax the itching, and dull the headache." He handed a tiny silver cup to Daniel and motioned him to help his wife drink.

"Do not bother." She seemed almost happy to say it. A dozen heads stoped and looked at her to see what she meant.

"Lenowe, don't fool with us. Please take a sip, it will help you recover."

"Daniel my love, my life is spent, and my soul, forfeit to liM's goodness. Tea cannot bring me back from a destiny such as this. I can hear him calling me."

"What are you saying? This is nonsence, take the tea."

"I have lived a beautiful life, full of love and bounty. I have experienced every kind of love that the good liM has created and have been loved back in all situations. I have done things that I could never have imagined in earlier life, and my regrets are few. In all, I have but one." Her hand slid to her stomach again as she continued. "Tal, has yet to live, and I know not if the chance for life will be given before death. I can wish only the beauty of my life on our child, but I am weak now and likewise for my babe. If this sublime creation is destined to pass with me, then the sorrow I feel is tried, and placed instead as the hope of recompense and more it will recieve from liM in it's first life." She saw the tears welling in her husbinds eyes and her own surfaced.

"I can only hope, that the creation we will be in together some day will have words that I might use to express my love for you, wife."

"I pass now. Cast aside fear: This is not an end, but a change, and one for the better. We will be together again, all of us. In a better place than this." She paused for a moment and looked to a healer near the door. "Is it dawn yet?" He threw his hood back and looked towards the hall.

"Any minute now m'lady, the sun will show it's head any minute."

"Very well. Then it is time. Husbind, take hold my hand and kiss me farewell."
Daniel couldn't think to do anything but what she said. He wanted to comfort her. To tell her it was going to be alright. But it was she who was consoling him. He couldn't move, but to press his lips to hers in one last kiss. He tasted tears. Salty, and backed away to look to her. She smiled again and turned her head away. Her eyes slid close, and her chest sank one last time.

He just looked at her. His face was wet with his own emotion. He scarcly noticed the tickle of one drop run down his chin and onto his neck. He heard the sound of the room kneeling, a healer say,
"Truely today the country shall weep. Their beloved queen, has passed."

Daniel kissed her hand shakily, and brushed his hand across her cheek and down her chin. After a moment he finalized things in his mind and stood. Wiping his face with his sleeve, he turned with a deep breath to Kearlic.

"I do not know what possible good it could do, but the queen is dead. Please, try to save my child. I know not if you can, or if you are willed to, but..." Kearlic nodded that he understood. That he understood everything, and started giving orders to the men in the room.

Daniel stumbled his way into the hall and fell to his knees before an arrow slit window. "Good liM, my wife is in your hands now. Please care for her until I meet her again." He bowed his head and said several silent prayers for her until he was interrupted by the light of the morning sun. He gazed up as the breeze stirred his hair to see the top of the golden ball rising just above the mountains. The sky was a streamer of a million reds and purples. He could never have imagined such a sunrise. Not in his life, or in the hundreds of paintings he had acquired over the years. In no jester's tales of far off lands and myth was there ever beauty of this amplitude. He almost felt immoral towards his mood while in the presence of such beauty. He shifted his prayers towards the ability to find some sort of comfort in a sight such as this which he'd never seen.

Far off he in the north tower he heard the bell of first light. It meant the start of a new day for the castle. He blocked it from his mind for a moment more and just listened to the whisper around him, closed his eyes as the sun warmed his face, and the breeze, playfully stirred his hair.

"Peaceful." He whispered.