Valdemar Anthology - [Tales of Valdemar 02] - Sun in Glory and Other Tales of Valdemar by Mercedes Lackey

look.
    Men lay abed. Women. There were children as well, although they were mercifully few. They gazed up at the ceiling of the room, or at the walls, their eyes unblinking. They did not move; their lips were still. She shook her head to clear it of the sounds of despair, and as she did, the priest gently pushed his way past her.
    â€œThey have been this way,” he said softly, “for weeks. They will eat what we feed them, and drink when we offer them water; we can clean them, wash them, bathe them. But they will not rise or move on their own; they do not speak. Some of them have families in this town, but—but most of their families can only bear to visit for the first few days.” He walked over to one of the beds and set upon its edge, heavily.
    â€œMore and more of my people are brought here every day. And throughout the town there are others whose families can afford the cost of their care.”
    â€œThey—they have no fever?”
    â€œNone. No rash, no bleeding, no outward sign of illness. But they are gone from us.” He looked up; met her eyes.
    â€œThe man that you—you found, today, would have joined them by evening at the latest.”
    â€œHow do you know?”
    â€œI’ve seen it. I know the signs. All of us do.”
    â€œBut—”
    â€œWe have no doctors who can aid us; no healers who can reach them.” He closed his eyes. Opened them again. “What did you do, Herald?”
    She shook her head. “N–nothing. And—and I’m not—not a Herald.” She walked into the room, to shed the weight of the bleak hope in his eyes.
    And as she did, she passed a small cot and stopped before it, frozen.
    It held a young child, eyes wide, hair damp against his forehead. Were it not for the slack emptiness of his features, he would have been beautiful. She forgot Darius; forgot his words.
    She listened with her heart.
    And her heart shuddered, and nearly broke, from the weight of what it heard. She had once been near the mines when a shaft had collapsed. The roar of falling rock had deafened her; the shouts of fear, of terror, the commands for action, had done the same. And through it all, one guilty thought had kept her still: she should not have come here. Children were not allowed by the mines. But she had wanted to see her father.
    Standing in this room, at the foot of this anonymous cot, she felt the same deafness and the same guilt. Some part of her urged her to turn, to run, but she ignored it because she had heard it for most of her adult life.
    What loss could she suffer that she had not suffered?
    She took a step, and then another, pushing her way forward as if through a gale, until she stood by the child’s side. And then she reached for him.
    He was not large; she did not know if he had once been chubby, as children his age often were; he was not that now; he weighed almost nothing. She lifted him, as she had lifted one other sick child, almost two years ago.
    He was screaming now, in the silence behind her silence, and she joined him because it was the only way she knew to answer the memories that even now threatened to break her.
    Her son.
    Mommmmmmmeeeeeee
    Her child.
    MOMMMMMEEEEEE
    Her own son had not wept or cried or struggled. The fever had spared him terror, and he understood, in the height of its grip, that she held him in the safety of her arms.
    Almost unconsciously, she shifted her grip on this stranger until it was the same embrace; her shoulders were curved forward, her spine rounded at the top, as if, hunched over him, she might hide from the death that was waiting, waiting, in the winter’s depths. She placed her lips against his forehead, and tasted salt.
    She was crying.
    He was screaming, but she knew how to comfort terror by now. Her arms tightened and she began to rock him, gently, back and forth, whispering his name, her son’s name, as if they were the same.
    It happened suddenly: His arms jerked and