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The first time Camilla reads over one particular letter from Palamedes addressed to the Duchess Septimus, she’s overcome with a wave of nausea so strong that she has to excuse herself to the lavatory.
She grasps the basin of the sink—grey, metal, like the taste on her tongue—and great, shuddering breaths lurch from her mouth. She’ll be ill if she doesn’t stop with the tears. Or she’ll lose consciousness from the hyperventilating. Either way, she thinks it would help to be reminded of the consequences of this…problem. If she doesn’t pack it away now, nip it in the bud and shove it into some dark, dank corner of her brain, she will not survive.
It was a marriage proposal. She knew it would be. He’d told her he wanted to propose weeks ago but needed time to think about how to word it, and she’d immediately gone numb, compartmentalized and put that information in a box to open later. And, well, she’s opened it. Some Pandora’s box of feelings has spilled over from deep in her chest into reality—she dry heaves into the sink.
The room is spinning; the tile walls look as though they’re melting, like they’ll slough off and reveal the ugly piping and drywall beyond. Her whole body is shaking, and she wants to go to him about it, because she knows he’d wrap her up in his arms and soothe her, but she can’t. She’ll never be able to.
This is part of being his cavalier, too—she refuses to let him see her as weak. They serve each other, cavaliers and necromancers, in their own ways, but she is his sworn protector. Not talking about the blinding, excruciating pain of this protects them both.
The wording of the letter comes back to her in a sickening crash of thunder and she lets her legs give out, slumping against the sink cabinet. He’d called Dulcinea so many saccharine things. Darling, and my dear girl. What exists between herself and the Warden will never be the same as that. Accept it, she thinks fiercely, and with a hot wave of anger and shame toward herself.
Camilla hears footsteps approaching the lavatory and curses under her breath, wiping the tears and snot from her face with the edge of her sleeve. She knows who it is by his footfalls—and she realizes that even though memorizing all of Palamedes’s physical quirks is something she has over Dulcinea, if they were to marry the Duchess would move to the Sixth, and then she’d know all of them too.
That should make her happy for them both, but it doesn’t.
A knock sounds at the door. “Cam, are you feeling alright? If you’re ill, don’t worry about editing the letter for now, it can wait.”
“I’m fine.” It comes out pathetically hoarse.
“You don’t sound fine,” he says, and she knows how deeply the frown lines are cutting into his face, “is there anything you need? Medicine?”
You, her brain supplies helpfully. “No, don’t worry about it.”
“It’s impossible for me not to worry about you.” His voice is so gentle. She wants to tear her hair out. “Well, come back to the bedroom when you’re up to it, and we can get some rest.”
She sobs out a laugh when he walks away. Some rest, he says. He never wants to sleep, but when her health is concerned…it means nothing. He’s merely being kind.
It takes her a long ten minutes to stop sniffling and wobble to stand. She assesses herself in the mirror. There are tear tracks on her face, her eyes are red and swollen, and her bangs are plastered to her forehead from when she’d broken out in a nervous cold sweat. Camilla splashes water on her face and rubs at her skin roughly with a towel—maybe he won’t notice, but if he does, would it matter? She won’t talk about it, and no amount of prodding from him will change that.
She may as well be sick, with the way she pushes off from the sink and nearly stumbles to the ground again, unsteady on her feet. She makes her way back to the Master Warden’s chambers, and she feels almost drunk. The halls of the Library are fuzzy around the edges.
Camilla knew it was coming, which is the worst part. It’s been coming for years. She knew he was drafting the proposal, but the reality of it, the image of Dulcinea sitting in a garden, peeling up the seal and holding the letter in her fine-boned hands swept her up in unexpected straight-line winds. She can’t see straight through the storm.
But there’s conviction beneath it all. He will never know, and she’ll make sure of it.
When she finally returns to the Warden’s room—her room, too, their room, but she tries not to think about it—she doesn’t get a foot through the threshold before Palamedes is there, fingers fluttering anxiously about her body. He puts a hand on her forehead and she feels nauseous again.
“You’re not fevered, but you certainly look unwell,” he says. He’s right up in her space, and she hates herself viciously for wanting to kiss him when the draft of the proposal is sitting on a table beside them in plain sight. It’s muscle memory at this point, after so long; her mind conjures up the usual fantasies, but they’re corrupted now. Like irretrievable data, she can no longer return to the point where she let herself hope.
“Probably something I ate.” Something horrible, with nasty, envious tendrils snaking their way past her stomach and up through her chest, cinching tight around her heart.
“You should lie down,” says Palamedes, and he guides her over to their bed. Their bed. If Dulcinea accepts, Camilla will have to take up the smaller cavalier’s bed. She bites back a fresh wave of tears and does her best to shut that part of herself down. Compartmentalize. Shove it away.
He procures a trash bin from somewhere in the room and sets it beside the bed, and sits next to where her legs are stretched out. He strokes a hand through her damp hair, murmuring something comforting, but she stares up at the ceiling and doesn’t hear him. In fact, she doesn’t feel anything at all.