After Times of Tender Agony: Ch. 27

It isn't Frailty

Notes:

Happy New Year's Eve!!! (Though it'll be the New Year where I am [in EST] by the time this gets approved! 🥳)

Lol, the chapter title was very nearly "General Discussion" 🤣

*****

Sara hadn’t touched the dinner Jebsun had kindly made for her. She simply wasn’t hungry yet. Considering lunch had come and gone when they were out looking for Janner, she should have been hungry by that point. Food had been the last thing on her mind when they were searching, and even if it had occurred to her, her stomach had been so tight and knotted, eating would have been impossible. 

They had found him now, though. Artham had found him, just as he promised. He had left too, without telling Sara where he had gone. Her best guess was that he wanted to find some way of informing others the search could cease: the King of Anniera had been found. 

Addie Shooster had been so generous, offering her time and speaking kindly and just sitting with her. She had even offered Sara a room at the Only Inn for as long as she wanted it, in case she wanted to bathe. And she had procured a dress for her from somewhere. “Sometimes guests leave their clothes at the inn, and this seemed just your size,” had been the explanation. Sara had hesitated initially, more regarding the room she wasn't being charged for than anything else, but she was glad she had accepted in the end. She hadn’t actually felt clean in what seemed like forever, and the soft fabric of the dress brought her a bit of peace.

Yet despite it all, fear and worry spun through Sara’s mind and tormented her. She gently squeezed Janner’s thin, pale hand again and forced herself to look at his face—much the same appearance, only covered in a mask of horrid-colored bruises. Jebsun had said he had been beaten and looked worse intially. Though Janner had been rescued more than a week ago, for him, it wasn’t strange for cruelty to still fill his face. Ever since he had come back four years prior, he hadn’t healed right—bruises*, common colds (which didn't really exist for Janner), coughs, the list went on. Everything took longer; some of it never really healed.

Janner coughed suddenly, and Sara practically lunged out of her chair to sit on the side of his bed so she could prop him up if it turned into a fit, but it was just the one, then the two a few seconds later, and after that he was done and fully asleep again. 

“So far it hasn’t become anything worse than the occasional cough,” Jebsun said suddenly, and Sara whipped her head around to see him standing in the doorway.  “I’m hoping it’ll stay that way.”

“Me too,” Sara whispered, brushing back the hair that had landed scattered on Janner’s forehead during the jolt of the two coughs. 

Though she couldn’t see it with her focus on Janner, it sounded to Sara as though Jebsun walked into the room and began rummaging through the cabinet.

“Has the fever broken yet?” he asked, cabinet doors still closing. 

“Not yet,” Sara replied with a sigh as her fingers brushed Janner’s cheek. 

Finally making his way toward them, Jebsun, without disturbing her, briefly laid his palm on Janner’s brow. “It’s not any higher than it was before, if that’s any encouragement,” he told her with a light smile. “It hasn’t broken, but I'm sure it’s getting there.”

Sara nodded. She supposed that was good. Sort of.

Jebsun pulled the light covers back only as was needed to expose the bandage wrapped around Janner’s leg. Sara didn’t look as he unraveled the cloth and instead picked up Janner’s hand and pressed it against her cheek. The heat and thinness drew tears from her eyes.

A sigh and odd movement captured from the corner of her eye drew Sara’s attention toward Jebsun, who, by the time she looked, had already replaced the covers. 

“What is it?” she asked quietly. “Please, just be honest.”

Pursing his lips, Jebsun shook his head. As much as she wanted to, Sara didn’t press. She rose from the side of the bed when he told her to, and stepped back as he tenderly turned Janner onto his side. Sara watched as Jebsun raised the white shirt, then gasped as it exposed a maze of healed and semi-healed lash wounds and other scars atop a mottled mess of angry bruises. 

“That wasn’t there before, not all of it at least,” she murmured, horror chilling her. Of course it hadn't been there before. The Overseer had only whipped him once in the Fork! Factory! He had never—

She squeezed her eyes shut, willing away the thoughts she didn't want to spend time thinking about. Just in time, as well.

Jebsun glanced back at her. “What do you mean by ‘not all of it’?”

Her mouth dry, Sara had to coax her tongue to answer him. “The oldest scars have been there for a while.”

“How?” Jebsun asked as he removed a strip of bandage, revealing a bright red lash mark, gently applying a bit of salve to it. 

Sara didn’t reply and watched as Jebsun lowered Janner’s shirt again and turned him onto his back carefully. Standing silent for a moment, he gestured to her, waving her back to the place she had been sitting when he came in—on the edge of the cot, near Janner’s head. She listened, glad he didn’t mind her sitting there.

“I think...I need to be honest with you. When I first found him,” Jebsun began unexpectedly as he sat down in the chair near the cot. “I cleaned the wound—salve with herbs, honey, salt—and bandaged it. A few days later, it was infected to the point at which I cut away what wouldn’t heal in an effort to keep him from getting blood poisoning. Salve, stitches that time, another bandage. The escapade, of course, ripped the stitches out, and for all my efforts to keep the infection at bay, it isn’t getting any better. Likely worse, in fact.”

“What about you...uh, optimism regarding his fever?” Sara asked, her brow knotted in worry.

Jebsun scrubbed his hand over his face. “It really hasn’t come down much, just enough to where I wanted to encourage you,” he mumbled. 

They sat in awkward silence for a few minutes before Sara finally said, “So what now?”

Pressing praying hands against his lips, Jebsun sighed. “I can clean it, remove the infected tissue again, re-stitch it. Hoping and praying and keeping watch so he can’t escape again will help. But at this point,” —he glanced over to a corner of the room, and when Sara followed his gaze, she saw a crutch that looked much like Leeli’s once had. She remembered seeing this one sticking oddly out from Artham’s saddlepack on the ride back to Glipwood— “at this point I’m less optimistic than I was when I first brought him here.”

Sara’s heart leapt into her throat. “In what respect?”

Jebsun’s eyes read in every respect, but that wasn’t what he voiced. “Walking, specifically, I suppose. I was hoping it would heal and there wouldn’t be more than a slight limp afterward but…now I’d be surprised if there was no need for a cane.”

Though her throat stung at the thought of anything that had happened in the past horrible month being permanent, Sara forced herself to look past that. She wanted to find something good in it. “At least we’ll finally be able to convince him to rest when he’s working.”

Jebsun let out an odd laugh. “Is that sort of thing normally a problem?”

“Well, yes,” she said, at first staring at him because she was surprised something like that wasn’t obvious, then realizing Jebsun very well might not know everything—or anything, for that matter—about Janner’s atrocious health. “Oh, goodness, I’m so sorry!”

“What?”

Sara managed a smile. “No one’s told you about him, have they? I suppose no one could've, and that is a plus—somehow Anniera’s kept one of her secrets under wraps even from the doctors in Skree.”

Jebsun stared at her, thoroughly confused. “What are you talking about?”

Smiling again, Sara explained everything from beginning to end to the best of her ability—the Fangs and Cloven, the Stones, Janner’s death, his subsequent life, the rotten success they’d had keeping him healthy—all of it—and oddly enough found herself at ease and as though what she was doing was right, even though what she shared with Jebsun was technically information privy only to Anniera, a good portion of it privy only to the family, in fact.

Jebsun didn’t speak for a while after she finished talking, he only stared at her and Janner and his hands, repeating in that order. “I suppose,” he began slowly. “That makes a good deal more sense than anything I came up with. And it explains why everything is healing so agonizingly slowly, especially since ‘general undernourishment’ didn’t really seem like a decent answer.

“If you’re not opposed to answering more questions…do you have any idea who did this?”

Sara hesitated and squeezed Janner’s hand again. “I can tell you, I suppose,” she said slowly, more terrified to share because of the questions that would follow, if she would be able to talk about it without breaking down than anything else. “But, um, with all this information I’m sharing with you, Artham’s either going to swear you to secrecy or force you to come back with us so you can’t spread the word that our King is rather…frail.”

“Sara,” Jebsun said firmly, placing a hand on her shoulder and looking her in the eyes. “Your King and betrothed is anything but frail. If he was frail, he wouldn’t be alive right now.” Sara winced inwardly at the thought but kept listening.

“He’s stronger than anyone I have ever met, and because of that I do believe he will make it through this. You have no need to worry. And I won’t tell anyone about Janner or Anniera, because I do see how Aerwiar might see it as a frailty. I’m not Aerwiar, though. In terms of Artham kidnapping me, if no one minds, I was planning on coming anyway. There's little use for me here, and one of my fellow apprentices from years ago recently reached out, asking if I knew about a free position. Unless, of course, you already have a physician for the family specifically.”

"We, in fact, do not, why, I don't know." Sara couldn’t help but smile at thought of Jebsun coming back with them. It felt...fitting. And he'd been so kind. “Thank you,” she whispered. 

“Now,” Jebsun said, clasping his hands together. “Who did this to him?”

Taking a deep breath, Sara forced herself to begin. “It has to do with the ‘not all of it’ from earlier. Sort of. The one who did some of that to Janner then, who likely did this to him now…he’s called the Overseer.”

*****

Notes:

*the bruises taking so long to fade is a specific result of anemia, that one condition where your blood doesn't carry enough oxygen to the rest of your body (not sick cell anemia, mind you, simply anemia). Honestly, I have my suspicions that book-Janner in fact does not have asthma and it's just anemia, which would explain his slightly odd out-of-breathness at quite a few points in the story. I've no idea if anyone even saw/remembers that post I made about it a long time ago, BUT the anemia theory actually works a bit well here, because if Janner had anemia prior to the events of In Hours of Grievous Hope, coming back certainly would have made said anemia worse, hence the detail in this chapter. And now I've gone on about this for far too long 😅

ANYWAY-

I can't think of anything else I have to say. Let me know if there's anything noncanonical!