Nightsworn | The Whispering Wall #2

Forty Nine: Overdrawn

"He was too open to it when it broke." A voice reached him through the murk of his thoughts. "He described it as...as a swelling pressure."

A rumbling response from a voice he dimly recognised.

He opened his eyes and coughed, rolling over to spit as his throat filled. Jordan found himself leaning over the side of a bed. Someone had put a bucket there, and his own blood-flecked spit already swilled in the bottom of it, though he didn't remember waking up.

"Am I dying?" he croaked. He was sure there wasn't meant to be blood in it.

"No." Yddris's voice came to him as if from a distance, even though Jordan could feel his tutor right behind him. "You overdrew, through no fault of your own. The fact that you held back against it probably saved your life." Jordan coughed again, and disturbed something that had crusted under his nose. He wiped it with a finger and it came away flecked with dark red. "Your insides still had a rough time of it, but you'll recover."

Feeling several decades older than he was, Jordan rolled back into the bed with a groan. In a chair beside his bed sat his tutor. He had been talking to a tall Unspoken woman who stood at the end of his bed – Cara, that was her name.

"How do you feel, Thorne?" she asked.

"Like I've been hit by a truck," Jordan muttered. The two Unspoken exchanged a glance, and he foggily remembered that they wouldn't know what a truck was. "Or like a Listener used me as a kickball." He grunted, rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his palms. "I felt better than this after the Gift appeared."

"It doesn't surprise me," Cara said with a small, sad chuckle. "You took the brunt of the rune net's collapse very hard."

"If you'd shown that kind of sensitivity in lessons I might have taught you how to avoid this. Or at least not get hit so hard," Yddris muttered. "Done now, though. First on the lesson plan after recovery, mind."

"Are you going to make me sit up a tree again?"

"That's a different lesson," Yddris said. "And as yet you've not shown much aptitude for it."

"Yddris," Cara said reprovingly.

"It's okay, he's right." Jordan produced a watery chuckle that made his head throb. He leaned back on the pillow, and with every moment he was awake he became aware of something else that ached. It was as if the collapsing net had forced itself through every cell of his body on its way past, scorching as it went. "Is the net fixed now?"

"Still working on it," Yddris replied. "It was the biggest one, encompassing the whole site. It'll take a day or two, but everyone has been moved further in while the work's done."

Jordan blinked and nodded, eyes gummy with exhaustion. "Did you get them?"

"Almost," Yddris said, after exchanging another glance with Cara. "And then the net collapsed. That was bad enough, and then I checked in on you."

"He was halfway back before Henrik even set off," Cara said. Yddris fidgeted, grumbling something unintelligible, and Jordan stared down at his bedsheet.

Nadiya interrupted the awkwardness with her entrance. She swept inside carrying Jordan's cloak bundled under one arm, freshly laundered. In the other she carried a tray with a cup and a bowl on it, both gently steaming. The contents of the bowl, when she put the tray down on the bedside, looked familiar.

"So Nika uses your recipe," Jordan said without enthusiasm. Nika had had him on the same slops for several days after he had been kidnapped by Marick what felt like a lifetime ago. The details of those days of recovery were fuzzy now, but the taste of the mixture was still fresh in his mind. Nadiya gave an amused chuckle.