Hope

Chapter Six: The Cure

After that conversation I had with Zack, his condition worsened. His fever reached a level that was impossible for most human beings and he began to get delirious. Most of the time he spoke in a language that we didn't understand, one that sounded almost singsong. He kept speaking to someone who wasn't there, someone named Holly. At least, that was the name I heard when he was speaking our language. I often found myself standing just outside the wagon peering in. I could stand there for hours at a time as Zack thrashed in his fevered daydreams and nightmares. I didn't understand why. I felt nothing as I watched him fight for his life. I didn't feel any hope or any despair. It was like a black hole had swallowed up my heart. It scared me sometimes, especially since the others felt so strongly about Zack, especially Jing.

Jing was frantic to find some sort of cure that would save him. "Nothing is working!" she shouted in the evening when his fever still hadn't gone down. "I can't even use my magic on him!"

Rebecca, instead of making one of her usual sarcastic comments, just looked at Jing with sympathetic eyes. "I'll light a fire under his bed in the wagon. I know of a spell that would allow the fire to rest on wood and not burn it up."

Jing cleared the tears away from her eyes and said thickly, "Thanks. That would be very helpful, Rebecca."

Now that we were all faced with Zack's possible death, I noticed that everyone was being a lot nicer to him. Zack seemed to notice this, too, even through his sickness and fevered visions.

"They're not being prickly," he said softly once when I was standing just outside the wagon, watching. "Not stabbing, not thorny. It's strange, like a bird with three wings."

"Why not a bird with four wings?" I asked.

Zack gave me a small smile, his feverish eyes having trouble focusing on my face. "Because a bird with four wings isn't strange. That's a wonder. They're not wondrous yet."

Other than these occasional moments of clarity, Zack was half asleep in the midst of some fevered dream. Sometimes he would yell out something, but it was in that strange language that no one understood. But a few times he said random sentences that made no sense.

"Hot is the fire when it rages, and bright it burns. But soon it shall fade to ashes and be no more," he said once when Rebecca popped in to check on him.

"What's that supposed to mean?" she asked suspiciously, but Zack was back to babbling nonsense again.

When Rebecca repeated Zack's sentence to the rest of the group, Tasha frowned. "It sounds like a warning."

"It sounds like gibberish," Stan said. "I walked in there once and he was talking about birds with three wings."

It was then that I began to wonder if Zack was seeing something the rest of us couldn't see in his fevered state. He did have magic, so the veil between him and the mysteries of the universe was thin from what I understood of it. The only question was what he was seeing and how we were going to understand him if he always spoke in metaphor. Of course, he could be insane, but I always thought that insane people knew more about the universe than the rest of us do.

We kept moving down the road, as that was the only thing we could do. We speculated on what had caused Zack's illness, but as usual we only had more questions and no answers. It was then that I decided to ask the others something that had been bugging me for over a week now.

"What was it exactly that you got in trouble for in the town?" I asked.

Tasha frowned, remembering. She then looked at me with sad eyes that made her look twice her age and said, "They just didn't like our looks. That was all it took. Now that we're gone, they're going to suspect monkey business. I wasn't planning for this."