Chapter 5
Raistlin was very ill for several days. The fever would sub-side somewhat after a dose of the willow bark, but it would always go back up again, and each time it seemed to go higher. Kitiara made light of his twin's illness whenever Caramon asked, but he could tell she was worried. Sometimes in the night, when she thought he was asleep, he'd hear Kit give a sharp sigh, see her drum her fingers on the arm of their mother's rocking chair, which Kit had dragged into the small room the twins shared.
Kitiara was not a gentle nurse. She had no patience with weakness. She had determined that Raistlin would live. She was doing everything in her power to force him to get better, and she was irritated and even a little angry when he did not respond. At that point, she decided to take the fight personally. The expression on her face was so grim and hard and determined that Caramon wondered if even Death might not be a little daunted to face her.
Death must have been, because that grim presence backed down.
On the morning of the fourth day of his twin's illness, Caramon woke after a troubled night. He found Kit slumped over the bed, her head resting on her arms, her eyes closed in slumber. Raistlin slept as well. Not the heavy dream-tortured sleep of his sickness, but a healing sleep, a restful sleep. Caramon reached out his hand to feel his brother's pulse and, in doing so, brushed against Kitiara's shoulder.
She bolted to her feet, caught hold of the collar of his shirt with one hand, twisted the cloth tight around his neck. In her other hand, a knife flashed in the morning sunlight.
"Kit! It's me!" Caramon croaked, half-strangled.
Kit stared at him without recognition. Then her mouth parted in a crooked grin. She let loose of him, smoothed the wrinkles from his shirt. The knife disappeared rapidly, so rapidly that Caramon could not see where it had gone.
"You startled me," she said.
"No kidding!" Caramon replied feelingly. His neck stung from where the fabric had cut into his flesh. He rubbed his neck, gazed warily at his sister.
She was shorter than he was, lighter in build, but he would have been a dead man if he hadn't spoken up when he did. He could still feel her hand tightening the fabric around his throat, cutting off his breathing.
An awkward silence fell between them. Caramon had seen something disquieting in his sister, something chilling. Not the attack itself. What he'd seen that bothered him was the fierce, eager joy in her eyes when she made the attack.
"I'm sorry, kid," she said at length. "I didn't mean to scare you." She gave him a playful little slap on his cheek. "But don't ever sneak up on me in my sleep like that. All right?"
"Sure, Kit," Caramon said, still uneasy but willing to admit that the incident had been his fault. "I'm sorry I woke you. I just wanted to see how Raistlin was doing."
"He's past the crisis," Kitiara said with a weary, triumphant smile. "He's going to be fine." She gazed down on him proudly, as she might have gazed down on a vanquished foe. "The fever broke last night and it's stayed down. We should leave him now and let him sleep."
She pushed the reluctant Caramon out the door. "Come along. Listen to big sister. By way of repaying me for that fright you gave me, you can fix my breakfast."
"Fright!" Caramon snorted. "You weren't frightened."
"A soldier's always frightened," Kit corrected him. Sitting down at the table, she hungrily devoured an apple, still green, one of this season's first fruits. "It's what you do with the fright that counts."
"Huh?" Caramon looked up from his bread slicing.
"Fear can turn you inside out," Kit said, tearing the apple with strong white teeth. "Or you can make fear work for you. Use it like another weapon. Fear's a funny thing. It can make you weak-kneed, make you pee your pants, make you whimper like a baby. Or fear can make you run faster, hit harder."
"Yeah? Really?" Caramon put a slice of bread on the toasting fork, held it over the kitchen fire.
"I was in a fight once," Kit related, leaning back in her chair and propping her booted feet on another nearby chair. "A bunch of goblins jumped us. One of my comrades-a guy we called Bart Blue-nose 'cause his nose had a kind of strange bluish tint to it-anyway, he was fighting a goblin and his sword snapped, right in two. The goblin howled with delight, figuring he had his kill. Bart was furious. He had to have a weapon; the goblin was attacking him from six directions at once, and Bart was dancing around like a fiend from the Abyss trying to keep clear. Bart takes it into his head that he needs a club, and he grabs the first thing he can lay his hand on, which was a tree. Not a branch, a whole god-damned tree. He dragged that tree right out of the ground-you could hear the roots pop and snap- and he bashed the goblin over the head, killed it on the spot."
"C'mon!" Caramon protested. "I don't believe it. He pulled a tree out of the ground?"
"It was a young tree," Kit said with a shrug. "But he couldn't do it again. He tried it on another, about the same size, after the fight was over, and he couldn't even make the tree's branches wiggle. That's what fear can do for you."
"I see," said Caramon, deeply thoughtful.
"You're burning the toast," Kit pointed out.
"Oh, yeah! Sorry. I'll eat that piece." Caramon snatched the blackened toast from the fork, put another in its place. A question had been nagging at him for the last day or so. He tried to think of some subtle way of asking, but he couldn't. Raistlin was good at subtleties; Caramon just blundered on ahead. He decided he may as well ask it and have done with it, especially since Kitiara appeared to be in a good mood.
"Why'd you come back?" he asked, not looking at her. Carefully he rotated the toast on the fork to brown the other side. "Was it because of Mother? You were at her burial, weren't you?"
He heard Kit's boots hit the floor and glanced up nervously, thinking he'd offended her. She stood with her back turned, staring out the small window. The rain had stopped finally. The vallenwood leaves, just starting to turn color, were tipped with gold in the morning sun.
"I heard about Gilon's death," Kitiara said. "From some woodsmen I met in a tavern up north. I also heard about Rosamun's. sickness." Her mouth twisted, she glanced sidelong at Caramon. "To be honest, I came back because of you, you and Raistlin. But I'll get to that in a moment. I arrived here the night Rosamun died. I. um. was staying with friends.
And, yes, I went to the burial. Like it or not, she was my mother. I guess her death was pretty awful for you and Raist, huh?"
Caramon nodded silently. He didn't like to think about it. Morosely he munched on the burnt toast. "Do you want some eggs? I can fry 'em," he said.
"Yes, I'm starved. Put in some of Otik's potatoes, too, if you've got any left." Kit remained standing by the window. "It's not that Rosamun meant anything to me. She didn't." Her voice hardened. "But it would have been bad luck if I hadn't gone."
"What do you mean, 'bad luck'?"
"Oh, I know it's all superstitious nonsense," Kit said with a rueful grin. "But she was my mother and she's dead. I should show respect. Otherwise, well"-Kit looked uncomfortable-"I might be punished. Something bad might happen to me."
"That sounds like the Widow Judith," Caramon said, cracking eggshells, making a clumsy and ineffectual attempt at extricating the egg from the shell. His scrambled eggs were noted for their crunchy texture. "She talked about some god called Belzor punishing us. Is that what you mean?"