Chapter Text
“No more on this.” Nemera cut off Doctor Ushenar halfway through his sentence. “We shall see his condition for ourselves.”
Nemera would have been greatly pleased if he never heard another mention of the goblin-child again, let have to subject himself to the boy’s snot-encrusted face. Ushenar, however, remained adamant that the boy was genuinely ill and refused to have him sent back to Thu-Evresar. Enough of that. Nemera had an hour before the court expected him at the dinner table. Enough time for the edocharei to ready him for the evening, and to deal with the goblin brat.
Ushenar had sequestered the boy in the most out-of-the-way section of the Lower Alcethmeret; the house steward had deemed the quarantine rooms used for infectious servants unsuitable to house a duke. Nemera, for his part, thought a thin mattress and a windowless room would greatly encourage the boy to “recover” swifter. But he was not in the habit of wasting his time on the minutia of the boy’s keeping and he was not about to start now.
Nemera’s soldier nohecharis opened the door to the small suite; an emperor did not condescend himself to the base act of turning door handles. As court protocol demanded, Ushenar trudged in two steps behind his emperor, but both his apprentices were with the boy. One was peering at the boy’s grubby foot. The other stirred some manner of medicament.
There was a predictable and tiresome moment of alarm, then the apprentices gathered their wits and scrambled into passable formal bows. Behind them, the boy, who had been sitting propped up by a mound of pillows, slid his legs off the bed.
“Your grace,” Doctor Ushenar called out in alarm.
The boy made it onto his feet and stood upright long enough for Nemera to note that he was only a hand-span shorter than Ciris. But as he moved to bow, he swayed. The two apprentices abandoned their courtesies and scrambled to catch the boy lest he end up crumpled on the rug.
“S-serenity.” The boy has the decency to look embarrassed and with an apprentice holding on to his arm, attempted to bow one more. Speaking in that same mousy voice his mother had used, he said, “We beg pardon for our clumsiness. We beg your pardon that we cannot greet you as… as your subject should.”
“Indeed. We’ve seen children in leading strings conduct themselves with more comport,” Nemera replied.
His ears flattening further, the boy mumbled something more, but Nemera had no interest in what he had to say. At present, it was the boy’s condition that mattered and in sooth, the boy was a vile sight. His cheeks were sunken as if he had not eaten a full meal in months and the grey of his skin had taken on a peculiar ashy cast.
“We were informed you show no improvement,” Nemera said.
The boy’s already low-slung ears dipped further. To Nemera’s eye, he looked guilty. Did he understand then that his charade was about to come to an end?
He had gone to considerable trouble for these dramatics, Nemera had to concede. One could not falsify emaciation. The boy must have actually starved himself, and in doing so, made himself sick enough to alarm Nelar and the doctors Nelar summoned. Soft-hearted fools, the lot of them. Nemera could understand the apprentices and the half-educated doctors in Thu-Evresar, but Ushenar should know better. This was a childish cry for attention, no different to Nemrian’s proclivity for mangling her skin with embroidery needles whenever some happenstance discomforted her.
“Doctor Ushenar,” Nemera continued, “has proposed a new course of treatment. Please explain the specifics to your patient, doctor.”
“A transfusion of blood has been known to assist recovery from Cazhereise Fever when a patient does not see improvement with conventional treatment. Blood is drawn from an individual who previously contracted the illness and recovered, and it is transfused into the patient. However, transfusion on the whole is considered an unreliable procedure. It’s been attempted as a treatment for a number of maladies and in some instances, the patient worsened shortly after.”
“Some even died. Is that not so, doctor.”
“Yes, in some cases,” Ushenar replied. He started to say more, but Nemera cut him off with a flick of his hand.
The boy twisted his hands together and chewed on his chapped lips. “Is there naught else that can be done? Perhaps it’s only a matter of waiting for the medication to work. It’s only been a few days.”
“Eight to be precise.”
“Your grace,” Ushenar said in a friendly tone the man typically reserved for Nemera’s grandchildren. “New research by our colleagues suggests that the risk of adverse effects is lower when blood is taken from a close relation of the patient. In your case, we are fortunate, for Serenity suffered and overcame this illness in his youth.”
The boy’s pale eyes, which already looked bulbous against the sunken features of his face, widened.
Nemera made a show of adjusting his many rings, as if contemplating his response. In sooth, he was savouring the boy’s bewildered expression. “Shouldst thou choose to proceed with the doctor’s proposal, we will consent for the procedure to be carried out. It will be a minor discomfort for us. For thee, however, it may well mean death. Considering the risk, we believe the decision should be thine and thine alone.”
A long silence followed that pronouncement. The two apprentices seemed determined to make themselves as invisible as the nohecharei, while Ushenar was attempting to rein in his facial expression. He failed. Nemera could plainly see the doctor disliked his emperor’s approach, and was in fact, scandalised by it. But Ushenar was not so foolish as to try to voice his disagreement.
“Doctor Ushenar,” the boy eventually spoke. “What will happen if we choose not to?”
“It is possible conventional treatment may yet have its desired effect. However, we… we think it unlikely. As Serenity noted earlier, it has been a week already.”
The boy gave a small nod, as if he had heard exactly what he was expecting to hear, and clenched his jaw. Anyone truly ill with this wretched illness would be counting up the odds at this point. If the wasting did not take the afflicted, the seized muscles would. The legs typically took the brunt of it, but as the illness progressed any muscle could become affected. One day it would strike at the chest, paralysing the diaphragm. It could be tomorrow, could be a month from now. One had to weigh up the risk of the transfusion against the risk of the disease itself.
But of course, that was only if one were truly ill. If one were faking, like the damned goblin-spawn was, it was only sensible to reject the transfusion.
“Well. What will it be?” Nemera pressed. The minutes were ticking by and his edocharei still needed to rebraid his hair before dinner.
The boy’s voice was soft, but his words were clear. “The transfusion, serenity.”