Not Vaili. Lady Vera. He smiled, in spite of himself, but the smile was short-lived.
He remembered talking with Bahn now. The memory might as well have been disconnected from everything else. It floated to the surface of his consciousness without his desire, without his bidding, and there it hovered. Bahn, seated by the edge of his bed, a colored ball rolling between his two hands. Almost as though he was hoping that it would give him strength. Bahn, checking the pitcher of water. Bahn, checking the bandages. All of it wearily with circles beneath his eyes. There would have been other healers. They were helping other patients. Eragos would not have wanted them to pull their attention away from innocents for a man who'd chosen his course.
"You chose to live," Bahn said quietly. "Not to die."
"I'm not worthy of it," Eragos had an answer for that, too; the dry rasp of his voice violated the calm of the room. "You honor a murderer, not a knight. Not a hero."
"Death comes for all men, no matter what we do," was Bahn's answer. "We aren't the ones who failed to make peace with that. You are."
The healer was too forward by half with his bloody opinions. He was most especially too forward with information he didn't have or couldn't possibly know. But all the while he'd been sitting in that chair, the same one that Lady Vera had now claimed for herself, but he'd not uttered a word of what had happened. Not to tell who was alive and who was dead, until Eragos was half-crazed with anger, and Bahn had slipped something into the next glass of water. Something to sleep, Bahn had said quietly. The world will still be here when you wake, Eragos, with all of its troubles.
The dreams had come, then.
Eragos drank the water as greedily as he ever had consumed a thing in his life. It felt strange against his throat. Almost as though he'd survived 'til now without it, and his first experience was jarring to say the least. Only when he'd wet his throat did he catch her hand, before she could escape him. The skin was soft as ever, but the muscles beneath it were tense and hard. The touch had thrown her off-guard, true, but it was something else. The stress of the moment could reveal itself in many different ways, Eragos knew, and he did not have any context for what it could be save one. The thought was too terrible to contemplate, and yet it had to be contemplated.
"He's dead," Eragos' voice was not steady; it couldn't be. "Isn't he?"