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Piltover smelled of incense and fear.

They burned it on every corner now — great braziers of it, cedar and frankincense and something sharper underneath that Jayce couldn't name, some herb the apothecaries claimed would clean the air. He didn't know if he believed that. He'd asked one of the city physicians about it two weeks ago, and the man had looked at him with the particular exhaustion of someone who had stopped having opinions about what worked and what didn't, and said only that it didn't hurt.

Everything that didn't hurt was being tried.

Jayce walked his patrol route through the Piltover merchant quarter in the early gray of morning, his breath misting in the autumn cold, and counted the black wreaths on the doors without meaning to. Seven on this street alone. There were four last week. He passed a carter moving slowly down the lane with his wagon half-full. The man did not look up, and Jayce did not look inside the wagon. The city had developed certain courtesies in the weeks since the plague began. Not looking was one of them.

It had come up from Zaun. That was what people said, though they said it quietly and not in front of their Zaunite servants, if they had them. The Undercity had been sick for a month before the first Piltover merchant turned yellow-eyed in his counting house. The lower quarters had been sick, and Piltover had looked the way it always looked at things below — briefly, distastefully, away — until the sickness climbed the bridges and the gates and came to call on the upper city in its good autumn coat, and all the looking-away in the world hadn't been enough to stop it.

The city was afraid now. It expressed this fear in the Piltover fashion — through commerce. Apothecaries were making fortunes. The incense merchants could not keep their shelves stocked. Silk masks had sold out within a week of the first upper-city deaths, and then the gauze masks had sold out, and then cloth scraps tied over the nose and mouth had become fashionable in a grim, pragmatic way that nobody spoke of as such. The lanterns burned all night in the wealthier quarters; darkness, it was believed, encouraged the sickness.

Whether or not that was true mattered little. The bodies were collected at dawn regardless. This had been formalized. There had been some discussion in the Council chambers about what to call the collection — not bodies, the advisors had suggested, something more administrative — but Knight Marshal Marcus had said bodies, with some economy of expression, and the word had stuck.

King Heimerdinger had addressed the city twelve days ago from the steps of the Great Hall, his fur brilliant in the pale sun, his face arranged into a kind of careful optimism that Jayce had seen him use before in difficult situations. He had spoken for some time about the resilience of the Piltover people. He had spoken about the history of the city, the plagues that had been weathered before, and the superiority of Piltover's healers and institutional will.

He had not closed the gates.

He would not close the gates.

Jayce had heard this from his captain, who had heard it from the Marshal, who had presumably heard it from the advisors or from the king himself.

Trade must continue. Piltover cannot seal itself. We will starve before the sickness takes us if we shut out our suppliers.

There was logic in it; Jayce understood, perhaps he had turned it over in his mind the way he turned over things that troubled him. The logic was sound. The black wreaths were still multiplying.

Heimerdinger's Council was fractured on the matter. The merchant faction argued vigorously against any gate closure — their livelihoods, their contracts, their supply chains. The healers' consortium argued for quarantine measures that stopped just short of closure. The city's two most senior physicians had died in the first week of the upper-city spread, which had complicated the debate. One faction wanted to bring in doctors from other cities. Another faction pointed out, in tones of careful neutrality, that the best plague physicians available were Zaunite, had always been Zaunite, and that perhaps this was a circumstance worth acknowledging.

Heimerdinger had listened to all of it with the ancient patience of a man who had weathered more political crises than most of his advisors had been alive for. He nodded thoughtfully, and declined to make a decision. That was itself a decision, and everyone in the room had known that, but nobody had said so.

Marcus had not attended the last two Council sessions. He was more concerned, at present, with the reports coming in from the border scouts — Noxian movement, nothing definitive, nothing that warranted mobilization, but the kind of slow pressure along a border that required attention the same way a leak in a ship did quietly and before it became something worse. He had expressed this concern to the king. The king had nodded with the same ancient patience. Marcus had returned to his maps.

Jayce, walking his patrol in the early cold, was not thinking about trade agreements or border pressures or the political mathematics of plague policy. Jayce was thinking about the flooded quarter he'd helped work yesterday — the water had come up into the lower residential streets after two days of rain, trapping the sick who were unable to move themselves. He thought about the way his fellow knights had looked at the assignment when it came down, then at him volunteering for it, before looking away again with a particular expression he'd learned to recognize over two years of service.

It was the expression of men who liked him and also believed he was going to get himself killed.

He was broad-shouldered, Jayce — the kind of man who took up space in a room without trying to, who had a face that people trusted on instinct. His fellow knights had said he had the look of a man in a ballad, which they meant as a joke. Jayce took it as a compliment, and they called him insufferable for it. These three things together meant that they liked him quite a lot. He also had a habit of volunteering for difficult assignments, which they found both admirable and deeply irritating.

It will kill him one day, Garreth had said once, not unkindly, watching Jayce sign his name to a flood-work rota that no one else had touched. He's too certain that things matter.

Things do matter, another knight had said.

Sure, said Garreth, But most of us know better than to act like it.

Jayce had not heard this conversation. He had been, at the time, asking his captain which sector needed the most help.

The flood work had been grim. The kind of work that settled into your hands and didn't let go — the weight of people who could not hold themselves, the smell of the water, the sounds. He had come back to the barracks tired in a way that went deeper than muscle. He'd told his captain it had needed doing, had been told to go sleep, and had slept badly.

He'd woken in the middle of the night with his shirt soaked through and a headache that sat behind his eyes like a splinter.

He'd told himself it was the cold.

By the afternoon of the second day, he couldn't stand without catching himself on the wall.

Knight Marshal Marcus was a man of economy — in his speech, in his affections, in his regard for other people's comfort. He was not unkind, exactly. He was efficient in the way of men who had learned that efficiency was indistinguishable from unkindness often enough that the distinction had stopped mattering to him.

But he had an eye for soldiers worth keeping, and Jayce Talis was worth keeping.

The sick houses were full. This was simply a fact of the city's current condition, the way it was a fact that the incense burned and the carters came at dawn. The sick houses had been built for thirty, were holding sixty, and the people who walked out of them were fewer than the people who were carried in. Marcus knew this because he made it his business to know things, even things that were not, strictly speaking, military matters. A city's capacity to survive a siege — any siege, plague included — was a logistics question, and logistics was something Marcus understood.

He had Jayce moved to a room in the east garrison before the boy had finished the sentence that began I think I may have— and ended with him sitting down heavily on his bunk with a very specific look on his face. It was the look of a man whose body had concluded negotiations without consulting him.

The room was small but private: stone walls, a cot, a window that looked out over the garrison yard. A chair. Marcus had a brazier brought up and wood stacked beside it. He did this without explaining why he was doing it, instead of routing Talis through the standard sick house intake, which was what protocol required. Nobody asked. Marcus had a particular quality of silence that made asking seem inadvisable.

The doctor he procured arrived by early evening. Marcus arranged this through a channel he did not elaborate on, involving two intermediaries and a not-insignificant amount of silver, and the result was a Zaunite plague physician who came up through the lower gates with a worn leather bag and a beaked mask. He said almost nothing to Marcus beyond a brief assessment of what would be required for the room.

Marcus said almost nothing back. They got on well.

What Marcus knew, and what the Council was still carefully not saying out loud, was that the Zaunite physicians were better at this than anyone Piltover had produced. They had been living in the shadow of this particular sickness for longer. They had developed the treatments, the protocols, the masks with their herb-filled beaks, the careful hierarchy of interventions. Piltover had its institutions and its long tradition of medical theory, and the Zaunite physicians had the specific practical knowledge of people who had been working the plague wards since before it became Piltover's problem. These two things were not equivalent, and anyone honest knew it.

Marcus was nothing if not honest, at least to himself.

He left the doctor to it. He had border reports to read.

Jayce was aware of the plague doctor's arrival in pieces.

He was sitting on the floor when he arrived — he'd slid down from the edge of the cot at some point and not gotten back up, because getting back up had seemed like an argument he would lose. He heard boots on the stone, quiet and deliberate. A smell reached him: camphor and cloves, and underneath that something herbal and sharp that he couldn't identify.

He looked up.

The plague mask was a beak of worked leather, long and curved, the eye-holes covered with dark glass. Jayce had seen them before on the doctors working the sick houses. He knew the beak was filled with herbs and aromatics, a barrier between the doctor and whatever traveled on the sick man's breath. He knew this rationally.

Feverish and horizontal, it was nevertheless a very strange face to look up at.

"You're the doctor," Jayce said. His voice came out rougher than he intended.

"Yes," said the doctor. He set down his bag — a heavy thing, dark leather, worn at the corners — and came to the bedside without preamble, and stopped when he found the bedside unoccupied and the patient on the floor. He looked down at Jayce with no particular expression that Jayce could read, given the mask.

"Can you get up?"

"Yes," said Jayce, and then didn't. The doctor offered him a hand that was lean and careful and pulled him upright with a brisk efficiency that made clear this was not the first time he'd managed a patient who'd ended up on the floor.

He did not introduce himself. He took Jayce's wrist in two fingers and looked at nothing in particular while he counted. Up close, Jayce could see that the man was lean — not unhealthily so, but built economically, the way some people simply are, as though they had been assembled with some care for efficiency. He had the posture of someone who had learned not to waste it. There was a quality to his stillness that Jayce associated with people who were always, at some level, working.

"How long has the fever been present?"

"Since yesterday morning," Jayce said. "Maybe the night before. I thought—"

"What is your pain?" Not interrupting, exactly. Redirecting.

Jayce told him. Head, chest, the deep bone-ache of it. The doctor listened, asked two more questions in the same tone — not cold, not warm, simply precise — and then opened his bag and began working. He moved with the manner of someone who had long since stopped performing competence and simply had it, each action connecting to the next without wasted motion. 

"What are my chances?" Jayce asked.

A pause. The doctor was measuring something into a small cup, his movements unhurried.

"Better with treatment than without," he said. "Worse, if you exhaust yourself asking questions."

Jayce opened his mouth.

"I am going to need you to drink this," the doctor said, turning, "and then to be quiet for some time."

Jayce drank it. It tasted like the floor of a forest after a hard rain, if the forest had been on fire. He said so.

"It will help with the fever," the doctor said, which was not a comment on Jayce's assessment.

What the doctor did not say, then or in the days that immediately followed, was what he had seen of the fever's progress: the speed of it, the specific configuration of symptoms, the way Jayce's pulse had moved under his fingers. He had seen this pattern before. In Zaun, in the early weeks of the outbreak, he had seen this pattern many times. He knew what it required — close monitoring, specific timing of interventions, the difference between a night watched and a night unguarded measured in whether the patient woke. He had calculated this as he measured out the first medicine, with the steady, affectless arithmetic of a man who had learned to move fast inside bad odds.

He did not offer this information to Jayce. It would not help. What would help was the medicine, the monitoring, and quiet.

He stayed through the night. Jayce, drifting in and out of something that wasn't quite sleep, was aware of him as a presence at the edges of consciousness — checking, adjusting, that quiet tread on the stone floor. At some point, Jayce thought he heard him pull the chair closer to the window and sit down, and that was the last thing he registered before the fever pulled him under properly.

He did not know, yet, that the man in the chair had not left.

The first week was largely lost to him.

He surfaced and sank and surfaced again, and the garrison room became a place with no reliable edges. The gray stone walls, the chair by the window, the smell of herbs burning in a small brazier that the doctor had positioned near the door. Time moved strangely. Sometimes it was morning when Jayce had been certain it was evening. Sometimes he asked questions and received answers he forgot immediately and asked again, and asked a third time, and the doctor answered each time with the same inflection, neither patient nor impatient, simply consistent, as though repetition were simply a feature of the work.

He was always somewhere in the room when Jayce surfaced. Not always close. Sometimes at the window. Sometimes, at the small table near the door, he would write something in a notebook with a cramped, meticulous hand. But there. Reliably there, which Jayce found himself orienting around without meaning to.

In the fever, the plague mask made the doctor look angular and strange, a figure from a woodcut illustration — one of the old plague prints that decorated the pages of the history books Jayce had read as a boy, the dark-cloaked figure with the long beak that children pointed at with a mixture of fear and fascination. He understood, in some clear part of his mind, that this was the same function and the same design. The rest of his mind was not always in agreement about what was real.

Once, delirious, he asked the figure by his bedside if it was real.

The doctor looked at him for a moment. Then he pressed a cool, damp cloth to Jayce's forehead with a very deliberate hand.

"Drink this," he said, and held the cup.

Jayce took that as a yes.

But the mask was not always on. When Jayce surfaced at odd hours — late, when the candle had burned to a stub, and the garrison yard outside was fully dark and quiet — it was sometimes off. He registered this in fragments, in the imprecise way of fever: a lean face, angular in the low light, a jaw shadowed with the evidence of too many nights in a chair. Eyes that were a dark amber-brown and that assessed things with a kind of steady attention that Jayce associated with people who did not miss much. He looked like someone who slept badly as a matter of personal policy rather than circumstance. He looked like someone for whom rest was something that happened between problems.

Jayce had a sense, in those half-lucid moments, of being one of the problems. He found this oddly comfortable.

On the fourth day — he was fairly certain it was the fourth, or possibly the fifth — Jayce talked.

This was not a decision so much as a fact about Jayce. He had never been good at sustained silence. Even sick, even half-hollowed by fever, the impulse to fill the quiet was nearly structural. He understood, dimly, that the doctor found this at best neutral and at worst an inconvenience. He did it anyway, because the alternative was lying in the dark with his own thoughts, and his thoughts were not currently good company.

It was easier, probably, that the doctor had stopped wearing the mask. Easier to talk to a face. Jayce had noticed its absence on — the third day? — and hadn't remarked on it, which was the closest he'd come to restraint all week.

"You're from Zaun," Jayce said.

"Yes."

"I've never been to Zaun."

The doctor wrote something in his notebook. "I know."

Jayce considered this. "How do you know?"

"People who have been to Zaun do not usually state that they have visited as though it explains something. People who have been to Zaun tend to have a look about them. A specific look, like a man who has reconsidered several of his assumptions at once — and you do not have it."

Jayce thought about that for a moment. It was a more precise observation than he'd expected. "That's fair," he said.

"Yes."

"What is it like? Zaun, I mean."

Now the doctor looked up. He seemed like he was trying to determine whether the question was genuine or merely conversational filler — the kind of question that wanted “fine,” rather than an actual answer. Whatever he found seemed to satisfy something in him, because he set down his pen.

"Dense," he said. "Loud in ways that become inaudible when you have lived with them long enough. The air is not clean." He paused. "There is a particular quality to the light when it comes through the ventilation grates from the city above. Like living permanently late in the afternoon."

Jayce was quiet for a moment. "Do you miss it?"

The doctor considered this with the same attention he gave everything — not long, but genuine, as though the question deserved actual engagement. "It is where I understand how things work," he said at last. "One tends to miss that."

Jayce didn't push. He filed the answer away instead, next to several other things he'd been filing away since the fever's lucid intervals had begun to grow longer: the fact that the doctor corrected Jayce's wrong assumptions about Zaun with no irritation, only a steady, precise adjustment, as though being misunderstood was a condition he had made peace with and worked around rather than resented. The fact that in four days Jayce had not once seen him eat anything in the garrison room, though he drank tea from a battered tin cup and refilled it from a small pot on the brazier. The fact that when the surgeon's assistant came by in the mornings to bring supplies, the doctor spoke to him courteously and efficiently, and without any of the condescension that Jayce had noticed other Piltover physicians use with their subordinates.

He was not warm, exactly. But he was precise in a way that felt like its own form of care. He did not tell Jayce that things would be fine. He told Jayce what was happening and what he was doing about it, and the information was consistently accurate, which Jayce found more steadying than reassurance would have been.

Every person who entered the room, Jayce thanked. The supply assistant, the garrison orderly who brought wood for the brazier, and the doctor himself. This was simply how Jayce was made — he noticed the people around him and said so, even when he was too sick to manage much else. He did this without calculation or performance; it simply seemed to him that if someone was doing something for him, he should acknowledge it.

The doctor observed this. He did not comment on it. But Jayce noticed, at some point, that he had begun to answer Jayce's thanks with a brief nod rather than silence, and that the nod had a quality of receiving rather than deflecting, which felt like progress of some kind.

"You never told me your name," Jayce said.

"Viktor," said the doctor, already writing again.

"Jayce," said Jayce.

Viktor looked up briefly, with an expression that said very plainly that he already knew this.

"Right," said Jayce. "Of course you do."

Viktor went back to his notes. Jayce closed his eyes, and the corner of his mouth moved. He was not entirely sure what he was smiling at.

The fever began to break on the ninth day.

He knew it the way you know the end of a storm — not in a single moment, but in a gradual receding, the world becoming more solid at its edges, sounds acquiring their proper distance. He laid still for a long time and looked at the ceiling and felt, with a clarity he hadn't had in over a week, that he was still in his body and his body was still his.

Viktor was at the window when Jayce turned his head to look. The early light was coming through at a low angle, and his coat was off — draped over the back of the chair — and he was in his shirtsleeves with his notebook, reading something he'd written previously with the focused attention of someone checking their own work. Without the coat and mask, he looked younger than Jayce had been imagining, and simultaneously like someone who had not slept more than four hours at a stretch in recent memory.

"The fever broke," Jayce said. His voice came out strange to his own ears — too clear, after a week of rough edges.

Viktor looked up. He crossed to the bedside and did the same assessment he'd done every morning: pulse, temperature at the forehead, a brief check of Jayce's eyes. He straightened without expression.

"Yes," he said.

"Is that good?"

"It is what we were working toward," Viktor said, which was not quite yes but was not not-yes either.

Jayce looked at him. In the clear light of a fever-free morning, Viktor looked precisely like what he was: a man who had spent nine days sleeping in a garrison chair watching someone else's crisis resolve, and who was not accustomed to having this noticed.

"You stayed," Jayce said. "The whole time."

Viktor turned back toward the table and his notebook. "You required monitoring."

"Other doctors don't—" Jayce started, and stopped, because he wasn't sure how to finish that sentence without making it sound like an accusation of other doctors.

"The critical window for this strain is the first week," Viktor said, without looking up. "The treatments require specific intervals. A single missed intervention in that period can be the difference between a patient who recovers and a patient who does not." He paused. "I do not like inefficiency."

Jayce was quiet for a moment. He thought about what it would mean to frame nine days in a chair as a question of efficiency, and whether Viktor knew how transparent that was, and whether Viktor had decided he didn't mind.

"Thank you," Jayce said. "I mean it."

Viktor looked up briefly. Something moved in his expression — not quite discomfort, more the look of a man receiving something he hadn't budgeted for. "Yes," he said. "I know."

It was a strange thing to say, and Jayce turned it over in his mind and found that he understood it: I know you mean it. I am choosing to accept it. Not deflection. Receipt.

"You should sleep," Viktor said. "Properly, this time."

"What about you?"

Viktor looked at him with a very level expression.

"I have a cot in the next room," he said, "which I intend to use now that the crisis has passed. Sleep, Talis."

Jayce slept. And the thing he thought, in the last clear moment before he went under — not feverish this time, not fragmented, just sleep — was that he hoped the next room was comfortable, and that he hadn't actually checked whether the next room had a cot or if Viktor had simply said that to stop him asking questions.

He found out later that it did not.

He found this out because he asked Viktor directly, and Viktor said the chair was sufficient, with the tone of a man who had made his peace with stone garrison floors and was not interested in discussing it further.

Jayce spent the next three days of his recovery arguing, intermittently, that this was unacceptable. Viktor spent those same three days responding with the steady, unarguable economy of a man who had already solved the problem and did not see why a solution required justification.

It was, Jayce thought, a very efficient way to be impossible.

He found, despite himself, that he was already looking forward to the next argument.

The fever broke for good on a Wednesday. Jayce didn't know it was Wednesday until later. He woke to the gray light of early morning coming through the garrison window and the sense — unprecedented in what felt like a very long time — that his body was a thing he was residing in rather than being dragged along by. The ache was still there, deep in his bones, but the burning quality of it was gone. The room had edges again.

Viktor was in the chair by the window.

He had his coat on, but the mask was lowered — resting against his chest on its cord, its long beak pointing downward like a sleeping bird. He had a book, small and battered, which he was reading by the thin morning light with the slight forward lean of someone who has been at it for some time. His hair was dark and fell forward when he bent his head. He had a quality of complete stillness when he was reading that made Jayce think of the way a cat sits in a sunbeam — not sleeping, not waiting, simply being somewhere with total commitment.

Jayce watched him for a moment before he said anything.

He couldn't have said afterward what he noticed first. The fact of Viktor's face, seen properly, was angular, sharp at the jaw, with something of the worn quality of a person who worked too much and slept at odd hours. The fact that he was still there, in the chair, with the air of someone who had not left. The way the morning light was very matter-of-fact about all of this, falling across the chair and the man in it as though this were a normal and continuing situation, which Jayce supposed it was.

"You're still here," Jayce said. His voice came out rough from disuse.

Viktor looked up. Something in his expression adjusted — briefly, barely — before it settled back into its usual professional steadiness. "The fever broke in the early hours. I wanted to confirm the pattern."

"The pattern."

"Fevers of this type often return. I wanted to confirm it did not."

Jayce looked at him. "And?"

"It did not."

"Then I'm—"

"Not well," Viktor said. "Better. These are different things." He closed the book, with a finger to hold his page — a small, automatic gesture. "You will feel substantially better than you have in the past week. You will mistake this for being recovered. You should not."

Jayce tried sitting up. His arms shook with the effort. He fell back against the pillow.

"Yes," said Viktor, without inflection. "Like that."

"Right," Jayce said, to the ceiling. He thought about dignity. He had not had much of it in the past week, and the store was running low. "How long?"

"Before you can return to active duty? Three weeks at minimum. More likely four."

"And you'll — you'll need to keep coming. To check."

Viktor reached for his bag. "Daily, for the next week. After that, every other day until I am satisfied your recovery is complete."

"Satisfied," Jayce repeated. He looked at Viktor. Viktor was looking through his bag with the efficiency of a long habit, and he did not look up, but something in the line of his shoulder was not quite its usual perfect neutrality, and Jayce didn't know what to do with that, so he looked back at the ceiling.

"Viktor," he said.

"Hm."

"Thank you. For all of this. The week, I mean. I know it was your work, it's your job, but you were still—" He stopped, because he'd run out of road on the sentence. "Just. Thank you."

Viktor was quiet for a moment in a way that didn't feel like he was ignoring it.

"You should eat something," he said finally. "I'll send for broth."

He did. Jayce ate it slowly, watching Viktor write in his notebook, and neither of them said anything else for a while. It was not uncomfortable.

Recovery, Jayce discovered, had its own particular torture.

He was well enough to be bored and not well enough to do anything about it. His body had a new, humbling tendency to inform him — without warning, without courtesy — that he had reached the limit of what it would tolerate, usually at precisely the moment he had convinced himself he had no limits left. He tried to lift his practice sword on the third day of convalescence, and his vision went gray at the edges, and he had to sit down very suddenly on the floor.

Viktor, arriving for his daily visit, found him there.

"I wasn't trying to train," Jayce said, from the floor.

"I see," said Viktor.

"I was just seeing—"

"How heavy it was."

"Approximately. Yes."

Viktor set down his bag, crossed the room, and held out a hand without comment. Jayce took it, and Viktor helped him to his feet, which required Viktor to brace, because Jayce was significantly larger than he was, and Jayce had a brief, strange awareness of the small hands in his and the effort in them, the way Viktor simply absorbed the task without making it a moment.

"Sit," Viktor said.

"I know, I know—"

"And give me your wrist."

Jayce sat. He gave Viktor his wrist. Viktor took it in that two-fingered grip and counted, looking at nothing, his mouth very slightly compressed.

"Your pulse is good," he said. "You are an idiot, but your pulse is good."

"Those aren't mutually exclusive," Jayce asked.

"No," Viktor answered. "But in my experience, they are frequently correlated."

Jayce laughed. It came out weaker than he intended, but it surprised Viktor — Jayce could see that. Not alarm, exactly, but the brief recalibration of someone whose expectations have been exceeded in a minor direction. Viktor's mouth softened, very slightly, and then steadied.

"The medicines that taste bad," Viktor said, opening his bag. "Did you take them this morning?"

Jayce made a face.

"I'll take that as a no."

"They taste like the inside of a boot."

"They are working," Viktor said. "The boot is relevant."

"Is it possible to make them taste like anything else?"

"No."

"You didn't even consider it."

Viktor looked at him sideways, with an expression that contained, somewhere inside its composed exterior, something very like amusement. It was subtle — a particular quality in the eyes, the faintest easing at the corner of his mouth — but Jayce was, he was discovering, quite good at reading Viktor now.

"Take the medicine," Viktor said.

"Fine," said Jayce. "Fine. But I want it on record that I object."

"Noted," said Viktor, handing him the cup. "The record is very concerning."

Jayce took the medicine. Viktor recorded something in his notebook. The morning light came through the window at an angle that caught the dust in the air and made the room look, briefly, warmer than it was.

That afternoon — before Viktor arrived for the second visit — Jayce tried the sword again. Just to see. He made it three paces across the room before his legs informed him, with considerable authority, that this was not going to continue. He sat on the edge of the bed, breathed carefully, put the sword away, and resolved not to tell Viktor.

Viktor arrived, looked at him, looked at the sword's new position against the wall — slightly different from where it had been — and said nothing. He wrote something in his notebook.

"That's not what it looks like," Jayce said.

"Good," said Viktor. "Then I don't need to say what I was going to say about it."

Jayce spent two days confined strictly to the bed.

The visits developed a shape.

Viktor would arrive — there was a particular quality to his footsteps, measured and unhurried, that Jayce began to recognize before the door opened — and set his bag on the table near the door and come to the bedside, and there would be the routine of it: pulse, temperature pressed by the back of Viktor's hand against Jayce's forehead, the small notations in the notebook with that cramped and meticulous handwriting. Then Viktor would ask him questions — how had he slept, did he have any pain in the chest, had he eaten everything sent up from the garrison kitchen — and Jayce would answer, and then Jayce would ask questions that had nothing to do with his health, and Viktor would answer them more than Jayce expected.

He was not, Jayce was discovering, a closed person. He was a precise one. He answered what he was asked and did not volunteer what he wasn't, which could look like reticence if you didn't know him, but which Jayce increasingly understood as a kind of honesty — a disinclination to say things he didn't mean, which meant that the things he did say carried a specific weight.

He told Jayce about plague medicine — the state of it, the gaps in it, the ways in which the city's understanding of disease was still operating on theories that Viktor, with the meticulous politeness of a man who had been wrong about things before and taken it seriously, considered likely to be incorrect. He had a way of explaining complex things that made them feel inevitable rather than technical — not simplified, exactly, but stripped to their logic. Jayce, who had a mind that liked knowing how things worked, found himself genuinely absorbed.

"You think the air isn't the cause," Jayce said one afternoon — it was the second week, he was sitting in the chair now rather than the bed, dressed and upright, which felt like a significant achievement. "But everyone says—"

"Everyone says many things," Viktor said. He was standing at the window, looking at the street below. "The miasma theory is old, and it is comfortable, and it explains the surface of the phenomenon without requiring anyone to look further." He turned slightly. "I am more interested in what I find when I look further."

"And what do you find?"

"Questions, mostly. But useful ones." He paused. "The plague spreads through contact. I believe this more strongly every year. But to say so is to challenge what the city physicians have invested careers in believing, so one says it carefully."

"But you do say it."

Viktor looked at him. "Someone must."

Jayce was quiet for a moment. Then: "Is that why you came here? To Piltover?" 

He remembered Viktor's answer from the first week of fever, the simple declarative — sickness does not observe borders, so neither do I — and the way it had lodged in him, the way certain things do, in the specific way of things that are true without qualification.

Viktor's expression shifted into something very slightly more guarded, which was not quite the same as closed. He looked back out the window.

"Partially," he said. "Zaun needs its doctors. But the plague is here, and the concentration of resources here is greater, and the ability to—" He stopped. Started again. "There is more that can be done from here. In terms of study. Of understanding."

"But Piltover doesn't exactly—" Jayce hesitated. He was thinking of the way the city talked about Zaun. The way even Marcus talked about it — as a problem in the geography, an inconvenient neighbor. "It isn't always a welcoming place. For people from—"

"No," said Viktor simply. "It is not."

The plainness of it sat in the room for a moment.

Jayce looked at him. The angle of his profile against the window, the careful neutrality of his expression, which was not the neutrality of someone who felt nothing but of someone who had practiced where to put the things he felt. He thought about what it would be like to come to a city that regarded your home as an afterthought, to do work that that city would benefit from while barely acknowledging you existed. He thought about how Viktor had said someone must with no particular bitterness and no particular pride, only the factual quality of a man describing the way things were.

"I think that's the bravest thing I've heard anyone say," Jayce said.

The words came out simply, without decoration, which was not how Jayce usually said things. Viktor went very still. It was a particular stillness. Not the comfortable stillness of a man at rest, but the stillness of one who has received something he did not know how to hold.

He looked at the window. Not away, exactly. More the way a person looks at the middle distance when they need a moment to arrange their face into something manageable.

He did not respond.

After a moment, he said, "You should sleep." He reached for his bag. His movements were as unhurried as always, but he was done with his notebook faster than usual, done with his instruments faster, and when he said good night, it was with the specific brevity of a man who has decided the visit has reached its natural conclusion somewhat earlier than scheduled.

He left a little earlier than usual that night.

Jayce listened to the footsteps going down the hall and sat in the dim room and turned the thing over — the stillness, the window, the not-responding — and thought that Viktor was the sort of person who received things carefully, who put them somewhere private and examined them alone. He did not know what to make of that. He sat not knowing for a while, which was, he was finding, a thing Viktor had somehow made more possible.

He brought books.

He mentioned it in passing, the first time — mental rest is as important as physical rest, overstimulation impedes recovery — and produced a slim volume on natural philosophy that he set on the table beside Jayce's bed with the air of a man who had not particularly planned this.

Jayce read it in a day and a half. Viktor arrived the following morning to find him finished.

"That was fast," Viktor said, with something that wasn't quite surprise.

"I had nothing else to do," Jayce said, which was true, but also: he had found it genuinely interesting, the argument the author made about the behavior of water through different materials, and had read the last third with the specific focused attention he usually reserved for sword drilling.

Viktor looked at him. That assessing look, the one that came and went too fast to be entirely sure you'd seen it, and the following day he brought two more books. These were slightly more complex, slightly more specific to questions of natural law that Jayce had, apparently, given some indication of interest in. Jayce didn't ask how Viktor had known.

He read them both. He had questions. Viktor, arriving on the third day, listened to the questions with the particular quality of attention Jayce had noticed about him — not polite listening, not waiting for the other person to finish, but actual, operational interest in what was being said, the kind that occasionally interrupted with a clarification before a sentence was done because it had outpaced the speaker.

It happened once, and Jayce stopped mid-sentence, and they looked at each other, and Viktor's jaw shifted the way it did when he was recalibrating, and Jayce said, "No, no — you're right, that's the question actually," and they were off.

They talked for two hours. Viktor entirely forgot to write in his notebook.

He noticed this on his way out, turned back, wrote something quickly, and left.

Jayce looked at the closed door for a moment. He was smiling in a way he hadn't quite decided to. He pressed his thumb against the cover of the book on the table, the one on the transmission of force through fluid systems, which Viktor had apparently selected for reasons that implied he had been thinking about what Jayce would find interesting before Jayce had given him any real evidence — and thought that he would very much like to be around Viktor when he was not sick.

He thought: I wonder what Viktor is like with time to spare. And then he thought that Viktor was the kind of person who probably did not have much time to spare, and that was a different kind of thinking, more careful, and he put it away.

There was one evening.

The window was blurred with rain, the particularly heavy rain of autumn in Piltover that hit the stone streets and bounced. The garrison room was warm because Viktor had, at some earlier point, fed the small hearth without making an event of it. Jayce was well enough to sit at the table now — this was the end of the second week, the beginning of the third — and Viktor had brought food without calling it anything. No, “I thought you should eat properly”, or “the garrison kitchen is inadequate”, just: he arrived with it, set it on the table, sat down across from Jayce, and removed his coat.

He was wearing a plain dark shirt beneath it, rolled at the sleeves. His arms were thin, and there was an old scar across the back of his left hand that Jayce didn't ask about. He ate with the same economy he did everything — neither rushed nor leisurely, simply present to the task.

They talked about Heimerdinger's Council, and about the border situation that Jayce had been hearing fragments through the garrison door, and about whether the plague would worsen or break with the cold. Viktor had a view on this. The cold made people crowd together indoors, which worsened transmission; he said this with the quiet certainty of someone who had watched it happen before. Jayce listened. He'd started to notice that he listened to Viktor differently than he listened to most people — with more of himself, less of the part of his brain that was already thinking about what to say next.

At some point, the candle burned down, and neither of them moved to light another one. The hearth gave off enough light. The rain was very even against the window.

Viktor told him, without Jayce asking about the first plague house he had worked in Zaun. He'd been nineteen. He'd been the youngest person there by eight years. He described it economically, without self-pity, as a set of facts about the nature of the work and the smell of it and the way time moved differently inside a sick house, slower and faster at once. He said that he had understood, in that year, that this was the work he would do. Not as a calling in the romantic sense but as a simple recognition of fit. This is what I am suited for. This is where I am useful.

Jayce watched his face while he spoke. Viktor talked with a particular quality of attention to precision, pausing sometimes to find the right word, not settling for an approximation, and he did not look at Jayce most of the time when he spoke, looking instead at the middle distance or at his hands. He looked up at the ends of things sometimes. To see if they had landed.

This time, he looked up and found Jayce already looking at him.

Jayce said, "I think you're the most honest person I've met in a long time."

Viktor looked at him. Something in him had gone very still.

"You mean," he said, slowly, "that you find my manner direct."

"I mean that you don't say things you don't believe," Jayce said. "And you don't pretend to think things are fine when they aren't. And you don't make the shape of kindness without…You don't perform it. It's just—" He stopped. Waved a hand at the room, somewhat helplessly. "You've been here every day. Twice some days, because I'm bad at following instructions."

"You are very bad at following instructions," Viktor agreed, quietly.

"And you never made it feel like charity," Jayce said. "Or an obligation. It always felt like—" He stopped again. He wasn't sure what word came next.

The room was very quiet except for the rain.

Viktor looked down at his hands. "It is important work," he said. It came out measured, careful, the tone of a man who had taken something that had too much in it and reduced it to its defensible core.

"Viktor—"

"You should sleep," Viktor said. And then he did something he rarely did — he said something twice, turned it over: "You are recovering well. Truly. Another few days and we'll begin looking at a return to easier duties."

He was gathering himself. Not obviously in the way of someone who was flustered, but in the subtle way of a man who has decided that the room has become something he needs to have a plan about. He put his coat back on, and the coat came with its professional distance, with the shape of the doctor it was designed to make him.

"Good night, Jayce," he said.

"Good night," Jayce said.

He listened to the footsteps going down the hall. He sat in the warm room with the burned-down candle and the rain on the window and thought, with the slow, careful patience of a man who suspects something important but isn't ready to name it yet, about the way Viktor had looked at the middle distance when he spoke about being useful. About the fact that the coat had come back on. About the particular geometry of someone taking a room and making it something more manageable.

He thought about the way Viktor had looked up and found Jayce looking at him.

He looked at the empty chair across the table for a while.

Then he went to bed, and he did not entirely sleep.

Knight Marshal Marcus came to see him ten days later, with the manner of a man conducting an inspection of a supply line.

Jayce passed. Marcus noted it with a single satisfied nod, the kind that meant acceptable, move on. He looked around the garrison room with the brief attention of a man cataloguing the cost of things, taking in the books on the table, the small pot of medicines Viktor left for the days between visits, the general evidence of sustained occupation.

"You're mending," Marcus said.

"I am," Jayce said.

"Good. We need you mending faster."

Jayce waited.

"There's trouble at the Noxian border," Marcus said, with the clipped ease of a man delivering a weather report. "Skirmishes. Small ones, for now. The Council has been in session more days than not." He paused. "Heimerdinger is resistant. But that won't hold."

Jayce absorbed this. He was sitting in the chair by the window — he'd taken to sitting there when Viktor wasn't in it, which he didn't think too hard about — and the morning was clear and cold outside, and the city was going about its business below, which it did even now, even with the black wreaths and the incense and the quarantine flags on certain streets.

"How long?" Jayce asked.

"Before mobilization? Weeks. Maybe a month." Marcus fixed him with a flat look. "So. Get well."

"I'm working on it," Jayce said.

Marcus looked at the books on the table. "The doctor from Zaun. He's thorough?"

"He's excellent," Jayce said, and meant it without qualification.

Marcus nodded with the brevity of someone filing information. "Good. Carry on."

He left.

Jayce sat in the chair for a while. Outside, a cart full of empty crates clattered over the cobblestones below. He thought about what Marcus had said. He thought about mobilization, and border skirmishes, and the particular machinery of the city grinding toward a direction it had been grinding toward for a while. He thought about all of this in the distant, abstract way of a man in a warm room who is not quite ready to give up the warm room.

The warm room. He looked around it — the books, the hearth, the chair that was Viktor's by default now, the gray square of the window. A garrison room. He'd been in garrison rooms his whole adult life. He had never previously thought of one as something he was not ready to leave.

He didn't linger on that. He put it where he'd been putting things lately: somewhere aside, where he could return to it later.

When Viktor arrived that afternoon, the visit was brief, businesslike, but Viktor asked how he was sleeping with what Jayce thought was additional attention — Jayce didn't mention Marcus' visit.

He sat up straighter than usual when he heard the footsteps in the hallway, and he noticed that he did it, and he noticed that he didn't stop.

"I'm being declared fit," Jayce said on a Thursday. Viktor had just finished his examination and was closing his notebook.

"Not entirely," Viktor said. "Light duties initially. No drilling for another week. No heavy exertion."

"But I can move around."

"Carefully."

Jayce nodded. He was looking at Viktor in a way he'd been doing more often lately — directly, openly, without being quite aware that he was doing it. Viktor had set his notebook on the table and was returning instruments to his bag, and he moved with that characteristic economy, that absence of wasted motion, and Jayce thought about the long, strange landscape of the past month, the way the garrison room had become something other than a garrison room.

"I'll be returning to the barracks," Jayce said. "So you won't need to—"

"I'll check in twice more," Viktor said, not looking up. "Just to confirm the recovery is stable before we close the record."

Close the record. Jayce turned the phrase over. It was a perfectly reasonable professional phrase. It was correct and appropriate and described the situation exactly. He didn't know why it sat in him the way it did.

"Is that standard?" Jayce said. "Twice more."

Viktor looked up briefly, then back at his bag. "It's what I consider appropriate."

"Right." Jayce watched him. "So it's not always twice more."

"It depends on the patient."

A pause.

"Viktor," he said.

"Hm." Viktor was still in his bag, adjusting something.

"When I'm — when the record is closed, what happens?"

Viktor looked up. He wore the particular careful expression of a man who wants to be sure he has understood the question before he answers it.

"You return to duty," he said. "I return to the sick houses."

"And we—" Jayce stopped. He made a brief gesture that didn't resolve into anything specific.

Viktor held his gaze for a moment. There was something in his expression that Jayce had come to recognize. The thing that happened sometimes when they had talked too long, or the candle had gone too low, that quality of being present in a way that had weight to it. He seemed aware of it. He always seemed aware of it.

"You will recover," Viktor said, which was not precisely an answer to the question. But it was said with a specificity that made it feel like one.

Jayce made a small sound that might have been a laugh if it had decided to be one.

"Right," he said. "Of course."

He could have said something else. He thought about the weight of the thing he hadn't said — the something he'd been circling for days, maybe longer, maybe since a candlelit evening with rain on the window and Viktor talking about the inside of a plague house when he was nineteen. He turned it over in his hands, where Viktor couldn't see it.

He didn't say it.

Viktor left, at his usual unhurried pace, the bag on his shoulder, the coat settled around him. He said good night with a specificity that Jayce's name seemed to acquire in his voice sometimes — not more warmly than other words, but more precisely, like a word he had thought about.

Jayce stood at the window and watched him cross the courtyard below. It was dark, and Viktor's lantern made a small bright circle around him as he walked. He turned at the corner, and then he was gone.

Jayce stood there for a while after.

The announcement came on a Tuesday, read aloud in the garrison hall by a herald with the particular dead-eyed professionalism of a man who had read many announcements and found them indistinguishable from one another. He had a carrying voice and used it without inflection, the way a man driving nails uses a hammer. For function, not feeling. The gist of it was that King Heimerdinger, in consultation with the Council, had determined that Noxus' crossing of the agreed border constituted an act of aggression that required formal military response. Piltover was mobilizing its knights. The campaign would begin within the fortnight.

The garrison hall went from loud to louder in a different way. Not quiet, not surprised, but shifted into the particular frequency of men who have been waiting for the thing to be official. There was a breath, a half-second of something that might have been gravity, and then the room was back in motion: louder than before, with more purpose in it, the sound of a machine that had found its task.

Jayce stood in the hall and felt it land in him differently than he expected.

He had been on the mobilization list for two weeks. He knew this. Marcus had told him himself, had clapped him on the shoulder in the particular way that meant good man, glad you're back, we need you, and Jayce had nodded and said yes, sir, and felt the appropriate readiness, or something he had identified as the appropriate readiness. He had polished his equipment. He had checked the draw of his sword with practiced attention. He had done all the things a fit, recovered soldier does when he learns he will be needed.

Standing in the hall now, with the herald folding his parchment and the room going loud around him, he understood that he had been doing those things in a particular kind of silence. The kind of silence that is not the absence of sound but the absence of thinking, all the way to the end of something.

He thought: I need to find Viktor.

He didn't know why that was the first thought. Not Marcus, who would have orders. Not his family, to whom he owed a letter. Viktor, who was not in the garrison and had no part in any of this, who worked in the sick houses and kept his ledgers and treated the ill with the same steady, methodical attention he brought to everything.

Viktor. The first thought.

He didn't examine it. He moved toward the door.

He didn't find him that day, or the day after. The garrison was in organized chaos — lists being made, equipment being checked, letters home, provisions assessed and reassessed by quartermasters who couldn't agree, all the machinery of departure grinding into motion with the particular noise of many people doing many necessary things at once. Jayce moved through it with a heaviness he couldn't account for and a feeling he was trying not to look at directly, the way you don't look directly at something bright.

He thought about leaving in a way he'd never thought about leaving before. He had gone on campaign twice — brief ones, border patrols that had sharpened into minor skirmishes and then resolved into muddy marches home. He'd gone with the straightforward weight of duty and come back and resumed his life, and the resuming had felt natural, continuous, because there had been nothing in particular to resume toward. His life before had been full in the way that a room is full of furniture. Present, functional, not especially missed when you were somewhere else.

Now he kept thinking about a lamp burning low on a table. The smell of a sick house in the morning. The way Viktor moved through a crowded ward — efficiently, without touching anything he didn't mean to touch — and the way he stood still when he thought.

The feeling didn't sharpen into anything he could name. He let it sit.

He sent one of the orderlies to ask if Dr. Viktor had a moment on the second day. The orderly came back and said the doctor was in surgery and couldn't be interrupted. Jayce had nodded and gone to check his equipment again, which did not need checking.

He found Viktor on the third day by accident.

He was crossing the back quarter of the sick house district — a shortcut he had started using sometime in the past month, without deciding to, the way a path forms — when he saw the long dark coat and the slow, deliberate movement of a man going about work that required precision. Viktor was in one of the wards through a low archway, visible from the street through a window that had no glass, only oilcloth rolled back for the cold-day air. He was speaking to another doctor in his quiet way, something about a patient, his mask pushed up on his forehead, and he was holding a chart at the angle he always held charts, which Jayce had somehow memorized without trying to.

Viktor turned and saw him.

There was a moment where something changed in his face. Not a surprise, exactly. Something prior to surprise. Something that looked like a man who has been waiting for a thing and has been, on some level, dreading the waiting ending.

Then he finished his sentence to the other doctor and came toward the archway.

"Jayce," he said.

"You heard," Jayce said.

A pause. Viktor nodded, once.

They went out to the small courtyard behind the sick house, which was bare and cold in the November air, the stone dry and gray, the sky above it the particular flat color of impending weather. Viktor stood with his coat closed around him and his hands at his sides and his face in its careful configuration, and Jayce looked at him and felt something very specifically like the feeling of a door he had been standing in front of for weeks, the handle in his hand, pressure beginning.

"We're leaving in eight days," Jayce said.

"I know," said Viktor. "I — yes. I know."

Jayce studied him. Viktor was looking at a point somewhere near Jayce's collarbone rather than his face, which was not quite his usual habit. Viktor looked at things directly, or he didn't look at them; the intermediate was unusual. There was something different about him. Something in the set of his jaw, the slight compression of the line of his mouth, but it came and went so fast that Jayce thought he might have imagined it.

"I wanted to tell you myself," Jayce said. "Before I just — disappeared."

Viktor looked up then. His gaze was steady, and present, and there — the way it always was, that quality of full attention he gave to things he chose to attend to — and he said: "That was thoughtful."

It was a small thing to say. Jayce heard it as slightly larger.

"I also wanted to—" He stopped. Tried another approach. "How is the work going? The sick houses. Are they—"

"The numbers are manageable," Viktor said. He had shifted back to the easy register he used for reports, precise and clean. "The lower wards are still overwhelmed, but the upper sick houses have maintained capacity. The new ventilation is working. The mortality rate in ward seven is down." A brief pause. "There are two other doctors who have been trained in the protocols. The work will continue."

The work will continue. Jayce looked at him.

"That's good," he said, and heard himself say it, and felt the smallness of it.

He wanted to say something useful. Something that named the shape of the last month — not sentimentally or in a way that would require Viktor to manage his face through it — but honestly. Simply. He had the words somewhere; he could feel the outline of them. He kept arriving at the moment and then stepping to one side of it. He had been doing this for days, in his head, rehearsing and retreating, and now they were standing in the courtyard with eight days between them, and the specific words kept failing to arrive in the right order.

"I keep thinking," Jayce said, slowly, "that I should say something useful. Something actual." He made a small, frustrated gesture. "And then when the moment comes, I make a bad joke, or I ask about the sick houses."

Something in Viktor's expression softened. It was minimal but Jayce knew his face now, the geography of it, the way certain lights moved across it, and he saw it.

"You should be careful," Viktor said. "On campaign." Then, as if he had thought about whether to add it and decided to — reluctantly, because it was the only way he knew how: "Your recovery was complete. I'm satisfied with the state of your lung function. But the first weeks of heavy exertion after a respiratory illness of this severity — the sustained physical demand of a march, cold nights in the field — the body is still recalibrating. You should not assume fitness means full capacity. The two are not the same."

"Viktor," Jayce said.

Viktor stopped.

"I know," Jayce said. "I'll be careful."

Viktor nodded, once. Then he cleared his throat — slightly, briefly, just a small sound — and Jayce noticed it because Viktor never made sounds he didn't mean to make. In a month of knowing him, Jayce had not seen him fidget, never seen him reach for a word, never seen him do anything with his hands or his voice that was unintentional. Viktor's body was a controlled instrument. The slight sound was nothing.

He almost asked. He filed it away instead, not knowing why.

"There are always more sick," Viktor said. The words came out — almost nothing, just the smallest hesitation after the throat-clearing, the barest pause — and then continued evenly: "While you are away, I will continue the protocols in the lower wards. I've requested additional funding for the third sick house. The Council will likely refuse, and I will request again. There will be correspondence to draft, if you — " He stopped himself. Looked briefly away. "There will be work."

"I know," Jayce said. "You'll do what you always do." A pause. "You'll be meticulous about it."

Something crossed Viktor's face that might, in a different light, have been described as bleak. It came and went in less than a second, and then there was only the careful steadiness again, and the cold courtyard, and the pewter sky beginning to deliver on its earlier threats.

"Yes," he said. "I will."

Jayce stood in the courtyard and felt the eight days like a weight on his chest, and thought about all the specific, nameable things he was not saying. The evening with the candle burned down to a stub, Viktor asleep in the chair, and waking without embarrassment. The particular quality of the morning light through sick house windows. The way Viktor's head bent over his notebook in the early hours, and the shape of his handwriting, which Jayce had not meant to learn and had learned anyway. The question he had been turning over without letting himself fully hold it — what does this mean, what is this, what would I say if I—

He wanted to say: I've been thinking about you in the spaces between things, which I did not do before you, and I don't know what to do with that information, but I thought you should have it before I leave.

He made a bad joke instead. Something about coming back with better stories than he left with; something about Noxian wine being supposedly excellent, and it being a shame to let a war pass without testing the claim. It was the wrong shape for the moment, and he knew it as he said it.

Viktor looked at him with an expression that was fond and careful and did not say anything.

"What will you do?" Jayce said — and here he heard himself, recognized the question, this was the question he'd asked on the day he got his light duty orders and the question he kept returning to without knowing why — "when I'm away."

Viktor met his eyes when he answered this time. He did not look at the collarbone. He looked at Jayce's face, fully, with the same attention he gave to things he chose to attend to.

"The work," he said. The same answer. Always the same answer. But he said it while looking directly at Jayce, and Jayce held that for a moment — just that, just the looking — and did not say anything either.

They stood in the cold courtyard. The sky had gone from flat gray to the pewter shade that meant real weather was coming; there was a smell in the air, damp and iron, the specific smell of snow before it fell.

"Write to me," Jayce said, and was surprised to hear himself say it. "If you — or even if you just. I don't know. If there's something worth saying."

Viktor looked at him. He was quiet for a moment that had weight in it, a moment that might have been the space before something, and then he said:

"Walk carefully. On the march. The roads will be bad after the rains."

It was such a Viktor thing to say — so precise and practical and real, care expressed in the only register he fully trusted — that Jayce felt something catch in his chest like a hook.

"Okay," he said.

They said goodbye in the way of two people who have too much to say and have decided not to say it, which is a kind of warmth in itself, painful at the edges. Viktor's hand was briefly, briefly on Jayce's forearm — the briefest pressure, clinical in its placement, the contact of a man who knows where the pulse is and had put his fingers near it, except there was no pulse being checked, and they both knew it, but neither of them said so.

Jayce walked out of the courtyard. He stopped in the street, in the cold, and stood there for a moment with the feeling of a man who has set something down and is not yet sure it was the right surface, who is already calculating whether he can go back, and who knows he cannot.

He went back to the barracks.

What he did not know — what he could not see in the careful stillness of Viktor's face, in the slight clearing of his throat, in the particular quality of the goodbye that Viktor had made into something clinical and managed:

The roughness had not been emotional.

Viktor knew the roughness. Viktor knew the specific tightness that followed it, the way it settled in the throat differently than ordinary dryness, the faint pressure behind the eyes that would begin, by evening, to be something more definite. He had treated dozens through this exact progression. He had documented its stages in three different ledgers. He had stood at more bedsides than he could count and watched this specific thing move through a person's body with the unhurried confidence of something that had nowhere else to be.

Viktor knew.

He had known — he recognized, later, with the precision he brought to all diagnosis — when the words had come out slightly wrong, slightly slower, the throat requiring that small negotiation. He had known and had kept his face still and his voice even and had said: walk carefully, the roads will be bad, because that was a thing he could say without his voice doing anything that Jayce would notice.

He stood in the empty courtyard for a while after Jayce left, looking at the gray sky. The smell of snow was stronger. His hands were still.

Then he went back inside.

There were always more sick.

He was only another one of them now, which was, he thought, with the dry clarity he applied to problems he could not solve, a particularly efficient arrangement. No disruption. No announcement. The work would continue exactly as he had said it would.

He picked up his chart and found his next patient and did not think about Jayce walking back through the cold streets, the eight days already counting down, and the letter that would not be written in time to matter.

The roads were, as Viktor had predicted, bad.

Jayce marched through two weeks of autumn mud with the kind of sustained physical discomfort that stops feeling like information and becomes simply the weather of existence. He was with his company, with men he knew and trusted, and the work of soldiering — the maintenance of equipment, the logistics of camp, the particular focused animal attention that combat required — occupied him the way work occupies people who need occupying.

He was good at it. This had always surprised people who met him first as a knight and expected something ceremonial, something decorative — the height and the jaw and the particular way he filled out dress armor suggested a man who had been selected for appearances. But he had grown up in the Undercity margins, in the specific school of “don't back down” that the lower city runs on, and he had learned early that the body is a tool and tools are for using. In the field, he was tireless in the grinding way, the way that has less to do with strength than with a refusal to register certain kinds of cost. He carried more than his share. He slept less than he should. He went into bad situations first and came out last, and somewhere between these habits, he had acquired the particular reputation that gets men killed by being placed at the front of difficult things.

Marcus, marshaling the campaign from the command tent two positions back, occasionally gave him looks that communicated something between appreciation and frustration. They had clashed twice, quietly and professionally — once over the handling of a village that Jayce thought could be spared and Marcus thought could not, once over an advance Marcus had ordered that Jayce had followed and then told him, in private and with extreme precision, had been the wrong call. Marcus had listened. Had not changed his approach. Jayce respected him and found him, occasionally, difficult to be in a tent with — the kind of man who did the arithmetic of war with a cleanness that was necessary and correct and that Jayce could not quite match without something in him going cold.

The arithmetic, in the third week, included a village. Jayce did not think about the village if he could help it. He kept his hands occupied.

In the spaces between things, he thought about Viktor.

He turned it over the way you turn over something you've been given and aren't sure you deserve. The month in the garrison room. The books on the table. The evening with rain on the window and the coat off and Viktor talking about a plague house in Zaun like it was simply geography, simply a fact, his hands on the table and the candlelight on the side of his face. The way he'd said Jayce's name — not warmly, exactly, but precisely, and Jayce was only now understanding that for Viktor, those might be the same thing.

He was, slowly, arriving somewhere.

The arrival felt like something that had always been the destination, the way certain things do when you finally face them — not a surprise but a recognition, a yes, obviously, this, of course. He'd known something all along, he thought, in the way you know things before you know them. The reason he'd sat up straighter when he heard boots in the hallway. The particular weight of the last night before he'd returned to the barracks. The fact that his first thought on hearing the mobilization order had been; I need to find Viktor.

He was in love with Viktor.

He sat with this information in the cold dark of a campaign tent while rain hit the canvas above him and men snored around him, and it felt very simple. Not easy — simple. Like a sentence you'd been struggling to write for weeks and then found, suddenly, in its shortest form.

He began to compose things in his head. Things he would say. He was aware that he was bad at it — that he had been, demonstrably, very bad at saying the things he meant to Viktor's face, that he circled and joked and deflected in the specific way of someone who suspects they have something to lose. He was going to be embarrassed. He didn't care. He was going to be embarrassed in the specific way of someone who has decided that embarrassment is acceptable and the alternative is worse.

He would come back, and he would say it. Plainly. He was going to look Viktor in the face and say something true.

He rehearsed it badly and kept the rehearsal anyway.

A letter from Piltover arrived three weeks into the campaign, forwarded through the military post in a batch of dispatches. It was from one of his fellow knights, left behind with a broken wrist — a general letter, news of the city, the ordinary texture of home. Jayce read it in one of the in-between hours, sitting on a log outside his tent in the thin winter sun.

Near the end, in passing: The plague has worsened in the lower wards. More deaths than anticipated. The sick houses are overwhelmed.

He read it twice. He looked at the words sick houses and felt a cold spike of something he didn't fully let himself look at, the way you don't fully look at something that would require action you're not capable of taking.

Viktor is careful, he told himself. He is meticulous. He has done this for years, and he knows the protocols, and he has never — he is fine, he is more careful than anyone, he knows how this works better than any physician in that city, he is fine.

He folded the letter, put it in his coat, and went back to work.

He thought about Viktor every day for the rest of the campaign. This was not new, but it had acquired a different texture — not just the warm, complicated texture of figuring out what something meant, but occasionally the sharp, cold texture of the lower wards overwhelmed with more sick than anticipated.

Viktor was meticulous. He was fine.

He picked fights he shouldn't have. Marcus noted this, said nothing, moved him to a flank position where the action was reliable, and the terrain was open, and there was less opportunity to manufacture a reason to be at the front of something terrible. Jayce understood what was happening and let it happen. He was not, in the ordinary sense, suicidal — it was more that he found the moments of combat easier to be inside than the hours around them, where there was nothing to do but think and nothing useful to think and the coat in his pack that still faintly smelled like a room in a garrison in Piltover where someone had once explained the migratory habits of a particular disease like it was the most interesting thing in the world.

He wrote a letter back to Piltover. It was short. It asked how things were in the lower wards. It asked about the sick house numbers. It did not say: I am asking about a specific person, a physician who works in the worst of it, please tell me he is not among the numbers. It did not say this because he could not say it and still function, still marshal his company, still be the man his men needed him to be out here in the mud.

The letter may not have arrived. He never received a reply.

The campaign ended as these things do — not with glory but with exhaustion and a negotiated line on a map that everyone could pretend, for the moment, was satisfying. Men had died. A border had been held. The accountants of war had tallied the cost, and the Council had decided it was acceptable, and now there was the long, muddy road home.

The negotiation had taken two weeks. Jayce had sat in the back of a cold hall and watched Marcus work across a table from men who had been trying to kill them three weeks prior, and had found that he could not produce the appropriate feeling about this. He understood it. He had done it himself, the switching-off of the combat register, the return to the language of terms and concessions. He simply could not locate it today. He kept thinking about the coat. He kept thinking about the letter he'd sent that had not been answered.

It's slow, the post, he told himself. Everything is slow out here. It doesn't mean anything.

He rode back to Piltover thinking about Viktor with the specific focused attention of a man who has made a decision and is keeping it warm. He had rehearsed his terrible speech approximately forty times. He had thrown most of it out and kept the essential part, which was: I need to tell you something. I should have told you before I left, and I didn't, and I'm telling you now.

Simple. He was going to be simple.

He was going to walk into the sick house district and find Viktor and say the simple, true thing and be embarrassed, and it would be fine. Viktor might say nothing in return — Viktor might say it back in the particular way of a man who communicates in what he does rather than what he says, and Jayce had learned to read that language. Either way. Either way, there would be no more of the garrison room, no more of the empty courtyard, no more leaving things behind him in the street.

He rode through the city gates with his company in the late afternoon, gray sky and cold air, and Piltover was quieter than he'd left it.

The city felt wrong before he could name why.

He noticed it first in the market quarter — the particular silence of a place where the usual noise had simply stopped. The stalls were thinner than he remembered. The people moved differently: heads down, or too watchful, the walk of those who had grown careful. He saw black wreaths on four doors in a single street. Then six more. Then he stopped counting.

Piltover had gone on without them. That was the unbearable and obvious truth of it — the city had kept existing while they were absent, and the plague had kept taking while the army was away, and the arithmetic of it was visible in every quiet corner, every shuttered window, every gap in the crowd where someone had been and was no longer.

He should have gone to the barracks first. There was a protocol. There was always a protocol — the return of the campaign, the accounting of men and materials, the reports that needed filing and the commanders who needed briefing. He had rehearsed what he would say. He had been rehearsing it, actually, for the better part of the road home, composing sentences in his head in the gray light of the early morning march. Practical things, mostly. Some of them not practical at all.

He went to the sick house instead.

He didn't decide to, exactly. His legs made the decision for him somewhere in the market quarter, turning without his full participation toward the building he had last seen from a window in a garrison room, the building he had looked at every day for a month while someone came and went through its doors.

There was a woman at the entrance — harried, competent, clearly managing twelve things at once in the specific way of someone who had been managing twelve things at once for weeks and had stopped expecting it to improve. She looked up when he approached. He gave Viktor's name.

Her face did something.

He had seen many faces do many things in the campaign. He was familiar with the particular architecture of bad news — the small collapse that happens before the words arrive, the eyes that go somewhere else for a fraction of a second. He knew it the way you know something you've been dreading has finally happened.

The pause before her answer was a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

He stood in it and understood most of what it contained before she had said a single word.

Another doctor told him, in the end. A man whose name Jayce did not retain — would not retain, he suspected, regardless of how many times he was told — who had worked alongside Viktor in the final months. He was careful, this man. He delivered the information with the quiet, practiced care of someone who had delivered similar information many times and had learned to move through it at exactly the right pace. Not hurried. Not slow.

Viktor had died five weeks prior.

He had contracted the plague. They believed he had begun showing symptoms in the late stages of the campaign — possibly earlier. He had continued working for as long as he was able. By the time he could no longer stand, it was already advanced.

Jayce heard all of this from a great distance. The words arrived at him through some medium that was not quite air, settling into his understanding slowly and strangely, the way objects settle into deep water.

He heard more: Viktor had kept his illness as private as possible for weeks. He had still done his rounds. He had still treated patients — dozens of them, at the height of it, when the sick houses were at their most overwhelmed. He had kept writing in that meticulous, cramped handwriting, notes on cases, patterns of spread, the careful, accumulated record of a man who understood that his observations had value beyond himself. They had taken the pen from him near the end, practically had to take it. Even then, the doctor said, Viktor had continued to specify — to specify, as if the words were running out and the important ones had to go first — where in his notes the relevant information about his current patients could be found.

Because he was Viktor, and that was how Viktor was.

"He didn't suffer long after he could no longer work," the doctor said, and seemed to mean it as comfort.

Jayce could not locate the comfort in it. He looked for it in the space after the sentence and found only the sentence itself.

He asked — heard himself ask, as if from somewhere slightly outside his own body — whether Viktor had said anything. For him, or about him, or just — anything that might — had he —

He was not sure how the question ended. He was not sure it ended at all.

The doctor hesitated. He looked at Jayce with the expression of a man who is deciding something: whether the truth is a kindness, and for whom.

"He asked once," the doctor said, finally. "Near the end. He asked if there had been any word from the campaign. Whether the knights had come home yet."

The room was very quiet.

Outside, distantly, the city made its ordinary sounds — a cart on cobblestones, voices at some remove, a door closing. The sounds of a world that had continued. Jayce stood in the quiet and held the sentence in both hands and understood, with a completeness that felt almost physical, what it had cost Viktor to ask it.

He had asked, near the end. He had wanted to know.

And no one had come to tell him.

Jayce sat in a small empty room off the corridor — one of those institutional spaces that exist between other spaces, neither here nor there — because there was nowhere else to be and his legs had made the decision for him again, the way they had outside the market quarter, choosing on his behalf.

He sat for a long time.

He thought about Viktor. Not abstractly — not the generalized grief of losing someone, the blurred outline of a person gone. He thought about the specific, exact Viktor who had existed for the past months. The particular texture of him. The footsteps he could identify before the door opened, that uneven, effortful rhythm he could have picked out of a crowd. The way he'd taken Jayce's wrist in two fingers and counted without speaking, his eyes somewhere else, his whole attention gathered into that single point of contact. The cramped handwriting in the notebook he would never read. The battered book with the finger holding his page. The coat coming on and off, and what the coat meant. The meal that wasn't called anything. The way he said Jayce's name, as if the name itself were a complete sentence.

Then he thought about the plague.

Viktor had been meticulous. More than meticulous — he had been a man who had survived years in sick rooms through the precise, disciplined practice of understanding what killed people and refusing to give it the opportunity. The mask, always. The coat, always. The herbs and protocols and measured distance, the careful architecture of a man who knew that the distance was not coldness but survival, his own and everyone else's. He had treated dozens of patients. Hundreds, maybe, across the months of the outbreak. He had maintained his careful space with every one of them because he understood, in the specific and technical sense, what dropping the distance cost.

He had treated one patient without that distance.

Jayce sat in the small room and assembled the arithmetic of it, the way you assemble something you don't want to be true, setting each piece down carefully and looking at what they added up to.

The long visits. The evenings that ran past the point of necessity. The books Viktor had brought without being asked, chosen with an attention to what Jayce would find interesting, required paying attention to Jayce. The time the mask was down, and the coat was off, and Viktor sat by the window in the early morning light reading, simply reading, like a person making themselves at home in a room they had decided to belong in. The meal in the low candlelight, with nothing clinical about it and nothing named. The moment in the courtyard when Viktor's hand had been on his arm without purpose — without any purpose except the hand, the arm, the choice to be near.

The way Viktor had lingered.

He had been careless, in the specific sense that his carefulness had had an exception, and the exception had been Jayce. It was not that he had failed to take precautions — Viktor was never careless, Viktor had been meticulous in every ward, through every exhausting week of the outbreak. He had maintained his protocols with every patient, every colleague, every person who passed through those doors.

Except with Jayce. With Jayce, he had simply chosen differently. Made a different calculation, or perhaps no calculation at all, which was its own kind of answer.

Viktor, who communicated in what he did rather than what he said.

King Heimerdinger found him.

He did not ask what Jayce was doing there. He stood for a moment, taking in the fact of him — the travel-worn coat, the posture of a man who had arrived somewhere and not yet decided what to do with the arrival. He waited until Jayce noticed him, reached into his coat, and produced a folded piece of paper that had been folded and refolded until the creases had gone soft.

“I went to visit when I had heard he’d fallen ill.” Heimerdinger began, looking at the paper in his hand as he handed it over to Jayce. "He asked that I give this to you myself."

Jayce took it.

The paper was light in his hands. He turned it over once before he opened it.

The handwriting was Viktor's. He could see that immediately, could see the particular slant of it, the cramped precision he recognized from the notebook he had never read. But it was Viktor's handwriting failing. The letters listed. Some words had been attempted twice, the second attempt written over or alongside the first as though his hand had not trusted itself. There were whole lines where the pen had drifted from the baseline and not recovered, where the ink was thin and uncertain. The handwriting of a man working at the very edge of what he had left.

He read it.

Most of it he could not parse. Sentences that started and did not finish, or finished somewhere that was not where they had begun. Words that might have been names or might have been something else. There was a passage near the top that seemed to be about herbs, then a gap, and then something in what might have been Zaunite, or might have been neither language in particular. Just the words that had come.

He read it again.

Two things resolved out of the wreckage of it.

The first was in the middle of the page, in slightly larger letters than the surrounding text, as though Viktor had gathered himself to write it: I would like to be remembered as more than a doctor. The sentence was complete. It was one of the only sentences on the page that was.

The second was near the bottom, in the smallest and least certain handwriting on the page, as though it had been added last when the last was very nearly used up. I don't want to die without anyone knowing.

He had died alone. 

The city had been full of the sick and the dying and the exhausted, and Viktor had been one of the sick and the dying, and the dying had happened — Jayce understood, had understood since the road — without anyone in the room. He knew this. He had known it for hundreds of miles of cold road, and he had carried it, and he was still carrying it, and he had not yet found the place to put it down.

I don't want to die without anyone knowing.

He had not known. He had not been there to know. He had been on the road, composing speeches to the person who was already gone, and Viktor had written I don't want to die without anyone knowing at the bottom of a letter on a day when his handwriting was failing, and then he had died, alone in a room, in a city full of people, and the letter had been waiting in Heimerdinger's coat for Jayce to come home.

Jayce understood now what all of it had meant. He understood it with the complete and devastating clarity of a man who has been handed a letter and learned to read the language only after the person who sent it was gone, in a room where the ink is already cold.

The love had been in the evenings. In the books and the lingering and the meal that wasn't called anything. In a plague doctor — a man who had survived years of sickness through the rigorous practice of keeping himself at a remove — taking off his coat, lowering his mask, and staying. Just staying, in the specific and irreversible way of a person who has decided that the distance has become too costly. Who has looked at the distance and found that what he was losing by maintaining it outweighed what he stood to lose by dropping it.

Viktor had not said I love you. Viktor would never have said it — not because it wasn't true, but because Viktor trusted action over declaration, and his actions had said it in every language available to him.

And those same actions — that same love, that singular and irreversible carelessness — had killed him.

Viktor, who had kept his distance from everyone, had not kept it from Jayce. And it was not an accident, and it was not an oversight, and it was not the result of anything except a choice, made again and again across weeks of evenings, to stay close to the one person he had decided was worth the cost.

He had made that decision without ever telling Jayce he was making it. And Jayce had not understood what was being decided, or what it was costing, until now, here, in this small room, when the understanding had nowhere to go.

That was the unbearable part. Not the grief alone, but the knowing — the complete and belated knowing, the comprehension arriving at full force into the specific space where it was no longer of any use to either of them.

He sat in the small room, not even realizing Heimerdinger had left him alone.

Outside, the city continued its sounds.

He sat.

He went to the garrison room.

It was being used for something else now — storage, the accumulated detritus of the winter campaign. Crates and rolled maps and equipment that needed cataloguing were stacked against the wall without ceremony. Someone had shoved the table aside. The small hearth was cold, gray with old ash, the kind of gray that meant it had been cold for a long time.

The chair by the window was still there.

Jayce stood in the doorway for a moment. Then he stepped inside.

The room smelled of dust and cold stone, and beneath it, almost nothing — almost no trace of what it had been, of the particular life it had briefly held. Rooms did that. They shed the people who had passed through them with an efficiency that felt almost cruel, becoming again what they always were underneath: four walls, a floor, a ceiling, a window.

The window gave the same view. The courtyard below, the stone street, the same gray November sky that it had always been. He had looked at this view for a month. Viktor had looked at it from this chair.

He stood between the two.

He didn't say the thing he had rehearsed on the road home. The words were still there, present in him, sentences he had been composing and revising across hundreds of miles of cold road, but there was no one to say them to, and without a recipient they were just words in a room, and the room could not receive them, and neither could the chair, and neither could the window or the view or the gray sky beyond it.

He had planned to explain himself. To account for all the things he hadn't said, hadn't known he needed to say, hadn't understood were being said to him. He had planned to say: I understand now what all of it was. I see it now, all of it, and I'm sorry I didn't see it in time, and I would have stayed in the room with you too, I would have let the distance go, I would have—

He said none of it.

He stood in the room instead, as a kind of witness — because there should be someone who stood in this room and understood what had happened here, who held the full accounting of it in their hands without looking away. Viktor had deserved someone who understood him completely while he was alive. Jayce had not managed that. He could manage this: to stand here, in the room where the understanding had been possible and had not occurred, and to see it now at last, clearly and completely and too late.

Viktor had treated the sick and kept his distance. Every patient, every ward, every careful day of his careful life — he had understood what the distance was for and he had maintained it, because he understood the stakes in the specific and technical sense of a man who had watched what happened when the distance failed.

And then he treated Jayce.

And he had not kept it.

That was the whole confession, written in the only language Viktor had ever trusted. Not words, which could be denied or misread or qualified into nothing, but action. The books. The evenings. The coat off and the mask down in the room of a sick man. The hand on the arm has no clinical purpose. The lingering. The choice, made without announcement, was to let Jayce matter more than the distance.

He had known. Some part of Viktor had known, in the specific and technical sense, precisely what he was doing when he stayed. Viktor, who knew how plague moved — through contact, through proximity, through time spent breathing the same air as the sick — Viktor had known, and he had stayed anyway, and he had done it again, and again, across all the evenings, because he was Viktor and he communicated in what he chose to do when he thought no one was watching the choice.

Jayce looked at the chair by the window.

He looked at it for a long time.

There was no arithmetic for grief that made the sum of it bearable. He had been looking for one, some accounting that settled the numbers into something he could carry, and there wasn't one. There was only this: Viktor had loved him in the only way Viktor knew how — in precision, in action, in the extraordinary and irreversible fact of choosing badly for the first and only time in his careful, meticulous life.

The understanding was the grief. Knowing it completely, at last, and having nowhere to put the knowledge.

He left without looking back at the chair. He did not trust himself to look at it again.

He walked out into the cold city, into the gray street, into the afternoon that continued — because afternoons did that, because days did that, because the city had been continuing without him for months already and would continue without him now. He walked, and the cold was specific around him, the cold of a city that had lost people while he was away, that had gone on losing them while he rehearsed speeches in a tent in the dark.

He thought about Viktor asking, near the end, in the careful, diminished voice of a man whose asking had become precious and rare: Have the knights come home yet?

I came home, Viktor.

I came home.

He walked.

Behind him, in a room being used for something else now, a chair sat by a window in the winter light. The window looked out on the same courtyard. The light fell on the stone below, thin and clean and indifferent, falling on the same street it had always fallen on, not knowing what it was illuminating, not knowing what had happened here, not knowing anything at all.

The light did not know.

Jayce walked, and the city held him. Somewhere behind him, the chair sat empty in the winter afternoon, as chairs do.

As rooms do.

As everything does when the people who made them matter are gone.