I woke up the next morning with a head full of cotton and a nose that wouldn't stop running.
"Don't," said Noctavia, from the foot of the bed, before I could open my mouth.
"I'm fine."
"You're glowing."
"That's the fever."
"Everything that glows in this house is a problem." She pressed the back of her hand to my forehead, frowned, and pulled it away as if I'd burned her. "Stay there. You're not getting up. I told you that you'd catch a cold."
"You did tell me."
"Idiot."
She stormed out of the room, and I heard pots banging downstairs.
I have been stabbed, burned, and thrown off a cliff. I had never been so fussed over.
She brought soup, a little salty, and tea with honey, which was perfect. She brought three blankets and then a fourth, and when I said I was too warm, she took one away and put it back a minute later without a word. At one point she stood at the end of the bed and stared at me, arms crossed, tail twitching.
"Do you need something?" I asked, my voice thick.
"No."
"Then why are you—"
"I'm monitoring you."
"Okay."
"Don't die."
"I won't."
"It's a cold." Her ears went pink. "I'm only saying."
Please stay.
I was too tired to smile properly, so I did it with my eyes. She looked away first.
By afternoon, she'd run out of things to fix inside the house.
I heard her go out into the garden, because I could hear her talking, very quietly, to the tomato. I couldn't make out the words. I could hear the tone, which was the one she uses when she is pretending to be stern and failing.
A little while later she came back in, hovering at the bedroom door.
"The tomato is leaning," she said.
"Hm?"
"It's three leaves tall, and it's leaning. The wind pushes it every time it blows. It needs a stake. And food. For plants. The book says so."
"There's a book?"
"I found it on the shelf. It's very informative." She held up a small, battered gardening manual. "Stake, and plant food, and possibly a cage. Where do I get those?"
"The Millbrook shop. Old Pell's. Next to the well."
"Noctavia. You'd have to go alone."
She was quiet.
"I can come," I said, and tried to sit up. A wave of dizziness knocked me straight back onto the pillow.
"Stay." She pointed at me with the book. "I'm the Demon Lord of the Black Throne. I've led armies through nine kingdoms. I can buy a stick."
"You gave Harlan three silver for a loaf of bread."
"That was once."
"Take copper. Give them one copper for the stick."
"I know how money works."
She did not. But she took the little bag of coins, pulled her gray coat over her tail, and put the hood over her ears, and stopped at the bedroom door with her back to me.
"Don't get up."
"I won't."
"I'll be back before dark."
"Okay."
"...Don't die."
"Noctavia."
"I'm leaving!"
The front door closed very gently, and her footsteps went down the road.
I know what happened next because she told me later, unwillingly, in small pieces, in the form of complaints.
The village was quiet again when she walked through the gate. But it was a different kind of quiet. People still stopped what they were doing. A woman with a laundry basket still froze in the middle of the road. But when Noctavia nodded, very stiffly, in the general direction of the crowd, somebody nodded back.
Then someone else did.
A little girl at the well, with a missing front tooth, waved at her with one hand and dropped her bucket with the other.
Noctavia, I'm told, walked past the entire square at a perfectly measured pace, with her hood low and her ears pink, and said "Good afternoon" twice, in her most terrifying voice.
Old Pell's shop was small and dusty and smelled of rope and twine. Pell himself was a thin, nervous man in spectacles who kept his hands flat on the counter the whole time, as if she might bite them.
"I need a stake," said Noctavia. "For a tomato."
"A... stake."
"And plant food. And possibly a cage."
"Y-yes, of course. How tall is the tomato?"
She held out her hand about knee height. Then, because that was probably an exaggeration, lowered it to her ankle.
Pell looked at her hand, and a very small expression crossed his face. Then he took down a slender wooden stake and a small canvas sack.
"You'll want to tie it loosely," he said. "Soft twine. Not tight. A plant is like a child. It needs support, but it must be allowed to lean a little."
Noctavia paused.
"...Lean a little."
"Yes, my lady."
"That's... a reasonable principle."
Pell nearly smiled. She paid in exact copper. He gave her extra twine for free, and she pretended not to notice.
She was almost home when she saw them.
The square was emptying as the rain began again, thin and gray. At the far edge, under the awning of a closed fruit stall, two children sat on an overturned crate with their backs against the wall.
The girl was about fifteen, tall and thin, in a coat too short in the sleeves. She had her arm around a much smaller boy, maybe five, with straight brown hair that stuck to his forehead. They were splitting half a heel of bread between them, very exactly, and the girl was giving him the bigger half.
Noctavia stopped.
She stood in the rain with a wooden stake in one hand and a sack of plant food in the other, and she looked at them for a long time.
The girl noticed her first. Her eyes were sharp and wary. She pulled the boy a little closer against her side and looked straight at the hood, and the tail poking out from under the coat, and the pink tips of the ears.
She didn't run. She didn't speak. She only held the boy tighter.
I know what you are. Don't come any closer.
Noctavia understood that language better than anyone in the world.
She took one step forward. Her free hand twitched, and for a moment, I think, she meant to hold out her entire coin purse.
Then the girl's chin lifted, hard and proud and terrified.
Noctavia stopped. She stood there a moment longer. And then she turned around and walked home, a little faster than she had come.
She was in the garden when I came downstairs, a few hours later, wrapped in two blankets and holding on to the doorframe.
She had driven the stake into the ground next to the tomato. She had tied the stem to it with soft twine, loose, and she was kneeling in the mud, in the rain, with her coat soaked through, adjusting the knot for the fifth time.
"You're supposed to be in bed," she said, without turning around.
"How was the village?"
"Fine."
"Was it okay?"
"It was fine, Elise."
I looked at her back. At the rain on her shoulders. At the tail, which was drooping very low to the ground.
I'm not telling you.
I thought about the two children in the square, and about the thing I hadn't told her. Neither of us said a word, and the tomato leaned gently against its stake and did not fall over.
"The plant is going to be fine," she said, after a long time.
"I know."
"It just needed support."
"I know."
"...Come inside before you die."
I went inside.
That night, I added a line to the dictionary.
"Fine" means "I'm worried about something, and I don't know how to say it yet."
And underneath, in smaller letters, because I'm not very good at holding my tongue even when I'm sick:
Neither do I.