It wasn't that hard. Kichlan had helped me once, I could go to him again. Grovel like a weak chick cast from her nest, snivel because I had nowhere else to stay.
"Stop that," I whispered to the closed door, my teeth rattling in tune with my bones.
I knocked on the door. The knocker was steel and cold. It bit into my bare fingers and kept scraps of my skin as payment.
The house remained still.
I knocked again; my hand shook so much I wasn't sure I could control it. A long breath of darkness, of quiet and cold, and I started to doubt this was the right house. Started to believe I was standing in front of some deserted ruin knocking my way into a cold and endless sleep.
Then voices murmured behind the door, and I heard shuffling. A light peered out of a gap between door and top step. Keys rattled.
The door opened with a groan, exhausting to hear. It split the darkness with a crack of lantern light that hurt my eyes. And Kichlan was there. Only half of his face, the rest of him was hidden. And that half a face was squinting and scowling, concerned and angry all at once.
Perhaps intended to frighten off an intruder.
Or confuse them.
"Who's there?" His voice cracked. He had been asleep, I realised. A sleep he dearly needed and I had pulled him from it.
"I have a problem," I stuttered. My words jumbled over my rattling teeth, and my breath wove a thick haze in front of Kichlan's widening eyes. "I have… a problem."
I wasn't really sure what else to say, there on the doorstep. Without my jacket.
"Tanyana?" Kichlan opened the door wider, saw me properly. "Other! What are you doing?" He grabbed my shoulder and pulled me into the house.
Eugeny and Lad waited behind him. The old man held a fire stoker above his head as though ready to strike. Lad sat on the stairs, chin in his hand, eyes drooping and expression bored.
"Tan!" Lad stood when he saw me, all sleep falling from his wide eyes. "Kich! Tan is here!"
"Yes," Kichlan's gaze took me in with one long, unimpressed sweep. "I can see that. Give me your hands."
I blinked at him. "Hands?" I pried them from my pockets, and still trying to hold the book firmly beneath my left arm, held them out for him. My fingers were blue, the colour broken only by white beneath my nails and red where the door knocker had nipped me.
"Other's eternal darkness, girl." Eugeny joined Kichlan in peering at my frozen, battered skin. "What happened to you?"
I stared at the old man, his scowling tenant, and the younger brother's unconcerned grin. "It's very hot in here." Sweat was running beneath my uniform, itching where it trickled between my breasts.
Eugeny placed a rough hand on my forehead. "Other," he snapped. He turned to Kichlan. "Get her warm, that's a fever I can feel. Lad!" He drew Lad's willing and now firmly wide-awake attention. "Help me, boy. Tan needs medicine or she will be sick."
"Oh!" Lad, shocked, went a strange shade of mottled green and white. "Oh… oh no!" He ran off into the kitchen, overtaking Eugeny.
"Lad locked himself out of the house one Rest a few moons ago, gave himself a fever." Kichlan shook his head. "He hasn't forgotten it. Trust me, he'll hover over you and feel every ache and pain."
"Why is everyone calling me Tan?" I asked him. The idea of a fever was too difficult to understand. It wobbled away in a fog somewhere in my head, ineffectual and quiet.
Kichlan gave me a strange, tilted-eye look and didn't answer. "Why don't you sit down, Tanyana?" He still held my hands and tugged on them gently. I hissed through my teeth. My fingers were numb, but the back of my hands felt fiery beneath his touch. "Come and sit down."
He drew me into the drying room, where I had slept the last time I came here. I suddenly realised how exhausted I was. But Kichlan didn't let me lie down. He found a collapsed couch somewhere behind the forest of hanging clothes and bed sheets. He propped me up in its cushions, drew a blanket from a line close to the dim fireplace and draped it around my shoulders.
I struggled against its weight. "Hot," I murmured.
"No, Tanyana. It isn't. Not really." He wrapped long fingers around the book under my arm. "Give me that. You can sit, then, and have a nice drink."
Was I thirsty? "No." Maybe, it was hard to tell. My mouth felt dry, but the thought of anything in my stomach made me nauseous. "You can't take it."
Kichlan leaned very close. His breath smelled of cinnamon. "It's me, Kichlan. I'm not going to take it away, I'm going to look after it."
Kichlan. That's right, it was Kichlan. Not Barbarian lying on my floor, not Comedian clutching his wrist and howling. Kichlan. Kichlan I could trust. I eased my arm open and he slid the book out. He gave it half a moment's glance and placed it on the floor.
"Be careful," I whispered. "That's all I have left."
Eugeny entered, a tray in his hand and Lad at his heels. Lad carried a mug, steaming faint trails of haze over his face, with a reverential delicacy.
"Drink." Lad bent at the waist to hand me the mug. His eyes were focused on the surface of its dark liquid so intently they nearly crossed.
I tried to take it from him but Kichlan was much faster. He took the cup with a click of his tongue. "Fingers like that, you'll spill it all over your own lap."
"Don't want to do that," Lad told me, solemn. "Need to drink it all."
Kichlan held the mug up to my lips. I scowled at him. "I'm not a child, I can hold my own drink."
"Don't be stubborn." A firm light came into Kichlan's eyes, the kind I had seen when he spoke to Lad in one of his moods. "You came here for help, didn't you? So take it."
Help involved a roof and a space away from the snow. It didn't involve being fed like an invalid or a child. But as I opened my mouth to protest, Kichlan pressed the mug against my lips, and I ended sipping something hot and bitter instead.
I coughed, and Lad gave me a knowing smile. "I know it tastes bad," he lectured me in a fair imitation of Kichlan's voice. "But you need to drink it all."
"What is it?" I made a face at Eugeny, certain he was the cause of this particular problem. "Not another gold plant."
He lifted his eyebrows at me. "Golden roots of the waxseal plant? No, not this time. Hyssop, liquorice root, thyme."
Words in a language I didn't understand. So I glared, puzzled, at him over the rim of my mug as Kichlan – with gentle, but inexorable hands – forced me to drink.
Eugeny shook his head. "You always come here in a state, girl."
I swallowed and leaned my head back long enough to gasp some much-needed air. Kichlan's idea of drinking, it seemed, did not involve enough time to catch one's breath. "Here is a good place to be in a state," I said, before I finished the drink's grass-murky dregs.
"Bro?" Lad, having satisfied himself that I would in fact finish the disgusting but no doubt beneficial brew, collected my book from the floor. "What is this, bro?"
Before I could move, Kichlan smoothly turned, stood, and took the book from his younger brother. "It's Tan's. She brought it with her."
Lad seemed content to peer at the cracking leather cover from over his brother's shoulder. "A book!" Excited, he clamped his fingers over Kichlan's upper arm. Kichlan winced. "What does it say, bro? Do you know what it says?"
Kichlan ran his finger below the embossed lettering on the jacket. It had once been gold, I had been told when given the gift, but years and use had eroded the title to the point where it was almost illegible. "Its title says Principles of Architecture, by Eldar Velchev."