"He's alive."
The King said it quickly, almost roughly, as though he needed the words out of his mouth before whatever came next could be allowed to matter more. "Wounded. A blade caught his side during the counter-charge, and the healers say the fever that followed was severe enough to worry them for two days. But he's alive, and by the time this dispatch was sent, the fever had broken."
Yuan's knees very nearly gave out from relief alone, the weeks of dread cracking open all at once into something almost too large to hold. He'd spent every night since the messenger's grim face at the gate imagining the worst — a body instead of a report, a funeral instead of a homecoming — and hearing the opposite confirmed felt, for one long, suspended moment, like the only thing that mattered in the entire room, worth every sleepless hour it had cost him to reach it.
