"I think I must have been fifteen," she said. "So that would have made him seventeen, then."
She spoke calmly, conversationally, and apropos of nothing at all.
Gunther paused in the act of applying a damp cloth to her forehead. He raked his free hand through his hair, then rubbed it hard down his face from forehead to chin, trying to compose himself.
Every single time she spoke out in her delirium, another little piece of his heart was ripped to shreds. He didn't think he could take much more.
"Jane?" he asked finally, tentatively. His voice broke on the single syllable of her name. It was a voice so roughened by exhaustion and stress that he barely even recognized it. It could almost have belonged to a stranger.
At this point he was feeling a bit like a stranger in his own body.
"When I knew," she said, answering a question he hadn't asked, and sounding slightly exasperated, as if she could hardly believe how dense he was being. "That was not when it started – I am not sure when it started, it came on so gradually. But that was the day that I knew. It was the day the princess broke her leg, do you remember that?"
"Yes," Gunther said. He knew it was ridiculous to be engaging in this conversation – it couldn't truly even be called a conversation; it was the one-sided ravings of a delirious person. She had no idea he was even there. But he was so tired and off-guard that her question, asked in a perfectly reasonable manner, evoked an answer from him because God yes, he remembered that day. It had been a terrible day. Terrible.
"Cuthbert came running," Jane said, in a musing, reminiscing sort of tone. "We were the first people he encountered – Gunther and I. We followed him back to where she was, and it was a distance; they had snuck out of the castle keep. Gunther carried her all the way back, he was so gentle and patient with her and she was screaming, I mean absolutely shrieking in his ear the entire time – it must have given him a headache, but you never would have known."
A headache? Even all these years later, Gunther grimaced. It hadn't given him a headache, it had given him the headache. The mother of all headaches. His head had never pounded that way at any other time before or since. And it hadn't stopped when he'd left the screaming princess in the hands of other, more qualified caretakers, either. That monster headache had stayed with him for hours. It had been bad. Bad.
"And then he sat in the courtyard for two hours, mending her broken wings," Jane continued. "She was not even wearing them all the time by then – only occasionally. But he sat there for two hours mending them anyway. And then his father showed up shouting and carrying on because he had been expecting Gunther's help with a shipment – Gunther had been getting ready to go and do that when Cuthbert fetched us. Magnus called him a good-for-nothing layabout, and a lot more too –" (Gunther winced again; even all these years later, the pain of his father's words was just as memorable as the pain of that headache) – "and said that if Gunther did not follow him directly, there would be hell to pay. So of course Gunther said he would – and then he sat there for another whole hour making sure he got those wings just perfect. They were better than new. He even adjusted them to account for the fact that she had recently had a growth spurt. When he finally did go home… I cannot even imagine the reception he must have gotten."
Jane might not have been able to imagine it, but Gunther remembered all too well. Suffice to say, it had been pivotal in his decision to take up full-time residence at the castle, which he'd done soon afterward.
"So that was when I knew," Jane concluded simply. "That was the day I knew I loved him."
Then, for a while, she said no more. Gunther was left in silence to contemplate the fact that one of the absolute worst days of his life had apparently, unbeknownst to him, played a critical role in winning this amazing woman's love.