The Temple of Sooths is known to take in abandoned females. The girls and the niece will be safe there with those prognosticators that I don’t believe in. At least their wall is solid and strong.
“He will never… allow that.”
My eyes move up to the tip of Elly’s nose. “You are aware of what I can see, yes?”
“Yes,” she says weakly. “And what… you can do. But death… is not always… a curse.”
I shut my lids, aware that she and I are of agreement. I will not save her in the way I’m able. “Take ease then. The torment from him will not last long now, and when his time comes, I’ll make sure your lovely daughters and his niece are taken in at the temple.”
There is a flare of surprise from her, but it doesn’t last. “Promise…?”
“I promise upon my beating heart.”
Going back inside the wet folds of my cloak, I take out the satchel I prepared earlier. Mare needs the herbs. Elly needs them more. They’re supposed to be brewed as tea, but there’s no hope of that. I wouldn’t trust the farrier, and I can’t stay here much longer. Someone could walk in, perhaps with news of what happened at the pub with Mr. Cavenish.
Now is not the time for me to be found next to the birthing pallet of yet another dying woman.
Lifting up the hem of my cloak, I go through the layers to reach my underskirt. With my knife, I cut a square of the thin cotton the size of my hand and make a table of my knee. After I open the satchel’s neck, I empty all the dried flakes onto the center of the square. Then I bundle it up and use the little bag’s tie to close the corners.
“I want you to put this in between your back teeth and chew.” I lean in, and help her open her mouth. “This will soothe the pain.”
I adjust the shape into a flat wedge, and push the medicine off to one side, so that it doesn’t block the back of her throat. Closing her jaw, I hope that she holds the wad in place. With the herbs undiluted, they are going to be potent and I don’t want her choking if she loses consciousness—
The relief that comes over her is quick and carries with it a brief aura of light. For a moment, I think she’s leaving us, and with my word given, I will not stop the process. But no, the flare is a lie my mind creates because with her easing comes my own.
As she slips into the sleep that will hold her dear until her heart stops, I brush a tear from my eye, and realize I have marked my cheek with her blood. This feels right.
I gather up the bundle in the tunic, and rise to my feet.
I find the farrier at his planked table full of bones, the scatter of white sticks an allegory for all the consuming, the breaking, he has done in the calendar days and nights he has had upon Anathos’s once-hallowed ground. He’s got a bladder to his mouth, and has dribbled his beard with his haste to suck on the teat that muddles his mind.
The girls are nowhere to be seen, and I imagine they have a hiding place somewhere close by, a refuge outside of this domestic hell. That niece is going to watch after the sisters well, and I hope the farrier’s fate with the hot fire in his forge happens very soon.
“You will come to me in two hours,” I say as I place the dead bairn on the table, on the bones. “I will have herbs for her, and you will administer them.”
It’s too risky for me to enter here again, even in the darkness. I don’t care about him, but those girls must be protected from my presence. Especially after what Mr. Cavenish brought to the Gauntlet tonight.
The farrier passes his meaty paw down his face with defeat. “She is still alive, then.”
“Yes. And youwilldo right by her.”
I bend down and stare across at him from out of my hood. As I meet his stare once again, like lightning splitting a tree, I am struck anew by his suffering, and I breathe in his hot pain with a nasty satisfaction.
The voice that comes out of my mouth, comes up from my soul, vibrates between us, deep and low. “I will know if you do not.”
The fear that sparks in his bloodshot eyes is the leverage I have over them all. In the daylight, in the safety of lanterns and numbers, the villagers shun me, but they’ve come to me. Each one, in their own way, has sought me out for unlawful things, and been witness to a strange and troubling miracle.
So even though the dance with death is my only distinction, they assume there are others I could wield against them.
I’m perfectly content to have this man worry about what I can do to him.
With my message received, I straighten. “Dispose of your boy properly as you did not the wife and daughter you first lost. And know that at the moment of your death, no matter where I am, or what I’m doing, I will know—and I will rejoice.”
I don’t tell him to mind being around that hearth of his. Don’t warn him that there will be an accident, soon. Say nothing about the flames that will claim his flesh first and then his life.
I leave as I came in, sneaking back out into the freezing rain and the dangerous night. I’ll have to see Mare tomorrow. With a full pub and the hour being late, there will be tables to wipe down, messes to clean up, tankards to wash. But none of that, and even my elderly patient being left without help through the night, is what’s on my mind.
Another side of me, one that’s mostly hidden and that I don’t recognize as myself, has broken free, and like a horse bolted from a stall, there’s no easy way to get the anger and vengeance back under control. It’s just so hard to see the same thing played out, over and over again.
