The Night Shift at Saint Elias

• Chapter 1 The Curfew Bell
• Chapter 2 Shadows at the Gate
• Chapter 3 Blood and Bitter Herbs
• Chapter 4 The First Influx
• Chapter 5 Leech and Needle
• Chapter 6 Echoes of the Trebuchet
• Chapter 7 A Healer's Oaths
• Chapter 8 Whispers in the Cloister
• Chapter 9 The Tainted Draught
• Chapter 10 Hands Unshaken
• Chapter 11 Fever Dreams
• Chapter 12 Breached Walls
• Chapter 13 The Young Apprentice's Burden
• Chapter 14 Secrets Kept in Poultice
• Chapter 15 The Midnight Cry
• Chapter 16 A Mask of Merciful Lies
• Chapter 17 Thread and Sinew
• Chapter 18 Fire on the East Ward
• Chapter 19 Sins of the Apothecary
• Chapter 20 Cold Steel, Warm Blood
• Chapter 21 The Matron's Vigil
• Chapter 22 Sifting the Ash
• Chapter 23 The Breaking Point
• Chapter 24 Hour of the Wolf
• Chapter 25 The Final Triage
• Chapter 26 Light upon Saint Elias

The bronze toll of Saint Elias’s evening bell did not merely announce the coming of dusk; it settled into a man’s teeth like grit. It rang forty strokes, slow and flat, carrying over the lime-washed walls of the hospital ward, through the narrow arrow-slits, and out into the choked streets of the lower bailey. With every stroke, the city of Oakhaven drew itself tight against the cold spring mud and the certainty of siege.

Old Peter did not count the strokes. He had worked the infirmary floor for forty-two years, and his joints kept better time than the cathedral carillon. Instead, he wiped his bone-handled knife on a strip of boiled linen, laid it aside on the cedar prep-block, and picked up a jug of stale vinegar.

"The wind has turned north," he said to the empty air between the trestles. "It carries the smell of burning peat from the ridge. They’ve finished clearing the orchards."

Across the flagstones, kneeling by a low pallet where a teamster lay sweating out a lung rot, his daughter Anna did not look up from her needle. She was knotting a waxed thread through the hem of a fresh mattress ticking.

"Let them burn the trees," Anna said, her voice steady enough to crack walnuts. "Apples don't stop crossbow bolts anyway. What matters is whether the miller brought the coarse flour before the North Gate was chained. If we are eating bran mash by Tuesday, I will have half the dysentery ward throwing chamber pots at my head."

"The flour came," Peter grunted, hauling an iron cauldron two inches closer to the embers. His knees made an audible pop. "Three sacks of rye and one of damp wheat. The carter swore it was dry when he loaded it, which means he dumped it in the moat to weigh it down and took the difference in silver coin."

"Naturally," Anna said. She bit through the thread with a sharp click of her front teeth. "And Master Baldwin will call it God's will when the bread turns green."

"Master Baldwin is currently praying over the cellar keys," Peter noted, allowing himself a dry flicker of a smile. "Which is his way of ensuring that none of us steal the sweet malmsey while the sun goes down."

Between them sat the apprentice, young Robin, though at seventeen he looked less like an apprentice physician and more like a crane that had narrowly survived a fox attack. He was perched on a three-legged stool near the window bay, scraping dried madder root into an alabaster mortar. He scraped too fast, spilling crimson powder across his sheepskin apron.

"Steady, boy," Peter murmured without turning around. "The root costs two silver pennies an ounce since the southern road closed. If you powder your lap with it, I shall boil your breeches for a broth."

Robin froze, his pestle suspended three inches above the stone. His knuckles were gray from chalk and washed tallow. "I heard shouting by the barbican, Master Peter. Men on horseback. The watch was blowing the horn—two short blasts and a long one."

"The heralds returning," Anna said, rising from the pallet and smoothing her apron over her wool kirtle. She was thirty-six, built like an ox-cart, with hands that had set more broken femurs than any sworn barber in the shire. "They gave the duke until nightfall to deliver the town keys. Well, the sun is behind the western palisade. The keys are still on the mayor's belt. Ergo, we are now under formal investiture."

"Besieged," Robin breathed, tasting the word as if it were a bitter clove.

"Invested," Peter corrected firmly. "Siege implies someone has actually battered down the timberworks. Invested merely means the butchers outside won't let the butchers inside go out to pick mushrooms. It is a legal distinction of interest primarily to clerks and gravediggers. For our purposes, it means the night shift has begun, and the carters will not be bringing fresh straw until the treaty is signed or the ditch is filled with corpses."

He pointed a gnarled, ink-stained thumb toward the far end of the Great Hall.

"Check the lamp oils. Not the cheap mutton tallow—the smoke makes the lung-sick cough blood. Use the rape-seed flasks from the lower press. And Robin?"

The boy scrambled up, nearly overturning the stool. "Yes, Master?"

"Wash your fingernails in the lye bucket before you touch another dressing. I can see the stable dirt from here, and if you give the blacksmith's boy the gangrene with your filthy claws, his brother will come in here and use your head to repair an anvil."

Robin bobbed his head twice, pale as tallow himself, and scuttled toward the washing trough near the postern door.

Saint Elias was an old stone barn of a place, originally built by a guild of weavers who had all died of the sweating sickness seventy years ago. The church had taken the shell, scraped out the looms, and placed sixty beds beneath its vaulted timber roof. It smelled of its history: wet wool, sulfur, dried mint, vinegar, old urine, and the faint, sweet decay that clung to the plaster walls like damp moss. High up in the rafters, barn swallows still nested, dropping occasional feathers down onto the wool blankets of the dying.

The hospital was divided into three ranks. Along the south wall, where the small hearths provided some warmth, lay the paying patients—merchants’ clerks with the stone, minor guild-wardens with the gravel, and the occasional bailiff who had taken a knife between the ribs in an alley off the Shambles. The center aisle was reserved for the dropsical, the palsied, and the chronic paupers whose parishes paid four farthings a month to keep them from dying under the town gates.

The north side was currently empty, its pallets stripped bare and its floor scrubbed with lye until the timber grain showed white. That was the casualty ward. It was kept cold deliberately; cold stopped the stink from rising, and it kept the flies from breeding in the sawdust before the wounds could be stitched.

Anna walked the center aisle, her heavy clogs clacking rhythmically against the stone. She stopped at the fifth pallet, where an old weaver named Simon lay curled like a dried leaf. His breath came in thin, rattling whistles that sounded like dry reeds in an autumn pond.

"How is the hip, Father Simon?" she asked, resting her cool, flat palm against his forehead.

"Cold," the old man whispered. "The priest came at nones. He took my last brass groat for a candle to Saint Jude."

"Father Thomas would take the wool off a sheared sheep's back if he thought it would shorten his own time in purgatory," Anna remarked, tucking the coarse gray blanket beneath Simon's chin. "You don't need Saint Jude tonight. Jude is for desperate cases. You only have the rheumatics and a bad liver from thirty years of drinking small beer at the sign of the Harrow."

"My water was black this morning," Simon croaked.

"It was brown," Anna said. "I looked at the jar myself. If it were black, you wouldn't have had the breath to complain about the broth at midday. Drink your water with the willow bark, keep your hands under the wool, and stop listening to the bells. When the cannons start, they make enough noise to rattle your teeth out of your gums; you will have plenty of warning to say your prayers."

She moved on to the next pallet before the old man could conjure another symptom. Her efficiency was not cruel, but it was narrow. There were seventy-one souls inside the stone perimeter of Saint Elias this evening, not counting the four lay-sisters who worked the laundry and the two drudge-boys who carried out the buckets. If she stopped to weep over every gray face, the fires would go out, the laundry would rot in the tubs, and the dressings would turn green before midnight.

At the eastern door, where the porch met the inner lane of the monastery, the heavy oak iron-banded door groaned inward.

A gust of sharp night air swirled through the aisle, carrying with it the unmistakable stench of the city gutters: offal, night-soil, and the sharp tang of horse sweat. With the draft came Master Baldwin, the Chief Warden of the infirmary, his fur-trimmed mantle pulled tight over a belly that had survived five municipal famines without losing an inch of girth.

Behind him lagged Brother Martin, the apothecary monk, carrying a willow hamper that clinked with dark glass phials.

"Bar the shutters," Baldwin bellowed, his voice carrying the oily authority of a man who held three church prebends and had never once emptied a bed-pan. "Every shutter on the north gallery must be bolted with oak pins. The duke’s scouts have crossed the lower ford. They’re firing the thatch along the river."

Peter did not look up from the iron pot where he was stirring mutton fat with crushed elecampane. "They won't waste fire arrows on stone tiles, Master Warden. Slate doesn't burn, and lead is too expensive to melt when they can simply wait for us to eat our horses."

"You know nothing of modern siegecraft, Peter," Baldwin snapped, shedding his cloak with an irritable flick of his shoulders that left Robin scrambling to catch it before it hit the damp flags. "The Lord Marshal has ordered the town gates secured with iron chains and granite foot-stones. No one enters. No one leaves. Any wounded from the skirmishes at the ditch are to be brought here through the water gate."

"And the surgeons?" Peter asked, squinting through the steam of the cauldron. "Are the guild surgeons coming to assist, or are they still sitting in the guildhall debating whether iron extraction is a craft or an art?"

Master Baldwin’s mouth tightened until his lips vanished into the gray stubble of his chin. "The Guild of Barber-Surgeons has withdrawn to the Upper Ward. By order of the Mayor, they are reserved for the defense of the Citadel and the household of the Governor."

Anna stopped in the middle of the floor, a basin of vinegar balanced on her hip. "Reserved?" she said, her voice dropping into that quiet, dangerous register her father knew too well. "There are four hundred foot-levies on the low walls, Master Baldwin. They have boiled-leather jacks, tin pots for helmets, and pitchforks. When the stone-bows start throwing iron, who does the Mayor think is going to sew up their bellies? The parish clerk?"

"The Mayor has determined," Baldwin said, puffing his cheeks out, "that the civic line must hold where the council resides. We are the hospital of the poor, Mistress Anna. We do what we have always done. We offer the consolations of Holy Church and such physical succor as our endowment permits."

"Which is damp rye flour and six rolls of linen," she said.

"Ten rolls," Brother Martin chimed in timidly from behind his hamper. He set the basket down on the table with great care. "I managed to secure two stones of lint from the draper's widow before the guards closed the High Street. And some alum. Not much, but enough to burn out proud flesh if the cuts turn sweet."

Peter stepped away from the fire, wiping his hands on his greasy leather apron. He walked over to the hamper, his boots dragging slightly on the flags, and peered inside.

"Where is the poppy?" he asked.

Brother Martin swallowed. His tonsure was uneven, fringe sticking out like feathers around a crow's bald pate. "The castle provost seized the Constantinople stock. He said the archers would need it for the pain when their fingers split on the longbows."

"Liar," Peter said, not with heat, but with the cold certainty of an appraiser. "The castle provost has an ulcer on his leg the size of a turnip and he drinks three vials a week to sleep through the night. What did he leave us?"

"Henbane," Martin muttered. "Some dry mandrake root. Two jars of elderberry wine with lead oxide to settle the turbidness."

"Lead oxide," Anna spat. "Splendid. If the arrow doesn't kill them, we can poison their kidneys before matins. Robin, take that jar and set it on the high shelf behind the vinegar. If I see anyone give elderberry to a child tonight, I'll pour the rest down Brother Martin’s cowl."

The monk looked down at his sandals, his face flushing crimson. "I took what was given, sister. The carters had spears. One does not argue the pharmacopoeia with men who have iron on their boots."

"Enough," Baldwin commanded, though he stepped back toward the door as he said it. The sound of horse hooves, muffled by the slush in the alley, clattered outside the thick timber walls. A long, mournful blast from a cow horn rolled over the rooftops from the river gate—not the crisp signal of the city watch, but the harsh, grating call of the county militia.

"The Curfew has rung," Baldwin announced, adjusting his skull-cap. "The Bishop’s bailiff has declared the precinct closed. The keys to the larder are in my scriptorium. If you require lard or tallow, Peter, you must submit a billet in writing to Brother Martin."

"A billet," Peter said flatly. "In writing. While a man is spurting his life through his femoral vein into a bucket."

"Order must be preserved," Baldwin replied, his dignity restored now that he was near the exit. "In times of trial, the rules of the Foundation are our only defense against chaos. I shall be in the chapel, praying for the preservation of the walls."

"Mind you don't wear out the kneeler," Anna said to his retreating back.

The door clicked shut behind the Warden, the iron latch dropping into its keeper with the decisive snap of a mousetrap.

Silence returned to the ward, though it was a different silence than before. The bell had stopped, leaving an ache in the ears where its tone had been. The forty patients in the long hall were entirely quiet now. Even the dropsical dyer in the third row, who usually groaned like a dying pig when the night air set in, had pulled his wool over his nose. Sick men had an instinct for these things; they knew that the world outside the high lime-washed walls had suddenly contracted until nothing existed except this long, drafty corridor and the people who held the knives.

Robin came back from the trough, drying his raw, red hands on a rag that was only slightly less gray than his apron. "Master Peter?"

"Aye?"

"My brother is on the North Wall. With the fletchers."

Peter looked at the boy. The lad's lip was trembling, though he was trying hard to hold it firm by biting it between his front teeth.

"Your brother has two good legs and a helmet, hasn't he?"

"A leather cap, sir. With an iron hoop around the crown."

"Then he is better protected than half the poor bastards who took the duke's silver," Peter said, turning back to his prep-block. "Now stop gaping at the rafters and bring the cedar boards. We need twenty splints cut to the length of a man’s forearm, and twelve for the thigh. Smooth the splinters off with the drawing-knife. If you leave a rough edge on an ash splint, it turns a clean break into an ulcer within two days."

The boy nodded and ran toward the timber chest under the eastern stairs.

"You shouldn't lie to him," Anna said softly, coming up beside her father's elbow. She was sorting through a wicker basket of rolled linens, checking each one for dampness by holding it against her cheek.

"I didn't lie," Peter said, his knife scraping a thin curl of horn off an old spatule. "His brother might survive. God has an affection for idiots; that’s why He made so many of them."

"The North Wall is dry rubble," she said. "The Duke's grandfather built it with river stones and poor lime during the Scottish scare. If they bring an engine against the Water Gate, the whole curtain will slide into the ditch like porridge."

"Then we will have a great many broken bones to set," Peter said. "Which means we will need those splints Robin is scraping. Work your fingers, Anna. The tongue won't stop an arterial fountain."

Anna sighed, a long, weary sound that smelled faintly of the dried sage she kept in her pockets to mask the ward's reek. She looked toward the small iron-grated window that faced the northern skyline.

The dark was complete now, black and thick as lamp-black, but along the rim of the low hills beyond the river, tiny sparks had begun to prick the night. One, then three, then twenty. Not stars, but campfires—the great, sprawling circle of the Duke’s siege lines, closing around Oakhaven like an iron collar around an old dog's neck.

Far off, down toward the river where the willow beds grew thick, there came a sound like a great tree snapping in the winter frost.

A single thump followed, vibrating through the solid limestone foundation of Saint Elias until the pewter mugs on the dry-shelf clinked together like teeth.

"The engine," Robin whispered from the timber chest, the draw-knife frozen in his hands.

Peter didn't look up from his horn spatule. "That was the test shot. They're finding the range of the barbican. We have two hours yet before they hit anything that bleeds."

He pointed with the blade toward the iron cauldron.

"Anna, put more wood on that fire. If we don't have twenty gallons of water boiling by the fourth watch, we'll be washing arrow wounds in cold slime, and I am too old to listen to men scream because the water gave them the shivers."

The woman moved to the woodbox without another word. Outside, the night grew very cold, and somewhere down in the city, an iron chain was drawn through an iron ring with a sound that screeched like an owl through the dark.

The North Porch of Saint Elias opened not to the paved courtyard where the monks paced their devotions, but onto a narrow cul-de-sac called the Ditchway. In ordinary seasons, it was where the tanners tipped their spent bark and where stray dogs fought over mutton knuckles discarded from the friary kitchen. Tonight, the alley was a throat choked with cold mist and the smell of wet wool.

Anna pulled the wicker basket of scrapings toward the heavy oak door. She did not bother to knock or call out, but shoved the oak slide of the viewing wicket aside with the heel of her hand. The iron grating was chilled enough to burn the skin.

Outside, the darkness was thick, but it was not empty. A cluster of hooded figures was huddled against the flanking buttress, their cloaks glistening with the oily frost that settled off the river. Two city guardsmen stood near the mouth of the alley, lean-faced men in boiled leather brigandines who held their bills at a weary slant, their breath pluming white against the pitch.

"The gate is barred by the Warden's order," Anna called through the grille, her voice flat and loud enough to scatter the pigeons roosting in the arch. "If you have a fever, sit on the steps. If you have the bloody flux, sit twenty paces downwind. If you are whole, go back to your own hearth and pray the wind stays out of the north."

A woman detached herself from the wall, stepping forward until her eyes caught the tallow glow from the opening. She wore a stained wool mantle pinned with a cheap pewter brooch shaped like a hazelnut. In her arms she held a bundle of gray sacking that did not move.

"Mistress Anna," the woman said. Her teeth were chattering, clicking together with a frantic rhythm. "It’s the water. The constable’s men threw three dead horses into the lower conduit when they retreated from the ditch. My boy drank from the stone trough by the Shambles before the bailiff could post the guard."

Anna squinted down at the bundle. "How old?"

"Four winters. He hasn't kept milk since midday. His skin is like a scalded pig’s."

Behind Anna, Old Peter’s boots dragged across the flagstones, their iron-shod heels making a dry scraping sound. He carried a small dish of burning sulfur on a long brass ladle, holding it low so the pale yellow fumes drifted upward between them, making Anna’s eyes water.

"Bring the boy through the small wicket," Peter muttered, not looking at the mother. "Leave the blanket outside. The wool holds the stench of the ditch, and we have enough rot inside without inviting the river's leavings. Robin! Get the small tub of vinegar-wash and three dry rags."

The boy scrambled from the timber chest, dropping a draw-knife that clattered against the stone floor before he caught himself and lunged for the buckets.

"Father," Anna said under her breath, turning her head slightly so her words stayed between them. "Master Baldwin took the cellar keys. We have no honey for the stomach-draught, and if this is the well-rot from the Shambles, the child will be dry as a salt herring before midnight. We have no clean well-water left in the cistern—only the rainwater from the lead gutters."

"Then we boil the rainwater twice and steep it with dried oak-bark," Peter said without halting his shuffle. "The tannin binds the bowels. If the child lives, he lives; if he dies, he dies with a dry belly instead of drowning in his own bile. Move the bolt, Anna. Don't let the draft linger."

Anna slid the heavy iron bolts. They were stiff with years of tallow and damp, grinding through the keepers with a shrill screech that echoed down the quiet length of the nave. She cracked the leaf open just wide enough for a body to slip through, her shoulder braced hard against the wood to prevent the small crowd on the stones from surging forward.

The woman practically fell inside, bringing with her a gust of air so foul it overwhelmed the sulfur: the bitter, sharp reek of stagnant river mud and child-vomit. She dropped to her knees on the cold flags, clutching the bundle to her breast as though Anna might tear it away.

"On the bench," Peter commanded, pointing with the handle of his ladle toward a scrubbed ash plank set against the lime-washed wall. "Strip him. Leave the clout by the door. If he soils the flags, you will scrub them with sand yourself, woman."

The mother obeyed with clumsy, trembling fingers. The child was small for four, his ribs showing through yellowish skin like the laths of a plaster wall. His eyes were half-open, glazed with the dull, greasy film that comes when the spirit begins to loosen its grip on the flesh, and his breath smelled faintly of rotten fruit.

Robin arrived with the basin, sloshing sour-smelling vinegar onto his wool cuffs. His face was gray. "Master Peter, his lips are blue."

"His lips are blue because his blood has turned to sludge," Peter said, laying two fingers on the child’s throat. He pressed firmly, feeling for the flutter beneath the collarbone. "The heart is pumping ditch-water instead of spirits. Robin, don't stand there gaping like an ox at a butcher's block. Take the linen square from the jar on the second shelf—the one marked with the black cross. Dip it in the cold spring-water we drew at sext. Not the vinegar. Vinegar will drive the heat deeper into his liver."

Robin hesitated. "The black cross? But Brother Martin said that water was for washing the communion plate."

"Brother Martin is not currently dying of the conduit-rot," Peter snapped, his voice rising just enough to carry over the mutter of the crowd waiting outside the iron grill. "The bread of heaven can be wiped with beer if the priest's hands are clean. Do as you're told, or I'll give your dinner to the teamster."

Robin vanished toward the apse where the locked armoires stood.

Anna was already at work, her large, capable hands moving over the small body with a swiftness that seemed at odds with her heavy frame. She lifted the child’s chin, pinched the skin of his belly—which remained standing in a dry, pale fold long after her fingers released it—and shook her head once, very slightly, toward her father.

"Too late for oak-bark," she said quietly. "His water has stopped. The heat is in his marrow."

"Then we cool the skin to keep the convulsions off," Peter replied. He set the sulfur dish on a tripod and wiped his thumb across the child's sunken temple. "His father is John the cooper, isn't he? From the gatehouse ward?"

The woman, still kneeling in the dirt of her skirts, nodded frantically. "He's on the palisade, Master Peter. With the iron-throwers. They wouldn't let him leave his station, not even when the boy began to purge. He gave me his silver ring—the one from his mother—to give you for the physic."

She fumbled in the hem of her bodice, her fingers hooked around a thin, worn hoop of pewter-colored metal.

Peter didn't look at it. "Keep your ring. A cooper's ring won't buy an ounce of Armenian bole in this town tonight. If John wants to pay me, he can make sure the duke's men don't drop a timber-log through our larder roof before morning."

He turned back toward the main aisle of the infirmary, where the low murmuring of the sick had begun to take on a sharper, more rhythmic quality. Two pallets away, an old carter with a crushed knee had pulled himself up on an elbow, his yellow teeth bared in an anxious grin.

"Master Peter!" the carter called out. "Is that the water-poison? Don't let them wash him near the well-bucket! My leg is bad enough without the river-scabs getting into the marrow!"

"Shut your face, Giles," Anna called back without turning. "The child is five yards from your greasy sheepskin. If you have the breath to shout, you have the breath to roll over and let the pus drain from your lint-pad like I told you at sunset."

The carter cursed under his breath, but he subsided, grumbling into his blanket about barber-leeches and the price of town dues.

Before Robin could return with the water jar, another sound cut through the damp air from the cul-de-sac. It was not the weeping of the women outside, nor the dull thud of the distant engine against the barbican, but the heavy, deliberate tread of armored shoes against wet cobbles. The rhythmic clink of iron mail rings against leather jacks grew louder, accompanied by the low, urgent muttering of several men trying to carry a dead weight over rough ground.

A fist pounded on the outer planks of the north door—three heavy, iron-ringed blows that shook the lime-dust down from the transom.

"Open for the City Guard!" a voice bellowed through the grating. It was a thick, wet voice, ragged from shouting against the wind. "Open up, in the name of the Lord Marshal!"

Anna stood upright, wiping her palms on her apron. "That will be the first of the gate-crews," she said to Peter. "They were using the old ash-beams to shore up the lower portcullis. One of them must have dropped."

"Or the duke's miners have found the dry ditch," Peter said. He picked up his bone-handled knife and tucked it into his belt beside his probe. "Robin! Leave the child to his mother. Take the iron kettle off the trivet and bring it to the middle trestle. Anna, draw the lower bolt."

"The Warden said—"

"The Warden is on his knees in the vestry," Peter said, his voice entirely devoid of passion. "And unless he has learned how to sew a slashed windpipe with an ave-maria, his opinion on the bolts is worth less than the straw under that dying boy. Draw the iron, Anna."

She did so, throwing her weight against the secondary bar. The heavy oak door swung inward three feet, checked by the limit of the chain.

Through the gap spilled three men. Two of them were common militiamen in greasy fustian jackets reinforced with iron plates at the shoulders, their faces black with soot and their wool hose soaked to the knees with ditch-water. Between them, slung in an old woolen horse-rug that was darkening rapidly with a deep, purplish stain, was a man whose helmet was missing. A thick clot of hair and matted blood covered the side of his head, but it was not his head that had brought them to Saint Elias.

His right leg was twisted beneath him at an angle that no natural joint permitted, the thigh-bone having punched through his gray homespun hose like a broken ash-stake through a sack. A jagged splinter of ivory-white bone stuck three inches into the cold night air, dripping thick, sluggish gore onto the threshold.

"The windlass snapped," one of the militiamen panted, his breath coming in whistling gasps. He was a young man, barely older than Robin, with the yellow hair of the northern marsh-dwellers and a wide, terrified mouth. "The counter-weight on the great drawbridge gave way when we were raising the iron teeth. It caught Master Hal on the timber-step."

"Hal the wheelwright?" Peter asked, stepping forward with the lantern raised to the injured man's face.

The wounded man did not answer. His skin was the color of skimmed milk, his lips parted in a dry, rattling hiss. A fine sweat had broken out over his brow, turning the soot on his forehead into thin black grease that ran down into his whiskers.

"Aye," the militiaman said. "The Mayor’s brother-in-law. The Mayor said he was to be brought to the Barber-Surgeons at the upper gate, but the street was blocked with timber-wains. The crowd is tearing up the paving stones by the market cross to make shot for the engines. We couldn't get the litter through the crush."

"So you brought him here," Anna said, stepping between the bearers and the trestle table. Her sleeves were already rolled up to her elbows, revealing pale, powerful forearms scarred by years of caustic lye and hot water. "To the poor-house. Because you know the barber-surgeons would look at that bone, take one whiff of the marrow, and tell you to find a priest before they dirtied their silk gowns."

"He’s the Mayor's kin," the militiaman repeated, as if the phrase were a charm against the cold.

"Then the Mayor's kin is about three minutes from bleeding to his ends," Peter said calmly. "Bring him to the high board. Not the center aisle—the blood will run between the flags and sour the lime under the paupers' straw. Lift him by the armpits, you fool, don't drag the leg! Robin, take his feet. If you drop the heel, the jagged end will saw through the great artery, and we will all be wearing his life on our stockings."

Robin, whose hands were still wet with the holy water meant for the altar plate, lunged forward. His skinny frame shook as he took the weight of the injured wheelwright's boots. The bone shifted with a sickening, wet crunch that made the apprentice’s throat work violently, but he kept his grip, his teeth set hard into his lower lip.

Together they hoisted the man onto the oak prep-block. The wood had been scrubbed so often with sand that it was smooth as lard, hollowed slightly in the center where decades of severed limbs and crushed torsos had rested.

Outside, the small crowd at the door surged forward an inch, trying to peer through the widening gap to see the Mayor's great kinsman laid low. Anna turned on them with the cold fury of a mastiff defending a larder.

"Out!" she barked, catching the foremost man—a limping weaver with a bandage around his jaw—by the chest of his doublet and shoving him back into the fog. "There is nothing here for you to gawk at. Robin, set the chain on the hook. If anyone else tries to squeeze through before the third watch, drop the iron drop-bar on their toes."

She slammed the leaf until the heavy iron hasp caught, shutting out the mists of the Ditchway and the gray faces of the town-folk, leaving only the close, sulfur-tinged warmth of the ward and the sound of Hal the wheelwright's ragged breathing.

"The tourniquet," Peter said. He was already at the man's groin, his fingers digging deep into the soft hollow where the thigh met the belly. His knuckles were white with the force he applied, pressing the vessel against the edge of the pelvis. "Anna, get the Spanish windlass from the leather roll. The hemp cord, not the horsehair. Horsehair stretches when it gets wet with blood."

Anna didn't answer with words; she had the hemp cord in her hand before Peter had finished the sentence. She looped it twice around the mangled thigh, four fingers above the protruding bone, slipped a short piece of seasoned oak through the bight, and began to twist.

The wheelwright’s eyes flew wide. A sound came from his throat that was neither words nor a scream, but a high, piping squeal like a pig caught beneath a pasture gate. His back arched off the cedar table, his fingers hooking like claws into the oak edge until his nails split against the grain.

"Hold his shoulders, boy!" Peter barked at Robin.

Robin threw his entire weight across the man's chest, his ribs pressing against the wheelwright's leather jack. The smell was overpowering: the stale beer on the man’s beard, the iron tang of the fresh blood soaking through the hemp, and the foul, fatty reek of the deep tissue exposed to the cold room. The apprentice felt the man’s heart hammering through both their clothes like an engine of war, frantic and irregular.

"Tighter, Anna," Peter said, watching the white stump of bone. The crimson flow that had been pulsing out in rhythm with the man's gasps slowed to a dark, thick ooze, then to a sluggish trickle that gathered in the hollow between the splinters. "That's enough. Tie the stick off with the flax-string. If you leave it too tight for more than a quarter-glass, the whole limb will blacken and fall away like rotten fruit."

"It's going to fall away regardless," Anna said, her voice dropping into the cool, technical cadence she used when the spirit had left her emotions behind. She reached for the small brass basin where the curved amputation blades lay in oil. "Look at the splinter, Father. It’s split into the joint. The marrow is full of gray dust from the stone-works. If we set that, he’ll be screaming with the timber-fever before Sunday, and his belly will swell until it splits."

Peter leaned close, squinting through the steam of his own breath. He touched the shard of bone with the tip of his silver probe. The metal gave a dry tink against the ivory surface.

"He's fifty winters old," Peter muttered. "A heavy man. He carries thirty pounds of suet around his ribs from drinking the town-hall mead. He won't survive the saw, Anna. His heart will crack before you are halfway through the marrow."

"He won't survive the night with that bone sticking into the air," she countered. She picked up a broad-bladed knife, its edge gray and dull-gleaming from fifty sharpenings on the oil-stone. "We take it off three inches above the break, seal the stump with hot pitch, and sew the flesh-flaps over with waxed linen. If he dies, he dies of the shock, which is quick. If he stays like this, he dies of the gangrene, which takes three days and smells so bad we'll have to burn the bedding."

Robin, still holding the wheelwright’s shuddering shoulders, felt the man’s skin growing colder under his palms. "Master Peter... he’s stopped fighting."

Peter looked up at the wheelwright's face. The man’s jaw had fallen slack, his eyes rolled back toward the high, dark rafters where the swallows roosted. A long thread of white spit hung from the corner of his lip to his shoulder.

"He hasn't died," Peter said, clapping a rough palm against the man's gray cheek. "He’s swooned from the pain. The spirits have retreated to the liver. It's the best time for it. Robin, fetch the saw from the grease-cloth behind the water butt. The one with the fine teeth, not the butcher's blade. And get the iron ladle full of pine resin off the side-hearth."

Robin let go of the man’s shoulders, his limbs trembling so violently he nearly knocked over the tripod. "The... the saw, sir?"

"The saw," Peter repeated without looking at him. "And move your legs, boy. God gave you two of them, which is one more than Master Hal will have when the watch changes."

The apprentice bolted down the aisle, his shoes slipping once on a greasy patch near the middle hearth.

In the corner near the entrance, the mother of the sick child was still crouched on the flags, holding her limp bundle against her knees. She had stopped weeping. She watched them with the wide, empty stare of those who have seen the butcher at work in the marketplace and know that meat is merely meat, whether it wears sheepskin or broadcloth.

From high above, through the arrow-slit in the north gable, came another low, shuddering crash. It was closer this time—not the barbican, but the high gatehouse of the Outer Baileys. A shower of fine, lime-scented dust drifted down from the ceiling rafters, settling like a gray snowfall across the wheelwright’s open wound and the clean linen Anna had laid upon the board.

Anna did not curse. She merely reached out with a scrap of dry tow and wiped the dust from the edge of the bone before picking up the large, horn-handled amputation knife.

"Robin!" she shouted into the dark at the far end of the hall. "Bring that grease-cloth, or by Christ’s wounds I'll use your own shin to practice the cut!"

The night had scarcely begun, and already the boards were slick. Outside, beneath the shadow of the great curtain wall, the first shouts of the wounded began to rise from the ditch, carried on the north wind like the calling of crows over winter stubble.