The Night Ward's Maggot Girl

• Chapter 1 The Rot Cellar
• Chapter 2 Belladonna and Bone
• Chapter 3 The Knight in the Night Ward
• Chapter 4 A Jar of Carrion Keepers
• Chapter 5 Blood of the Iron-Clad
• Chapter 6 Whispers in the Damp
• Chapter 7 Forbidden Spores
• Chapter 8 Flesh and Green Fur
• Chapter 9 The Matron's Cold Eye
• Chapter 10 Fever Dreams and Silver Crests
• Chapter 11 Scraped from Stale Bread
• Chapter 12 The Midnight Cleanse
• Chapter 13 Pulse Beneath the Blackening
• Chapter 14 The Apothecary's Suspicion
• Chapter 15 A Knight Awakens
• Chapter 16 Crypt-Bloom Cultivation
• Chapter 17 Murmurs of Heresy
• Chapter 18 Debt in the Shadows
• Chapter 19 The Broken Poultice
• Chapter 20 Sister of the Grubs
• Chapter 21 The Inquisitor at the Gate
• Chapter 22 Searing the Rot
• Chapter 23 The Secret in the Bandages
• Chapter 24 Trial of the Unclean
• Chapter 25 Armor Restored
• Chapter 26 Beyond the Hospital Walls

The stench of Saint Jude-in-the-Fen was not a single smell, but an entire hierarchy of insults to the nose. At the top of the abbey hospital, up where the Prior and the attending physicians took their watered wine, the air smelled predominantly of beeswax candles, dried lavender, and the sour vinegar used to sponge clean the linen shirts of men who still had money to leave in their wills. A floor down, in the Great Ward, the scent sharpened into stale piss, boiled cabbage, and the copper reek of open veins draining into tin bowls.

Down in the sub-crypt, where Elowen spent her working hours, all those higher perfumes simply died of shame. Here, the world belonged to cold river silt, tallow, and the thick, sweet putrefaction of horse offal kept at an exact, suffocating temperature.

Elowen pushed a lock of greasy brown hair behind her ear with the back of her wrist, leaving a smudge of grayish loam along her cheekbone. She didn't bother wiping it off. In the cellar, vanity was an impractical luxury, much like dry shoes or unbroken skin. Before her sat twelve wide shallow dishes of unglazed red clay, set atop a waist-high stone bench that wept condensation into the straw underfoot. Each dish was bedded with a layer of chopped suet, strips of liver from the knacker’s yard, and dampened sawdust.

And in each dish, the meat seemed to breathe.

It did not heave with lungs, of course, but with tens of thousands of tiny, blind, pearlescent bodies. They tumbled over one another in a frantic, glistening cream-colored tide, humming a faint, wet percussion against the earthenware edges. To anyone from the chapel above, the sight was a nightmare lifted directly from the frescoes of the damned on the north wall. To Elowen, it was a garden. A very specific, very hungry garden that required weeding twice daily.

"You're sluggish today, girls," she muttered, tapping the edge of the fifth dish with the flat tip of her bone spatula. The spatula had been carved from the rib of an ox three winters ago, worn down until its edge was as smooth and thin as a thumb-nail.

She leaned closer, the greasy flame of her rushlight throwing long, jumping shadows across the stone vaults. The third batch, seeded four days back from the green-bottle flies she trapped in the willow wicker cages behind the latrines, was growing nicely. They were clean feeders, the green-bottles. They possessed an admirable fastidiousness that the physicians upstairs were too proud to comprehend. A green-bottle larva wanted nothing to do with living muscle, pink skin, or the pulsing warmth of healthy blood. It wanted only the black, slick slurry of dying flesh—the necrotic waste that turned a man’s wound into a swamp before the poison took his heart.

The bluebottles, now, they were cruder. Given half a chance, they would chew their way into sound meat if the rot ran thin, making a patient shriek until the brothers had to tie him down with harness straps. Elowen kept the bluebottles strictly segregated in the rear niches, marked with crosses scored into the damp limestone.

With practiced, rhythmically steady strokes, she began to sort. Her hands were bare. Gloves were forbidden to her; gloves cost pennies, and Brother Ambrose, who held the keys to the hospital’s stores, would sooner have clad the cellar rats in velvet than grant an orphan girl leather to spare her fingers from grease. So her fingers had learned their own intelligence. They knew the difference between a worm ready for harvest—fat as a grain of barley, plump, pale, and dry to the touch—and the small, clear runts that still needed another afternoon nestled against cold calf kidney.

She scooped a measure of the plump ones into a small lidded pot of boiled linden wood. The wood was clean, having been steeped in water taken from the mid-stream current of the fen before sunrise, away from the tannery run-off.

"Brother Ambrose wants sixty for the dyer’s boy," she told the clay dishes. The worms made no reply, though the wet rustle of their feeding shifted slightly as a drop of sweat fell from her chin and struck the sawdust. "The dyer’s boy crushed his toes in the fuller’s press. Father Jerome tried to heal it with hot honey and hog’s grease, so naturally the boy’s foot has turned the color of an over-ripe damson and smells like an open ditch."

She gave a brief, dry snort through her nose. She had told Jerome two days ago that honey over an uncleaned gangrene was merely giving the devil a sweet supper, but Jerome had called her an insolent ditch-born creature and threatened her with three hours kneeling on the chapel flagstones. Elowen had kept her tongue between her teeth, gone down to her cellar, and waited. The churchmen always waited until the bone showed or the stink reached the choir stalls before they called for the maggot girl.

A heavy scrape of wood sounded from the top of the spiral stair—the thick oak door that separated the crypt from the hospital cloister had swung open.

Footsteps descended. They were deliberate, flat-footed, and accompanied by the soft, dry click of wooden beads against wool. That would be Brother Matthew. Ambrose never came down himself; he believed the smell of the rot-tanks curdled the humors of the brain. Jerome was still busy praying over his own failed poultices. Matthew was the only one whose stomach was tough enough to cross the threshold, though he invariably held a ball of pomander tucked tightly into his sleeve, lifting it to his nose every third breath.

The novice appeared at the bottom step, his gray cowl pulled so far forward his face was mostly chin and twitching nose. He paused on the bottom stone, his leather clogs hesitating before touching the slimy straw.

"Elowen?" he called, his voice muffled by wool and clove paste.

"I’m by the bench, Matthew. Mind the puddle on your left. The drainage ditch has backed up from the river again."

Matthew skirted the dark sheen of water, his habit hitched up nearly to his knees like an old fishwife crossing an oyster bank. He stopped three paces back from her sorting table, his pale eyes darting nervously toward the clay basins. Even after two years in the infirmary, he looked upon the dishes as though they might spring legs and carry him off into the fen.

"The physician is asking for the pot," Matthew said, staring fixedly at the rough mortar between two wall stones somewhere above her right ear. "The dyer’s boy has the shivers. The leg is hot to the hip."

"He has the shivers because Jerome packed the wound with old grease and left the crushed splinters inside," Elowen said evenly, without looking up. Her spatula flicked three fat grubs from the tallow into the linden cup. "The grubs won't eat crushed bone, Matthew. You tell the surgeon he’ll have to pull the splinters with the long pincers first, or my girls will just sit there and drown in the corruption."

"You shouldn't call them that," the novice muttered, shifting his weight. A damp draft caught his robe, making him shudder. "It’s unnatural. They’re vermin. Born of corruption by spontaneous generation out of the muck. They don't have kin, and they certainly aren't girls."

"Everything comes from something, Brother," she replied mild-toned, dropping a small square of clean, loose-woven linen over the mouth of the linden pot and tying it fast with hemp twine. "The flies lay the seed, the seed hatches the worm, the worm eats the filth, and turns into a fly again. If that’s spontaneous generation, then so is wheat coming out of a plowed furrow."

"Father Jerome says it is the corruption itself taking form to mock the living," Matthew said, though he didn't sound particularly confident about it. He reached out an arm, keeping his elbow stiff and his body leaned back as far as his spine allowed, waiting for the vessel.

Elowen held the pot just out of his reach for a second. "Tell him forty drops of vinegar after they’ve sat twelve hours. Not before. If he pours vinegar on them while they’re still working, he’ll pickle them alive inside the wound, and then he’ll have dead worms on top of dead meat, and the boy won't see Sunday."

Matthew snatched the wooden cup, his fingers brushing against hers for a split second. He jerked back as though he had touched a stove rake, his cheeks flushing pink under the gray cowl. "God preserve us from the wisdom of the pit," he muttered, though he tucked the pot carefully into the leather scrip at his belt. "You’re to stay down here through the third watch. There’s an intake coming down the North Road. A wagon from the skirmish near the weir."

Elowen paused, her spatula held motionless above the squirming tallow. "Soldiers?"

"Mercenaries and three men-at-arms from the Earl's garrison. One of them is a captain of some note, they say. Took a lance through the saddle-bow and into the thigh three days ago. They brought him in an open cart through the sleet." Matthew made the sign of the cross—hurriedly, using his left hand because his right had touched her cup. "He smells worse than your pans, girl. Ambrose thinks he’ll be dead before the bell rings Prime, but they’ve put him in the small cell off the lower ward because his sergeant threatened to burn the larder if he was left with the common beggars."

"A lance in the groin three days in the sleet," Elowen murmured. She set the bone tool down on the edge of the red clay. "That won't be simple rot. That’ll be river-fever and horse-hair drove deep into the meat."

"Don't sound so pleased," Matthew said sourly. "The man is gentle-born, or near enough. They won't want your crawling things on his skin. Jerome has already sent down to the village for three fresh pigeons to cut open and lay upon his belly to draw the venom."

Elowen could not help the short, sharp bark of laughter that escaped her. "Pigeons. To draw an iron-rust humor out of four inches of bruised gristle? Jerome might as well throw parsnips at him."

"Mind your mouth, Elowen. You’re only here because your mother knew how to boil bark, and we haven't found anyone else willing to handle the fly-boxes without puking into the larders." Matthew backed toward the stair, his eyes already fixed on the pale rectangle of light at the landing. "Keep your cellar swept. If the knight dies tonight, the Prior will want the lower crypt clear for the vigil before noon."

The heavy oak door shut behind him with a dull, subterranean thud that rattled the soot on the ceiling beams.

Elowen stood alone in the center of the vault. The silence returned immediately, filled only by the dripping of the fen-water through the joint-stones and that perpetual, faint, dry sizzle—the sound of ten thousand small white mouths clearing away the dead.

She did not return to the tallow immediately. Instead, she turned her back on the workbenches and walked deeper into the cellar, past the iron-bound casks of rancid lard, past the salt bins and the stacks of empty funeral boards. At the very rear of the crypt, where the Roman foundation met the native granite of the hill, the masonry was broken. A low arch had been bricked up two centuries ago, but the mortar had surrendered to the perpetual river-damp, crumbling into a gray paste that smelled of iron and stagnant water.

Behind a loose stack of hollow flue-tiles, hidden from the sight of any monk who didn't care to crawl on his belly through three inches of bilge, sat Elowen’s true work.

It was not a clay dish. It was an iron kettle, cracked across the belly and mended with pitch, sitting inside a wooden tub packed with decaying oak bark and wet moss. The mixture fermented slowly, throwing off a faint, steady heat—just enough to keep the interior of the kettle warm as a brooding hen.

Elowen knelt, uncaring of the wet that soaked instantly through the knees of her coarse wool skirt. She reached into the kettle and lifted the lid of thick, boiled leather.

Inside, there was neither fat nor meat.

There were only three rounds of dark, heavy barley bread, baked without salt, resting upon a nest of damp, crushed elderberry leaves. The bread had long ceased to look like food. Across its crusted surfaces grew a dense, velvety pelt—not the gray-green fuzz that grew on neglected cheese in the abbey larder, but a strange, deep, blue-green turf, rich as church silk, with tiny beads of clear, amber fluid sweating from its velvety crests.

The smell was entirely different from the rest of the crypt. It was sharp, cold, and earthen, like the air in a deep forest ditch after an autumn frost, with a distinct, mushroomy undertone that caught at the back of the palate.

Elowen closed her eyes and took a long, slow breath through her nose. Her mother had called it the green-mother’s fleece. Her mother had also died in a cage hanging from the town wall of Ely during the great sickness nine years back, after the local bailiff decided that a woman whose patients lived while the priest’s patients died must be trading their souls for herb-tricks.

Elowen had been eight then. She had hidden under the bridge until the soldiers rode away, then crept back to their cabin to salvage three things: her father’s skinning knife, a wooden box of dried fly-cases, and a crust of this very mold, wrapped in a pig’s bladder.

"You're growing thick, little ones," she whispered. The warmth coming off the rotting bark was steady. The blue-green velvet didn't care for sunlight; it hated the dry wind, and it died if it touched vinegar. But here, in the dark beneath the sickbeds of Saint Jude’s, it thrived on the damp breath of the stones.

She took a horn spoon from her apron pocket—smooth, clean, and never used for offal—and gently scraped three drops of the clear amber sweat from the mold-fur. She touched the drop to the tip of her tongue.

It was impossibly bitter. It tasted of copper nails, willow bark, and cold well-water. It made the spit rush into her mouth, followed by a faint, tingling numbness that lingered on the lips for minutes afterward.

"A knight with an iron wound," she said to the dark interior of the kettle. "Jerome will put his pigeons on it. Matthew will light two groats’ worth of candles. And then they will go to bed and leave him to me."

She replaced the leather lid carefully, adjusting the moss around the kettle to keep the draft away from the cracks. Then she stood, wiped her horn spoon on a clean scrap of linen she kept tucked inside her stays, and went back to the sorting table.

There was still an hour before the dusk-bell. She had twenty more dishes to clear of the dead flies, three cages to rebait with cow-throat, and the earthen floor needed another layer of dry ash from the kitchen hearths to keep the slugs from reaching the tallow.

Above her head, through twelve feet of solid stone and timber, she heard the muffled, mournful clatter of an iron wheel striking the flagstones of the abbey gatehouse. The wagon had arrived. A man screamed—not the sharp, indignant yell of a soldier struck down in battle, but the thin, ragged, bubbling shriek of someone whose body had already begun to rot while he was still using it.

Elowen didn't look up. She picked up her bone spatula, scooped four fat, white, headless bodies from the dish, and went back to work.

The bell for Compline had long since fallen silent, its final vibration dying out over the reed-beds of the fen, when Elowen climbed the narrow spiral stairs from her cellar into the Great Ward. She moved without haste, carrying an iron lard-lamp in one hand and a wicker basket lined with damp nettle cloth on her hip. In her skirt pockets sat two stone vials, one filled with mutton grease cut with crushed yarrow, the other stoppered with bees’ wax and filled with cold, strained spring-water.

The Great Ward was a cathedral of bad breath and failing kidneys. Forty narrow cots lined the lime-washed walls, their straw ticks black with the grease of a hundred desperate tenants. Two rows of stout oak posts held up the smoke-blackened rafters, and between them hung strips of wool soaked in bay-salt and vinegar, intended to break the corrupt vapors that drifted between the dying. They did nothing of the sort, serving only to make the room smell like pickled mutton.

Brother Matthew was supposed to be watching the candles, but he had tucked his elbows into his sleeves and fallen fast asleep against the grain of an oak support, his chin resting on his chest, snoring with the wet, bubbling rattle of an enlarged tonsil. At the far end of the hall, near the altar of Saint Jude, Father Jerome had finished his evening rounds. The dyer’s boy was quiet now, mostly because the fever had reached his neck and turned his brain into hot gruel. Jerome sat by the small brazier, his inkhorn out, carefully entering three pence into the infirmary ledger for the holy oils he had dabbed onto the child’s soles.

Elowen did not look at either of them. She knew the map of the ward’s flagstones by heart—the hollow stones where the rats nested, the greasy ones near the slop-buckets, and the high tiles that squeaked under a soft turn of the foot. Keeping her head bowed and her apron gathered tight so it wouldn't brush the pallets, she crossed to the western wall, where a low arched timber door led into the inner cells.

The small room smelled of hot tallow, fresh horse dung, and scorched brass.

"Get back, girl," a voice rumbled from the corner before she had even cleared the lintel. "The priest said no more washers until morning. He’s had his oil. If he dies, he dies with his boots near, not under the paws of some kitchen slut."

A man sat on an upturned oats-tub by the hearth. He was wide-shouldered, scarred across the nose by an old crossbow graze, and clad in a leather jack that had lost half its horn rings. An arming sword, unbuckled from his hips, leaned against his thigh within easy reach of his calloused right hand. His eyes, rimmed with the pale, red salt of three sleepless days, glared at her through the soot-light.

"I’m not a washer," Elowen said, stepping past him into the narrow room. The air was heavy, hot enough to bake pastry, trap-doored by the small charcoal brazier the brothers had set by the window to drive out the night fog. "I'm the maggot girl. Brother Matthew sent down for the cellar pot."

"The pot’s already on him," the soldier spat, wiping his mouth with a hairy wrist. "Some church fool tipped forty crawling worms into his groin an hour back. Covered them over with a dead pigeon and a cabbage leaf. Said the beast’s heart would draw the malice out of the spear-cut. Bastard looked like he was seasoning a stew."

Elowen set her lamp down on the low three-legged table beside the pallet. "Who was the priest?"

"The skinny one with the teeth like peeled turnips. Jerome."

"Jerome is an idiot who thinks the blood runs on four wheels like a brewer’s dray," Elowen muttered, setting her wicker basket down on the floorboards. She turned her attention to the man on the cot.

He was a big man, broad across the breast-bone, with shoulders that took up the entire width of the rough mattress. Even lying flat, stripped to an unbleached linen undershirt that had been torn open from neck to navel, he had the hard, spare look of someone who spent his autumns in an iron saddle and his winters eating dried salted beef. His face was the gray-yellow of curdled sheep's milk, his beard clipped close in the Norman style, though it was now matted with cold sweat.

His eyes were shut tight, his mouth slightly parted, each breath whistling through his teeth as though he were drawing water from a dry well.

"He’s Sir Brand of the High Crag," the soldier said from his tub, his voice dropping an octave, though he kept his hand on the pommel of his sword. "Captain to the Earl’s western levy. If he dies in this fen-hole, the bailiff will answer for it. He’s got five hides of land behind the hills and cousins who don't care much for monks."

"He’s got four inches of ash-wood and river-slime in his inner thigh," Elowen countered, reaching out to pull back the coarse wool blanket. "His land won't stop the black humors from reaching his heart before the sun comes up over the reed-cutter's hut."

The smell rose as soon as the wool cleared his hips. It was not the simple sourness of sweat, nor the clean stench of horse sweat. It was the sweet, sickly reek of gangrene—warm, heavy, and tasting of brass.

The wound was in the right groin, where the thigh met the pelvic bone. The skin had swollen until it looked like an overfilled leather bottle, stretched so tight the pores showed white like pigskin. In the center, between two crude cross-stitches of black cobbler’s thread, lay a mangled lump of raw meat. Jerome had indeed followed his old books: a small gray wood-pigeon, split down the breast while still warm, had been tied over the hole with a strip of dirty linen.

Under the edges of the bird’s gray feathers, a dozen white grubs were already writhing blindly, trying to escape the dead fowl’s greasy belly.

Elowen let out a short, harsh breath through her nose. "He put them under the carcass."

"He said the bird would take the poison, and the worms would eat what the bird left," the soldier said, leaning forward, his eyes narrowing. "Isn't that how you people do it?"

"If you drop a sheep into a horse pond, does it turn into a trout?" Elowen snapped. She reached down with two bare fingers, seized the cold, limp foot of the pigeon, and peeled it off the knight’s flesh. A wet, tearing sound came from the wound, accompanied by a sudden release of dark, bloody serum that smelled like an uncleaned fish-box.

Sir Brand let out a low, shuddering moan. His hand, brown-skinned and scarred with white ring-marks from mail sleeves, twitched toward his hip where a dagger should have been. His fingers clawed into the tick, tearing the coarse canvas until dried chaff spilled over the side.

"Keep him still," Elowen said, reaching into her pocket for her horn spatula. "If he thrashes now, the pocket breaks inward toward the gut, and no one on earth will save him."

The soldier rose from his tub, his boots thumping heavy on the planks. "Don't touch him with that bone knife, girl. I've seen horse-leeches do this. They start cutting, and by midday the man’s carried out on a plank."

Elowen looked up at him, her gray eyes cold in the tallow-light. "He took the lance three days back. The spear-head broke, didn't it? The smith’s leaf came away, but the ash-shaft was split."

The soldier hesitated, his brow furrowing over his scarred nose. "Aye. The iron came out on the field. The boy pulled it with the horse-tongs. But the wood had splinters like thorn-twigs."

"And your clever Jerome sewed the hole shut over the splinters to keep the blood inside," she said, tapping the black thread with the edge of her bone. "Look at the belly. See that red line? That’s not blood. That’s the fire running up the vein. It’s two fingers from his bladder. Once it reaches the soft meat behind his ribs, he’ll start vomiting black bile, and by prime he’ll be colder than this hearth."

She didn't wait for his permission. She drew a small iron bodkin from her sleeve, dipped the point into the flame of the lard-lamp until the metal glowed dull red, and then, with three quick, merciless strokes, severed Jerome’s cobbler’s stitches.

The wound burst.

It did not bleed; it vomited. A thick, grayish-brown curd, streaked with curdled yellow pus and black bits of dried horse-hair, welled out of the slit. The stench was so sudden, so intensely rotten, that the veteran took a step back, gagging into his sleeve.

Elowen didn't blink. Her nostrils flared slightly, her fingers working with mechanical, unhurried certainty. She took a flat wooden spatula and pressed the flesh two inches above the opening, working her way downward toward the gash. With each press, more of the poison spilled across the oilskin cloth she had slid beneath the knight’s flank.

Sir Brand’s eyes flew open. They were wild, yellowed with jaundice, the pupils dilated until the blue of his irises was merely a thin rim around the black. He lunged upward, his left hand snatching at Elowen’s throat with iron force.

"Hold him!" she hissed, not breaking her grip on his thigh. "Soldier! Grab his shoulder or I’ll let the rot run where it likes!"

The man-at-arms dropped his sword with a clatter and threw his full weight across Sir Brand’s chest, pinning the knight’s good shoulder to the pallet. "Peace, Captain! Peace, by God! It’s the infirmary! You’re at Saint Jude’s!"

"The ditch..." the knight gasped, his voice cracked and thick with phlegm. His fingers twisted into the wool of Elowen’s apron, pulling her down until his face was inches from hers. His breath was cold, smelling of vinegar and death. "The horses... they’re down in the ditch... Gervase, the banner..."

"The banner is safe, Captain," the soldier lied through gritted teeth, his knees digging into the knight’s hips. "Lie still, damn your soul. Let the girl scrape you."

Elowen ignored the hand twisting in her wool. She dipped two fingers into her jar of cold yarrow-water and washed the lips of the wound clean of the pigeon’s grease. The grubs Jerome had tipped into the cut were mostly dead, drowned in the sudden rush of foul serum; she flicked them out onto the floorboards with the horn tip like so many grains of boiled oats.

"Jerome used the field maggots," she muttered, disgust plain in her voice. "Common ditch-crawlers. They've been eating the good meat along the edge while the deep core stays rotten."

She reached into her basket and pulled out her own box—the linden-wood cup she had prepared in the deep cellar before Matthew had called her. She cut the hemp string with her thumb-nail and peeled back the linen cover.

Inside, thirty green-bottle larvae, starved for twelve hours on clean sawdust, were writhing with frantic vigor. They were smaller than Jerome’s worms, their bodies clear as river glass, fat-headed and sharp-tailed.

"What are those?" the soldier asked, his breath coming hard as he kept the knight pinned. "They look like wood-wasps."

"They're the only things between him and the ditch he’s dreaming about," Elowen said.

She did not pour them in all at once. With her bone spatula, she took them three at a time, sliding them deep into the split, past the swollen red lips of the skin, right into the dark cavity where the ash-wood had splintered against the bone.

The knight stiffened under her hands, his belly muscles jumping like bowstrings, but he did not scream. He had passed beyond the sharp edge of common pain into that cold, gray place where the body merely registers impact without understanding it.

"Now," Elowen said, reaching into the bottom of her basket. "The bone."

She didn't have the iron forceps the surgeons in Paris used—the great hinged tongs that could pull a horseshoe from a hoof. She had only her mother’s bone tweezers, made from a heron’s leg, bound with waxed linen at the crook to give them spring.

She slid the thin bone tines into the hole.

Sir Brand’s fingers relaxed their grip on her apron, his head falling back against the straw tick with a wet thud. The yellow whites of his eyes rolled up into his lids.

"Is he dead?" the soldier whispered, his face gray.

"Not yet," Elowen said, her eyes fixed on the gap between her fingers. Her heron-bone tool clicked against something hard and wet—not the soft, sponge-give of rotten flesh, nor the smooth, greasy curve of the leg bone. It was rough, fibrous, and wedged deep into the crevice behind the great vein.

She held her breath. If she nicked the vessel that carried the red river from his liver to his heel, he would bleed out onto the straw before she could take another lungful of air. Her fingers were steady—not because she felt pity for the knight, but because her mother had spent five years teaching her that an unsteady hand on a dying man was simply murder done with tools instead of an axe.

Click.

The bone tongs took hold. She did not jerk. She began a slow, twisting pull, rotating the wrist a fraction of an inch at a time to clear the barb from the gristle.

Out it came: a splinter of black ash, three fingers long, thick as a raven’s quill, its edges furred with rotten green bark and dried pond-muck. It fell onto the red floor tiles with a dull tink.

A sudden gush of bright, clean scarlet blood followed it—not the thick black porridge of the gangrene, but the pure wine of the heart, hot and steaming in the chilly room.

"The vein’s open," the soldier gasped, reaching for a rag.

"Leave it," Elowen commanded, her voice dropping into the flat, cold tone she used when the cellar tubs threatened to sour. "Let it wash the ditch-water out. Two beats. Three. Now."

She did not use the monk’s vinegar. Vinegar on an open artery would turn the flesh into wet salt and make the knight shriek himself into an apoplexy. Instead, she took a dried puffball from her apron pocket—a thing she had gathered from under the hazel bushes behind the churchyard two moons ago—cracked its papery skin with her knuckles, and drove the fine, chocolate-brown dust straight into the weeping hole.

The dust drank the blood like dry sand. In seconds, a thick, brown crust formed over the gash, sealing the crimson flow while the green-bottle grubs remained trapped inside, beneath the scab, in the dark where they liked to work.

"You're sealing them in," the soldier said, his mouth open. "They'll eat him from the inside out."

"They don't eat living flesh, blockhead," she said, wiping her fingers on her skirt. "They'll eat the rotten fat that Jerome left behind, they'll lick the bone clean where the ash scratched it, and when they're fat as peas, they'll come to the edge looking for air. Then I’ll take them out with salt-water."

She stood back, her spine cracking with a sharp pop. Her apron was ruined, soaked through the bib with black serum and the brown soot of the puffball, but her pulse was steady.

The knight’s breathing had changed. It was still shallow, still irregular, but that wet, whistling rattle had gone out of his throat. His skin, though still gray, had ceased to pour that thin, greasy sweat that always preceded the coldness of the limbs.

"Will he live?" the soldier asked. He let go of Sir Brand’s shoulders, his arms shaking with the strain of holding him down.

"He won't die of the splinter," Elowen said, gathering her horn tools and dropping them into the net of nettle cloth. "The spear-shaft is out, and the worms will keep the wound-meat from turning black again before Prime. But the river-fever has him by the throat."

She pointed to his throat. Under the dark, stubbled jaw, the great glands were swollen until they looked like walnuts under the skin. His tongue, dry and white as tallow, protruded slightly between his lips.

"Jerome has an infusion of belladonna," the soldier said, looking toward the door. "He said three drops would quiet the spirits and cool the blood."

"If Jerome gives him belladonna with those glands as big as turnips, he’ll stop the man’s heart before the candle burns down two inches," Elowen said. "Belladonna is for men whose blood is too bold, men who've had too much beef and ale and taken a stroke. This man’s blood is thin as whey and cold as ditch-ice. Give him nightshade and he won't ever wake to curse you."

"Then what?"

Elowen did not answer immediately. She reached down into the small inner pocket of her stays, where she kept the horn vial of amber water she had gathered from the cracked iron kettle in the sub-crypt—the bitter, earthen sweat of the green-mother’s fleece.

She looked at the knight’s face. He was young, she realized now that the yellow grimace of pain had relaxed slightly. Not thirty, perhaps twenty-five or six. He had a scar through his left eyebrow where a shield-rim had caught him, and his nose had been broken and set straight, probably by a camp smith who knew his business. He was a creature of iron, horse-leather, and bad hymns, the kind of man who would ride down an archer without looking at his face, but he was also meat and bone, and the meat was rotting.

"Give him this," she said, pulling out a small wooden spoon from her basket. She did not offer the vial to the soldier. She uncorked it herself, tilted three drops of the dark, bitter fluid onto the wood, and pried Sir Brand’s teeth apart with the tip of her knife.

"What is it?" the soldier asked, his hand drifting back toward his sword.

"Moss-water," she lied, her face perfectly still. "Water gathered from the north side of the chapel buttress at midnight. It cools the gall."

The amber liquid slid down the back of the knight’s tongue. Sir Brand’s throat convulsed once, twice—an involuntary swallow that made his neck muscles stand out like cords. He gave a violent, shuddering cough, then his head sank deeper into the tick, his jaw slumping loose.

The soldier leaned down, his face inches from the knight’s mouth. "He’s stopped rattling."

"He’s sleeping," Elowen said, turning to pick up her lard-lamp. "Keep the wool over his chest. If Jerome comes back with his pigeons or his leech-jars, tell him the knight had a convulsion and the prior said he was to have quiet until dawn. If Jerome touches that dressing before the bell rings Prime, I won't come back up the stairs, and you can bury him yourself behind the swine-pens."

The soldier looked at her, his pale eyes steady in the flickering tallow. "You're the one they call the Maggot Girl. The witch's brat from the fen."

"I’m Elowen," she said. "And the worms belong to me. Remember that when he asks who pulled the ash-tree out of his groin."

She walked out into the corridor, her clogs clicking soft against the limestone, leaving the veteran alone with the smell of scorched earth, puffball dust, and the slow, blind feast beginning under the bloody linen.