by C. L. Polk
“Yes. How did you—”
She shoved her chair back, opened a storage closet, and brought my medical bag to the desk.
“I had to fill out these forms when you already had my bag?”
“The tyranny of paperwork,” she said. “Check each item on the list as received, and it’s all yours.”
I scanned the list. My fine syringes were gone, as were all the drugs. But so were Nick Elliot’s quarterlies.
I checked off the inventory and stopped at one line: pendant chain with weighted pointer of polished agate.
I skipped over it and kept going. I found another:
White-handled knife with curved blade.
She wasn’t looking. I checked the items off, and took my filthy property upstairs with me.
* * *
I turned the lock behind me and emptied everything from my bag. My scalpels were there, still wrapped in paper. I’d have them sterilized again. I’d hone them, wrap them, and tuck them away. The bandages were a filthy mess. They went into the wastebasket. Each item was either set aside or thrown away until I came to the last items.
Why did I keep these? I had no doubt my bag had been carefully searched, and those items left behind. To point the finger at me and call me witch. Suspicion was enough to make an accusation. I’d never withstand examination, and I wouldn’t escape the asylum. They call it a hospital, but it’s a prison all the same.
I pulled out the boline first, careful of the sharp blade. It wasn’t engraved, thank the gods. A plain knife with a whitewood handle, a knife of hedge-spells and physicality. This one was mine, given to me when I was eleven. Grace had cut her oath to me with the little blade she kept on her person. Mages used them in rituals. So did witches, according to the stories.
Next was the pendulum. Hold a pendulum in your hand, and the pattern of the swing told you what you couldn’t know—truth from lies, the sex of a child, the presence of the dead. Mages didn’t use these, but witches did.
I had held onto these items the way I’d held onto my scalpels, as pieces of the past. The knife is a letter-opener. The pendulum a prop I use for mesmerism. Easily explained, readily dismissed. I put the pendulum in my pocket and the knife on my desk.
I left my emptied bag on my desk and went downstairs for the parade.
FOURTEEN
Parade Day
Sixteen beds wouldn’t be enough.
People waved scarlet handkerchiefs and cheered loud enough to drown out the music in the streets, music to set your feet itching to move to the beat, to shuffle and stamp your heels. Citizens dashed into the street to give a soldier an apple and sometimes a kiss, darting back to pluck another fruit from the baskets lining the raised walks. They cheered; they laughed; they danced with arms raised.
I stood still in my uniform and counted the uninfected men. Each square was sixty-four soldiers, marching, waving, kissing girls, eating apples. That square had fifteen. The next, twelve. That one, eighteen. The rest were crowned with writhing clouds of dried blood, and I fancied their smiles strained, their joviality the mask they knew they should wear.
Discipline kept me standing even as my insides roiled. This was a disaster. I had to do something, spread the news among the staff—but what could they do? Why would they do anything? I had no proof, and a success story I didn’t want prodded.
That one had nine. The job in front of me mounted higher, threatening to spill. I had to find the cause. I had to find the cure. I’d have to take my mask off and shout it from the rooftops. A mouse couldn’t make the medical community listen.
I turned my face away and paid attention to the crowd—those who had waited for family and loved ones to return. Only soldiers had the miasma. The civilians had head colds, indigestion, ailments I could ease with a touch. The crowd glanced disapprovingly at a young parent with a crying infant. The baby had an ear infection, and her face streaked with tears and snot as she screamed her inconsolable pain.
I shuffled closer, made eye contact with the child’s mother. She gave me an apologetic smile. I stroked the child’s curls, cupped her ear, and she quieted.
“What did you do?” her mother asked.
“She’s overtired. The noise,” I shouted. “Keep her ears covered, or better, take her home and let her sleep.”
“We’re looking for her uncle. He’s in the parade.” She picked up her baby’s hand and waved it at the marching soldiers. The baby endured this with a wide-eyed look at me.
“I hope you see him soon. I’d better go back inside.”
“Say bye-bye, Mary.” She shook her daughter’s paw at me.
I caught a hug from a pretty girl who gave me a kiss on the cheek and an apple.
“You look a little pale, Captain.” She gave me a grin and sashayed into the street. I bit into the apple with gratitude. It was barely a healing, but the fruit was juicy, sweet with a drop of acid tartness. It crunched, firm and the perfect thing to chase away the tremors.
A chill ran down my neck, the hairs rising to shout alarm. I checked sight lines. Too many in the trees. The crowd cheered the soldiers home, but one face turned pale and pinch-lipped toward me.
Dr. Crosby glared hot enough to set my cap on fire, the downward twist of his mouth suppressing revulsion. His gloved hand curled around his throat. He turned toward the hospital, dodging the crowd to get back inside.
He’d seen me. What had he seen?
I had approached a woman with a crying baby. I’d touched the baby, and the crying had stopped.
But what had he believed?
A bewitchment. A spell. Whatever believers thought witches could do. It was my word against his. But if someone believed him, if I warned anyone about the avalanche of soldiers coming to crowd too many beds …
Blast it, I had to be a mouse.
I followed Dr. Crosby’s path to the doors.
* * *
The lobby teemed with discharged patients bearing heavy sling sacks—the same gray canvas bags each soldier packed their life into before sailing to Laneer. Some wore their uniforms, and if crutches and canes weren’t regulation, no one seemed to mind. My scarlet and gold braid stood out, and the way to the stairs parted before my officer’s uniform with nods of respect.
“There you are.” Robin hurried over to stand in front of me, her hands resting in the pockets of her skirt. “I missed you before the parade. The nurses are giving me a farewell party on the first of Frostmonth, and I know how much you love cake.”
I stretched my face into a hopeful look. “Chocolate cake?”
“If you’re lucky,” she said. “I have to go. We’re going to cut a man open and look for the shrapnel that’s been tearing his intestines to shreds.”
“Lovely thing to talk of, after tempting me with cake.”
“You’ll come to the party?”
She was leaving me the same day Tristan was. “I wouldn’t miss that. Not if there’s cake.”
She left laughter to trail behind her as she rushed off to the Surgery Wing.
“Dr. Singer!” Young Gerald thumped over to me, his sack strapped across his back. His smile could light a room brighter than aether. “Old Gerald didn’t want to go without saying goodbye. He’s in the unit.”
“I have a moment.” The crowd parted for us again, down the corridor to Ward 12. Old Gerald stood next to his stripped bed, loading the last of his clothing into his sack. He turned with a smile already on his face, and my heart kicked in my chest.
The infection clouded the inside of his mind, one tendril dripping slowly down his neck.
“We’re on our way,” Old Gerald said. “Thank you, Doctor.”
I had to do something. “I’d like you to follow up, Old Gerald. Come see me if you need anything, or if you have trouble sleeping.”
He flinched, but smiled wider. “I’ve got a script for your tonic. I expect I won’t have trouble sleeping.”
Would he take it? Would Gerald trust the tonic more than the fear He would rise up?
/> Old Gerald shrugged the sack into place. “Maybe if I came back for a mesmerism.”
“They make you fall asleep,” Young Gerald objected.
“I could make a house call. Say in four days’ time?”
“I’ll ask Marie to make tea, Doc.”
Away from the hospital, I could keep him treated without suspicion falling on me. “Then expect me.”
“Marie will be pleased to see you. We’d better get on, Doctor. Thank you for all you’ve done.”
They filed out of the ward.
* * *
Once the patients had cleared out, I put Bill through agony with my large-bore needle, drawing fluid from his spine. I had expected it to be murky or rusted to the color of dried blood, but it was clear even though I chose my draw site from within the clouded, furious boundaries of the infection.
An hour in the lab produced nothing. I wouldn’t get full results on all my tests, but I ordered them. I needed the paperwork for my research, even if I knew there would be nothing to find.
I hadn’t captured any of the muck in my needle, and I should have. Bacteria, virus, parasites—I should have evidence of something, because something was there. I had to find it by mundane means. How could I develop a test to prove the existence of what I saw with my gift?
I tried to put it out of my mind with simple work. Prescient clerks had put together new patient files, their blanks ready to be filled by countless hands. I had forms of my own to include, but sorting papers didn’t ease my frustration. Nothing in the blood. Nothing in the urine. Nothing in the spinal fluid.
Maybe I needed a biopsy of the spine, but I’d never get permission. If I could examine someone with the infection who had died, perhaps. Jack Bunting’s body was in the police morgue, far from where I could reach it anyway.
The weight of my task pressed on me. Doctors believed the delusion to be a product of the imagination, a defense against the atrocity of murder and the outrage of violence. A rejection of our base and brutish nature. Who wouldn’t flee from such memories?
But I knew. I saw. These delusions accompanied the dried blood cloud in the heads of the hundreds—no, thousands—of soldiers who’d gone over.
I shoved the new patient files aside. I laid out Bill’s chart to the left of my blotter and unlocked my desk drawer to retrieve my treatment journal.
I had written, Mass persists in Bill Pike’s skull and extends along the spine, appearing to follow the brain and nerves, when my telephone rang. Because what I needed was an interruption, of course. I picked up the receiver and rubbed ink on my temples. “Ahoy.”
“Miles.”
I fought a sigh. “Grace.”
“I’m glad I caught you in your office. How’s your day? Did you see the parade?”
“It went right by the hospital. What can I do for you?”
“I found a flat,” she said. “Halston Park. Eight rooms.”
“Too big. Too far west.”
“Miles. You can’t live in Birdland. Anyway, I had an idea. You could spend the night in my suite in the Edenhill before the carriage comes to fetch you in the morning.”
“I have an engagement tonight.”
The silence on the line chilled my ear. I capped my pen and waited.
“With your … friend?”
“Yes.”
“You shouldn’t associate with him. It’s dangerous.”
“How?”
“I know you can’t see what I saw.” Her voice spilled sympathy through the line. It clashed with the skin-crawling feeling of aether pressed to my ear. “But he’s a witch, Miles.”
I clenched my teeth, remembering the conclusions about the true difference between witches and mages I had come to last night. I quivered, too, because Tristan was in danger. If Grace wanted to, all she’d have to do was report him, and they’d scoop him up. I didn’t know if they could manage to keep a half-divine guardian of the dead, but I didn’t want to know.
“You didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
“I knew.”
“What? How could you? They’re dangerous! You can’t trust him—”
“That’s not what this is about.”
“I don’t care. Stop seeing him. Meet somebody else. How you could pair off with a jumped-up witch fixing to run mad any moment—have you lost your mind?”
“You cannot tell me what to do, I am not going to dinner with you, I am not spending the night at the Edenhill, and the conversation about my acquaintance with Mr. Hunter is over.” I shoved my secret journal in a drawer, and it closed just a little too loudly. “I have to go, Grace.”
I hung up. Counted to ten, deep breaths, all of it. She had grown up ordering me around; the moment it became clear that I wasn’t a Storm-Singer she’d taken charge. She had to learn that I wasn’t hers to command—that I was my own person, with my own career and my own problems.
Like my patients. I set my mind to the task of puzzling over the results. Something was there. I had to figure out how to test for it. But then what? Diagnosis wasn’t a cure. What if I couldn’t find a way to cure it?
I had to. Thousands of soldiers were infected.
A shadow filled the door to my office.
“Come in.”
Tristan wore a scarlet silk scarf that matched my tunic. He reached for my coat. “Michael is parked a few streets away.”
My cap waited in his hand as I donned my Service coat. “Couldn’t get any closer?”
“Traffic is a mess. People are dancing in the street.”
“I wish I could change.” I clamped my lips together. Shut up, Miles.
“Most people will look at the uniform and see little else. Come on. We can’t be late.”
FIFTEEN
The Star
The Star of Kingston lived and chattered in a twelve-story building east of the King’s Way, its limestone pediment marked with the legend Accurate, Interesting, Timely. The Star tended to lean past interesting and into lurid, but I read it every morning as my neighbors did.
Tristan followed the progress of a woman with two cameras around her neck dragging a trolley bag behind her. She raced for the lift in high-heeled shoes, and when it closed in her face she let out a string of words I’d never heard a woman utter until I’d gone to war.
I slowed my pace as Tristan sped up. She was the woman who’d come to Nick Elliot’s apartment, the woman with the high cheekbones and elegant carriage. Nick’s lover.
“Bad luck,” Tristan said. “Would you like help with your luggage?”
“I have to beat this pox-riddled deadline or Cully will have my head.” She tugged her gloves off finger by finger, revealing nails painted glossy black. When she finally looked up at Tristan, she smiled. “Lovely to have a gentleman’s assistance.”
“Tristan Hunter,” Tristan said. “This is Dr. Miles Singer.”
She pushed my coat lapel aside to read my medals. I stood still as she drifted a fingertip over my Queen’s Cross of Valor. “Well hello there, hero. I’m Avia Jessup.”
The look she shot me was so heated I felt it bloom on my face. “Pleasure to meet you.”
“Oh, I do hope so.” Her hand was warm in mine as I bowed over it. She was the tiniest bit drunk, but in otherwise excellent health. “What brings you to the Star?”
“We have an appointment with the editor of the Leisure Desk.”
“What a happy coincidence. I can take you right to her.” She took my arm and I led her inside the lift. As the brass cage rose to the fourth floor, Avia leaned into me. “Tell a girl what this is all about?”
“We’re here to ask for information about Nick Elliot,” Tristan said, and I closed my mouth.
Avia’s eyes widened and she drew in an openmouthed breath. “He’s dead, isn’t he.”
“I’m afraid so, Miss Jessup.”
She sighed and turned her face up to the ceiling. “I was afraid of this.”
Oh, really?
“Did you know him well?” Tristan asked.
&
nbsp; “We were good friends,” she replied. “How did he do—? How did it happen?”
“I believe it was arsenic,” I said.
“Oh, Nick.” Avia closed her eyes, but she opened them again, intent on my face. “What do you mean, you believe?”
“The circumstances around Nick’s death are suspicious. Did Nick have any enemies?”
“No. Everyone liked him, no matter what he thought of himself.” Avia stared at me. “He was murdered?”
I opened my mouth, closed it. She suspected suicide. What if we were wrong? What if Nick had gone mad? He might have been mad when he begged for my help, but he was certainly murdered.
“We have reason to believe he was,” Tristan said. “If you can help us—”
Avia spun on one foot and straight-armed the double doors to the leisure desk open. “I can’t believe anyone would do that to Nick. Everybody loved him.”
A woman pushed past us with a cup of black coffee in her hand. “What’s this about Nick?”
She looked us up and down, her survey halting at my medals. I should have changed.
“He’s dead,” Avia said. “Murdered.”
“Nick Elliot was murdered?” the woman exclaimed, and the newsroom’s dull roar fell all at once.
They stared. Pens and pads were snatched up and reporters closed in, prey spotted.
“You’re not police,” the woman went on. “Why are you here and not them?”
I hesitated. Tristan stepped in. “Dr. Singer is collecting evidence to present to the police.”
“Didn’t you have enough reason for their interest with the death examination?”
“How did Nick Elliot die?” someone else asked.
“We believe it was poison,” Tristan said.
The crowd leaned closer. “You believe?”
“That’s enough.”
Twenty heads turned toward a petite woman in a rose walking suit, her long hair arranged in an intricate crown braid, a popular style from my boyhood. She used a cane to steady herself. “You may go back to your work. Gentlemen, if you’d join me in my office?”
Avia made to follow us. The woman stopped her with a narrow-eyed look. “Have you developed the plates from the ladies’ red-ribbon luncheon, Miss Jessup?”