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Beswick may be half-dead, but at least it knew how to be quiet.
“Oh, no! No, you don’t!” bellows a voice from behind the bar.
I look past Iscairn towards a stout man standing with a jug of ale halfway tilted over a cup. He lowers it the moment he catches sight of us, his eyes settling on Iscairn’s mask.
“Out,” he snaps. “Turn right around an’ take thy trade back out into t’snow.”
Iscairn steps forward and rests his forearms upon the wooden counter. “I have coin.”
“I don’t give a tinker’s damn about thy coin!” The man sets his jug down with a thump, his great belly straining against the ties of his stained apron. “I’m running an honest house, mister, an’ I’ll not have Death supping at my hearth. Take that foul mask off my threshold afore somebody puts a timber through it.”
Iscairn draws a slow breath before answering.
“I am a physician, and this is my apothecary,” he says. “We are not carrying the pestilence, nor have we come to spread it. I have ridden across the high moors with no intention of examining your townsfolk. All I require is a dry room with a door that bolts from the inside.”
The innkeeper regards him suspiciously, his thick fingers drumming against the counter. “No doctoring? None o' thy lancets an' foul broths?”
“None,” Iscairn replies. “We have travelled a large distance today, and would prefer to be left in peace.”
The man looks between us, apparently deciding whether two paying travellers are worth the trouble of having a plague doctor beneath his roof. At last, he gives a reluctant grunt and reaches beneath the counter for a key.
“Top o' t'stairs,” he says, setting it down. “Right under t'roof. Room's small, an' t'flue smokes when wind's coming from t'east, but there's a bed an' a hearth. That'll have to do thee.”
“It will suffice,” Iscairn replies.
He collects the key and turns towards the narrow staircase at the back of the room. I follow close behind, conscious of the conversations that have fallen quiet around us, though by the time we reach the stairs, somebody has already resumed arguing over a game of dice.
Our room is tucked beneath the eaves, right at the top of the inn, and I begin to understand why the innkeeper was so eager to warn us about it.
Iscairn has to duck beneath the doorway, and even then, the sloping roof leaves him precious little room to stand upright. His hat brushes against the rafters as he moves aside to let me through, disturbing a few cobwebs that have apparently been left to their own devices since Michaelmas.
The wind has found its way through the shutters, bringing enough snow with it to leave a little white drift beneath the window, and the hearth looks as though nobody has bothered to light it in weeks.
“Home,” I mutter, looking around as Iscairn sets the key on the three-legged stool by the door. “How positively lavish.”
I limp towards the bed and lower myself onto the mattress, which rustles beneath me and sends the smell of old straw rising through the ticking. As I lean forward to unlace my boots, that peculiar emptiness beneath my ribs pulls at my gut again.
“Have you any of that cheese left?” I ask, tugging at a stubborn knot.
“I have.” Iscairn makes no move towards his satchel. “Though I suspect you've eaten enough since Oakhaven to feed half the parish, yet none of it has eased your hunger.”
I pause with one boot halfway off. “Well, I thought it was the riding.”
“It is not the riding.”
I frown. Well, what else could—
Oh.
My fingers loosen around the laces.
“You mean the…” I raise both hands, curl my fingers as though plucking something from the air, and make a long, wet slurping noise, like pulling a fat leech from somebody's backside.
His beak tips to my fingers, then my face, and he cocks his head. “An interesting interpretation, but yes. What remained of your mortal strength has been spent. Your body can no longer sustain itself as it once did, and whilst food may satisfy the stomach, it is a soul that must sustain the rest of you.”
It’s one thing to know that I am no longer entirely human, and quite another to discover that all the bread and cheese in Yorkshire won't do me a scrap of good when this particular hunger takes hold.
“There is nobody dying beneath this roof,” Iscairn continues, his head tilting slightly towards the noise rising through the floorboards. “Only a great many drunken men doing their best to shorten their lives with ale. But there will be others in the village whose time is nearly spent. I could take you to someone approaching their final hour, if you feel ready.”
