AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Enough; there was no need to sink into morbid thoughts. Besides, she had reached her destination: an ochre, red-roofed building facing onto a dusty square. Long ago, the Fountain Quarter had been a neighborhood of rich merchants’ houses built around courtyards, each one boasting one of the grand fountains that gave the neighborhood its name. Now the houses had been split into inexpensive flats of a few rooms each. Their frescoes had faded to muddy swirls, and the gloriously tiled fountains had cracked and gone dry.
Lin enjoyed the faded grandeur of the place. The old buildings reminded her of Zofia: They had once been great beauties, and their bones still revealed that grace beneath wrinkled, liver-spotted skin.
She hurried across the square, her footsteps sending up puffs of saffron dust, and ducked into the ochre house. The ground floor was stone and tile, curving wooden stairs leading up, each step worn and saddled in the middle. The landlady—a grumpy woman who lived on the top floor—really ought to see to fixing them, Lin thought, as she reached the second landing and found the doors there already open.
“Is it you,Doktor?” The door swung wide, revealing the wrinkled, beaming countenance of Anton Petrov, Lin’s favorite patient. “Come in, come in. I have tea.”
“Of course you do.” Lin followed him into the room, setting her satchel down on a low table. “Sometimes I think you survive entirely on jenever and tea, Dom Petrov.”
“And what would be wrong with that?” Petrov was already fiddling with a gleaming bronze samovar, the most elegant item in the small apartment, and the only thing he had brought with him from Nyenschantz when he’d left it forty years ago to become a trader on the Gold Roads. He’d always had his samovar with him, he’d told her once, as the thought of being caught in an inhospitable region with no tea was insupportable.
Unlike Josit, Petrov seemed uninterested in displaying much in the way of souvenirs from his years of travel. His flat was plain, almost monastic. The furniture was scrubbed birch, his books neatly arranged in shelves along the walls (though Lin, not being able to read Nyens, could not decipher most of the titles). His cups and plates were plain brass, his fireplace neatly swept, and his kitchen always tidy.
Having poured them both tea, Petrov indicated that Lin should join him at the table near the window. Pots of flowers adorned the sill, and a hummingbird buzzed lazily amid the red valerian blossoms.
As she settled herself across from Petrov, tea mug in hand, Lin’sgaze went automatically to the carpet in the middle of the room. It was a beautiful item—rich and plush, woven with a pattern of vines and feathers in deep green and blue. It was not the carpet that interested Lin, though, but rather what it concealed.
“Do you want to see it?” Petrov was looking at her with an impish sort of grin, uncharacteristically boyish. Petrov was in his sixties, but looked older, his skin papery, his hands given to the occasional tremble. His skin was pale, like that of most Northerners, and Lin sometimes thought she could see his veins through it. Though his hair was gray, his mustache and eyebrows were black (Lin suspected he dyed them) and tremendous. “If you’d like…”
Lin felt a slight flutter beneath her breastbone. She quickly took a sip of her hot tea; it had a smoky taste, which Petrov claimed came from the campfires along the Gold Roads. It was also too sweet, but she didn’t mind. Petrov was lonely, she knew, and the tea was a chance to draw out their appointment, to chat and visit. Loneliness, Lin believed, was deadly; it killed people as surely as too much alcohol or poppy-juice. It was hard to be lonely in the Sault, but much too easy to disappear and be forgotten in the chaos of Castellane.
“I have to examine you first,” she said. She’d set her satchel down by her chair; she rummaged in it now, and drew out the auscultor—a long wooden cylinder, hollow and polished—and set one end to Petrov’s chest.
The old man sat patiently while she listened to his heart and lungs. Petrov was one of her more mysterious patients. His symptoms did not match anything in Lin’s studies or books. She often heard crackling noises when he breathed, which ought to have meant pneumonia, but they came and went without fever, leaving her at a loss. Strange rashes often appeared on his skin—today there were red spots on his forearms and legs, as if the vessels beneath the skin had burst for some reason.
Petrov claimed all of it—his breathing troubles, his fatigue, the rashes—were a disease he had picked up on his travels. He did notknow the name of it, or who had given it to him. Lin had tried every treatment she knew: infusions, tinctures, changes in diet, powders mixed into his food. Nothing helped save the amulets and talismans she gave him to ease his pain and symptoms.
“Do be careful,” she said, drawing his sleeve down his thin arm. “The best way to avoid these painful red spots is to avoid bumps and bruises. Even as small a thing as moving a chair—”
“Enough,” he muttered. “What, am I supposed to ask Domna Albertine? She scares me worse than a bruise.”
Domna Albertine was his landlady. She had a vast bosom and a vaster temper. Lin had once seen her chase a stray goose across the courtyard with a broom, screaming that she would beat it to death and then track down and kill each of its children.
Lin crossed her arms over her chest. “Are you refusing my advice? Is it that you wish for a different physician?”
She let her voice quaver. She had long ago realized that the best way to get Petrov to cooperate was to make him feel guilty, and she used this knowledge ruthlessly.
“No, no.” He shook his head. “If I didn’t have you treating me, wouldn’t I be dead by now?”
“I am sure there are other physicians who could do what I do,” Lin said, rummaging in her satchel. “Even in Nyenschantz.”
“In Nyenschantz, the doctors would advise me to go out in the woods and punch a bear,” rumbled Petrov. “Either it would make me feel better, or the bear would kill me, in which case I would no longer be sick.”
Lin giggled. She took several talismans from her bag and set them on the table. Petrov, who had been grinning, looked at her thoughtfully. “Those papers you wanted,” he said. “Did you manage to get them?”
Lin sighed inwardly. She should not have told Petrov about her quest to get the Academie manuscript. It had been a moment of weakness; she had known she could tell no one in the Sault.
“No,” she said. “No bookshop will allow me even to look at it—not just because I am not a student, but because I am Ashkar. They hate us too much.”
“It is not that they hate you,” Petrov said, gently. “It is that they are jealous. Magic vanished from the world with the Sundering, and with it much danger, but also much that was beautiful and wondrous. Only your people still possess a fragment of that wonder. It is perhaps not surprising they seek to guard the bits of history they have. The memory of a time they were equal in power.”
“They are more than equal in power,” Lin said. “They have all the power, save in this one thing.” Lightly, she touched the necklace at her throat, the hollow circle with the old words etched onto it:How shall we sing our Lady’s songs in a strange land?The cry of a people who did not know how to be who they were without a home or a God. They had learned—over the many years they had learned—yet their belonging was still imperfect. Hollow in parts, like the circle itself.
She looked at Petrov closely. “You are not saying you agree with them, are you?”
“Not at all!” Petrov bellowed. “I have traveled the world, you know—”
“I do know,” said Lin, teasingly. “You tell me about it all the time.”
