him if he could go home and rest and the man laughed, wincingly, so he gave him an elixir to ease his pain. The elixir was one Nate had made himself. He’d considered stealing such things from Arkady as needed, replacing them later, but quickly realized that his own preparations were better than anything the old man made. If the hidden line of patients was close to its end, he’d have time to cook the eggs before Arkady was due back.
The last patient he saw that day was a girl, twelve or thirteen, holding a baby in her arms. The baby was about a year old and seemed happy enough, but the girl looked worried. “His head doesn’t feel right,” she said.
Nate felt the baby’s skull. It was soft. “Is this your brother?”
The girl nodded.
“Mother? Father?” Nate had learned to be brief about such questions, and accept whatever the answer was.
He was relieved when the girl said, “Ma works in the paper factory.”
But only for an instant. “Let me guess. She works from dawn to dusk, and brings him with her.”
The girl nodded again. “Is he okay?” she said anxiously.
“Sure.” Nate spoke more cheerfully than he felt. He’d smelled the air near the paper factory. He wouldn’t vouch for the health of any infant that spent its days there. “But he’s sun-starved. It softens the bones. Is there anyone else who can take him during the day?”
The girl was still for a moment. Then her small chin jutted out. “I can.”
Nate wondered what she was giving up. “All right. Try to keep him out in the sun as much as possible. And feed him pork and eggs. Can you get pork and eggs?”
“There’s a pigmonger down the street from us.” She sounded uncertain.
Nate took a measured breath in, let a measured breath out, and gave her his eggs. Her eyes grew wide at the unexpected bounty and Nate was ashamed of his own pangs of loss. “You know how to cook those?” he said.
“Sure,” she said happily. Then a shadow fell across her face. “You have anything needs cleaning? Or errands? I’m a fast runner. And I can write. For messages.”
That last was said with no small amount of pride. “Owe me one,” Nate said. The girl nodded; then she, the baby and the eggs all disappeared through the slop gate. It was his least satisfying interaction of the day. Pull a tooth, pop a shoulder back into place: those were easy. With a good diet, and a mother who didn’t spend all of her daylight hours in a paper factory, both of the children would be fine. They didn’t have either of those things. There was nothing he could do about it.
Nobody else came through the gate. He waited a few minutes, just to be sure. Then he took the rag down off the fence and went back inside.
* * *
“Guildsmen are savages,” Arkady said when he returned a few hours later. He was drunk. When he was drunk, he liked to sit in the parlor and feed the fire obscene amounts of wood until it roared; then he liked to sit by the obscene roaring fire and expound on the state of the world, and he liked for someone to sit and listen. Before Nate had come along, Vertus had served as audience, but now Vertus was free to do as he wished as long as he kept bringing wine.
“The crazy guilds—the ones that spend their lives dancing in circles and singing—” the old man said now, “you expect them to be idiots. The craft guilds, though. You’d think, they can make a thing. They have a skill. But these Wilmerians. It’s like they can’t think about anything that’s not a bloody pot or a bloody tank of gas. Even the Guildmaster. Man gets milk-sick and even as he cries and moans and shits himself half to death, there’s a plate of cheese on the table.”
“The Temple Argent used to deliberately leave their wounds untreated,” Nate said. “They thought it was a sign of faith.”
“The Temple Argent never bloody existed.”
They had. Nate had been to the ruins of the great stronghold, perched on the cliff above the cold, raging sea. But he didn’t see the point of saying so. “The stories exist.”
Arkady grinned. “Ah, the tales of heroism. When the warrior priestesses of the Temple Argent battled the sorcerers of Pala to the end of the earth, and scorched the north with ice and fire. As if a