Zofia looked gloomy. “He’ll put the pills up my bum.”
Lin hid a smile. This was likely; doctors of the malbushim were obsessed with suppositories for reasons she could only guess at. Partly, she supposed, because they had not mastered injections into the blood, as the Ashkar had, but she could not explain the rest of it, not when swallowing pills was a perfectly good way of getting medicine into the system.
“Oh, yes,” Lin said. “He will.”
She grinned as Zofia snatched the pills out of her hand and swallowed them down with only a slight grimace. The foxglove would treat, though not cure, Zofia’s failing heart and the swelling in her legs. Lin left her with a bottle of more pills and strict instructions regarding when and how to take them—instructions she had given before, but Zofia seemed to enjoy the ritual, and Lin did not mind. She would have stayed for tea today, as she often did, had she not been late for her next appointment.
The day was warm and bright, perfect for traversing the city. When she had first started seeing patients in Castellane, Lin had worried about criminals, cutpurses, and Crawlers. The Ashkar regarded the city outside the Sault walls as a dangerous and lawless place. She was sure she would be set upon and robbed, but she had gone mostly unhindered through the streets, rarely troubled by more than curious looks.
Once, in the Warren, after delivering a baby, she had made her way home late at night, under a green-tinted spring moon. A skinny young man, a knife flashing in his hand, had slipped from the shadows between two buildings and demanded her physician’s satchel; she had clutched it away from him, instinctively—the items inside were precious and expensive—when a dark shadow had dropped from a balcony above them. A Crawler.
To her great surprise, the Crawler proceeded to disarm the young man and send him on his way with a sharp warning and a sharper kick to the ankle. The would-be thief had scuttled away while Lin blinked in surprise.
The Crawler, whose hooded jacket hid his face, had grinned, and Lin had caught a flash of metal as he turned his head. A mask? “Compliments of the Ragpicker King,” he said, offering her a half-mocking bow. “He is an admirer of physicians.”
Before Lin could respond, the Crawler had vanished, scrambling up the nearest wall with the quick spidery movements that had earned the Crawlers their name. Lin felt safer after that—quixotic, she knew, to feel safer because of a criminal, but the Ragpicker King was a fixture in Castellane. Even the Ashkar knew he controlled the streets. And much to her own surprise, Lin’s rounds of patient appointments had turned out to be her favorite part of being a physician.
After Lin had passed her last medical examination, she had expected to begin seeing patients immediately. But other than Mariam, no one in the Sault seemed interested in availing themselves of her services. They avoided her, seeking out instead the male physicians who had scored lower than she had on the exams.
So Lin had expanded her reach into the city. Chana Dorin sold talismans in the city market every Sunsday, and spread the word that there was a young Ashkari physician willing to treat ailments for very little money. Josit, then one of the Shomrim—the guardians of the Sault gates—had told every malbesh who came seeking a physician of his sister: her skills, her wisdom, her extremely reasonable rates.
Slowly Lin built a stable of patients outside the Sault, from the rich daughters of merchants seeking someone to remove wens from their noses, to the courtesans of the Temple District whose jobs required them to be regularly examined by physicians. Once she had built her reputation, more began to seek her out: from anxious pregnant mothers to the gnarled old men whose bodies had been broken by years of toiling at shipbuilding in the Arsenale.
Illness was a great leveler, she realized. Malbushim were just like the Ashkar when it came down to their health: fretting over their own wellness, vulnerable where it came to sickness in their family, frantic or silent in the face of death. Often, as Lin stood quietly while a family prayed over the body of a lost loved one, she would hear their words—may he pass through the gray door unhindered, Lords—and she would add some of her own, silently, not just for the dead, but for those left behind. Be not alone. Be comforted among the mourners of Aram.
Why not? she always thought. They did not have to believe in the Goddess for her to touch their hearts in their greatest time of need.
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’s gaze 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 . . .”