Page 34 of Malady

“You do not care for William Mercer,” Iscairn says as the last of my laughter finally begins to subside.

I wipe beneath one eye with the heel of my hand and tuck my freezing fingers back into my cloak. “Whatever gave you that impression? The shouting in the street, or the part where I threatened to rid his wife of their unborn child?”

“I suspected there was more to it than this morning.” He shortens his stride to match mine as I limp through the slush

“There usually is, in a village this small. Billy and half the men he drinks with have been finding reasons to dislike me for as long as I can remember. They managed well enough when I was a child and did little more than exist where they could see me; then I grew older and gave them better material. I never married, I have a temper, and I refuse to bow my head simply because a man expects me to.”

“And William Mercer objects to this?”

“Billy Mercer objects to most things when a woman is doing them.” I glance up at him. “Men do seem remarkably fond of believing that whatever hangs between their legs qualifies them to rule the rest of us.”

“An ambitious amount of responsibility for such a small organ.”

I choke on a laugh. “Do you feel the same way, Doctor Iscairn?”

“That it is small?”

“That you are above me because you are a man.”

“No.” His answer comes without hesitation. “If I wished to claim superiority over you, Ophelia Harrow, I have a considerable advantage in height already. There seems little need to consult my cock on the matter.”

The ugliest snort of laughter bursts out of me and folds me nearly in half, throwing my next step badly enough that my boot skids in the slush. My thigh gives beneath me, the laugh breaking into a startled curse as Iscairn catches my arm before I can go down in the road.

“Hold on,” he says.

Ordinarily I would object on principle. Instead, I slip my hand through the crook of his arm and let him take some of my weight.

For a while, there’s only the wet crunch of our boots through the slush and the distant, shrill shrieking of children in the next lane—which I sincerely hope has nothing to do with that bloody rat.

“Gideon expects me to be a saint,” I confess quietly, the physical closeness suddenly making it dangerously easy to speak the truth. “He believes an apothecary must treat the cruel and the kind with exactly the same gentle hands, and that I must never hold onto spite. But I am not a saint. Sometimes, I just want to tell a man to go hang himself.”

I brace myself for the lecture on holy charity, or for him to insist that a true healer leaves their personal grievances at the door of a sickroom. Instead, his arm flexes, steadying me as we navigate a slick patch of icy mud.

“Saints make for terrible healers,” Iscairn says. “They care more for their own souls than the bodies bleeding in front of them.”

He turns his head down. “It is inhuman to be perfect. You are allowed your spite, Ophelia Harrow. If a man makes a habit of acting like a swine, you are under no obligation to treat him like a gentleman.”

A wicked warmth blooms in my blood.

He doesn’t care that I’m spiteful, nor expect kindness simply because I tend to the sick. He seems perfectly content to let me spout my vitriol and carry on walking beside me anyway.

There’s a peculiar freedom in that. Besides, if I were truly in league with Hell, Billy Mercer would have sprouted boils a decade ago and saved us all a great deal of trouble.

My gaze wanders back to the pale beak beneath his hat, gleaming faintly where the morning light catches it. It really is an unsettling thing. Too smooth for leather, surely. Too rigid. I’ve never seen it bend or crease when he moves, and now that I’m looking properly, I can’t find a stitch anywhere along the beak. It looks carved rather than sewn.

Like… bone.

My fingers tighten slightly where they rest against his arm.

“Then I would ask what it wanted in return.”

Gideon’s warning surfaces unbidden, and I swallow against it. What could I possibly offer a creature that drinks the dead? I own an apothecary that leaks whenever it rains, and I have three matching spoons. Hardly the stuff of infernal bargains.

Oh, I don’t know anymore. If the Devil truly did send this terrifying man to walk at my side and threaten the throats of men who insult me, then I suppose I’ll simply have to discover his price.

“Would you like a roasted turnip?” I ask, tossing a handful of dried peas into the frost. The hens bustle around my boots, pecking greedily.

Iscairn answers from where he’s sat on the wall. “Why would I want a roasted turnip, Ophelia Harrow?”