Chapter XXII The Most Esteemed Surgeon
XXII
The Most Esteemed Surgeon
“No,” the Most Esteemed Surgeon said. “Not you.”
He was standing at the center of one of the villages within the Outer Wall, upon an improvised podium that was no more than an overturned crate.
Flies swarmed heavily. The leeches he had brought along—Truss and Mordaunt, his favorites—attentively swatted at them with horsetail staffs.
Yet this had the additional effect of blowing the scents of the village directly into his nasal cavities.
Boiling offal, teeming latrines, and the brine of seldom-washed bodies.
The Most Esteemed Surgeon sighed and tried to breathe only through his mouth. All these gross odors of humanity made him despair. Was this a hopeless endeavor?
The girl he dismissed slunk away, head hanging low.
Behind her, the line had swelled to two dozen, maybe three, all jostling over one another’s shoulders to catch a glimpse of the Most Esteemed Surgeon and his retinue.
So many smudged, leery faces. Not a single one stood out to him or even dared to meet his gaze.
Mordaunt waved the next girl forward. The Most Esteemed Surgeon regarded her.
She had her dun-colored hair tucked beneath a kerchief, and her brow was tacky with sweat. Under that brow, however, were the most curious eyes. One was a kaleidoscopic gray, the color of pebbles on the beach. The other was a clear, sharp blue.
The Most Esteemed Surgeon studied those eyes. “Name?”
“Ninian,” she answered softly. Her pert chin quivered.
The Most Esteemed Surgeon squinted at her until his own eyes watered. Sensing the need of his master, Truss reached up and dabbed at his unshed tears. The Most Esteemed Surgeon blinked to clear his vision. And then he looked at the girl again.
Fair she was, for an islander. There was a naturalness to her features that would not be found in Seraph, where every cheekbone and nose bridge and brow was sculpted as if by the deft hand of God himself.
But her lips were pink, her lashes full, her face mostly symmetrical—except for those astonishing eyes.
And yet, when he looked upon her, the Most Esteemed Surgeon felt nothing at all.
Nothing, not even a quick skipping of his heart, not even a quiver in his stomach, not even a faint warming of his veins or a catch in his throat.
There was no great, encompassing emotion that eradicated all else, that made the foul odors and the voices of his leeches recede into the background, so that it seemed as though the only two people on earth were him and the girl with mismatched eyes.
In fact, the nothingness he felt made the scents and noises assert themselves even more dramatically, and he found himself wrinkling his nose and resisting the urge to clap his hands over his ears.
Somewhere a horse snorted and pawed the dirt.
A woman tossed the contents of a chamber pot into the street.
Truss and Mordaunt both watched him expectantly. With a weary exhale, the Most Esteemed Surgeon shook his head.
He had been at this increasingly fruitless toil for weeks now.
It had all begun when he heard that the prince was to be wed to a noble lady of Drepane.
Impossible, he had thought, at first, until her carriage clattered down from the morose mountains surrounding Castle Peake.
And he had been taken by her loveliness, the lady Marozia, Mistress of Teeth (now princess-consort).
He had not imagined such beauty could exist on this grim, forbidding, godless island.
If the prince could not import a Seraphine bride, this was the next best thing.
And so the Most Esteemed Surgeon began to wonder if he, too, could find a mate among the women of the island.
Surely there was at least one woman here who was to his liking.
He would accept half, even a quarter of the beauty of a purebred Seraphine, if she was gentle in her manner and eager to please him.
He thought he would have his best luck searching among the inhabitants of Castle Crudele, as if, through their proximity to the royal family, they might have leached a bit of Seraph’s graces.
Yet he had already moved through nearly every dwelling within the Outer Wall and found nothing.
And with each day the search wore on, he became more and more despondent.
Perhaps he should not have had such high hopes.
For, in truth, beauty and gentle manner were not enough to soothe the soul-deep yearning that he felt.
This was both the blessing and the burden of having Seraphine blood: Every Seraphine has one great love, the other half of his soul, and no other can compare.
Even the kisses of the most beautiful woman would taste like ashes in his mouth if she were not his true mate.
Her words of adoration would be hollow and cold.
Their marriage bed could only ever be as barren as a salt flat.
There was, in fact, a pamphlet commissioned by the Dogaressa of Seraph that offered guidelines for any man in search of his great love. These rules were adhered to as strictly as the laws of the city that prohibited theft and ravishment and murder.
Marriage is no excuse for not loving.
He who is not jealous cannot love.
No one can be bound by two loves.
No one should be deprived of love without good cause.
A true lover never desires the embraces of anyone save his lover.
Love rarely lasts when it is revealed.
An easy attainment makes love contemptible; a difficult one makes it more dear.
Every lover turns pale in the presence of his beloved.
When a lover suddenly has sight of his beloved, his heart beats wildly.
He who is vexed by thoughts of his love eats little and seldom sleeps.
The true lover believes only that which he thinks will please his beloved.
Love can deny nothing to love.
In desperation, the Most Esteemed Surgeon had begun to forgo sleep, to refuse eating, as though he could trick his soul into believing it had found its matched half. But this only left him tired and hungry and no closer to sating his soul with love.
Yet…perhaps. Perhaps there was still some hope.
His gaze did keep wandering back to the girl.
Ninian. He had thought at first it was merely the unexpected strangeness of her eyes.
But could it not, he wondered, be love? He had not felt his heart flutter.
He would have to ask Truss and Mordaunt if they noticed his face growing pale.
Perhaps the seed of love was here, and he would have to tend it, coax it out of the earth, protect it from harsh winds and bitter frosts and trampling feet until it flowered to its fullest. Could that, he wondered, be love? The steady and patient hand?
Before the Most Esteemed Surgeon could wrestle further with these questions, the crowd of girls and women parted.
There was some disquieted murmuring, gazes turning to the ground.
And then two members of the Dolorous Guard marched through the cleared path and right to the base of the Most Esteemed Surgeon’s crate.
Their faces, mostly disguised behind the grates of their helmets, revealed nothing. One of them said, “We have been looking everywhere for you.”
“Why?” the Most Esteemed Surgeon asked.
“There is a grave matter of state,” he said. “The Exarch has been found dead.”
Dead. The word floated up like a cold plume of smoke. It chilled the Most Esteemed Surgeon’s blood. For a moment, he could not speak.
At last, he managed, “How? Was it…a natural expiration?”
The guards glanced between themselves.
“It appears to be so,” one said. “But the prince calls for your judgment. There are many questions to be answered and many decisions to be made.”
Slowly, the Most Esteemed Surgeon nodded. He reached up and, with the sleeve of his robe, patted his brow. Then he looked across the crowd of women again, feeling so terribly alone.
“Let us go, then,” he said. Truss and Mordaunt helped him down from the crate. “And you, girl. Ninian. Come with us.”
The Exarch’s body lay face down upon the floor of the chapel.
His limbs were splayed; even his fingers extended as far as they could reach, as though he had been dropped from a great height and landed flat on his belly, killed the moment of impact.
His gray robes were pulled up around his hips, baring his thighs and his buttocks.
The life had only recently gone out of him.
His veins still bulged with bluish blood, vast, spidery networks of them, like the mold in a crumbly wedge of cheese.
But it was clear immediately what had arrested his life.
The Most Esteemed Surgeon’s gaze traveled down to the Exarch’s right calf—or at least what remained of it.
An enormous, currant-colored pustule had erupted through his skin.
Where the tumor was exposed to the air, it had turned an ashy, putrid black, like the crushed wick of a candle.
The innards of the tumor so strongly resembled jam that the Most Esteemed Surgeon caught himself envisioning a knife slicing through the jellied red, then scooping and smearing it onto a crust of bread.
Truss and Mordaunt were enlivened by this, so different from the dull, quotidian deaths they ordinarily oversaw.
They whispered to each other, eyes growing bright with glee.
At their side, Ninian clapped a hand over her mouth to muffle a squeak of horror.
Her face drained of color, and the Most Esteemed Surgeon felt a twinge of chagrin.
Not because he had frightened her, but because he feared that no true love of his could be so stricken at the sight of a corpse.
His mate would have to be hardier than this.
“Well, obviously he is dead,” said the Most Esteemed Surgeon. “Pity. On Seraph he could have lived fifty more years, at least.”