Doctor & Duelist (The Blades of Saint-Mitre #1)

Chapter 1

One

A Perfectly Ordinary City Physician

Dorotèa supposed the little office attached to the university hospital was a standard tidying project save for, perhaps, the corpse.

She was grateful someone had left the feet out from beneath the sheet that covered it atop a chipped folding table; removing the cloth unsuspectedly would have made the situation go from curious to frightful.

At any rate, Docteur Oste Lézin proved, at once, that he needed her help.

Leaving the dead in the center of the room was sloppy and hazardous, even for him.

“Dreadfully sorry if I give you a bump,” Dorotèa whispered down to the unexpected guest. “I thought they had morgues and theaters for this sort of thing.”

The young woman procured a pin from her pouch and fastened back some extra-unruly locks of chestnut hair, careful not to dislodge her flat cap.

She ought to have worn a head wrap, and she made a note of it for next time.

Her assignment wasn’t meant to be brief, and for a mission of great importance by her standards, a lady couldn’t be fussing with curls.

One had already wrapped itself around the grapevine brooch transfixed to her simple dress.

“You know,” Dorotèa continued to speak to the corpse, “I was warned not to touch Docteur Lézin’s things in here.

Only, there’s a lot of those, and not very much floor to sweep on account of you and your table taking up so much room, so I’ll do my best to sweep around you, if that’s permissible.

Dear me, he has even more tomes by Ambroise Paré in here than I thought… ”

She continued on, grabbing a broom she’d hauled up from a supply closet. And fancy that, it was nicer than the one kept at home! She assumed the nurses’ pitying glances when Dorotèa told them she was to assist Oste had something to do with her being offered the most pristine of them.

How many of her own tight-lipped glances of worry had she made when he’d been nearby, she wondered? It was an unnatural discomfort. She never used to make them at all.

“I’ll more than likely be out of your hair soon; can’t say there’s much I can do in here, and our Saint-Mitre fellows said I’d be seeing more to his errands, anyway.

I’ll make my way to his apartment too. If Eflamm is to be believed, it’s in a dreadful state.

I assume, though, that it will lack anything like—erm—you, unless there’s something the doctor hasn’t told any of us.

I don’t think fixing supper there with the dead for company is wise, but I’ll not make anything less than the best. Nothing will bulk up his sword arm like my daube—”

Dorotèa had only just begun to sweep when the door creaked open behind her.

She turned, face deadpan, just in time to see her charge step through the archway, close the door, and immediately careen to a halt.

Oste backed up into the door with a thud as his jaw slackened, leaving him to look back and forth from Dorotèa to the covered body in muted horror.

The physician’s muddy green eyes didn’t so much as blink.

“Dorotèa!” sputtered Oste. His tan skin flushed. “Wh—how—you’ve a corpse.”

She blinked, taking in the appearance of his own grapevine brooch on his sleek grey doublet, which twinkled and distracted from his unmistakable shock.

She’d seldom seen such an expression on her confraternity leader’s face.

She rather thought it made him look younger than his twenty-nine years, which was some small miracle considering how much he seemed to have aged in the last six months.

Dorotèa continued to stare. “Yes?” she remarked slowly, then looked across at it. “Is it not supposed to be there?”

“No. I’d have been informed. It wouldn’t… be in here.”

She scratched her head. “I did wonder.”

Oste placed his fist in front of his mouth and shook his head. Dorotèa looked on with parted pink lips as the implication dawned on her. She’d anticipated their first collision in the office to be unsettling for reasons other than sprung-upon work that lacked a pulse.

The physician looked over his shoulder as though he expected Dorotèa to faint, but she believed he appeared closer to that state than she did.

She only gave him a little shrug in return—like many Aixois, she’d grown used to the sight of the dead since the troubles began.

Sometimes she was closer to them than she ever wanted to be.

Sometimes they were familiar. Everyone knew someone who had bled or been run out for the shape of their faith.

Dorotèa was only stirred from her broom-hugging stillness when she caught the bend of Oste’s knees and forward tilt of his frame that indicated the man intended to go and have a closer look.

His too-bright eyes were fixated on the white sheet, and he angled himself over it despite the stiffened lock of his right shoulder and the slow, ginger pace in which he shifted weight off his left leg.

Her heart lurched when his body came to rest, and she, too, had to mask her lips with the cover of her fingers.

Merde, she thought. His troubles performing menial tasks that she’d witnessed before hadn’t been imagined.

Oste pinched the edge of the sheet and lifted it to take a closer look.

He peered beneath, then almost immediately his dark brows arched sky-high.

He let go when a rustle atop the white sheet drew both of their attention, and he twisted to grab the source.

A small piece of parchment was placed delicately on top, which he lifted in front of his face to read.

“Dorotèa,” said Oste, “you picked a strange day to give in to the Order of Saint-Mitre’s whimsies.”

“They didn’t think it a whimsy.”

“I suppose they wouldn’t.”

Oste closed his eyes and counted to ten. It was a ritual that he was certain he’d gotten worse at putting into practice. Only, when he took the time to think about it, he wasn’t sure he’d ever been good at it. There came a point when meditation likely meant and did very little.

When he opened his eyes, he read the scrap of paper.

Her name was Marie.

See if there’s anything you can figure out, and do as you must. I will be by soon to visit my ailing third cousin.

Yours,

-J

The physician loosened a growl that, at first, he didn’t realize came from himself. The visage he took on in the wake of reading, then reading again, would have certainly had his mother gently chiding him that he might gain extra wrinkles or frighten a child or two.

This would have been unpleasant enough without Dorotèa hovering over his shoulder.

Now, it was a catastrophe. And, by God, he liked the young woman, which made it harder to be upset about all this.

She was as much a familiar comfort as summertime fireflies, but, of course, she’d been there to catch them with him when they were small.

Oste slowly looked back over his shoulder and found her where she’d planted herself from the start, albeit with her mouth covered and the broom looking like it was going to fall out of her hand at any moment.

It took him a moment to realize, though, that her trepidation wasn’t accompanied by her looking at the corpse, but at him.

Her honey-brown eyes were so attentive that he almost felt naked.

He knew that the body beneath his work clothing was why the Order—his Order—sent her skipping up into his office and into a situation she ought to have nothing to do with.

He supposed he must have watched her in silence for a long time, because Dorotèa eventually lowered her hand from her mouth and spoke.

“You appear very displeased,” she whispered.

“You’ve always been observant,” said Oste pointedly. “I’m furious.”

Dorotèa’s eyes wandered down to the sheet. “About…?”

“Yes,” said Oste, “and the fact that I actually agreed to let you—anyone—have their own key.”

He didn’t miss her subtle flinch, but it was fleeting on account of him busying himself by pushing back from the table.

There came that weak push again, a vestige he hadn’t been able to shake off.

His leg throbbed a little, but it was a dull and distant thing now; more inconvenience than anything.

He supposed this was lucky, since, as a physician, he knew all too well how rare it was for men to make it to inconvenienced from such a starting point.

That Dorotèa flinched again and looked straight at his legs made his silent rage lose its quiet designation; because he knew exactly where this ‘Marie’ came from and what he’d have to do, whilst finding a way to deal with his confraternity’s pity in the shape of the woman they sent, who now had seen too much.

“Could you make it any less obvious?” Oste asked, exasperated. He threw up his arms, even though the gesture bore the soreness of morning in its own right. “What am I doing wrong? What is it that I need to say?”

Dorotèa shook her head. It was like he was seeing two of her in the periphery of his vision, if not three.

Her hair looked too red, her eyes, too large and shining.

Fireflies were akin to the edifice of her skin.

The room felt bright, but it was hardly bright at all. No one had even lit a candle yet.

He didn’t want humiliation from the swordsmith’s daughter.

He didn’t want it from anyone. He didn’t want a soul to have seen ‘Marie’, dropped on his doorstep courtesy of men with better reputations than he.

He couldn’t say that Dorotèa looked innocent when she looked at the corpse and then to him, because those eyes of hers were too wise for that.

No, he’d met enough people to know that she was the foil of expectations.

She was aware, and—more terrifying than that—unmoved.

“Obvious in which sense, Docteur?” Dorotèa asked. He didn’t miss the strangeness of hearing her use his title instead of the name she’d always known.

Oste frowned. “Every sense.”

“That could mean so many things.”