4
Chapter
The Unlicensed Physician
Liora
The mud in Asteria’s outskirts never froze through; it turned into a thick, blackened paste choked with saltpeter, foundry ash, and refuse from the lower-wharf tanneries.
I left the estate before the stable hands lit the lanterns in the shed.
Maevra and Celene had been settled at the Golden Lion inn in the capital’s upper district for two days, busy with guild seamstresses and preliminary audiences with Council secretaries.
They had left me to inventory the flour sacks at the old mill and bundle the winter blankets for the freight wagon due to depart for Asteria the day before the Solstice.
I had twelve hours before Mina came up to the attic to ask for the pantry key.
Twelve hours to cross ten miles of waterlogged roads, find a street that appeared on no official map, and return with a substance capable of sending me to the scaffold.
I walked with my gray wool skirt hitched up over hemp petticoats, a coarse brown wool cloak pinned across my chest with a bone pin.
Beneath the collar of my cloak, the brass band burned against my skin with a dry, dull thrum.
The half tablet Oria had given me a week ago had worn off the night before; a steady prickle throbbed at the base of my tongue, my pulse hammered, and an oily heat crept up the sides of my neck whenever the wind caught me in the face.
My own scent—that blend of warm rain and resin my mother had taught me to scour away with ash soap—was beginning to seep from the pores of my wrists, faint yet unmistakable to any guard hound that crossed my trail.
I quickened my pace through the alleys of the lower riverbank.
The district of clandestine apothecaries reeked of sulfur vapors venting through earthenware pipes from the cellars.
No oil lanterns bearing the Crown wolf hung here, and no patrols passed in polished chain mail.
The house doors were uneven planks reinforced with rusted iron strapping, and the few men who crossed my path walked with hoods pulled down to their noses, shuffling their boots so as not to slip in the waste gutters.
I stopped in front of number seven, Clove Alley.
The facade had been a perfumery in the days of the sovereign’s grandfather, when minor bloodlines still kept scent workshops along the canal bank.
Now, the rotting wooden sign over the lintel bore a branded image of a cracked glass flagon, nearly swallowed by green mold.
The windows were boarded shut with crisscrossed pine planks, and a sharp stench of wood vinegar and camphorated spirits hung over the doorstep, thick enough to sicken a stray dog.
I didn’t knock at the main door.
I skirted the building through the side alley, where canal water slapped rotting timber pilings with a rhythmic suck of dirty foam. At the far end of the wall, half-hidden behind a heap of broken barrel staves, an iron trapdoor was anchored to the stone flags by two heavy hinges.
I tapped the iron three times with the brass bit of the key in my pocket. A pause. Two more strikes, sharp and quick.
Ten seconds passed, filled only with the whistle of wind cutting across the roof tiles and the drip of a drain pipe into the mud. Then, a bolt screeched from below.
The trapdoor lifted two inches. A seam of dense dark, warmed by stifling heat and an acrid smell of bitter salt and boiled roots, hit me in the face.
“The apothecary closed five years ago,” a dry voice said from the dark. “Beggars sleep at the barge wharf.”
“I’m looking for Master Nhal,” I answered, keeping my grip on the key inside the fold of my sleeve. “I have silver coin and a recommendation from the eastern canal.”
The trapdoor opened slowly.
“Get down here before the lock workers notice the steam.”
I climbed down a steep wooden stair, its rungs slick with a thin glaze of tallow. The air grew hotter with every step, heavy with the slow metallic creak of bellows and the steady bubbling of several copper stills lined along the exposed brick walls.
Soren Nhal shoved the trapdoor shut with an oak pole and threw two iron drop-bars before turning around.
He was a lean man in his fifties, his spine slightly bowed from decades of hunching over distilling benches.
He wore an unbleached linen shirt with yellowish chemical stains at the cuffs, a thick leather apron tied at his waist, and round-lensed spectacles hooked behind his ears with silver wire.
His scent was the characteristic void of a Beta who had worked too long among acids: lye soap, linseed oil, and a metallic trace that defeated any attempt to read his mood.
“Pull your cloak shut,” he said, gesturing with his chin toward a three-legged stool beside a workbench crowded with test tubes. “You reek of fear and cheap suppressant. If you let that stink mingle with ether vapors, I’ll have to air this cellar out for three days.”
I sat on the edge of the stool, keeping my hands tucked inside my sleeves.
The room was broad, dug beneath the bed of the street, with a vaulted stone ceiling crossed by frost-covered lead pipes.
On the pine shelves stood no common apothecary jars with labels in high chancery script; there were hundreds of dark glass vials, crooked-necked retorts, and clay trays of crushed mineral powders that glinted beneath the dim light of two grease lamps.
“Who gave you the knock for the trapdoor?” Soren asked, approaching the bench with a grimy rag to wipe down a silver spatula.
“A boatman at Lock Four,” I lied, picking a route the estate hands mentioned when talking about the black market. “He said you prepare compounds that bypass the Alchemical Circle’s registry.”
Soren let out a short laugh, a sound that scraped in his throat.
“Boatmen at Lock Four talk too much when they have brandy in their bellies. One of them turned up floating face down at the lower wharf two nights ago with his pockets stuffed with stones.” He set the spatula on the bench with a dry clatter. “Take off the collar.”
I hesitated for half a second.
“Take it off,” he repeated with a coldness that admitted no bargaining. “I can’t know what you need if you have three ounces of stamped brass choking your glands like a glandered mare.”
I brought my hands to the nape of my neck.
Numb from the cold outside, my fingers fumbled before finding the safety catch.
When the metal gave way and the collar sprang open, a sharp burn seared down the vertebrae of my neck.
The warm cellar air touched my damp skin, bringing on a wave of dizziness so violent I had to brace a palm against the bench edge to keep from pitching forward.
The scent that broke free was no explosion, but it filled the space between us with the steady surge of a warm tide: clean rain, dark stone, and that deep salt I had spent ten years trying to smother.
Soren didn’t step back. He pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his nose and studied me with near-surgical precision, still as a heron over a pool.
“Well,” he murmured, and for the first time his voice lost the rasp of a back-alley shopkeeper. “A pureblood Omega, reared in someone else’s pen and dosed on willow bark dregs since puberty. It’s a wonder your lungs haven’t turned into rotted sponge.”
“I need a dose for Solstice night,” I said, swallowing to soothe the burn in my throat. “A concentrated formula that leaves no trace in the gate inspectors’ vials.”
“For the Solstice Gala?” Soren raised a graying eyebrow. “You want to walk into the halls of Vhal smelling like a Beta servant to pour wine at the low tables?”
“I want to go in as a guest.”
The physician stood watching me in silence for several seconds. Then he dropped the rag onto the bench, crossed his arms over his leather apron, and leaned against the edge of the distilling rack.
“Noble guests pass through three cordons before their boots touch the marble of the great hall, girl. The first is the outer gate guard checking rolls and weapons. The second is the Royal Alchemists’ steam chamber, where two trained hounds scent cloak hems for common suppressants.
If you’re carrying a dose of bark or bitter salts, those beasts will mark you before you cross the courtyard, and Thorne’s men will hang you by your heels in the ditch dungeons. ”
“That’s why I came here,” I insisted, pulling from my pocket a small cloth pouch holding the four silver coins Elayne had hidden in the lining of her sewing box and three coppers I had scraped together through the autumn. “I was told you could conceal any designation.”
Soren looked at the pouch without touching it.
“Concealment is useless at Vhal Citadel. An Omega without a scent is an empty pocket in the air; court Alphas catch that void the way a wolf catches the scent of dead leaves over a pitfall. If you want to cross those thresholds without being questioned, you can’t hide what you are.
You have to look like something so dangerous the inspectors won’t dare meet your eyes. ”
I frowned, trying to make sense of what he meant.
“A highborn Beta?”
“No one cares about Betas on Solstice night,” Soren said, walking toward the back of the cellar, where a row of cobalt-blue glass vials rested inside a wooden crate lined with damp sand.
“The sovereign needs an Alpha consort to keep from losing his grip. The Council has packed the halls with territorial Alphas offering wartime dowries and five-century pedigrees. Guards are trained to step aside when highborn Alpha presence sweeps past them.”
He lifted one of the cobalt vials with wooden tongs and held it up against the lamplight.
The liquid inside wasn’t clear like the water of common suppressants; it was dense, a dark amber that shifted with violet gleams as it moved.
“This isn’t a suppressant,” Soren said, lowering his voice. “It’s a glandular inversion blocker. It doesn’t mute your scent; it saturates it with a base of fossil resin and black-root alkaloids that react to your body heat to project the signature of a noble Alpha.”