Dr. Matthias Corvus's Arc

Chapter 1 of 8

The boy on the cot was seven and burning, and Dr. Matthias Corvus had left a cure half-mixed on the workbench to reach him. He pressed a cool cloth to the child's neck. In the next room, a woman coughed the wet cough he knew too well. Down the lane, three more families waited for him to come knock. He had promised each of them he would. He was the only plague doctor who would take these streets. Other doctors had walked past the boy's door twice already this week. Matthias had learned young not to trust them. He had buried his parents behind one man's mistake and his girl behind another's shrug. Now he worked alone, and alone meant every hour was a choice about who lived. He carried the boy's fever down with willow bark and left him sleeping. In the front room, his shelf waited: labeled bottles, wrapped packages, dried bundles hanging from the top rail. A mortar sat half full of the thing he actually needed to finish, the compound he believed could break the plague itself. He had been building it for two years. Three more nights of work, maybe four. He picked up the pestle. A fist hit the door. A man he half-knew begged him to come to a sister two lanes over. Matthias set the pestle down. He went. He came back at dusk. The sister would live. The boy's fever had climbed again. The compound on the workbench had dried wrong and was ruined. He stood over it and did the arithmetic he had been avoiding. If he kept splitting himself, the cure would take another year. In another year, he knew the names he would have to add to the list he kept in his head. He wiped the mortar clean. He put on his coat and mask and walked out into the last light. The apothecary two streets down still had a lamp burning. He had passed the shop a hundred times without going in. Bundles of lavender hung by the door. Jars glowed behind the glass. Inside, an old man in a stained apron was sorting dried stems by feel, not sight, his fingers quick and certain. Matthias had heard the name in the market. A retired physician. The best of his generation, before his eyes went. People said he was gentle if you were kind and cruel if you were not. Matthias took off his mask so the man could hear him plain. "I need hands," he said. "Mine aren't enough. I'm trying to end the plague and I'm losing patients doing it." The old man's fingers stopped on a stem. He turned his face toward the sound of Matthias's voice. "Sit down, boy," he said. "Tell me what you've mixed so far." Matthias sat. For the first time in years, he was not working alone.