The Exorcist Doctor

Chapter 115 - A Child Born // In a Better World

Night or day made no difference in the underground herb garden. It was as pretty and bright with an artificial moon lantern and dense with exotic vegetation as ever—and Gael had even upgraded it once or twice throughout the past year. Little channel-rivers twined between the soilbeds, carrying cold water and bringing cool humidity to the garden. He’d also laid down thin cobbled paths that wound through the fruit trees, so visitors from beyond wouldn’t have to dirty their shoes stepping on raw dirt.

Of course, Gael and Maeve were no strangers to harvesting herbs and vegetables on demand for certain picky customers.

Hunched over in two different corners of the garden, the two of them toiled under artificial moonlight. Gael cut springs with a scalpel while Maeve pinched stems with neat fingers. Saint-basil, moonmint, witchhazel, devil’s thyme, marrow-flax seedheads, three hands’ worth of bruiseleaf, one length of knuckleroot… all into their baskets with the soft thuds of patient hearts.

In the middle of the garden, Zora waited right under the moon lantern, humming a tune like a traveling kettle as he spun in slow circles.

“What a refreshing place,” the man said cheerily. “Who knew you could tuck a whole moon under a Church? The air’s clean. The water’s frank. Even the dirt sounds awake.”

Gael glanced over his shoulder and scowled. “You haven’t opened your eyes once, decorative stranger. How, exactly, are you telling?”

“Closed eyes do not mean blindness,” Zora replied lightly. “They only mean the eyelids are doing their job. I can hear the zipper-stitch of shy leaves in the clover, and that says the soil’s cool and well-fed. I can smell the sugar breath of basil flowering too early, which says the gardener waters at dusk and not dawn. I can feel the river’s small cold on my ankles, and that says the channels fall a thumb more to the east than to the west.”

Maeve paused, smiling despite herself, and Gael made a dubious noise. Then Zora added, “There’s a saying where I come from: ‘A beetle that keeps its feelers tucked walks into kettles.’ This is a pretty garden.”

“Uhhh… Okay.”

Gael bent again to the beds and filled his basket with more things: saint-poppy pods, a twist of gutter-fennel, moonflower-less moonleek, and a dignified handful of catgut thyme. When his side of the list looked sufficiently beaten into submission, he rose, trod the flagstones to Maeve, took her basket as well, and carried the two to Zora.

He held the load out. “Everything on your pilgrim shopping list,” he said. “Or near enough the saints won’t complain.”

Zora tilted his face down at the smell of crushed green and damp bark in the baskets, chuckling. “Well, I wouldn’t know if this is everything I asked for, would I?” he said. “But if the Raven of a crooked Church says this is everything, who am I to correct him? I’ll trust you. Otherwise I’d take twice as long and be half as right.”

Gael’s scowl softened into suspicion. “If you don’t know these herbs by sight—or smell or hearing or whatever—why do you even want them?”

“Oh, these aren’t for me.” Zora took the baskets gently. “I have a friend and colleague. He’s a doctor from the Plagueplain Front—just a ‘doctor’, mind you, not one of the notorious ‘Plagueplain Doctors’—and he’s run out of prime ingredients to use in his concoctions, so seeing as I’m marching one last circle around the continent, he gave me a list of ingredients to take back with me while I’m in the Plagueplain Front.”

“Huh.” Gael accepted the answer, then shrugged. “All right. Anything else while you’ve got us under your moon?”

“... Actually,” Zora said, pivoting on his heel towards the sound of a trickle, “yes, I do have another request: do you happen to have any medicine that helps with childbirth?”

Maeve and Gael both stopped the way two thoughts hit a wall at once. Maeve looked at him. He looked at Maeve. Then Gael huffed a little laugh.

“‘Medicine’ is dramatic,” he said. “It’s childbirth, not a duel. There’s no medicine that can guarantee a safe delivery, but… there are helps.”

So the two of them went back to picking herbs: hearthleaf and re-rasp leaves from bed three, and cramp-bark twigs—small ones. While Maeve gathered some more mother’s milkweed seed, he went over to yank down a spoon of stoneflowers.

“All of these herbs we’re pulling up and down for you, just boil them into a tea,” Gael said idly, stuffing their new herbs into a third basket. “It’ll keep the lady’s muscles from throwing killing tantrums.”

“Childbirth is common,” Zora mused, admiring the garden again, “but even still, my wife is expecting, and when the beetle’s got eggs, every shadow of a bird looks like a calamity.”

“Your wife?”

“Oh, yes. I’ve fought gods and monsters and stood on frozen ridgelines and argued with death; I didn’t sweat half so much doing all that as I do now, thinking of that delivery room she’s going to be in.”

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Gael whistled. “Nice. How long she’s got?”

“Two months, give or take the moon’s greed. And the doctor says it’s going to be a girl.” Zora’s grin turned soft enough to bruise. “Truth be told, I do worry about the delivery as well given my doctor’s… tendency for surprises… but I suppose I have to trust him with their lives.”

Gael cut the last floss, palmed it, and dropped it into the basket with a small paper twist. “My sister does births. ‘Hands like a hawk and voice like a saint’—or so the people say, I dunno. Feel free to bring your wife by when the time comes. Cara’ll midwife an angel out of her.”

Zora chuckled. “I appreciate the offer, but we are very far.”

“Suit yourselves.”

“Still, the thought of such a clinic existing here…” Zora trailed off for a moment before smiling softly. “It sits well with me. Last time I was in Bharncair, there was nothing like this in the southern ward.”

Maeve was the first to go back to Zora with her basket, cheeks pink from the damp and the hurry. “You’ve been here before?” she asked.

“Mmh.” Zora nodded. “About twenty years ago now. The Vile wasn’t so thick then. The back alleys didn’t hiss as much when your back was turned, but even in that thinner age, Bharncair treated me and my friends… poorly, to say the least. I took the lesson once I got what I wanted coming here for the first time, and I never came back. It’s the only city I haven’t revisited ever since.”

“Fair,” Gael said, walking back over and dumping his part of the herbs into Maeve’s basket as well. Zora took it from them; now he was holding three full baskets of herbs. “But Bharncair’s still home.”

“That it is.”

Their steps were light as they climbed back up the stairwell and returned to the prayer hall. Zora’s staff ticking gently against the floor was still the loudest sound in the entire clinic.

“... Even still, I cannot help but wonder what sort of world my child will be born into,” Zora said, glancing back at the statue of the crooked Saint halfway down the red carpet. “Will our war against the bugs of the dark stars end with our generation, or will my child—and yours—carry it forever, never seeing the end in their lifetimes as well?”

Maeve slowed a step, her lips pressed together. Gael said nothing.

By the time they reached the clinic’s front doors, dusk was bleeding through the stained glass, dimming the crooked Saint’s tilted smile—so before Zora could step outside, Gael stopped him with a casual tone.

“Tell me, Mister Fabre,” he said, “are you a well-traveled man?”

Zora looked amused as he turned his head slightly. “I would say so, yes. Why do you ask?”

Gael scratched his jaw, eyes narrowing in the half-light.

“... Nothing,” he mumbled. “Just wondering if people still do that.”

The man didn’t press further. Instead, he gave a simple nod, raised a hand in farewell, and left.

Gael and Maeve returned the gesture, bidding him goodbye as they closed the heavy doors behind him together.

Then they turned back to face the crooked Saint.

Forever midway through a nod, a little amused and a little pitying…

Cara’s question strolled back through his skull.

‘What does it really mean to run the greatest clinic in the city?’

He rolled the thought on his tongue and found the taste unripe. Greatest how? By purse? By pew? By piles of saved bones stacked neatly out back like cordwood?

“... Nah,” he said at last, low enough the Saintess could pretend not to hear, and turned to Maeve. “Listen—”

She lifted her gaze at him at the same time. “Listen—”

They stopped, and the Saintess’ lopsided smile seemed to approve of the synchronized failure.

Then Maeve let a small, tired smile break. “You first.”

He took a breath. “This isn’t it,” he said, gesturing at the length of pews, the cots, and the cupboards of tinctures lining the walls. “The southern ward hears our name, but only the Saintess knows we ain’t hot shit outside the south. I’m going to the other four wards to spread seed Saint’s Hands where we can, bribe where we can’t, and bully the rest… and maybe, while I’m at it, I’ll pry into this new ‘strain’ of Myrmurs as well. You in?”

He watched her carefully, and he didn’t have to. She’d already lifted her ankle, flashing their chain at him—a reminder that his question was rhetorical and stupid, because he couldn’t go anywhere without her, and she couldn’t go anywhere without him.

“I was going to say the same thing,” she said, letting her foot fall softly. “That man yesterday… shouldn’t have died. Someone built him to die when saved, and I’m not living in a city that treats lives like tripwires.”

And, just to get a word in as well, a cough came from above.

Both of them looked up.

Leaning against the surgical chamber’s windowframe was Cara and Evelyn and Liorin at her sides. Cara raised a hand and wiggled her finger once—permission, benediction, or a threat. He wasn’t exactly sure what it was until she spoke.

“You’ve spent two years making yourself replaceable around here,” Cara said, nodding at the front door. “The clinic can cut and stitch without its Raven and Caser for a while. The tinctures will brew, the garden will water itself, and the Saint’s Hands will handle the rest. The southern ward doesn’t need both of you underfoot all the time, so go make yourself replaceable and be a problem somewhere else.”

She didn’t ask. It was an order.

“Conquer the rest of the city in the name of peace and health.” She laughed, waving them away as she turned away from the window. “We’ll be fine without you.”

Evelyn made a face that meant enthusiasm and danger in equal parts, while Liorin nodded once, confidence as a stitch.

So Gael’s grin split the dim—all teeth and mischief and something that might be courage if he squeezed it in—and he stepped closer to Maeve, taking her hand and holding it up to their faces.

“... How about right now?” he asked. “Let’s have our round-city honeymoon before the wedding.”