Where Heaven Bleeds

Chapter Four

Brother Cassian arrived at noon carrying a clay pot of broth and the expression of a man who had given last rites so many times in recent weeks that he'd stopped flinching when he knocked on doors.

He was a wide, weathered man of perhaps fifty-five, with the kind of face that had probably never been handsome but had achieved, through decades of listening to people's worst moments, a quality more useful than handsomeness. He had been the village's only remaining cleric since Father Edmund died in October, and he wore his provisional authority the way soldiers wore armour, with relief at the protection and weariness at the weight.

He stopped in the doorway of the Vale house and looked at Seraphel.

Seraphel looked back.

"Brother Cassian," Aldric said, "this is Seraphel. She's helping."

"Helping," Cassian repeated. He was still looking at Seraphel with the careful attention of a man who had spent decades reading people for the presence or absence of grace. "I see."

"She helped Mira through the worst of last night." Aldric poured the monk a cup of watered ale and set it on the table. "The breathing has eased. She took some water this morning."

Cassian set the broth down slowly and moved to Mira's bedside. The girl was sleeping proper sleep, not the unconscious fever-sleep of the night before, and the colour had come back enough to her face to make her look like herself again. The monk touched her forehead with practised gentleness, murmured something under his breath, and straightened.

"Remarkable," he said, and looked at Seraphel again. "You're a healer."

"I am trained in healing," she said carefully.

Aldric watched Cassian watching her, and thought: he doesn't believe it. He believes something, but not that she is simply a healer. The monk had spent too many years with the unexplainable to mistake the texture of this for anything ordinary.

"We need to talk about the village," Aldric said, before Cassian could ask any of the questions forming behind his eyes. "How many sick?"

Cassian let it go, for now. He sat at the table and listed the households who had the sweating sickness, who had the swellings, who had the lung-sickness that came on so fast. He named the dead of the past week. There were eleven of them. Aldric kept his face still and counted.

Seraphel stood to one side and listened, cataloguing each name, symptom, and household with her scholar's precision.

When Cassian finished, she spoke. "The lung-sickness moves fastest. Those households should be isolated, not cruelly, but completely. Nothing in or out. Fresh air when possible. The swellings are slower; there is more time." She paused. "Boil the water. All of it. From every source. The water is part of how it moves."

Cassian looked at her for a long moment. "You've seen this before."

"I have seen many things."

"The Black Death came out of the east. Genoa, they say. Venice. But you sound" He tilted his head. "You sound like someone who saw it before Genoa."

Seraphel said nothing.

Cassian nodded slowly, as though confirming something to himself, and picked up his broth pot. "I'll start with the Harrow household," he said. "They have three down with the lung sickness." At the door, he paused. "Seraphel. That's not a name I've heard before."

"No," she agreed.

"No." He looked at her once more with those careful eyes. "Well. God works as God works." He went out.

Aldric exhaled. "How long before he knows?"

"He already suspects. He will know when he decides to know. Some men take longer to permit themselves certainty than others." She turned to the window. "He is a good man."

"Yes," Aldric said. "He is."

Mira stirred in the bed. When she opened her eyes and squinted up at Aldric, he felt something loosen in his chest that had been wound tight since he first saw the smoke.

"You came back," she said, her voice raw.

"I said I would."

"You're late."

"I know."

She turned her head and saw Seraphel at the window. She looked at her the way children looked at things that didn't fit openly, without the adult reflex to pretend. "Who is that?"

"Someone helping," Aldric said.

Mira studied Seraphel a moment longer, with those dark eyes that had always seen further than was comfortable. "All right," she said, and closed her eyes again, apparently satisfied.

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