The Hospice of the Blessed Mother was one of Anthusa’s foremost houses of healing and respite. With walls of speckled marble, a threshold chased in gold, and statues of the Archangel Raphael bearing the serpent and cup, any patient permitted inside could not help but rest assured that their life was in the best of hands.
Alas, space inside the Hospice was always in short supply, now even more so under the plague’s oppression. When it first came to Anthusa, thousands of victims crowded its gates, begging for treatment. Eighteen died and dozens more were injured as the crowd was repelled by the guards. Where once the citizens of Anthusa lined up for a chance to be treated within, now the space in front of the gates was empty. Those who approached were of two types: those who had bought appointments inside with coin or the favor of their patrons, and the desperate, who were invariably turned away.
Inna and Myshkin hobbled down the steps in front of the Hospice, away from the menacing polearms waved about by the guards in banishing these two intruders. They were covered in rags, coughing horrible, and their exposed skin was covered in black pustules.
Granted, the coughs didn’t sound quite right for the plague, and if the guards paid attention they would have noticed the pustules were drawn on with ink, but they saw what they wanted to see and acted accordingly.
Inna and Myshkin played their part to perfection, and as they stumbled away from the hospice into the back streets, lamenting their fate, they were soon approached by a middle-aged man who told them of a miraculous healer who would treat them free of charge. Down they went through the twisting, dingy alleys, until they reached an unassuming portal attached to a disused house. Inside was a makeshift hospice, with sickbeds piled together chaotically amid basins of water and boxes of medicines, roots, and leeches. Scented candles and incense burned and filled the room with sweet aromas, and portraits of angels and saints looked down benevolently upon the sufferers.
Dozens of assistants tended to patients in various stages on the road to death. Some would recover, and others would die, but human effort was not to credit or blame for either. Dozens more assistants had passed through this back-alley hospice and left in tears, distraught by the fickle violence of the plague and their complete powerlessness to cure it. Those who remained were the hardened, steadfast core of their discipline, who knew their mission was to provide comfort and ease to the suffering without regard for life and death.
“Miss Agatha!”, the middle-aged man called out. “These two were rejected by the Blessed Mother, and have come here for treatment.”
And chief among these healers was Agatha. She looked to be in her late thirties, and dressed in a simple tunic laden with innumerable tools of medicine and surgery. She turned her attention from a patient in the early throes of infection and looked the two newcomers up and down. Inn and Myshkin kept their composure: for all her costuming, this was the witch they knew from the little backcountry shack.
“Come with me,” she instructed, as she stepped into a back room and left the door hanging open.
Inna and Myshkin followed her to a chamber that belonged less in the back of a hospice than a fortune-teller’s circus tent. Astrological diagrams covered the walls and ceiling, an astrolabe and a wide table competed for elbow room: there was even a watermelon-size ball of thin crystal upon an ornate stand.
Myshkin faked a hacking cough and tried to lower his voice. “Why have you brought us here, o wise healer? Will you tell us our fortunes?”
Agatha looked at them both, picked up a bucket of warm, soapy water, and set it in front of them.
“Go to the baths outside and wash off those spots. I trust you have clean clothes under those rags, yes?”
The shepherds flushed with shame and stared down at their feet.
A mirthful giggle broke the silence, and Agatha stepped forward to embrace them both. Inna and Myshkin were briefly reminded that, contrary to their perceptions, Agatha was actually a full head shorter than either of them, and had to stand on tip-toe to get her arm around Myshkin’s shoulders.
“I’m not angry. It’s so good to see you both in good health. Now go!” she smacked Inna playfully with a sponge. “We can catch up later, but I need to speak with someone else.”
She looked to the door, still gently ajar. The air shimmered there, and to the shepherds it looked as if Cato suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Myshkin would have been shocked to learn that it was another application of the technique Cato learned from him, exerting control over one’s aura to diminish and conceal it to such a degree that the uncultivated eye simply did not register his presence.
“Lady Agatha,” he bowed, “my apologies for the deception.”
“I wasn’t deceived, my lord.” Those last words still held just a tinge of reproach. “Come sit.”
She waved Inna and Myshkin out again like a grandmother shooing away her favorite grandchildren. Once they had gone, her expression hardened, and Cato felt a presence as dark and deep as the open ocean fill the room. It hung over him like a weighted net, trapping him, making any use of energy clumsy and sluggish.
Cato learned enough from Remiro and Andrea to know that cultivators often exposed their auras in greeting to one another. This was most common on the battlefield or in negotiations, a way to size each other up and establish dominance. But it was also used more shrewdly to test a stranger’s intentions.
Right now, surrounded by the emanations of Agatha’s soul, Cato was vulnerable. If this was a battle, he would marshal his own power and exert it on his surroundings, like he had in Beroli. If this were a battle, he and Agatha would be trying to intimidate the other with a display of force.
If this were a battle, Cato would have already lost.
He had an inkling of Agatha’s power just from approaching the hospice, but now it was clear. She was comparable to Benicio Cecchini, and unlike his ambush on the road, Cato had walked right into her lair. The drawings on the walls and ceiling hummed a resonant note when her aura spread through the room, and Cato didn’t doubt there were spells hidden among the astrological diagrams all around him.
If Agatha wanted to kill him, only the golden lions might have saved his life. Now that those were destroyed, he was entirely outclassed. If he tried competing with her at this point, it would only belie his goodwill. So even as he pushed away memories of fire and teeth, he restrained himself and allowed the presence to wash over him without resistance.
“What brings you to my hospice, my lord?” She spoke lightly and easily, as if she wasn’t pressing down with oceanic pressure.
Cato strained to crack a friendly smile and speak. “So you know who I am?”
“No.” The pressure doubled, and Cato held on to the table with whitening knuckles. “But I know who you are to them. And I expect you to keep your oath.”
“I… understand.” The pressure softened slightly. “Please know… Lady Agatha, they insisted on… coming to see you.”
She sat in silence for a time, letting Cato stew under her aura’s oppression.
“Tell me, Cato of Inillo, how many villagers have died under your care?”
Cato hung his head. “One.”
The pressure redoubled, and Cato felt the chair underneath him starting to give out.
“Really? Just one of Inillo’s people died of the plague in weeks of journeying?”
“No… one was murdered. None died… of plague.”
“How?!” She spoke in anger and confusion, but she could detect no falsehood.
“I healed them!”
Cato took a deep, gasping breath as the pressure was relieved all of a sudden. He barely stayed in his seat, but Agatha didn’t wait for his lightheadedness to pass.
“How?” She was staring at him like a butterfly pinned to a display board.
After regaining his breath, Cato explained… almost everything. His miraculous survival of the Holy City’s destruction, his ignorance as to his true identity, his encounter with Inna and Myshkin, the oath he swore, the journey to Anthusa, even his death and strange return. Agatha, for her part, explained that she had a premonition while hiding out near Inillo, which led her to take the shepherds under her wing and leave them with a book they couldn’t read. Though her oracular abilities only allowed a hazy look at the future, she knew that course of action would save Inillo from disaster and lead their savior to her door.
But the details made no goddamn sense.
“You’re telling me you haven’t been infected with the plague at all?”
“I… yes?” Cato hadn’t really thought about it at all. “I figured because I had cultivated my body I was immune.”
Agatha nearly tore her hair out. “No! First of all, you’ve barely cultivated your body. Second, the plague only begins by attacking the body. If it encounters resistance, it infects and multiplies in the soul and uses that to attack the body from the inside until it completely wears down. Only cultivators much, much more developed than you can prevent the infection of their soul, let alone purge it entirely, and the plague retaliates by infecting anyone who tries to cure it magically in others.”
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
She pulled out stacks of loose paper: letters from doctors and healers, case reports, documentation from her own hospice.
“Second of all, healing others with your own power, oath or no, requires someone much, much more skilled and experienced in bridging the soul and body than you.”
“Like you?”
“No, like a sage. Maybe the Mother Serene could pull it off, and there were a few Holy Sons who could definitely do it in the past. But you…”
Agatha stood Cato up and turned his face to and fro.
“Who are you, exactly?”
“I was hoping you had some clue yourself.”
Agatha stood still for a moment, then dashed over to a cabinet full of yet more books and loose paper.
“If you don’t mind my asking Lady Agatha-”
“Drop the titles.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, Agatha, how does one come to be a witch?”
It was a totally artless question, but Cato just couldn’t square the woman in front of him with the image of a cackling hag stewing children in a cauldron. Inna and Myshkin had painted a much more restrained picture, but their retelling, fond though it was, was tinged with superstitious fear.
She certainly wasn’t restrained in pursuing her goals, and Cato felt her power firsthand, but Agatha didn’t seem the least bit malicious. It would never occur to him that she had colluded with demons or anything of the sort.
Even though Cato suspected he had done that himself.
“It’s not something you are so much as something you do. I was raised in the church. I was given to a nunnery at a young age, and I excelled.” Her low, calm tone grew into a crescendo of fury and frustration. “I excelled! I justified doctrine beautifully! I translated texts that had never been read in Vintic! But then they caught me with a copy of Mystic Conclusions. Did they take my past record into account? Did they listen to its arguments at all? No! Of course not! They handed me over to the Inquisition for heresy, and I was stupid enough to try convincing them.”
She went back to shuffling papers aside.
“So… what happened?”
“Oh.” She seemed surprised he even asked. “I pretended to repent and then ran like hell. Faked my death. They stopped looking for me years ago. Let me tell you, it was hell getting a book collection back together. Teaching dangerous secrets to shepherds is my way of getting back at them.”
“Are those spells really so dangerous?”
She pulled out a thick, leatherbound book and set it gingerly on a steadily rising pile. “Those two taught you the Eye of Aforgomon and the Wolf’s Howl, correct?”
“The sight spell and the aura technique?”
“The same. Those are derived from spells created by much more powerful cultivators. The Eye of Aforgomon is a divination that invites an angel of the sixth choir, the Dominion of Time, to give a glimpse of eternity. The Wolf’s Howl is less potent: it brings one’s soul closer to the angel of the third choir responsible for the fearsome quality of howling and roaring beasts, and imbues that power into the cultivator’s aura.”
“So-”
“No, you haven’t been invoking angels. Spells like those are immensely complex with a great many sub-techniques and require an extremely developed cultivation of body and soul. The versions I gave Inna and Myshkin, which they taught to you, are the fundamental preparatory techniques. Still, the fact that any part of those spells is outside their control infuriates the church to no end. It’s like…” She reached for a comparison suited to her very, very low estimate of Cato’s comprehension. “Like taking apart a sword and giving someone the pommel. You can still hit someone with a pommel, and it’s part of the original construction, but there’s no comparison between them.”
“Or maybe,” Cato protested, “it’s like how the eye sees but the soul comprehends, and with greater comprehension one gains both more knowledge and deeper understanding of what one already knew.”
Now that changed how Agatha looked at him. An iota of respect, maybe?
“So you did read the Book of Zevon.”
“Chapter eight, verse seventeen, from the parable of the dark glass.”
“Can you read old Achaean?”
She didn’t have to be quite so quick to pop his balloon. “I can… remember it. Father Andrea can actually read it.”
Agatha rose with a swaying stack of paper and books, set them down on the table, and started scratching away with a quill.
“Male, aged-”
“A hundred and sixty.”
“Aged a hundred and sixty, physical appearance in early twenties-”
“I looked a bit older. You know, before…”
“How old?”
“Maybe twenty-eight?”
“Aged a hundred and sixty, former appearance twenty-eight years, spoke old Achaean…”
She waited. Pointedly. Cato decided not to interrupt her in the future.
“... and was protected by the Golden Lions of Gulphay. May I?”
She already took out a crystal lens set in a brass monocle before Cato could assent. She had him turn in a circle, and she focused on a pair of points on his back, below his shoulder blades.
“Anchor point for the Golden Lions located between the trapezius and latissimus dorsi muscles, placed symmetrically, as described by Galeanus of Tamur.”
“Erm…”
“What is it?”
“What exactly are you looking at back there?”
“I’ll show you. Open the Eye.”
Cato stilled his senses and opened the dreamlike sight. In the course of learning it, he borrowed Inna’s sight through his connection with the villagers. Now he was on the other end, and it felt completely different. Merging his senses with the villagers’ felt natural, like another limb. But Agatha did it artificially, deliberately, like tying a thousand microscopic knots simultaneously. For the first time, it struck Cato how complex a process it was, and how much of the difficult work was performed without his own awareness.
“Good. Now look through the lens.”
He looked, and was amazed. The invisible eddies of energy he could feel when he meditated became visible in bright, swirling colors. The rich greens and blues of the earth, the crimson fire, kaleidoscopic purples and oranges and the eighth color he could only see out the corner of his perception, all of them flowing around his body in interconnecting patterns. But there, at the points Agatha indicated, two solid chunks of luminous golden energy poked out of his body.
“They’re broken. Might still be repaired later, but you’d need a sage from House Gulphay to do it.”
Cato snapped back to his ordinary senses, still swimming in what he just saw.
“To summarize: male, 160, late twenties appearance, bestowed with the Gulphay lions, in the Holy City when it fell.”
“And I had a dagger with the Gulphay crest sticking out of me in the river.”
“Noted.” Agatha concentrated, then sighed. “Most likely, you were part of Prince Maximilian’s contingent, maybe a younger relative, or your family are long-time vassals of the Gulphay royals. That’s not a large pool of people—the Golden Lions aren’t common—but I’d need to do more research.”
“And I’m guessing that’s not free.”
Agatha turned and faced him head on. Like Inna and Myshkin earlier, Cato was surprised to find that she didn’t tower over him; despite looking down at her, he felt compelled by an intangible force.
“I will help you find out who you are. I’ll even teach you. You have some ability right now, but your knowledge of cultivation is scattershot. I’ll bet your knowledge of history and the wider world is the same.”
He couldn’t argue with that.
“In exchange, you will help me find a cure for the plague. You could heal the villagers, and despite that the plague didn’t retaliate against you. Fate has brought you to my door. With your help, I could save so many people.”
She didn’t bother to hide the raw, anguished notes in her voice. There were dozens of people piled on sickbeds in the next room. Some would live and some would die, and the power of human reason was powerless to decide which.
This plague was a refutation of everything Agatha had lived for since she ran away from the nunnery. Now that a chance for progress was in front of her, she had to take it.
Anthusa’s bells tolled out midday in musical tones.
“I’ll help. But I have something I need to do.”
“What could possibly be more important than this?”
Cato turned away, pulled up his hood, and vanished from mortal sight. He would rather not face Agatha after telling her that he was duty-bound to guard a five year-old’s birthday party.
⚜ ⚜ ⚜
Teresa was about to turn five, and was making sure everybody knew it. She already told her nanny Myra and Colombo the gardener three times, and she’d told all the other servants twice.
But there were two people she hadn’t been able to tell yet. Mama was doing really important things in the tower, which meant she couldn’t come. She wrote letters, but hadn’t gotten any back yet. The letters took a very, very long time to go up and down, because the tower was so tall.
She also hadn’t been able to tell Mr. Otto. He liked to be called ‘Duke Ottofried Orczy, Protector of Anthusa’ in letters but when it was just them he let her call him Mr. Otto. He hadn’t been around for a whole week! That was almost a two-hundred-fiftieth of Teresa’s whole life he missed!
Yes, Teresa did the math herself. She was very good at it, and whenever the servants asked if she could count how many years old she was, she would show them how much higher she could count.
Oh, and she had only told Mr. Rosso about her birthday once! He forgot all sorts of things, so she had to make sure to tell him again.
He was also late to her lessons. This never happened. Teresa hoped he was alright.
So to pass the time, she wrote a letter.
“To his Grace the Duke Ottofried Orczy, Protector of anthusa, Teresa Forna, the Baroness of Urdan, his loyal subject, sends greetings. I told Colombo that I wanted a fluffy white bunny rabbit, and he said that there were wild bunnies in the castle garden. Today I went hunting, and I found one! I know that the castle rules say we can’t have wild animals, but can I keep this one? I will train it a lot so it won’t be wild anymore. Yours in servitude and friendship, Teresa Forna. P.S. I’m turning five today!”
Just as she was finishing up, the door creaked open and Mr. Rosso came in. Teresa told him off for being late, but he smiled and said sorry. She supposed that could be forgiven. As penance, she had him read over the letter to make sure everything was right.
Teresa was a genius: she could write letters fit for a duke, and she wasn’t even five yet. But Mr. Rosso was pretty smart too, and knew some things she didn’t.
“This is very good, my lady, very good.”
No, it wasn’t very good. The ‘a’ in ‘Anthusa’ in the address had to be capitalized. Mr. Rosso knew that, which meant he wasn’t paying attention at all.
But Teresa decided not to point it out. Mr. Rosso looked like he was thinking about something very far away.
He looked scared.
“I don’t like it! I’m going to write it again.”
She took the letter from his hands and wrote a new one, without the error. Better to not let him know she tried to trick him, it would only make him sadder.
“Will you come to my party, Mr. Rosso?”
“Of course, my lady. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
He still looked sad and worried. He also has his secret face on, like when Teresa asked him where he came from before he worked in the castle. He’d only been here for a few months, though Mr. Rosso was her favorite tutor by far, and she hoped he would stay. He said he was from Roche, but his face didn’t change. Mr. Rosso was a really bad liar.
Teresa wasn’t very good at lying either. Lying was a sin. But she knew that adults lied a lot anyway, and that was between them and God.