Chapter Text
The sun is sinking towards the horizon when Grief appears at the edge of the menkhu’s garden.
Isidor is out, attending to a matter of surgery for the Kin; it would have been improper for you to accompany him, he said, and witness such things.
But it’s different when it’s the Kin. They’ve guessed enough of what I’m teaching you , he said, with that wry, weary expression. Best not to salt the wound.
As if you haven’t watched him cut flesh half a hundred times before. But there’s a new shipment of medicines from the Capital, so you try to push aside your dark thoughts and begin the work of unpacking and sorting the crates.
You’ve just begun to pry the second open when the familiar voice hails you from the top of the fence.
“Stakh!”
You look up and see Grief perched at the edge of the fence. The fading sunlight catches on the little strands of red hair falling into his face, lighting them up gold.
“Grief,” you say, not letting any of the frustration or the relief that wells in your chest into your voice. It’s been some weeks since he’s appeared.
He’s got a new scar on one cheek, an ugly line of flesh across his jawline, and one of his hands is bandaged with a scrap of dirty linen. When he catches you looking, he smiles and calls it a badge of honor.
“More like a badge of blood poisoning,” you grumble.
“It’s your worry’ll make me sick before anything else.” He’s in a fine mood, you can see. “How’s the business of bloodlettin’?”
“Busy.” You gesture at the crates.
“Where’s old Burakh?”
“Out.” You wave a hand towards the Steppe.
You don’t miss the way Grief’s shoulders relax. “Still letting the old man pull your strings,” he says, that infernal smirk dancing at the corner of his mouth. “Here I was, thinkin’ you would get bored.” He swings his feet, kicking them against the wood of the fence.
All of the relief you felt seeing his face disappears. “Isidor keeps this town alive,” you say, shutting a crate with more force than necessary. “You should respect that.”
“I’ve got plenty of respect for the old man,” Grief says. “But being some kind of stand-in doesn’t suit you, you know that as well as me.”
“I’m learning his trade,” you snap. “I’m helping people. That’s more than can be said for you- off dancing on the strings of the knife-men in the warehouses.”
“It’s not the knifework that interests me. It’s the business.” A spark lights in Grief’s eyes. “And I’m not gonna be dancing to their tune forever. It’ll be my show, sooner or later.”
“You can’t know that,” you say.
“It’ll be mine just as easily as it’s theirs now,” Grief said. “But you can’t say the same, can you?” When you don’t say anything, he pressed onward. “Soon as Cub comes home…”
You still. If he comes home.
Three or four years , Isidor had said, when he sent his son away. A fancy education, away from the rural limitations of the Town, the feudal squabbling of the ruling families, the politics of the Kin. But then the war had come, and even a half-trained surgeon was an asset.
You should have left then; taken a rifle and enlisted, found Artemy. Then it would have at least been two of you against the devouring unknown.
But then there would be no student for Isidor, no assistant in the constant labor of the Town’s health. He would have faced the Outbreak alone.
“The Town can use more than one doctor, Grief.”
Grief smiles like he can see right through you, and you wish you could throttle him. “Sure it can.”
“Why are you here?”
He shrugs “Missed that mean face of yours,” he says. “You never come to see me .”
“Your friends would be likely to greet me with a knife in the back,” you say. “Forgive me if I don’t come calling .”
“Come on, Stakh, no one would dare lay a finger on you,” he says.
“Why, because I’m your friend? You’re not so important to them-”
“No, ‘cause they’re still scared,” he crows. “‘Couple of the boys remember back when you ran with them, when you-”
“Shut up,” you say, and for once he does.
There had been no goodness, no mercy in the child you once were. There had been nothing more than survival. You don’t like to think of it; you tell yourself you were too young to remember, and sometimes you even believe it. What matters is that Isidor picked you out of it, took you into his home and showed you how to live, how to fix things, how to do good. Let you into all the secrets of healing.
And then Artemy and Grief and Lara made you whole, in a way you hadn’t been before. You’ll always love them for that, little that your love has done for them.
But how could Grief understand that?
You come over to the fence and lean against it, peering up into his face.
“What?” He tilts his head at you, looking almost innocent. Him calling you ugly was a pot talking to a kettle, as he would say, but there’s a certain charm to his face. When he was younger, he could smile at you in a way that stole all of your anger, all of your worries.
You have more of both now, and the cracks between the two of you now are not so easily bridged with a word and a smile. “What are you doing out there, in the Warehouses?”
Grief’s eyes narrow. “Living. What are you getting at?”
He’s not so stupid as to not pick up on your meaning. You stare at him. He stares back.
Or maybe he is that stupid. You shake your head, and push away from the fence, going back to the crates. “Nevermind.”
You half expect him to disappear in a huff, but he stays, tapping his feet against the fence in an aggravating, off-kilter rhythm. As you get back to tallying, he produces a knife and starts to clean his fingernails. The blade catches the sun, the warm light reflecting cold and wan off the cheap steel.
For a few minutes, the silence in the garden is almost companionable.
“How’s our Gravel?” he asks.
Lara’s not yours, and she sure as hell isn’t Grief’s. “Her father is still dead,” you say.
Grief has the decency to look chastened.
“Ask her yourself,” you add.
“She doesn’t want the likes of me,” he says.
You can’t think of anything to say to that. What makes you think I want to see you?
But you do. You do.
You open another crate, and begin to tally the boxes of tablets. Scarce as usual, but between this and the twyre tinctures Isidor brewed, the two of you would make it last until the next shipment. You did your best to set aside extra, after the Sand Pest, but with the war, sometimes months went by without a ‘monthly’ supply train, and then all your stockpiles invariably dwindled down to nearly nothing, even with the tinctures.
“I did look in on Lara,” Grief says. There’s something in his voice, a hesitancy that makes you look up. “Back when I heard the word about Uncle Ravel. She was...” He shakes his head, for once fumbling for words.
You nod.
“At least she didn’t even throw anything at me,” he says. “Worrying, to be honest.”
You snort, and Grief grins.
“You should visit again,” you say, after another moment. Lara, locked away in that big, empty house all alone, waiting for her father to come home.
It might do her good, if only to have something else to get angry about, something tangible.
How do you grieve someone who died like that, not by battle or cataclysm but by cold calculation, by checks and lines on paper? For you, death has always been real, immediate, something you can taste in the air, something you can feel with your hands. You’ve known it since you were a child, scraping for scraps in the Crude Sprawl. But Lara never knew it like that, and now she has no body to bury, no farewells to carry with her, only the cold brutality of an army dispatch. Death like that doesn’t allow you to grieve.
“Maybe I will,” Grief says, with the same grin, but he’s never been able to lie to you. There’s that cringing guilt in his eyes, like you’ve called him on it before he opened his mouth.
“Can’t avoid her forever,” you say. “Sooner or later, she’ll march down to the warehouses herself, and it’ll go badly for you.”
Grief’s eyes light up. “She’d call for my blood then and there,” he says. “Pistols at dawn, like somethin’ from one of her books.”
Or just take you by the collar and call you a fool. Lara could do that, strip away your wits and excuses and weapons with the lash of her tongue. You had never been able to master it; somehow, you always just made enemies.
But Lara hasn’t been in the state to chase down you or Grief.
How long has it been since you called on her? A twinge of guilt runs through you. The past year has been a blur of work, and before then- well, the Sand Pest changed everything.
You ignore it, popping open a tin of tablets to count the number inside, to estimate the number in the crate, before heaving the crate up to the doorstep. You return to open the next crate.
You feel Grief’s eyes on your back, and when you turn to carry another crate up to the porch, you hear his footsteps in the garden. When you turn, he’s leaning against the wall, just a few paces closer.
Any decent man would have lent a hand, but decency interferes with Grief’s pride, so instead he skulks at the edge of the threshold like a kicked dog.
You wait.
“Any news of Cub?” The question slips from his lips casually enough, with another smile, but his eyes are fixed on you. It would be laughable, under other circumstances. Now, it just winds up something in your throat, something cold and angry.
Why am I the keeper of our friends, Grigory?
“Not on the casualty lists,” you say, turning back to the crates. Your voice sounds cold and harsh in your ears, but you don’t try to soften it. You were the one who picked up the hated papers every month, to pore over the lists of the dead and dying. “I sent him another letter, care of his unit, but no response.”
Casualty lists were hardly definitive. News of the war trickled out to the Steppe, a mix of occasional official missives from the Capital and rumors that changed with the week; cities burning to the ground, entire battalions slaughtered or left to starve in disastrous retreats, campaigns of fire and ashes. In all of that, what were a handful of souls from a distant town on the Steppe?
Artemy’s last letter had been two years past.
You try not to think about it.
Some days it feels as if Artemy has been dead for years. You rarely speak of him. You and Isidor move through the familiar rhythms of master and student; nights spent gathering twyre on the Steppe, learning each variety by song and color, and laboring over the alembic, mixing and refining tinctures for the Town’s ills, and days spent administering them, navigating the fragile systems of trust and truce within the Town to protect and heal all those you can. You have your own house now, but more nights than not you sleep in the Burakh household, collapsing on the old bed that you and Artemy and Grief and Lara used to cram into to whisper secrets to each other before anyone had realized such things were ill-advised. You tiptoe around those memories, and each year they become more faded, next to the vivid reality of learning the art of a doctor.
But you are not his son. And you are not a menkhu. No matter how hard you work. Even if Artemy never returns from the Front, you will never be Isidor’s successor in the eyes of the Town.
That’s fine. That’s how things are supposed to be.
What if Artemy never returns? the treacherous part of you whispers. The Outbreak gave it voice, but it had always been there. What if he’s left the Town behind, with no intention of returning? What if he’s deserted? What if he’s dead?
If he were dead, you would know it. A foolish thought, some scrap of superstition that rubbed off on you. All that was between you was childish oaths, and men left childhood oaths in childhood. Grief has already amply proven.
“Come out to the Broken Heart.” Grief’s words yank you from the tangle of your thoughts. “First drink’s on me. It’s been a good week.” He smiles, showing you the points of his canines.
You smother the impulse to ask just what qualifies as a good week for him. You don’t want to know. “I have work to do.”
“The old man ain’t here to notice.” He smirks. “You spend enough time on his heels anyway.”
“This isn’t some sort of game, Grief. I have responsibilities,” you say. Unlike you.
You don’t say the words, but you know Grief hears them all the same.
“Plenty of men with responsibilities have time to catch up with old friends,” he says. “If you’re worried about your respectability. The day’s done, and it’s been too long since we talked.”
“We’re talking now.”
“You know what I mean,” he says.
“Whose fault is that?” you say, straightening.
His eyes linger on you, and for a moment you think he’s going to say something sharp, but he only smiles. “You keep frowning like that, Stakh, you’re going to be old before your time.”
Then he’s gone.
You recount the boxes of tablets, just to make sure none of them had disappeared with him.
Grief has been stealing things for as long as you can remember. At first, only small things; handfuls of raisins and nuts; buttons. Needles and razors and scraps of cloth.
But it was the charm that really started it.
It was carved bone and red yarn, crafted to bring the wearer luck, Grief had boasted as he dangled it between his fingers. You remember watching the scrap of bone twist on its thread in the morning sunlight, and feeling something twist inside of you, some fear you couldn’t quite name, as he told you how he snatched it from the belt of a Steppe woman on the way to her shift in the factory.
Even you knew it wouldn’t bring him luck.
“You should give it back,” you had said, and Grief had just laughed.
“Too late, now,” he said. “How would I even find her?”
If Artemy had been there, he would have yelled at Grief, called him stupid and thick-headed and if it had come to a fight, Artemy would have badgered Grief black and blue with those big paws of his and somehow they would have ended up laughing. Grief would have given the charm back, for Artemy, and things would have been no different.
You’ve never known how to do that. You’ve never been able to pick fights and end up with friends, or talk someone out of a bad decision. When you open your mouth, all you can do is speak your mind, and Grief calls you sanctimonious, and worse, and it was no different back then.
But if you had only tried harder, found the right words, maybe things would have been different. Old man Burakh wouldn’t have caught Grief with the charm, and given him a tongue-lashing worse than you had ever heard him give anyone.
Grief wouldn’t have put the charm under his boot and ground it into the stone of the steps, until it was just fragments of bone hanging in scraps of dirty yarn.
Things had never quite been the same. When Grief came to the house, he never came closer than the garden, and Isidor’s eyes followed him, dark with trouble. He never asked after him anymore. More and more evenings Grief spent out in the warehouses with the lowlifes and rabble, playing dice and cards and trading his pilfered trinkets for twyrine and vodka.
You learned the science of the body under Isidor’s careful tutelage; you read the massive medical tomes, learned how to look into blood and see its disparate parts, to test bacteria, to track the paths of the body and coax them back into harmony.
Grief learned other lessons.
You wake in a panic. Dreams spin in your reach for a moment- sand slipping through your hands, the swish of grass against your feet as you fled, a yawning ache in your chest, the loss of-
Someone bangs on the door, and the dreams shatter, fragmenting into faint slivers of color and pain.
It must have been a knock that woke you.
“Rubin!” a voice calls. Rough. Unfamiliar.
You bolt from your bed, and scramble for the door, prepared for whatever disaster has come to your door. An accident at the factory, or a child with a fever-
Me? Now? The townsfolk came to you when Isidor was called away by the demands of the Kin. But you had been with him some hours past, sorting the last of the medicines and listening to him pore over the latest treatises from the Capital.
You yank the door open and the answer is there, pale and soaked in blood and shivering on your doorstep.
Two figures stand there, one leaning against the other. There’s a rapidly-spreading pool under their feet; ink, you think for a moment, but in the faint light it glimmers red.
“Stakh,” Grief says, his lips pulling back into a smile that shows you every inch of his bloodstained teeth.
The other man helps carry Grief into your study. There’s a dirty shirt wadded up and pressed to Grief’s side, but blood drips across the floor; he must have left a trail of blood halfway across the town.
“What the hell happened?” You sweep papers off your table without care for where they fall.
“A disagreement,” Grief says, through gritted teeth. His friend’s hand slips and he stumbles, pitching forward. You catch his shoulder. “Said something that was… with hindsight… inadvisable.”
The man helps lift Grief onto your table, and you gently pry Grief’s hand away from the wound. He fights you, a hiss of pain escaping through his teeth.
You catch his hand, pressing it, and waste several precious seconds fumbling in your sleep-fogged mind for some sort of reassurance. You’re no good at that on the best of days. His skin looks gray in the wan light of your candles, and his eyes are wide, flooded with unguarded fear. “Grief!” you snap at last, looking into his eyes. “Sit still .”
The fear doesn’t diminish, but he jerks his head in a nod. “Sure,” he says, with a strangled laugh that turns to a whimper as you ease the wrappings away.
A wound gapes beneath your fingers, a jagged, red-lipped mouth in the pale expanse of Grief’s side. Ropy coils of glistening red poke from the wound, like threads of hand-spun yarn.
Behind you, the man swears.
In your mind’s eyes, you see the bone charm swinging in the air between Grief’s fingers on its strand of red.
Your hands hover over the ugly tangle of his flesh, before you begin to stand.
He catches your wrist, his grasp crushing. “Where…”
“We need to send for the menkhu,” you say. You turn to the man who brought Grief here. He’s lingering at the edge of the room, his face almost as gray as Grief’s. “You. Go to Burakh’s-”
“No!” Grief’s fingers tighten on your wrist. “Don’t want to… bother… the old man.”
“I’m not a surgeon , Grief,” you say. It’s not strictly true. You’ve learned the skills; you’ve practiced on cattle and corpses, under the cover of night, under Isidor’s careful eye. But when living patients come, it’s Isidor who has always wielded the scalpel.
Grief shakes his head, still clinging to you. “No.”
“Do you want to die?” Your blood feels hot inside your veins, your pulse pounding through your head.
“I came to you.”
“I can’t do this.” You force the words from your throat.
“I trust you.” He gives you another horrible smile, the red of his teeth glistening. He shouldn’t even be awake.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” you snap.
“Please… Stalkh. Please.” Fear creeps into his voice. His eyes roll to you, the whites gleaming on the candlelight. “Please. No Burakh. I don’t want… I can’t… I came to you .” His fingers are still curled around your wrist, but all the strength has gone from them.
You recoil, from his limp grasp, from the words, from the desperation written across his face, bare as bone.
“I’ve never done this before,” you say. “You could die.”
“ … you’ve… always been a quick… study…”
Send for Isidor anyway. Grief is too weak to put up a fight. You open your mouth, but the words don’t come out. Can’t come out.
I came to you.
“Fine.” Your heart is hammering in your chest, but it’s not fear that threatens to make your hands shake; it’s anger, blinding, coiling hot in your stomach and searing the back of your throat.
Grief, and his pride. You, and your cowardice.
“Bring me water,” you say to the man. God, you don’t even know his name. You’ve never been able to keep track of the boys Grief runs with. “From the pumps. Boil it over the stove.”
You need morphine, but there’s none on hand; you handed the last of your stock out a week ago, and the latest shipment is still sitting in Burakh’s house. You can’t risk giving him oral painkillers, or even alcohol to take the edge off, not with a gut wound. If the knife nicked his entrails, he’s likely as good as dead anyway.
You begin to clean the wound and trying to map its edges. Grief goes taut, a strangled noise escaping his throat. His hands go out; one catches you in the chest, pushing you backwards with strength borne of desperation. You stumble and just manage to catch yourself on the edge of the table.
“Grief!”
“I’m… sorry…” the words come out a thin whisper from his lips. “I…”
You grit your teeth, swallowing the sob that it’s in your throat. It’s not his fault; an involuntary reaction, his body fighting against the pain. You think you might hate him anyway.
If you had morphine…
You wait an agonizing handful of moments for Grief’s friend to return, listening to the rapid gasp of Grief’s breathing. Grief a moment to recover. His eyes are wide, staring out into nothing, his breathing too fast. You can’t do anything but apply careful pressure to slow the bleeding and wait.
Finally, the man returns with the water, and you prepare again.
“Hold him still,” you snap to the man, and his hands crush down on Grief’s shoulders, pinning him to the table even when he shakes and shudders.
He doesn’t scream, but the quiet gasps and whines that escape his throat are almost worse.
There’s no sewer-smell of viscera, but the air is so thick with blood and alcohol and your head so addled that you can’t trust your senses.
You slip your hand into the tangle of his guts. The thick red threads of entrails slide over your fingers as you assess the damage, trying to find placing the knife tore, coaxing them back into place.
You keep seeing the frayed edges of snapped yarn ground with shards of bone in your mind’s eye.
At last Grief goes slack, finally at the threshold of what his body can endure.
You finish your inspection, inch by inch.
No lacerations.
You bite your tongue against the fear that rises in the back of your throat and put things right as best you can, with a needle and fine catgut thread.
There’s blood in your mouth, and blood up to your wrists by the time you set aside your tools. The crimson of the sunrise is creeping across the floor. You should be on your way to Isidor’s by now.
The thrill of exhaustion sings though your body, the jittery, sickening emptiness warring with your leaden limbs.
You send Grief’s friend away, and survey your work. Your stitches are neat, precise, just like Isidor’s. Looking at them turns your stomach, and for a moment the room spins, the silver of your tools and the dead pallor of Grief’s skin blurring together.
You blink until your vision clears, and then wash and bandage the wound with mechanical proficiency. When at last that is done, you sit down and rest your head in your hands.
You listen to the rasp of Grief’s breathing, your stomach twisting at every irregularity, every space between one breath and the next. The whole world shrinks to the slick pressure of your hands against your face and that rattling inhale and exhale.
If you had accepted his invitation, gone along to the Broken Heart. If you had persuaded him to stay, instead of running off with his crooked friends. If you had been the one sent off to school. If the superstition and idiocy of others hadn’t forced Isidor to educate you under cover of darkness, on corpses and cows. If you were Isidor’s son in truth.
If, if, if.
The sob catches you off guard. Your body, so carefully under your command for the surgery, rebels, shaking with dry convulsions until the tears begin. Once they’ve started stopping them feels like telling the Gorkhon to stop flowing, except you’re standing in the middle of it, buffeted this way and that by the current. Sobs tear from your throat, stealing your breath.
You cry until the strength for it runs out, and you’re left staring at the blood smeared across the floorboards. You force yourself to stand and check Grief’s pulse. His skin is cold and clammy to the touch, but at least he’s still breathing. You wash your hands and clean your tools, and then pull a blanket over Grief and put your head down on the table to wait.