THE BONE AND THE ANVIL - The Crimson Tavern

The rain off the

March didn’t fall

The rain off the

March didn’t fall so much as it crawled sideways, heavy with the stench of wet timber and the sulfur from the mine-vats down by the river.Dr.

Cormac’s knees popped like dry pine knobs as he leaned his weight into the shoulder of the boy.

The kid was light—too light, like a bundle of wet straw wrapped in soaked canvas—but his legs dragged uselessly through the freezing muck, making every five yards a battle against the dark.”Keep his head up,

Garth,” Cormac rasped.

A spittle of yellow phlegm caught in his beard, but he didn’t have the breath to wipe it away. “Keep his mouth clear of his collar.

If he chokes on his own vomit now,

I’ve ruined four pairs of socks for nothing.”Garth didn’t answer.

The lad was seventeen, built like a hay-rick, but his knuckles were white where he gripped the boy’s torn tunic.

He was making a wet, whistling sound through his teeth—the same sound his father used to make when hauling poached roe deer past the foresters’ huts at midnight.”He’s stopped twitching,

Doctor,” Garth grunted, his foot slipping three inches into a water-logged cart rut. “He feels like an icicle.

A wet icicle.””He’s breathing.

I can feel the steam on my ear.” Cormac kicked open the low wicket gate of

Nail, the iron hinges screeching like a scalded cat. “Move, boy.

Ostrander’s night-watch sees us dragging a fugitive past the stables.”They burst through the heavy oak door together, staggering under the dead weight between them.The tavern didn’t quiet down because a half-dead kid had arrived; it quieted down because the cold air came in behind them, cutting through the thick, sour fog of boiled cabbage, burnt tallow, and fifty men’s unwashed wool.A greasy oil lamp swung near the hearth, casting long, jiggling shadows across the saw-dusted floorboards.

At the far corner table,

Jarek sat with a tin mug clutched in both swollen hands, his bloodshot eyes staring into the dark amber depths of cheap beet-gin as if he expected his dead son to swim up from the bottom.”Shut the bloody door!” a teamster roared from near the hearth, slamming a pewter tankard down hard enough to splash ale over his cuffs. “It’s freezing enough to turn a man’s balls to lead!”Cormac didn’t look at him. “Garth, the big table.

By the tap-wall.””That’s my table, doctor,” the barkeep growled from behind his grease-caked pine counter.

He was a cadaverous man named

Gike, with teeth the color of wet slate and a apron that looked like it had been used to wipe down a butcher’s block every day since the

Siege of the

Reaches. “I’ve got three drovers coming in at eight.

They want clean wood, not blood on the pine.””They’ll take what they get,

Gike,” Cormac snapped, his voice dropping into that razor-sharp register he used when telling an apprentice that a limb was about to rot.

He hit the edge of the long table with his hip, clearing a stack of crusty bread trenchers with one sweep of his elbow. “Help me get him up.

Easy with the leg—the skin’s split to the bone.”They hauled

Kian onto the wood.

The boy didn’t groan.

His head dropped back against the grease-stained grain, his lips parted just enough to show teeth stained dark with dried blood and mud.The lantern light caught his face then.The room went thick and silent, the kind of silence that usually preceded a knife-fight over a card-hand.”God’s teeth,” someone muttered near the hearth.Old

Jarek lifted his head from his mug, his watery, yellowed eyes squinting through the tallow smoke.

He let out a long, wet wheeze that sounded like a bellows full of sand. “That’s an easterner.

Look at the eyes… even shut, you can see the flat bones above the cheeks.

That’s a sun-drowned rat if

I ever saw one.””He’s from the canal cuts,” a teamster said, leaning over the back of his bench to spit into the hearth-fire.

It hissed sharply against the coals. “One of

Wilhelm’s ditch-diggers.

They ought to leave him in the ditch.

Their blood’s thin as whey anyway—doesn’t keep the cold out.”Garth turned on the man, his square face flushing purple under his freckles. “He’s thirteen years old, you great pig!

Gorge barefoot!””Then he’s a stupid thirteen-year-old,” the teamster spat back, though he didn’t rise from his bench.Cormac paid no attention to either of them.

He had already pulled his thick horn-handled knife from his coat and was slicing through the frozen, salt-crusted hemp of

Kian’s tunic.

The cloth came away with a sickening shhh-tick sound, peeling off the boy’s chest like bark from a wet log.The scars were old, white, and thin as wire across his ribs—canal lashes, the work of

Ostrander’s three-stranded whip.

But the new wounds were ugly: five deep, ragged furrows across the breastbone where the scag-hound’s claws had skittered over the bone.And there, right in the center of his chest, sat the thong.The bone pendant was dull now.

It looked like a handful of old pig-teeth tied together with wire, smeared with grey slime and dried muck.Garth reached out a hand. “I’ll cut that off him,

It’s filthy—it’ll rot the flesh if it stays against the tear.””Touch that thong, boy, and

I’ll use the scalp-hook on your knuckles,” Cormac growled without looking up.

He pressed two fingers against

Kian’s neck, right beneath the jawline.

The pulse was there, but it was light and erratic, like a bird fluttering inside a wool mitten. “Get the kit from my satchel.

The iron needles and the waxed thread.

Not the cotton—the cotton swells when it gets wet with pus.””I don’t have any spirit left,” Garth muttered, his hands shaking as he unbuckled the greasy leather bag. “Used the last of the juniper water on that drover’s thumb this morning.”Cormac straightened his back, his spine making three distinct cracking sounds.

He turned his eyes toward the bar, where

Gike was wiping down a tin cup with a rag that smelled of sour mash.”Gike,” Cormac said.”No,” Gike said before the doctor could finish. “Not a chance,

I’m running a house of refreshment, not an infirmary for runaway canal-trash.

Wilhelm finds out

I let a slave die on my pine, he’ll double my malt tax.””Three bottles of the grain,” Cormac said.

His voice was very quiet now.Gike stopped wiping. “The grain?

That’s four years old.

That’s sixty-proof bootleg from the high crags.

It costs eight coppers a pint.””Three silver crowns,” Cormac said.

He reached into his waistcoat pocket—the small one near his ribs where he kept the money his wife had saved before the

Glass-Fall—and pulled out three thick, heavy silver coins.

They weren’t

Imperial groats; they were old regional sovereigns, heavy with real silver, stamped with the head of a king whose country didn’t exist anymore.He didn’t toss them.

He placed them one by one on the pine counter with three distinct, heavy clinks.The tavern seemed to hold its breath.

Three crowns was enough to buy a small milk-cow in the lower valley, or two months of bad pork and rye for a family of four.Gike stared at the silver.

His thin, dark tongue came out and licked his upper lip where a drop of stale ale hung. “You’re an idiot, doctor.

A certified, grey-headed fool.

He’s going to die before the moon crests the watchtower.””Then

I’ll have two bottles left over to drink at his grave,” Cormac said coldly. “Give me the liquor, or

I’ll tell the

Lieutenant why your basement smells like black powder.”Gike’s eyes went dark, but he didn’t argue.

He reached under the counter, pulled out a three-legged stool, stood on it, and hauled down three dusty, green-glass bottles from the top shelf behind the gin-casks.

They were sealed with red lead and smelled of raw potato-skin even through the glass.”No refund if his heart stops while you’re pouring,” Gike grunted, shoving the bottles across the wood.Cormac took two of them, handed one to

Garth, and snapped the neck off the third against the edge of the iron hearth-grate.

He didn’t bother with a corkscrew.He walked back to the boy, knelt by his head, and tipped the broken glass bottle over the raw, red gashes across

Kian’s ribs.The clear, heavy liquid poured out like hot oil.The reaction was instant.

Kian didn’t scream—his throat was too dry for that—but his body went completely rigid, his spine arching off the wood until only his head and his blood-stained heels were touching the table.

A low, dry rattle came from deep within his belly, a sound like dry gravel being shifted with a spade.”Hold him!” Cormac shouted. “Garth, grab his shoulders!

Don’t let him roll off!”Garth threw his heavy body across

Kian’s chest, his own tears spilling down his freckled nose and splattering onto the boy’s blood-stained forehead. “Hold still, kid!

Hold still, damn you!”Through the steam of the raw alcohol burning through rotten flesh,

Kian’s eyes suddenly snapped open.They weren’t blue or brown like the valley folk’s.

They were black—deep, flat, and terrible, like dark water under an inch of ice.

For a fraction of a second, he looked straight through

Cormac, straight through the soot-stained rafters of the tavern, toward something three hundred leagues to the east.His hand—thin, brown, with nails worn down to the quick from three years of shale-digging—shot up like a striking viper and latched onto

Cormac’s leather apron collar.”The… the cups,” Kian gasped.

His voice was a rasping whisper, thick with dark blood that spilled over his chin. “Mother…

I can’t… fill them…”Cormac didn’t pull back.

He leaned closer, his cold grey eyes searching the boy’s face with a strange, fierce intensity that wasn’t entirely medical. “Save your breath, boy.

You’re out of the

Gorge.”Kian’s fingers twitched once, twice, against the stained apron leather, then his grip collapsed.

His eyes rolled back until only the whites showed, his head falling sideways against the pine table with a dull thunk.”Is he gone?” Garth sobbed, his chest heaving as he lifted himself off the boy.Cormac reached down, picked up his horn-handled needle, and threaded a length of heavy, waxed hemp through the eye with a hand that didn’t shake at all.”He’s too stubborn to die tonight,” the doctor said softly, his voice cutting through the quiet tavern like an iron blade. “The cold couldn’t kill him, and

Quell’s hounds couldn’t finish him.

Pass me the rag,

We’ve got forty stitches before the gin wears off.”