Read Chapter 4: Rules of an Outlaw

The summons came before the morning bell. A boy of no more than ten years stood in the infirmary doorway, eyes wide as he took in the rows of empty pallets, the stained linen buckets, the iron pot bubbling over the hearth. He swallowed hard and pointed at Thomas.

“The council wants you. Father Aldous says now.”

Agnes looked up from the mortar she was grinding, her lined face unreadable. “Best not keep them waiting. They’re not used to it.”

Thomas set down the roll of bandages he had been preparing. John lay in the corner, his breathing shallow and wet, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. The boy’s swellings had not yet surfaced, but the fever burned hot enough that Thomas had made him drink a willow-bark draught an hour past. The lad’s eyes fluttered but did not open.

“Watch him,” Thomas said to Agnes. “If the lumps appear, do not lance them. I don’t care what the local wisdom says.”

Agnes gave a short nod. “Go. I know my business.”

The council house sat at the center of the village square, a timbered hall with a steep roof and a cross carved above the door. The village of Blencarn was small enough that the square served as market, meeting place, and gathering ground all at once. A few villagers stopped to stare as Thomas crossed the muddy yard, his coat dark with yesterday’s rain, his boots leaving deep prints. No one spoke. They only watched, and then looked away.

Inside, the fire had already been lit, though the morning was warm. Three men sat at a long oak table, and Thomas recognized none of them. The youngest was a priest, perhaps forty years, with thinning brown hair and dark, intelligent eyes set close together. He wore the black robe of a parish rector, but the silver cross at his throat was heavy and ornate—too rich for a village church. Father Aldous, Thomas assumed.

Beside him sat a man in his fifties, broad-shouldered and thick-necked, with the ruddy complexion of one who spent more hours hunting than praying. His tunic was wool dyed deep blue, fastened with a silver buckle, and his hands rested flat on the table as if he owned it. He did, probably. Sir Richard.

The third man Thomas recognized only from Agnes’s terse introductions: the constable, a thin, nervous sort named Whitfield, who had questioned him at the gate the day before. Whitfield would not meet Thomas’s eye. He studied the grain of the oak instead, tracing a knot with the tip of his finger.

“Master Blackwood,” Father Aldous said, rising slightly in his seat. “We are grateful for the charity you showed the girl’s father. It was a Christian act to attempt his care. But the situation here is delicate.”

“The situation,” Thomas said, “is a dying man. Two, if you count John in the infirmary. The pestilence has arrived. You know it, and so do I.”

Sir Richard’s jaw tightened. He glanced at Whitfield, who seemed to shrink further into his chair. “We know no such thing,” Sir Richard said. “The man you treated was old and infirm. His death was a natural one—a failing of the heart, perhaps. The boy, John, has a summer fever. He’ll recover.”

“He won’t.” Thomas’s voice was flat. “I’ve seen this sickness a dozen times. The swellings will come, and then the black marks, and then he will drown in his own blood. Unless you have some miracle here I’ve not been told of.”

Father Aldous’s smile was thin. “Miracle is a strong word. We have been blessed, Master Blackwood. Blencarn has been spared the worst of God’s judgment. That is all.”

“The register of the dead says otherwise.” Thomas pulled the leather-bound book from his coat and set it on the table. It landed with a soft thud. “Thirty deaths this past month. All recorded as natural. A village this size, with no outbreak, losing thirty souls in thirty days—that is not natural. That is a lie dressed up in ink.”

Sir Richard’s fist came down on the table. The register jumped. “You will not call us liars in our own hall, physician.”

“I will call what I see what it is,” Thomas said evenly. “I watched a man die of the pestilence yesterday. I watched his corpse taken away in the night, and when I followed, I found a grave filled with lime and no body. What do you call that, Sir Richard?”

The silence stretched. A log cracked in the hearth. Father Aldous folded his hands and leaned forward, his voice dropping to something near gentle. “You are an outsider, and you have seen little of our ways. We have taken measures to protect the living from despair. The burial rites we perform are our own, sanctified by the Church. The burning of the dead is a precaution, nothing more. The plague is a scourge sent by God, and burning purifies.”

“You buried the father of the girl who fetched me,” Thomas said. “She watched you dig his grave. She will want to see where he lies.”

“She will be comforted,” Father Aldous said. “As all our people are comforted.”

Sir Richard pushed back from the table and stood. He was taller than Thomas had first judged, and he used the height to loom over the room. “You will leave at first light. The gate will be opened for you, and you will be given a horse and enough provisions for three days’ travel. You will not speak of what you have seen here, to anyone, anywhere. Blencarn has its own burdens, and it will not carry yours as well.”

“And if I refuse?”

Sir Richard’s smile was not a smile. “Then the gate will be closed to you—permanently. We are a quarantined village, Master Blackwood, by order of the crown. Any man found within our bounds without leave will be dealt with as an outlaw. You’re a physician. You know what that means.”

Thomas held his gaze a long moment, then looked to Father Aldous, who returned it without blinking. Constable Whitfield had found something fascinating in the heel of his palm.

“Until dawn, then,” Thomas said.

He turned and walked out before they could add conditions.

The infirmary was quiet when he returned. Agnes had pulled a stool to John’s pallet and was pressing a cool cloth to his forehead. The boy’s face was gray, his lips cracked. Thomas crossed to him, felt his pulse, noted the shallow rise and fall of his chest.

“No swellings yet,” Agnes said.

“They’ll come.”

“You told them you’d leave.”

“They told me I’d leave,” Thomas said. “I didn’t agree.”

Agnes studied him with hard, ancient eyes. “You’re a stubborn man. That will kill you here.”

“Most things kill you here,” Thomas said. “That’s why I came.”

He was rolling fresh bandages for the hundredth time when the girl appeared again. Not the one from the gate—the father’s daughter—but another, younger, perhaps twelve. She stood in the doorway, gripping the frame with white-knuckled fingers, and her face was a mask of fear so total it seemed to have carved itself into her bones.

“Please,” she said. “It’s my sister. She’s bleeding.”

Thomas stood. “Bleeding where?”

The girl shook her head, unwilling or unable to say. Agnes rose and moved to the door, but the girl shrank back, afraid. Thomas stepped past Agnes and knelt before the child, bringing himself to her eye level.

“Where is your sister?”

“The green cottage by the millpond. She won’t let anyone near her. She says she’s cursed. She says the dark men come for her at night.”

Thomas looked at Agnes. Agnes’s face had gone still.

“Dark men?” Thomas said.

The girl nodded, tears spilling down her cheeks. “She saw them. Through the window. Five nights ago. She saw them carrying bodies to the church. She saw the priest leading them. She says they’re not dead, the bodies. She says they’re not dead at all.”

A cold current ran up Thomas’s spine. He stood and gathered his bag, pushing in the scalpel that had not been his the night before, the fine silver blade that had appeared in his kit like an accusation.

“Take me to her,” he said.

The girl led him through the village at a jog. The green cottage stood by the millpond, its shutters closed, smoke curling thin from its chimney. Thomas knocked once, twice, no answer. He pushed the door open.

Inside, a girl of perhaps sixteen lay on a pallet by the hearth. Her face was flushed, her eyes glassy with fever, and when she turned to look at him, he saw the marks—two black swellings, one at her neck, one beneath her arm. Advanced. Painful. Fatal, without treatment.

But she was alive. She was alive, and she looked at him with such desperate, animal hope that Thomas felt something in his chest crack open.

He closed the door behind him and knelt beside her. He took her hand, felt the heat of her skin, the tremble of her pulse.

“I’m going to stay,” he said. Not to her, not to the council, but to himself. “I’m going to stay until she is well, or until I am dead.”

Outside, the church bell began to toll. Three slow, heavy notes. A burial, then. They would bury her in the morning, if the fever took her. They would bury her in a grave filled with lime, and the cart would come for her body before the sun rose.

Unless Thomas could stop it.

He looked down at the girl, then at the door, then at the window, where the light was beginning to fade toward evening. Dawn was a long way off.

And Sir Richard’s gate would not open for him.

Not out of Blencarn. Not alive.