Gael's lenses fogged from his own breath as he bent over the unconscious lady on the surgical table. His hands, steady despite the alcohol still simmering through his veins, worked his iron tongs deeper into the open wound. A bunch of stone and steel had nested so far inside her ribs that even the light from the overhead lamp looked reluctant to follow.

"Hold the forceps right—no, hold it right, not polite-right," he snapped without looking.

Maeve stiffened beside him, her gloved hands trembling as she adjusted. "I am holding it right."

"You're holding it like a duchess with a spoonful of soup." He twisted the tongs, scraping against something lodged hard in the lung cavity. A faint metallic screech answered him. "These aren't spoons, these are instruments of barbarous salvation. Tighten."

"Tighten how?"

"Just don't hold it like it's porcelain. You'll make me nervous."

Maeve's gloved hands shook faintly as she slid the tool into place. "I am not nervous."

"You sound like someone trying to convince a priest she isn't guilty. Don't lie in the presence of the Saintess, she's right out there. Hey, do you think we should fix her head?"

"I am not nervous," Maeve repeated, a little more sharply.

"Everyone's nervous when it's their mother on the table." His hands plunged deeper into the wound, steady, fingers probing for the shard that'd burrowed itself into meat and lung like a parasite of steel. "Difference is, you've gotta hide it. If you shake when you're the one holding forceps, you'll turn help into harm."

Her mouth pressed tight, but she clenched her jaw and steadied the instrument.

"That's better," Gael muttered. "Now if she dies, at least I'll know it wasn't entirely your fault."

"You're unbearable."

"Flattering." He leaned deeper, sweat rolling down his temples. With a last heave, the tongs jerked free, clutched around a jagged shard of rust-blackened rebar. He flung it onto the tray with a wet clink. "There. One more piece of the city dug out of her."

Once he closed her up with a stitch, they both sagged back, pushing their stools away from the table. Gael ripped off his gloves and flexed his cramped fingers.

"And that," he exhaled, "should be the last of the debris… unless it's not. Then we'll just have to open her up again."

Maeve was hardly listening to him, though. Her eyes were fixed on the unconscious woman—her mother who'd once led her, trained her, and protected her. A full week of daily surgeries had hollowed Alana's cheeks further and wrapped her in more bandages than blankets. Given she'd been getting crushed by an entire building when they finally found her, though—and he couldn't very well have removed all of her debris in just one, long surgery for safety reasons, so he had to split them up into daily surgeries—he'd say the fact that she was still alive was a saint-blessed bloody miracle.

But she hadn't stirred once since they pulled her out of the rubble. There were plenty of people like her in Bharncair: functionally alive, but realistically, not really.

"... Do you think she'll ever wake up?" Maeve asked softly.

Gael stared at Alana's pale, scarred face. His drunken mind still worked fine for anatomy; the body didn't lie. He studied her chest rising and falling, thin but stubborn.

"She should," he said plainly. "She's still breathing. Frail, yes, but the bones underneath all that destruction are hard. Even if she weren't a former Exorcist Hunter, I'd say there's a good eighty-twenty chance she does wake up… soon."

"You don't sound sure."

"I'm not." He scratched his chin. "Could be days. Could be years. But this clinic isn't going anywhere, and neither is she. No matter when she decides to crawl back into the waking world, she'll still have a bed here... and then I want my real long talk with her."

Maeve whispered her thanks, eyes still fixed on her mother. Then the surgical chamber sank into a hush for a while, nothing but the faint hiss of lamps and Alana's slow, stubborn breathing.

Gael exhaled through his teeth, then leaned back and cracked his neck in Maeve's direction. "So, tell me straight: think your mom will ever accept me as your husband?"

"Absolutely not."

He burst out laughing. "Ha! There it is. Exactly what I expected. Well, I expected as much, so—"

"But in time, she will," she cut in firmly before he could sink into his own mockery. Her voice softened, though, steady as stone. "She let me into her family as an Exorcist when she didn't have to. She can let you into ours, even if you're a Plagueplain Doctor."

She turned her face at him then, mouth curling into a grin that was more certain than it had any right to be.

"Are you worried?"

"Me?" He scoffed. "Are you worried?"

Then he grinned back, and he swore she was about to throw something at him when a roar of cheering and laughter swelled up from the prayer hall below. Both of them jumped slightly, glancing out the window.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

"What's going on down there?" she muttered. "Liorin playing tricks with the metal plants again?"

Gael cocked his head, listening. "No. Sounds more like Evelyn trying to outrun Fergal around the benches in a speed contest. Idiots." He waved a hand dismissively. "Either way, the noise is only gonna get even worse through the night. Wanna slip out and do something else?"

He thumbed over his shoulder without looking, and Maeve flushed, eyes dropping, caught between irritation and embarrassment. "Like… what?"

His grin widened until it nearly split his face.

The two of them sat on the belltower of the Heartcord Clinic like gargoyles that drank instead of brooded.

Two chairs sat crooked on the tiles, two bottles sweated in the light acid rain, and two fools leaned back with their boots hooked on the railing like they owned the ward. Gael rapped the neck of his bottle against the iron bell—clang, clang—a drinking song for one and a half competent drunks.

"Again," he chanted, wagging a finger at the smaller bottle in Maeve's hand. "Down the hatch. All of it. No courting. Seventy percent is practically tea."

She eyed the bottle as if it might bite. Her hair was pulled down from its ponytail, and she'd rolled her dress sleeves up like a diligent apprentice pretending she wasn't about to be irresponsible. "This is not alcohol," she said primly, then ruined it with a hiccup. "This is… industrial solvent."

"Blightmarch breakfast," he corrected, then slapped the side of her chair with his heel, setting it rocking. "Chug, receptionist. The clinic's reputation depends on your liver."

She drew a steadying breath, tilted the bottle, and committed. The liquid went down like a lit fuse, and she refused to cough until the last angry drop vanished.

Only then did she lower the bottle with a gasp and a full-body shiver, eyes watering. "My throat's burning."

"Pathetic," he snorted, raising his own 90% to the night. "Observe the professional." He drank deep. The stuff clawed at his chest, took a tooth from his breath, and he smacked his lips in noisy, theatrical pleasure. "Mmm. Medicinal."

"You're unbearable," she muttered, though she was smiling. She set her empty bottle beside four other empties and flicked the glass with a nail. "If some trader swindles me because I'm… what's your phrase… 'shit-faced', you'll cover for me."

"If you're gonna be the face of the clinic, you gotta be able to drink with the faces of commerce," he lectured, mock-sage. "They'll test you. They'll pour sweet poisons into crystal and call them contracts. They'll say, 'one more for the road,' and the road will lead to your purse—or your grave. Your liver will decide which one."

"You'll cover for me," she echoed dryly, then sighed and leaned sideways until her head found his shoulder. The motion knocked her chair into his, their armrests touching, their boots tapping in time on the railing.

The southern ward glittered with lanterns before them, a constellation written close to the ground. The other three wards lay much farther off, ganglia of faint lights threaded by alleys and the slow gleam of rain, but part of why it was so difficult to see the other three wards was because of Vharnveil: that floating, darker-than-storm silhouette of the City of Splendors in the center of the city. Four black chains tethered the corners of the floating city to each ward, and it alone commanded attention.

Neither one of them could look away from the floating shadow of a city as rain poured and distant laughter echoed from the prayer hall downstairs.

"... Ask me again," she said suddenly, her hair soft against his shoulder.

"Ask you what?"

"The question. Ask me properly."

He played dumb. "What question?"

"You know what it is."

"I don't," he lied cheerfully, then enjoyed the small kick she gave his boot. "You'll need to ask me to ask you properly. That's upper city etiquette, isn't it? I'm an ignorant quack. You've gotta guide me."

She groaned, covering her face with one hand. "You're… impossible."

"I'm patient," he corrected. "I simply want the ceremony to be right. There must be the correct bottle, the correct bench, the correct weather, and I'll need an orchestra of bats and a choir of drunken ravens. Also, we're gonna need paperwork. I am, at heart, a bureaucrat."

"You are, at heart, an arsonist," she said, but her voice had laughter pressed all through it. She pulled her head from his shoulder and angled towards him, cheeks pinked from spirits and wind. "Fine. If you're not gonna ask, I'll ask the question in due time, and you'll answer."

He clicked his tongue, wagging his bottle. "No, no. If anyone's gonna ruin our lives with a single sentence, it's gonna be me. I have seniority in poor decisions."

"Please. You've been 'preparing' to fix the Saintess' crooked head for half a year."

"It's honestly a signature of our clinic at this point. I kinda don't wanna fix it."

She shook her head. "Blasphemy against the Saintess."

"She's been dead for half a century. I don't think she'll give a shit."

"So you'll just put it off until I die of old age."

"Will you wait?" he asked.

She stopped. Her mouth quirked.

"... Yes," she said. "But will you stop making me wait, Gael Halloway?"

He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. He had answers: jokes; fencer's feints; a sermon about ritual; a line about needing to set the world exactly right before he tied a knot in it—but all that came out was a sound somewhere between a laugh and a loose screw rattling in a jar.

So he looked at her instead, which was a worse idea; the wind played her hair into stray strands, and the lanternlight below climbed the walls and caught in her eyes.

She really was a pretty one.

"... Fine," he muttered. He reached for his seventeenth bottle of alcohol and chugged it in one go. "Wanna marry me, Maeve Valcieran?"

To that, she seemingly couldn't help but scowl.

"Actually, I think I'll wait for you to make it pretty," she grumbled. "Or I'll be the one asking. You know what, I will be the one asking. You just sit here and wait for me."

"No."

"Yes."

"No."

"Yes. In fact, maybe I'll just do it. Will you—"

He lunged at her, clapping a hand over her mouth. "No theft," he crowed. "No robbery of rituals. I've been robbed by gangs and monsters, but I refuse to be robbed by my own receptionist."

She bit his palm.

He yelped, yanked his hand back, and she shoved him in the chest with both palms. He staggered into his chair, which skittered, clacked into the other, and both went over the railings.

Before he even realized what was going on, they were fighting.

"Savage!" he shouted.

"Coward!" she returned.

"Thief!"

"Snob!"

"Exorcist!"

"Doctor!"

They became two noisy children in their own belltower, wrestling etiquette under the rain. The bottles clinked and skated at their feet. The Saintess in the nave below, if she had ears, likely rolled her eyes—but they laughed, loud, graceless, and honest, because what else was there to do tonight?

Vharnveil could loom over them all it wanted.

One day, he'd run his clinic in the skies as well.

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