The next morning, Rob packed his doctor’s bag, hid the empty can of Red Bull beneath a fresh pile of straw, and prepared to set off on rounds.

Back in Seattle, where Rob had completed his medical residency and was closing in on the end of a two-year surgical fellowship, rounds meant moving from hospital room to hospital room in an efficient manner as possible.

Here, Rob was forced to wander over hill and dale to see patients in their far-flung homes, and if he managed to treat three sick people before nightfall, that was a good day. Not everybody was willing or able to get to the clinic days he’d been trying out, so Rob had to hoof it.

He’d waited for Maggie, who often accompanied him when his rounds took him far enough out of town to worry about wolves or ruffians. The over-protective Hans had made the arrangement soon after Rob had begun seeing patients, as the woodcutter’s daughter had a family history with wolves and was enough of a ruffian herself to keep anything with claws or a knife at bay.

Maggie made her living delivering baskets of food to forest-dwelling shut-ins, and their routes overlapped often enough so that Rob’s patients didn’t take her much out of her way. Rob insisted on paying for her time, even after they became a couple. In a land without GPS, Rob appreciated any help he could get in staying on the right path.

But Maggie hadn’t shown up this morning, and Rob didn’t know whether to feel relieved or worried. Either way, he was on his own today, and he’d just have to catch up with Maggie later.

“Frog!” Rob called out. “Frog, are you there?”

A hunchbacked man with eyes set too far apart opened the back door that led to Rob’s courtyard. “Yes, m’lord?”

“First of all,” Rob said, “You don’t need to call me ‘lord.’ Remember? Rob is fine. Or doctor, even. I’m not a lord.”

“Yes, m’lord,” Frog said.

Rob had met Frog not long after taking possession of his townhouse. He’d come home late one evening expecting to hear the animals signing out for their suppers, but instead they were quiet and content. Frog had snuck in to feed them, clean up their beds, and fall dead asleep in the empty stall next to the donkey.

The young, misshapen man wasn’t much to look at—he claimed to have been born under a witch’s curse, a common explanation for birth defects in this world—but he was kind, great with the animals, and didn’t appear to have much in the way of a home. Rob had hired him on when he awoke the next morning.

Rob slung his medical bag over his shoulder and thought about the can of Red Bull he’d hidden. “Second, I’m heading out to see patients. While I’m gone, please leave that new pile of straw alone, okay?”

Frog’s mouth, which could stretch wide enough to swallow a dinner plate, curled in confusion. “It looks like fine straw to me, m’lord.”

“It’s not. I mean, it is, but it needs to dry out first.”

“Seems plenty dry, m’lord.”

Rob took a breath, thinking of all the other places he should have hidden the can. Under his bed, or inside a cupboard? But then Maggie or Hans would have found it, and he wasn’t prepared for those kinds of questions. Maybe the can of Red Bull had just been an aberration, Rob thought. A one-off. Nothing to worry about and never to be repeated. Like Zev. Or himself, for that matter.

But Rob was too old to believe in that kind of fairy tale.

“Just leave the straw alone for now,” Rob said. “I’ll be back tonight.”

Rob took off, hiking to the outskirts of the small, medieval city, and allowing his mind to wander. When Rob used to ride the exercise bike at the hospital’s small but functional gym, he’d always have headphones in, listening to music or podcasts or whatever sporting event the TV was stuck on. But his ears had been headphone free since he’d arrived here, and that gave him a lot more time to think about his patients, to daydream about cheeseburgers, and to remember how he’d gotten here in the first place.

He’d been waiting to have lunch with his sister, who worked for one of the local TV stations. She’d been called in to substitute host a science segment at the last minute, so he’d hung around in the green room, waiting with an upcoming guest—a odd man with a sweaty brow and a wired-up big black box—while his stomach rumbled.

The box had begun sparking, and the man had asked Rob for help in reattaching the bevy of electrical plugs snaking out of the box. He remembered the odd man’s hands shaking as he urged Rob to push harder on the plugs to get them to stay in, and then a bright yet silent explosion catapulted Rob to the ground.

But not Seattle ground. Not by a long shot.

Rob only needed an FTD exam to diagnose his first patient of the day.

From the door—or FTD, in physician speak—Rob saw a bedridden man in middle age, once muscular and capable, now with pasty skin and lifeless eyes. His salt-and-pepper hair blended into a mangy beard, giving him the appearance of an aging beast.

Rob would have liked to have run some tests, but he knew what he’d find: low red blood cell counts complicated by insufficient protein reserves, brought on by excessive consumption of alcohol. His body had wasted away to the point where he didn’t even have a beer belly anymore, and Rob knew that regardless of what he did or didn’t do in his capacity as a physician, this new patient of his might soon be dead.

“Thank you for coming,” said the man’s wife, a stunning beauty with honey-colored hair and bruising about her wrists. Spousal abuse here was all too common, Rob had learned since he and Hans had opened their medical practice, and Rob tried not to imagine how many more bruises were hidden by the woman’s long tunic. “My husband’s friends in the barber’s guild wanted to bleed him, but I worry he isn’t strong enough for that, so I called upon you. Do you think he should be bled?”

“No bleeding,” Rob said, shaking his head. The barber’s guild had fought his efforts at modernization, especially when it came bloodletting, a service that kept their guild members in coin. “That won’t help. How long has your husband been like this?”

“How long has he been unable to leave his bed?” the wife asked. “Or how long has been been a drunk?”

Beauty, and a beast. By now, Rob hardly blinked at the familiar stories he saw echoed in this world. The characters were all over, writ big and small, and Rob knew he wasn’t catching all the references. Most of the fairy tales Rob recognized had run their course years ago, and if the stories hadn’t played out exactly the way Rob remembered them, there was enough kernels there to give Rob insight some into the people he met.

He’d soon learned to keep these insights to himself, however. When Rob tried telling Hans the story of “Hansel and Gretel,” the small man had exploded, demanding that Rob stay out of his personal business. Even Zev didn’t seem to think it was that strange, so Rob tended to keep his mouth shut on the topic.

Suddenly, Rob realized he’d let his attention drift. What had the wife just said? He was tired after the long hike to the cottage, an aspect of medicine his training hadn’t prepared him for. Focus, he told himself, and when in doubt, ask for a patient history. “Okay. Tell me about your husband’s complaint.”

“He’s always been a drinker,” the beautiful wife explained. “I knew he had a beastly side when I married him, but never at home. Never with me. That changed a month or so ago when he hurt his leg and couldn’t make it down to the tavern. Then he went truly mad, striking anyone and anything in his reach. Now even that’s stopped.”

She sniffed back some tears. “You’re sure he doesn’t need to be bled?”

Rob took the husband’s wrist and found his pulse to be stronger than expected, though irregular. His digital watch would have come in handy to measure heartbeats per minute, but the Chancellor wasn’t about to give it back, so he’d have to make do with what he had.

Rob turned to the wife. “When was the last time he ate solid food?”

“I don’t know. Days? I should have called you sooner, but we don’t have the money. I’d heard that you sometimes accepted goods in lieu of coin?”

While few people could afford a doctor’s going rate, everyone remained desperate to pay something. Rob accepted money from patients if it didn’t seem too dear, but he gladly took meals, firewood, or even bits of cloth he could make into bandages. He’d learned to ask for just a little of what he thought his patients could afford, and everyone except for penny-pinching Hans seemed happy with the arrangement.

“Let’s not worry about payment right now. Is that his chamber pot over there?”

Rob didn’t hold with bleeding, or astrology, or balancing bilious body humors, but he did hang on to the well-used urine flask that had come in his predecessor’s bag. Absent lab results, urine gave Rob a real, if odiferous, window into what was happening inside his patients’ bodies.

The dark liquid in the chamber pot confirmed Rob’s suspicions. The husband needed more fluids than he was taking in to wash out the body’s waste products, but the only fluids he wanted to consume would create more problems than they’d solve.

Rob wiped his glasses on his cotton T-shirt. His shirt was dirty, but with all the dust on the roads, his glasses were even dirtier, so Rob figured with enough wiping he’d come out ahead. Either way, it gave him a little space to think.

“Your husband isn’t well,” Rob began. “His body is consuming itself in an attempt to get nutrition—breaking down bits it requires for energy to keep him alive. Your husband needs simple foods, like porridge. We need to hydrate him, so lots of water. But no alcohol, no matter what he says. If he recovers enough to go on another bender—”

“I understand.”

“—I don’t think he’d survive. I really don’t.”

The wife nodded. “What else?”

“Get him up and moving, if you can. A little activity might help him remember that he’s hungry, and his body could use the solid food. But remember what I said about alcohol. I’m afraid his body couldn’t take another drop.”

The wife led Rob to the door. Even in her sadness, she remained a true beauty.

“I’m sorry you had to meet him like this,” she said. “He’s more than a drunken beast. He can be a wonderful man.”

Rob nodded. “I hear what you’re saying. But if he starts getting violent with you, call a neighbor. Get somewhere safe. There’s no excuse for that.”

Rob outside on their stone slab of a doorstep, wishing he had something better to offer victims of domestic violence. Perhaps he could talk the abbot into starting a program of some kind.

“About your payment,” she began.

Rob glanced at their simple cottage. “Forget it. I didn’t do much, besides give you advice.”

“There must be something . . . wait, I have it.” She dashed outside to the henhouse and returning with three eggs wrapped in a rag. “Here. Thank you, doctor. And be wary on the roads.”

Rob’s light hiking boots racked up several more miles that day. He treated a deep cut from a harvesting scythe that had become infected, draining the pus from the farmer’s leg and washing the wound with the strongest grain alcohol Hans had been able to talk a brewer into making. He identified a cluster of strep throat cases, which were such an ENT staple that the diagnosis felt like running into an old friend, even if there wasn’t much Rob could do about it besides trotting out his hand-washing speech.

And he set a child’s broken finger. She didn’t even cry after Rob wrenched it back into alignment, reminding him how tough kids here were.

Rob felt good about helping these people, some of whom had never laid eyes a doctor before, let alone been treated by one. He wasn’t as happy about the primitive medical supplies and attitudes, but that could change.

He’d been working with the abbey, helping to train some of the brothers to take care of common ailments, and though the barber’s guild would never agree to abandon their bleeding revenues, the state of medicine around these parts was definitely improving. Rob liked that feeling, even if Hans wouldn’t appreciate the eggs, apples, and pennies he was bringing home after a full day’s work.

Strolling home in the dusk, Rob lost himself in feelings of satisfaction to such an extent that he didn’t see the men who clocked him in the head with a blunt object, nor would he remember passing out cold.