Kat’s mind raced. The name flashed in her memory, sending her scrambling backward to the heavy volume open on her desk. She flipped through the parchment pages, her eyes scanning the ink illustrations of putrefaction. Black-Stitch Rot was an uneven, creeping decay, the text noted, accompanied by a distinct, nauseating stench of sweet rot.

She looked back at the tanner. There was no smell of rot. And the dark border on his leg was strangely uniform.

“Nicholas, a moment,” Kat whispered urgently, slipping between the apprentice and the weeping patient, keeping the book shielded from the man’s view. “Look closely at the margin. It is too even.” 

Nicholas paused, his chalk hovering an inch from the slate. He stared at the defects in the black skin, the terror slowly draining from his face as Kat’s words took hold. Frowning, he reached for a clean rag, dipped it into a jar of pungent, clear alchemical spirit, and knelt by the tanner’s ankle. With a firm, testing pressure, Nicholas scrubbed. The stubborn blackness smeared.

Underneath the dark layer, the clear spirit revealed a patch of perfectly firm, healthy pink flesh.

The man didn’t have a lethal, flesh-eating plague at all. He must have simply spilled a vat of raw copperas dye into his work-boot.

Nicholas let out a long, ragged breath of relief. He quickly wiped the terrifying diagnosis off the slate with his sleeve, casting a deeply grateful, conspiratorial look at the Princess. Watching the overwhelming joy break across the gaunt tanner’s face, a genuine thrill bloomed in Kat’s chest. She knew well enough that Archanatomist Cledwyn or any of the anatomists would have caught the mistake before the bone-saws were fetched; in truth, she had only saved Nicholas from a chiding.

Nevertheless, this small experience made her feel useful in this inscrutable bustle in a way she had never felt before. She held to Celesta’s advice and took up the path of an apprentice.

◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

It was in her books that Katarina first learned about the month’s blood, and it threw her into a panic. She confronted her slightly older maid, Celia, about it first, and then Lady Valiya, the Mistress of Scrolls and her Royal Instructor.

“But my child, you do not have to worry about it until you are at least thirteen, and I have prepared lessons for it. Do not fret,” Lady Valiya reassured her, though her words were woefully insufficient.

Celia, however, was far more forthcoming. Though she had not yet bled herself, in the rough neighborhoods of Friartown where she had spent her childhood, she had seen the older girls writhe on their pallets, crying out from the raw pain of it. The daughters of well-to-do merchants would hide themselves away in dark rooms for the week. The lowest of the low made do with whatever coarse rags they could forage, forced to scrub their stained linens by the public riverside each morning.

“There is nothing to be stitched, my child,” Lady Valiya had explained softly during a later lesson. “I shall provide you with fine, bleached linens which you must change every few hours. Celia will wash them and spread them beneath the direct sunlight, for the sun’s light purifies all things.”

“And what of the agony?”

“Why, child, we are women. We bear what is dealt to us. It is a minor shadow compared to the labor of childbearing, though a leather skin filled with boiled water against the abdomen offers great comfort.”

 These were simple enough solutions. Yet her anatomists’ books had very little to say on the matter. There was only one female anatomist in the Scriptor’s Hall, Lady Ethel Tawnhook, whom Kat felt she could approach about the dearth of information on these common ailments.

“Your Highness, keep your voice to a whisper,” Lady Tawnhook hissed, glancing nervously over her shoulder. “It is highly scandalous to speak of such matters aloud—there are men of the cloth and scholars all about us.”

“But these men spend their days up to their elbows in the fluids and miseries of the human body,” Kat whispered back, her brow furrowing. “Surely the talk of a woman’s natural blood is tolerable to their ears?”

“We are speaking of the hidden vessels of women,” Lady Tawnhook replied flatly, effectively closing the conversation.

 In a grand capital of hundreds of thousands, the private afflictions of women were left to this one highborn, overtaxed anatomist, alongside scores of uneducated midwives and back-alley leeches.

Kat’s head throbbed with frustration. She refused to go to Malin—the woman her father had wedded to the throne following her own mother’s passing—for counsel. She found her friends equally bewildered by the prospect of the month’s blood. She let the bitterness stew quietly within her.

 Shortly before Kat’s thirteenth birthday, her month’s blood arrived, and it came with a blinding pain. It kept her bedridden for three days, reeling from both physical and mental shock. It reached such a point that even her royal father came to visit her in her chambers. He kissed her brow, held her hand, and sighed in sorrow; he knew he could not comfort his daughter in the manner her mother, the late Queen Naya, would have done. And Kat would sooner choke than allow her stepmother Malin the satisfaction of playing the maternal comforter.

“There is something you can do, dear father. I intend to ask this as my birthday gift.”

The King nodded, curious, though his eyes held a faint glint of apprehension regarding her intentions.

“Father, I want a regular bounty of clean, soft linens distributed throughout the lower quarters of the city every moon,” Kat said, leaning forward against her pillows. “It can be managed quietly through the temple deacons, if the court would find the mention of it distasteful.”

Alisander’s expression softened, warm with amusement at his daughter’s sharp wit. “You will do very well indeed, my love,” he murmured, lifting her fingers to his lips. “You possess a rare and practical empathy. It is a small thing to ask. It shall be done.”

And thus, Kat’s rags came to be known and celebrated among the lowborn women of the city.

◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

By fourteen, it was obvious that Kat was to inherit the full brilliance of Queen Naya’s beauty, and she carried that inheritance with immense pride.

The late Queen had spent the final year of her life locked away, ravaged by a cruel illness. Seeking to spare his young daughters the trauma of watching their mother disintegrate, King Alisander had barred them from the sickroom entirely. Because of this isolation, Celesta—who was only six when their mother passed away—possessed scarcely any distinct memory of her at all.

But Kat, a year older and seven at the time, was left with a rare gift. Because she had never seen her mother as she was in her sickbed, her mind held only an untarnished treasury of the days before the sickness took hold. She remembered her mother’s thick hair, her rich scent, the majestic grace with which she carried herself, and her kind, radiant smile. In Kat’s mind, Queen Naya remained, without a doubt, the most beautiful person who had ever lived. To ensure that everyone who looked upon her felt her mother’s majestic presence lingering in the royal halls, the princess always dressed impeccably.

Now, Naya was coming alive once more in Kat’s own features. The realization delighted her.

The single grudge she held against her father was how quickly Queen Naya’s successor, Malin, ascended to her mother’s place after her passing. At eight winters old, Kat had been far too young to express her dismay and heartbreak, or to fully comprehend the shifting tides of power around them and how they altered her and her father’s lives.

The absence of a mother was filled only by Lady Valiya, who rigorously maintained a curriculum rich in geography, history, warcraft, statecraft, arithmetic, laws of taxation, and the sacred scrolls of the Scriptor. This education, balanced with her duties as an anatomist’s aide, was more than enough to occupy her days.

Through her work as an anatomist’s apprentice, Kat became deeply involved in the lives of the common folk she treated. She had heard it said many times that down in the slums of the capital, people spoke with distinct pride of being permitted such close proximity to her, and praised her for her sincere care.

She did not know if this was simple flattery, but it strengthened her resolve to do her best for her charges. She had been shaped by the enduring stories of her mother’s championing of the populace, and Katarina tried to emulate that same sense of responsibility and empathy. She had been told by castle guards, by the Grand Butler Lord Caldwell, and by petitioners in court on petition day just how beloved she was in the capital—and these accounts warmed her heart almost as much as hearing of her mother.

Then, in the midst of a life so thoroughly consumed by duty and devotion, came the quiet disruption of Sir Daniel Norwood.