For the middle three days of every week, Princess Katarina traded the lavender-scented calm of the high palace for the lower levels of the Scriptor's Hall, where the air hung thick and sharp with boiling vinegar, wet wool, and old blood.

She had worn the heavy linen apron of an anatomist’s aide since the age of twelve. It had been King Alisander’s decree that his eldest daughter take up a pursuit among the common folk—one that required her to stain her own hands.

“It builds character to shed blood and sweat to hone a craft,” her father had told her, his emerald eyes grave and earnest. “And it builds wisdom to meet new people, especially the ones you hope to rule one day. Choose something that requires both.” 

Kat thought this a rather clever scheme of her father’s. He could not send a princess out to wander the city the way he had as a prince, and so to disguise her ventures outside the palace as service or education was a way around that. But the reasons he named aloud—the building of character, the winning of hearts—mattered to her too.

It was Celesta, her sister and a precocious eleven-year-old at the time, who had nudged Kat toward the healing arts. “You do dote on children,” Celesta had whispered, tugging on her sleeve. “And this way, you will come across many in need of help.”

Kat had initially recoiled at the grim, bloody reputation of the Scriptor’s sawing rooms, but Celesta had remained practical. As a princess, Celesta noted, Kat could easily command the masters to spare her from the most stomach-turning tasks, using the apprenticeship to test her limits until she found her footing.

Kat had taken her sister’s counsel, and the humbling reality of the Scriptor’s Hall had quickly erased any lingering royal squeamishness. In her first weeks shadowing the Archanatomist, Lord Cledwyn, she learned the ancient tri-fold foundation of diagnosis: look, touch, and question. The ceaseless activity of the hall was staggering. Huge copper vats bubbled constantly, purifying stained rags, bedsheets, and heavy iron bone-saws.

Though the lowborn laborers tried to maintain a stuttering, reverent decorum in her presence, the sheer urgency of the suffering made Kat feel that royal ceremony was nothing more than a dangerous hindrance. She quickly learned to make herself small, staying out of the way and burying herself in the dense, leather-bound medical tomes she was assigned to study.

By her third day on the intake floor, she was assigned to assist Nicholas, a senior apprentice whose nerves were perpetually frayed by the volume of patients. Together, they stood over a gaunt leather tanner brought up from the lower docks.

The man was shivering violently from a common bout of seasonal marsh fever, but he was weeping openly over a deep, agonizing ache in his lower limb. When Nicholas unbuckled the man’s stiff leather gaiter and pulled away the grimy wrappings, the young apprentice gasped, taking a sharp step back.

The tanner’s right foot was a terrifying, swollen shade of deep purple-black.

Just the evening prior, they had heard the Archanatomists gravely discussing three certain, lethal cases of Black-Stitch Rot spreading through the slums.

Nicholas went pale and sweating before her eyes. He snatched up the chalk with a shaking hand and raised it to the wooden intake slate, and Kat knew the mark he meant to make—a fatal diagnosis that would consign the man to immediate, brutal amputation.