As a practicing Anatomist, Kat now possessed far more agency within the Scriptor’s Hall to act as she saw fit. She felt self-assured in her diagnoses, and she could feel her fellow Anatomists according her a newfound respect, having witnessed her stellar performance during the practical examinations.

She fully owned her skills now; were it not for the small matter of the throne standing in her way, she was well on the path to becoming an Archanatomist in her own right. 

Through laboring in the depths of the public wards, she had forged unbreakable bonds with her fellow apprentices. She could easily pick out those who possessed the grit to become masters of the craft, and a scheme was beginning to coalesce in her mind—a way to leverage her understanding of the Hall’s system to serve the realm while weaving its people closer to the crown.

There were only two formal Scriptor’s Halls in the entire realm: the grand house in the Capital, and an independent branch run by the Guild in Friartown. The capital’s hall possessed barely enough capacity to serve the city itself; everywhere else, the commonfolk were forced to rely on superstitious leech-doctors or the rare, traveling hedge-physician. 

Great lords generally retained a single Anatomist in their keeps, and a merciful master might allow that healer one day a week to attend to the local tenantry. As a consequence of this desperate neglect, the overwhelmed wards of the Scriptor’s Halls regularly drew ailing commoners from the furthest corners of the kingdom.

On account of this void, the high, arched vestibule of the capital’s Scriptor’s hall was an unrelenting theater of human misery, but over the years, Kat had learned to navigate the throng with a calm, practiced eye.

A weeping laundress complaining of a persistent cold that lingered all through the spring and summer months? Kat did not waste a scrap of her parchment scrolls on such simple plights; she merely instructed the woman to boil a daily decoction of dried stinging-nettle leaf and wild mint to quiet the angry vapors in her breast, explaining that her body was simply warring against the invisible drift of meadow-pollen and seed-fluff.

A pale, hollow-cheeked weaver who came in trembling, suffering from blood-stained stools and a severe loss of weight despite a ravenous appetite? It was a classic manifestation of the Inward Serpent—the devouring worm that nested in the bowels after one consumed ill-roasted swine. Kat calmly prescribed a coarse mash of wild garlic and crushed pumpkin seeds to paralyze the beast, followed by a heavy draught of bitter castor oil, promising the man that the worm would wash out in his night-pot within a week.

But not every affliction could be traced to the classical logic of the library folios. Once in a while, a case would cross the threshold that left even the senior physicians bewildered, though many were far too proud or embarrassed to admit their ignorance outright. 

More often than not, an Archanatomist would simply scowl, chiding the trembling patient for wasting the guild’s precious tinctures on an imagined curse of the blood before dismissing them back into the gutters.

Kat, however, could not dismiss them so easily. One particular ailment that deeply puzzled her was brought by occasional travelers arriving from the East, who displayed an identical, deeply unsettling progression of symptoms that defied every text on the humors.

It always began with a peculiar, leaden lethargy that no amount of rest could lift. Within days, a dark, rust-colored mottling would appear beneath the skin, creeping along the tracks of the veins like an ink stain spreading through linen. 

Those afflicted suffered from a hollow, dry racking cough that left a bitter, coppery taste upon their tongues, and their joints grew stiff and brittle, as though the fluid in their bones were thickening into iron slag. Yet what confounded the Masters most was the fever—a raging, internal ague that burned hot to the touch, even while the patients wept that their limbs felt as cold as river ice.

The senior scholars muttered vaguely of an unseen miasma or an unseasonal dampness rising from the low-lying tanneries. But Kat’s mind kept circling back to a different memory entirely.

Every few moons, a wounded knight or mercenary would turn up in the wards bearing a jagged, festering sword-wound — soldiers returned from skirmishes on fronts scattered across the realm. When Kat had cleansed that torn flesh, she had marked that very same metallic corruption: thick, sludge-like blood that refused to flow cleanly, and an unmistakable, rust-tinted darkening of the veins radiating outward from the slice of the blade.

It was a vexing riddle. It was expected for a martial man to harbor strange afflictions if his flesh was pierced by a corrupted iron edge out in the wild Marches. But these eastern travelers were simple, sedentary dwellers—weavers, bakers, and kitchen-maids who bore no such wounds.

The security of the East had long seemed precarious to Kat; the recurring mystery of the borderland child-snatchings had gone ignored by the Crown for want of reliable word. 

At times like this, Kat found herself wishing they maintained trustworthy eyes across the provinces to learn what was truly happening from local folk, rather than relying on Lord Blackwood to indulge the princesses on specific questions. The scheme she was forming to put her friends from the Scriptor’s Hall to good use might just provide the perfect trellis upon which such a thing could grow.

◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

Dogged by these heavy concerns, Katarina sought out the one mind in the keep she trusted to untangle a purely intellectual knot: her studious younger sister. Late into the night, away from the prying eyes of the court, the two princesses sat huddled over a scattering of anatomical charts in the quiet sanctuary of their chambers.

“The progression is too precise to be a mere trick of the seasonal air,” Kat explained, tracing a quill over a rendering of the human circulatory system. She laid out the sequence for her sister—from the lethargy and the mottling to the eventual cold limbs and burning core. “It strikes both the commoners from the East and the soldiers returned from the Marches in the exact same order, Cel. It is a calculated decay.”

Celesta leaned closer, her sharp eyes scanning the notes Kat had frantically transcribed. “A widespread corruption of the blood… Do you believe it could be an affliction born of the forge? Something akin to the poisonous rot that takes root within rusted iron and locks the jaw?”

“Yes, I believe that is a viable path,” Kat murmured, leaning back against the timber of her chair, her mind working furiously. “Think on it, Cel. What do the smiths fold into the metal during the smelting? If a blade or an iron vessel ages, or if the ore itself carries a latent malice, is it not possible for ordinary iron to drift toward causing such an affliction? That would explain how simple folk who have never drawn a sword are succumbing to the rot. They are not being cut by blades; they are eating off plates and drinking from cups forged from that very same corrupted metal.”

Celesta looked up from the parchment, her gaze sharpening. “And you are certain this is rooted strictly in the Eastern provinces?”

“The soldiers displaying the rot come from all over the realm,” Kat noted grimly. “The commoners who present the symptoms are, without exception, travelers arriving from the East.”

Celesta furrowed her heavy brows, her fingers tapping a rhythmic, thoughtful beat against the edge of the oak table.

“There are far too many shadows stretching out from those eastern quarters,” Celesta said, her voice dropping to a cautious murmur. “That Guild and that ancient forest… they guard their secrets jealously.”

“Blackwood’s answer to our Friartown petition came at last,” Celesta added, her voice dropping further still. “Three pages of courteous nothing—his trails all went cold at the forest’s eaves.” 

Kat bit her lower lip thoughtfully.

“What we truly require, Cel, is many eyes and ears—people we can trust, drawn from the smallfolk, to find out what is really happening on the ground.”

Celesta frowned slightly, the sheer scale of the suggestion giving her pause. “A magnificent notion, sister. But how could two princesses possibly form such a web without involving the King or the Master of Spies? If we bring this idea to them, they will only bury it beneath the weight of statecraft, or outright dismiss it as one of our childish fancies.”

“I may have a solution for this,” Kat said softly, a shadow of a mysterious smile playing at the edge of her lips. “But it requires a bit more tempering before I lay it before you.”

Celesta studied her elder sister’s face for a long, quiet moment, the flickering candlelight casting deep shadows across her features. Slowly, an answering, amused smile softened her stern expression.

“Sister, I cannot entirely shake the sensation that you have begun to harbor far too many secrets from me of late,” Celesta murmured, a knowing tilt to her head that made Kat’s heart skip a beat. “But regardless of what you keep in the dark… I shall always appreciate a well-crafted conspiracy.”

◆ ◆ ◆ ◆

Driven by a desire to bind her closest confidants to her expanding designs, Kat shared these sobering anxieties with her knight.