‘Sunlight is gold in the City of Splendors.’

  Maeve sat by the dining room window, knees tucked under her chin, brushing Lady Orlaith’s curls with slow, careful strokes. Her silver brush had tiny patterns on the handle. Roses, she thought. Or maybe swirly clouds. She never really decided. It was soft in her hand, like the doll’s hair, which was much prettier than her own. She’d tried to brush her own hair the same way once, but it never came out right.

  Lady Orlaith was the most beautiful lady in all the lands. That was a fact. She wore a blue satin dress with real lace on the sleeves, and her glass eyes sparkled when the sun hit them. Beside her sat Sir Hoppington, the bravest knight in the realm. His ears flopped sideways, and one of his buttons was loose, but that was only because he’d fought a hundred—no, a thousand battles and won every single one. Even against the terrible blanket monster that tried to eat Maeve's feet at night.

  “My lady,” Sir Hoppington said, his voice deep and serious, “it is time to prepare for the royal feast.”

  “Yes, of course,” Lady Orlaith answered, very grandly. “We shall have gypsy pudding!”

  Maeve nodded to herself, setting Lady Orlaith on a cushion. She reached for the teacups on the tiny table, carefully placing them in front of her guests. There was no tea, but that didn’t matter. She’d already decided it was lemony and sweet.

  Outside the dining room, the streets bustled like it always did. The road was clean, not a single spot of dirt or ugly stains like the ones she’d see down in Bharncair if she peered over the railings. Down there, the stones looked sick and the air made her throat hurt. Up here, even in the lowest, most neglected part of Vharnveil, the sky was wide and open, and sunlight spilled through the window to make the wooden floorboards warm beneath her toes. She could hear the old tram bells ringing, the chiming voices of street vendors, and the soft, familiar hum of the city.

  It was a perfect, peaceful morning.

  Then—

  Coughing.

  Maeve’s hand stilled on Sir Hoppington’s head.

  She frowned, glancing over her shoulder. The sound came from the living room. Mama sometimes coughed when she woke up, but this time sounded different. It wasn’t just one cough. There were many. Rough and ugly and loud.

  Another one came. And then a choking noise, sharp and awful.

  Maeve’s stomach squeezed tight. She scrambled up, Lady Orlaith and Sir Hoppington forgotten, and hurried towards the doorway.

  In the living room, her mama sat hunched over the table, shoulders shaking, fingers gripping a handkerchief. Her papa stood behind a chair, one hand braced against it, head bowed.

  Maeve blinked.

  “Mama?”

  Her mother’s head jerked up. Her lips were red. The handkerchief in her hands was spotted dark.

  Maeve didn’t understand.

  Papa made a strange noise, a grunt that turned into a cough halfway through. His whole body jerked, like something was trying to claw its way out of his throat.

  Maeve stepped forward. “Papa—”

  A loud bang rang through the room. She jumped. Her father’s fist was on the table, knuckles white, his whole arm trembling. A glass toppled, rolling on its side before spilling dark liquid across the polished wood.

  Maeve clenched her hands at her sides.

  Something was wrong.

  Something was very, very wrong.

  Then the days became strange.

  The house felt different. Heavy. Tired. The curtains stayed shut most mornings, and when they were opened, the light wasn’t as warm as before. The air smelled funny. Not bad, just not right—bitter, like medicine, like the funny drinks her mama made her take when she had a sore throat.

  Maeve didn’t play by the window anymore.

  Most days, Mama held her hand too tight and dragged her through streets she didn’t know. The people in white coats peered at them with big round glasses and said words Maeve didn’t understand. They whispered things to each other. Then they shook their heads. A curse maester they visited stared into her papa’s eyes for a long time, then waved incense in his face. He closed his book with a heavy sound and told them something that made mama’s fingers shake.

  Her mama and papa were dying because of a curse.

  Then they went to the Church.

  The priests pressed their hands to Mama and Papa’s backs and spoke in low voices. Candles flickered. The air smelled thick and warm. Maeve clapped her hands together like the other people were doing, pressing them tight.

  ‘Dear Saintess Severin.’

  ‘If you fix them, I promise I won’t fight with anyone anymore.’

  ‘If you fix them, I won’t sneak sweets before dinner.’

  She prayed for her mama and papa’s health until her knees ached.

  But when the priests stopped chanting, they just shook their heads.

  Her papa didn’t say anything on the way home. His hands were fists at his sides.

  That night, Maeve curled beneath the dining room table, hugging Sir Hoppington and Lady Orlaith close.

  There was another crash. Wood splintered, and something sharp snapped in half in the living room. She squeezed her eyes shut.

  “Stop it!” Mama’s voice wavered, but she stood firm in the hallway. A paper flapped to the floor. Maeve peeked out from the tablecloth and saw a torn letter, half a wax seal still stuck to the top. “We just have to keep looking! Keep trying! I’m sure there’s a curse maester or a doctor in the city skilled enough to—

  Papa’s voice roared through the room. “Even the bishops don’t know what’s wrong with us! No maester or doctor will be able to do anything but drain us dry of what we’ve already lost!”

  Her papa was angry that night. Mama tried to stop him from breaking things around the house, but things kept banging against the walls, making her flinch.

  It wasn’t a few hours into the night when there was a knock on the door.

  Her papa screamed at the person to ‘fuck off’. Her mama yelled at him to be quiet so he wouldn’t disturb the neighbours. There was a pause—and then there was another knock, like the person outside didn’t care about the noise they were making.

  The house went silent.

  Maeve held her breath.

  Mama hesitated before moving to the door. Her steps were slow, like she was afraid of what she’d find on the other side.

  The door creaked open.

  A man stood there.

  Maeve didn’t really remember his face, but she remembered the black cloak. It spilled over his shoulders, darker than anything she’d ever seen, almost like it swallowed the light around him. His mask was long and curved, shaped like a crow’s beak, gleaming dully in the lamplight, and he had a walking cane with him. The handle was carved

  He was grinning.

  “... Good evening,” he said, voice smooth as syrup. “I hear there is a couple afflicted with a rather interesting curse here.”

  Mama swayed where she stood. “Who—”

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  The man tipped his head. “The Church sent me here.” He tapped the beak of his mask with one gloved finger. “I have a particular interest in cases like yours. Unsolvable curses, ailments. Things that don’t quite make sense even to the city’s foremost curse maesters and doctors.”

  Maeve stared up at him, wide-eyed. He smelled strange. Not like a person. Not like medicine, either. He felt… sharp and dry, like the books in the study when they’d been left open too long.

  Papa took a step forward. His voice was hoarse. “And you think you can help?”

  The man spreads his hands, palms up, like he was offering something. “Nothing in this world without a price,” he said swiftly, “but I’ll take a go at poking around the curse. If you’ll invite me into your home, of course.”

  Mama’s fingers tightened on the doorframe as the man tapped his cane on the doorsill, like he couldn’t enter with permission. There was another long silence.

  Then papa let out a slow breath. His shoulders sagged.

  Maeve didn’t know why they were hesitating, but something light fluttered in her chest.

  ‘Finally.’

  ‘Finally, Saintess Severin has sent an angel down to help.’

  Later, she would learn that the man was one of the ‘Seventy-Two Demonic Plagueplain Doctors’, but at the time, she rushed out from under the dining table to greet the man who said he’d save her papa and mama like she’d never greeted anyone before.

  Maeve woke with a start, the dream wrenched from her grasp like a child’s toy torn away mid-play.

  Her breath hitched. The warmth of golden light, the sound of her mother’s voice, the scent of old books and fresh linens—it was all gone. In its place, there were only the stale, sharp tangs of alcohol and rust. Her skull throbbed. She was lying on her sides, head resting on a stony pillow. Her body ached with exhaustion, marrow-deep, like she’d burned herself hollow and had yet to feel the full weight of it.

  Something else was wrong.

  She blinked, and there it was: Gael’s face. Right in front of hers.

  Too close. Way too close.

  He was lying on his sides, and his eyes were open too. They’d woken up at the exact same time, and he stared at her like she was some ghost that’d decided to haunt him specifically.

  Seeing his mask first thing in the morning made her stomach twist violently as well.

  For half a second, neither of them moved.

  Then, simultaneously, they recoiled from each other.

  Maeve shoved herself upright, shoulders stiff, muscles tensed like she’d woken to an attack. Gael did the same, nearly pitching off the bed but catching himself just before he could hit the floor.

  “... Fucking hell,” he muttered, running a hand through his tangled hair as he grumbled tiredly. Maeve adjusted her Exorcist’s combat dress, fingers smoothing out the fabric with sharp, methodical movements. She kept her face blank, but something in her gut still churned with the deep, instinctive wrongness of waking up next to a Plagueplain Doctor. It wasn’t even about him specifically—just everything he stood for.

  But where… am I?

  Her head throbbed as she blinked groggily, the world around her sluggish and unfocused. Green light slanted through the grimy windows, thick and sickly, splattering across the rotten wooden walls. It took a moment for her brain to catch up—this was the clinic. The shoddy little bedroom in the back of the surgical chamber.

  But it wasn’t exactly the bedroom she remembered.

  Puddles of sickly green blood were scattered across the wooden floor like pus from an open wound. Steaming. Bubbling. Some eating and chewing through the floorboards with quiet hisses.

  While Gael yawned and stretched his limbs like he’d woken from the worst hangover of his life, he blinked at the nearest blood puddle, squinting as if his brain couldn’t quite process it.

  “... And what the fuck are these things?” he muttered.

  Maeve swallowed, stiffening. She knew exactly where they’d come from, but just as her mouth drifted open, ready to lie—

  The door slammed open.

  “You two up?”

  Maeve’s head jerked up just in time to see Cara standing in the doorway, arms crossed, expression unimpressed.

  Gael, still blinking blearily, didn’t even hesitate. “Yep.” While Maeve continued rolling her head around to stretch her muscles, he’d already found a bottle of alcohol from god-knows-where. He twisted the cap off with his teeth, took a long pull, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “How long were we out?”

  “Three days,” Cara said casually.

  “Damn.”

  Maeve pressed a palm against her temple, massaging slow circles to fight the pounding in her skull. “It happens,” she muttered. “Fighting two Myrmurs two nights in a row with barely any real rest in between—it’s only inevitable. The shackle shares our strength, but it also shares our weaknesses. The moment one of us goes down, the other will follow. Blacking out at the same time is very common amongst Symbiote Exorcists.”

  Gael made a face. “But why were you in my bed?”

  “I didn’t carry myself here.”

  They looked at Cara at the same time, who only thumbed outside the door.

  “Either you share a bed together, or each of you share the storage room with a corpse,” Cara grumbled. “And I’ve been sleeping on the benches downstairs, thank you very much for asking.”

  Gael squinted at Cara like he’d just remembered something important. “And the money? Did the old man send it over?”

  “Yep.”

  “Our gifts?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, shit. Where are they?”

  Cara thumbed outside and beckoned them to follow. Without hesitation, Gael hauled himself up, wobbling slightly before catching his balance. He didn’t wait for Maeve, of course, but she followed as well, the two of them stepping carefully around the poisonous blood puddles before exiting the bedroom and pushing open the door to the prayer hall.

  The moment they stepped out onto the stairwell leading down to the prayer hall, sunlight slammed in at full force. She continued trudging forward with squinted eyes, and when her hands finally found the warm wooden railings, she looked down at what’d once been a graveyard of rotten benches and rusty candelabras.

  Now?

  The benches had been shoved against the walls, stripped bare, and the space in the prayer hall was completely empty save for crates. Tons of them. At least fifty of them were stacked atop each other, most half-open, and they were all packed to the brim with so many coins that their dull, golden sheen almost seemed surreal against the building’s usual squalor.

  Maeve tried to count and estimate how many coins were down there.

  The broken roof still gaped open overhead, cracked wood framing the polluted sky like the remains of some dead creature, but she no longer felt like the clinic was on the verge of collapse.

  And Gael, who’d been silent for all of five seconds, started cackling. He spun toward Cara, eyes glinting, and smacked a sharp, resounding high-five against her palm.

  Ten thousand Marks.

  Ten thousand Marks a month wasn’t luxury. Not by a long shot. It wouldn’t buy anyone new lives, it wouldn’t fix the broken lower city, and it wouldn’t even be enough to buy a one-way ticket up the Grand Cleansing Elevator and into the floating upper city, but it was probably enough to patch the roof. Enough to replace supplies. Enough to keep them afloat.

  Survival was no longer a question.

  Cara leaned against the railings beside her, arms folded, exhaling long and slow.

  “I spent the past three days hauling them in,” she said, nodding at the crates, “as well as all the old furniture Old Banks was so generous as to donate them to us. I even split the Marks into smaller pouches so we can actually carry them around.” Then she tilted her head toward them, expectant. “So? What now?”

  Gael dragged a hand through his mess of hair, tilting his head back with exaggerated thoughtfulness.

  “Well,” he mused, “before we do anything fancy, we’ll fix the damn clinic. We’ll patch up the walls, replace the roof, seal all the cracks in the floors, and before that…”

  Noodle shop.

  Maeve hunched over her bowl by the window seat, slurping down her wraith squid ink noodles. The flat noodles were slick and black as oil, swirling in a broth so thick it clung to her lips like melted resin, and the sour tang of pickled bloodfruit cut perfectly through the deep, meaty salt of the broth. She’d had her reservations ordering it at first, but Cara insisted she try it out, and she didn’t regret it whatsoever.

  Across the table, Gael made a low, contented noise as he tore into a slab of peppered marrow jelly, sucking out the rich, fatty insides with all the grace of a gutter rat. Cara opted for a gelatinous, jelly-like mess that quivered under her fork, half-melted into the bowl of deep-fried bark shards and fermented bone broth. Maeve grimaced as she watched them shovel in their more… exotic dishes. She wasn’t quite ready for food on their level yet.

  Behind the kitchen counter, Miss Alba eyed them with mild exasperation.

  “And what the hell happened to you three?” she muttered, wiping her hands on her apron. Gael, halfway through inhaling a mouthful of marrow jelly, barely looked up.

  “We’re loaded now!” He jabbed his fork at his empty bowl. “Gimme a second bowl!”

  Miss Alba snorted, but she ladled out another portion and swooped in for a second serving anyways, making Gael grin like he’d won something.

  As they all drained the last drops of their dishes and exhaled in unison, Maeve let the warmth settle in her bones. For the first time in weeks, her body didn’t feel like a heap of bruises held together by sheer willpower.

  Suddenly, a voice rang out from the street.

  “Wallpaper! High-quality wallpaper! Fix up your shitty run-down crib today!”

  Cara’s head snapped up. “Perfect.” She was already standing, grabbing one of the pouches of Marks they’d laid out across the table. “I’m gonna get some for the clinic.”

  Before either Gael or Maeve could stop her, Cara was already out the door, disappearing into the mist-laced morning.

  Silence settled over the shop, save for the distant clatter of dishes and the low murmur of Miss Alba’s children helping her clean the dishes behind the counter. Maeve traced a finger along the rim of her empty bowl, debating whether to speak.

  “… Last night,” she said finally, voice quiet, careful as she looked at Gael. “During the Myrmur fight, you said something.”

  Gael, still licking marrow jelly from his fingers, looked up. “Yeah? What manner of verbal horror did I lob at you?”

  She hesitated.

  The memory of his voice still flickered sharp in her head.

  ‘I don’t like Plagueplain Doctors or Symbiote Exorcists either.’

  ‘I only like people who don’t like me.’

  …

  She shook her head after a while.

  “Never mind,” she mumbled. “It’s nothing.”

  Gael squinted at her for a moment before smirking.

  “That’s a classic horror line.”

  She frowned. “What?”

  He gestured lazily with his fork. “‘Never mind, it’s nothing’. That’s, like, the cliffhanger ending in chapter one of any horror chronicle. You’ve been reading too much old stuff. You should use some of the money to buy newer books. Get some fresher materials for your references.”

  Maeve stared at him.

  “…Or,” she said flatly, “we could fix the clinic first.”

  Gael sighed, heavy with mock suffering. They fell back into sharp-tongued squabbling, but as Maeve shoved her empty bowl aside to make space, she made a mental note to herself: buy a few new generation horror chronicles when I have the chance.

  But first, she had a clinic to help rebuild.

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