The apothecary's second customer

Turn 1 of 8

I take in the scene, and act on what matters most.

The bell is still ringing when you take him in. Good coat, dark wool, well-cut but soaked to the knee — he hasn't been out in the rain, he's been walking through wet grass, and a lot of it. His face has the greyish, soft-edged look of someone who has been awake long enough that sleep has stopped being something the body wants and started being something it has forgotten how to do. He is sorry before the door shuts. You can see that. He is sorry for the hour, for the bell, for the puddle forming on your floor, and most of all for whatever brings him here.

The coins are wrong. You know money. Four generations of Harrow apothecaries have taken payment in everything from butter to promises, and you know what a crown looks like from every duchy within a week's ride. These are none of them. The metal is warm to the touch, which it shouldn't be, and each coin has a tree pressed into it — not a symbol of a tree, but a portrait, every vein of every leaf picked out in fine detail, as though the die were made from a living branch. There are too many of them. Whatever he wants, he has overpaid for it tenfold, and he knows it, and he does not care.

"Not to kill it," he says again, quieter now, as if repeating it might make it more possible. "I don't want it killed. I want it to be able to rest." His hands are shaking. Not the dramatic tremor of illness or cold, but the fine, constant vibration of a body that has been bracing against something for too long and can no longer fully release. You have seen hands like this on people who have lost children, on people who have done things they cannot take back. You have never seen them on a man in a coat this expensive.

You have not said a word yet. You are still behind the counter with the evening's last preparation — a salve for the Carrow boy's eczema — cooling in its jar, and the lamp turned low, and the shutters half-drawn. The shop smells of beeswax and dried yarrow and, underneath, the faint mineral tang of the coins he has placed in front of you. From the back room you can hear Iris moving, the creak of the step-stool, the soft thud of a jar being set on a high shelf. She is supposed to have left an hour ago. She has not.

The man — he has not given his name, and you have not asked — is waiting. Not impatiently. He is waiting the way someone waits who has run out of alternatives and is not certain this one will work either, but has nowhere else to go. Outside, the wind moves through the street and the shop bell gives a single, small, involuntary chime. The coins sit on the counter between you, warm and strange, each one holding its little pressed tree like a secret kept in metal.