The Saint & The Healer (Ch. 1: Ash)

The girl had not cried in hours.
Her breath came like wind catching in cloth—muffled, brief, then still. The monk knelt beside her cot, one hand hovering above her brow. He had learned not to touch.

Around them, the chapel had become a ward. What once echoed with prayer now murmured with fever, coughing, and the rattle of basins. The saints in the stained glass looked on, their hands fixed in gestures that once comforted—but now only watched.

He whispered something then. Latin, barely formed. It may have been a prayer. It may have been an apology.

She did not hear him.

He had once believed in miracles. He had written them down, copied them onto vellum with ink made from oak galls and crushed prayers. But the miracles had grown thin, like the pages. Thin enough for death to slip through.

I felt her die. Not quickly, not mercifully. I did not hate the girl. Nor the monk.

***

He had seen her before, on the third day of quarantine.

A scrap of a girl, hair braided in two uneven ropes, watching the monks distribute bread from the cloister gate. She had not asked for anything. She had only looked at him with the expression children wear when they still believe adults know what to do.

He had avoided her eyes. Even then, he had known something was wrong. Her fingers were turning black, not from soot, but from the plague.

He feared me, though he did not yet name me. That was when I first noticed him.

Before the girl. Before the fever bloomed beneath her eyes, Brother Matthias had once been the youngest of them, swift-footed in the garden, precise in his copying, careful with his silence. He had arrived with nothing but a hunger to serve and a voice still cracking from boyhood.

That spring, he had argued gently with the Abbott about the spacing of the psalms.

“You crowd the margins,” he said, tapping the parchment with the edge of his nail. “If God left room between day and night, you can leave space between lines.”

Matthias smiled then. Not mockery, not defiance—just the quiet confidence of someone who believed in order.

He did not yet know how little order mattered to me.

In those days, the refectory filled with voices at dusk. Low, calm, ritual-bound. Bread was passed. The candle smoke rose in straight lines. It was a life so structured it lulled even sorrow into rhythm.

But even then, the letters sometimes blurred beneath his eyes. He had begun to hesitate in his prayers. To pause too long between verses.

“You are not here to question,” the Abbot had said, when Matthias asked why the sick could not be buried in consecrated ground, even if there was no other room.

Matthias had bowed his head.

But that night, he sat alone in the scriptorium long after the candles burned low. He stared at a blank sheet of vellum. And for the first time, he did not write.

I remember the ink drying in the well. I remember the stillness. Curiosity clung to him. Doubt weighed him down. That was when I began to stay close to him.

***

The girl was gone.

Brother Matthias sat where he had knelt, still as the stone floor beneath him. His fingers had curled against his robe, not in prayer but in some half-formed instinct to hold something together.

No one came.

Outside the chapel, the bells no longer rang. The sexton had died two days earlier, and no one had touched the rope since. Instead, the cry of her parents rang in his ears.

He should have called for help, he thought. Or covered her. Or closed her eyes. But he did nothing. He had seen too many faces stiffen into stillness. Nothing ever worked or made sense anymore.

I did not wish her to die. I never do. But I am what I am. And he … he still mourns, even now. That is why I watch him.

A door creaked. Brother Simon entered, a cloth pressed to his nose. He did not meet Matthias’s eyes.

“The body must be moved,” Simon said.

Matthias rose slowly. He nodded. He reached for the child’s wrists and stopped. His hands hovered. Shook.

“She was light,” he whispered. “So light.”

Simon said nothing.

Together, they buried her beneath the orchard wall, where the ground had softened from last week’s rain.

There were no rites. No incense. Just soil, and the shuffle of two men too tired to speak.

Matthias placed a single stone at the head of the mound. Not a cross. Just a stone.

“For the record,” Simon muttered, wiping his hands, “this wasn’t our task. We shouldn’t be burying the dead.”

Matthias looked up, angry. “Then don’t.”

Simon walked back toward the cloister. His figure blurred in the afternoon haze.

He did not turn back. Most don’t. But Matthias stayed. He always stays. Even when it’s too much. Even when no one asks him to.

The village below the hill still lived. Chickens still scratched in dust. The baker still left misshapen loaves on his stoop; no buyers, but the smell of crust and yeast clung to the air like a memory.

Matthias walked with his hood pulled low, though everyone knew who he was. The monk with the feverless hands. The one who hadn’t left when the others fled.

“Brother Matthias!”

He turned. A boy, barefoot and grinning, held out a dead frog as if it were an offering.

“It’s dry,” the boy said. “I think it was holy once.”

Behind him, his mother hissed and yanked the child back.

“Don’t touch,” she said, loud enough for the crowd to hear. “Not right now.”

Matthias raised a hand in peace. “He’s got good instincts. All relics start as something alive.”

A few chuckles. Nervous and tired. But real.

He walks among them, but he is not of them. He grieves with them, but cannot save them. I wonder what he will become when he cannot stop me.

The shop had once sold oils for muscle aches and salves for bee stings. Now its shelves were half-empty, its jars mislabeled or shattered.

Matthias entered with his hood down. He did not hide now. He no longer saw the point.

The apothecary, an old man named Marius with one cloudy eye, watched him from behind the counter, scraping something into a tin.

“You’re late,” Marius said. 

Matthias approached slowly, laying a folded scrap of parchment on the counter. It bore a list in his own hand. Ink faded, edges smudged.

“You’re still at it,” Marius muttered, scanning the names. “Wormwood. Rue. Vinegar of four thieves. Monk’s blood.” He raised an eyebrow. “You planning to cast out demons or poison yourself?”

“Whatever works.”

Marius snorted. “I liked you better when you copied books.”

Matthias offered a faint smile. “So did I.”

He seeks to unmake me. Not with blade or fire, but with rosemary and stubbornness. I should laugh. But I do not. I watch. I wait.

“You won’t find most of these,” Marius said, pushing the list back. “Half the herbalists are dead, and the other half are out selling pouches of ash to scared mothers.”

“Then tell me what’s left.”

Marius stared at him for a long moment. Then he sighed, and turned toward the back shelves. “Desperation. Let’s see what truth still grows.”

Marius weighed dried nettle with a shaking hand. “You’re wasting your time with poultices,” he muttered. “Unless you plan to steep yourself in them like a corpse in brine.”

“I can’t just stick back and do nothing as the village dies.”

Marius paused. “Tova.”

Matthias looked up. “Tova?”

“Lives beyond the market square, near the well with no bucket. Woman. Doctor, they say.”

“Woman doctor? A witch?”

“Nonsense. She’s a whole lot smarter than you, though,” Marius said, stuffing herbs into a satchel. “She doesn’t believe in demons. She believes in blood. Filth. Touch. She watches people. Measures them.”

“And she’s not sick?”

“Not yet.” He glanced toward the door. “But don’t expect her to open it for a monk.”

I have seen her, too. She moves with precision. She fears me, but not as others do. She sees me not as punishment, but as pattern. And pattern is dangerous.