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“No, you don’t!”

“No. Not this. But I know what the fever is doing to you.” His thumb passes over my temple once before he reaches for the bottle beside the bed. “You are going to take the poppy,” he says, measuring it into the cup. “Then you are going to sleep until the worst of this passes.”

“I don’t want any more.” I shake my head, trying to push the cup away. “I hate it. Don’t want to be witless again.”

“It will be better than what you are enduring now, will it not?” the creature asks, holding the cup steady.

“No!” I strike out before he can bring the cup any closer, my hand catching the rim hard enough to send the dark liquid sloshing across the blankets.

My eyes track the stain, then snap back up to the long, bony mask. It isn’t poppy. It’s poison. The bird wants me docile. It wants me numb and unresisting so it can crack my ribs and pick the meat from my bones.

“Get away from me!” I drive my good heel into the mattress and scramble backwards, kicking wildly at the tangled bedding as I press myself against the wall and throw my arms up to fend off the great black wings.

The creature sets the cup aside and reaches for me.

“Don’t touch me!” I claw at his chest, desperate to strike the flesh beneath the feathers.

“Ophelia, stop.”

The pale bone beak dips closer as I writhe against the sheets, twisting my hips to get away from him. Pain tears through the swellings in my groin and beneath my arms, but I hardly care. The walls are dripping yellow rot, the shadows beneath the bed are creeping towards me, and that great bloody bird is coming to tear my soul out of my chest.

The hands close around my wrists, pinning my arms to the mattress. I buck against his hold, sobbing and thrashing like a trapped animal, screaming until the sound wears down to nothing but raw, stinging air tearing through my throat.

“…deliver her from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence…”

“Ophelia Harrow.”

I blink, my chest heaving against the damp shift, tears blurring the body looming over me. I shake my head, a weak, broken noise slipping past my teeth. “You want the bones. You want⁠—”

“I am Doctor Iscairn,” he interrupts calmly. “And you are my apothecary, lying in your own bed with the pestilence burning through you. The walls are sound, nothing moves in the shadows, and nothing in this room intends to harm you. What you are seeing is the fever, Ophelia. Nothing more. It is putting horrors where there are none.”

My breath hitches. I stare up at the beak, my muscles still trembling with the instinct to flee, but the monstrous, sprawling shape of the bird is slowly knitting itself back into the broad shoulders of a man in a dark cloak.

“The skin over the swellings has softened,” he says. “They are ready to be opened, and if we do not drain the corruption now, the poison will spread further into your blood. I had intended to numb your senses with poppy before taking a blade to them, but you will not drink it, and I will not pour it down your throat. So may I use the soulglimmer instead? It will cool the fire and dull the pain enough for me to cut. Please, Ophelia. Let me use the light.”

I try to answer him, but my throat is too dry to manage a word, so I drag my chin against the sheets in a desperate little nod.

“I am going to let go of your wrists now,” he says quietly, his thumbs smoothing once over my racing pulse. “Keep your arms flat against the bed. Do not strike me again. But you may hold the cloak, if it helps.”

When he lets go, my hands drop to the mattress, but the room starts to warp again, yellowing and melting at the edges.

“Don’t eat me,” I slur. “You are not allowed. Soulglimmer only. You cannot have my soul. Do you understand? I am keeping it.”

“I am not going to eat your soul, Ophelia Harrow; it is not your time to die,” he says. “I am only going to ease the fire. That is all.”

He lowers himself onto the edge of the mattress, moving carefully around me until his weight settles beside my hip. I am still shaking hard enough to make the bed creak, one fist twisted stubbornly into the front of his cloak, and through the blur of heat, his free hand turns palm-up between us.

“…Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil…”

Blue light gathers slowly, spilling between his fingers and washing over the bedclothes.

“Are you ready?” he asks softly.

“Yes,” I whisper, my eyes fixed desperately on the beautiful light in his palm. “Yes, please.”

He lowers his hand, pressing his bare fingertips flat against the centre of my chest.

The blue slips beneath my skin and I suck in a breath.