His Wicked Verse

The small brass bell above my door chimed a sound too clean for the sullied air of Cheapside. I did not look up. My focus was on the mortar, on the steady, circular grind of the pestle crushing dried yarrow into a fine, fragrant dust. The scent of it, sharp and green, was a small prayer against the street’s perpetual stench of refuse and humanity. Another soul seeking a poultice for a weeping sore, or a tincture for a cough that rattled the ribs. They came, they paid their pennies, they left.

But this silence was different. It was not the shuffling quiet of a humble patron. It was a weighted, deliberate stillness that made the fine hairs on my arms prickle. When I finally lifted my gaze, he stood there, a stark column of black wool against the muted browns and greens of my shop. He had pulled the door shut behind him, trapping the afternoon light and the world’s noise outside, leaving us in a sudden, intimate twilight.

He was the new priest. I had seen him from a distance, a severe figure whose youth was betrayed only by the sharp line of his jaw and the fervor that burned in his eyes. Up close, he was taller than I had imagined, and thinner, as if he had whittled himself down to nothing but bone and belief.

"You are the woman they call Isabell," he said. It was not a question. His voice was low and resonant, a church-stone sound that seemed to absorb the light in the room.

I gave a slow, single nod, my hand still resting on the pestle. "I am."

He took a step forward, his dark eyes sweeping over the hanging bundles of lavender and feverfew, the neatly labeled clay pots, the charts of moon phases and plant cycles pinned to the wall. His gaze was an indictment. "Master Albright’s son was near death two nights past. The sweating sickness had him. Today, he sits up and takes broth."

"God is merciful," I offered, my voice even.

A muscle tightened in his lean cheek. "Master Albright confesses he did not pray for God’s mercy. He came to you. He paid for a devil’s cure, and in his desperation, he damned his son’s soul and his own." The words were stones cast into a sinner. "He says you gave him a bottle of black liquid. He says you practiced sorcery."

I slid the pestle from the mortar and set it aside. The clink of marble on slate filled a moment that was otherwise silent. I met his stare, this man of God who saw heresy in my healing. His eyes were the grey of a winter sky, and in their depths, I saw a terrible, rigid certainty. But a certainty for what was unclear.

"It was an infusion of willow bark and elderflower," I said, my voice quiet but clear in the heavy silence. "It cools a fevered blood. There is no magic in it, Father. Only the earth."

"The earth is God’s," he countered, his voice dropping lower, more intense. "And you twist His creations to profane ends. You offer remedies that belong to Him alone, and you whisper incantations over them." He took another step, the space between us shrinking, changing the scent of my herbs so that it mixed with his aroma. "Confess your sin, woman. Confess what you are."

He moved past me then, his black cassock brushing against a hanging sheaf of dried rosemary, releasing its sharp, clean scent into the air. He ignored it. His long fingers traced one of my botanical charts, the elegant, spiraling symbols I used to denote root, leaf, and flower. I had devised the system myself, a private language between me and my work. To his eyes, it was a demonic script.

"What devil's grammar is this?" he murmured, his voice a low vibration of disgust. He ran a hand over a row of clay jars, his touch lingering on the one marked Belladonna. "The shade of night. A poisoner's tool."

"A single drop can ease a racing heart," I said, my own heart beginning to beat a frantic rhythm against my ribs. "The dose makes the poison, Father. Not the plant."

His gaze finally settled on my worktable, on the small, worn book bound in dark leather that lay beside my scales. It was where I pressed my thoughts, my loneliness, and the words that came to me in the quiet hours. He reached for it, his movements slow and deliberate, as if handling a venomous snake.

"And what is this? Your book of shadows? Your pacts and incantations?"

"It is nothing," I said, the words coming out sharper than I intended. "It is private."

He paid me no mind. He opened the book, the leather creaking in the charged quiet. His eyes, accustomed to reading scripture in dim light, scanned the page. I felt a cold dread wash over me, a violation more profound than his search of my herbs. He was touching my soul. He found a verse near the top of a page and drew a breath.

And then he spoke my words.

His voice was not the condemning lash I expected. It was deep, sonorous, and achingly beautiful, the voice of a man who could make psalms weep. It filled the small shop, wrapping around the hanging herbs and jars, giving my simple, secret lines a weight and a sorrow I had never intended, but had always felt.

"The shadow drinks the light from stone,
And in the dark, a seed is sown.
It does not pray for sun or sky,
But finds its strength in a silent cry."

The last word faded, leaving a silence that was heavier than before. He had meant to expose me, to read my heresy aloud as proof of my sin. But something else had happened. In the resonant timbre of his voice, my private grief had been transformed into a hymn of despair. He recognized my solitude. I stood frozen, my breath caught in my throat, listening to the echo of my own heart spoken in the voice of my accuser.

He closed the book. The sound of the leather cover meeting the pages was soft. His long, pale fingers rested on the cover for a moment, a stark contrast to the dark, worn leather. He did not look at the book, but at me. The righteous fire in his gaze had been banked, leaving behind something grey and cold, like ash. The certainty was still there, but it was now laced with a profound and unsettling sorrow. It was the loneliness I knew so well, the kind that lived in the hollow of the ribs, a constant, quiet ache.

He pushed the book back toward me across the worn wood of the table. "This is a dangerous game you play, woman." His voice was low again, the beautiful resonance gone, replaced by a flat, hard tone. "You meddle with things that are not yours to command. The health of a man’s body is tied to the salvation of his soul. You cannot treat one without poisoning the other."

He moved toward the door, his black robes stirring the dust motes in the single shaft of light. He stopped with his hand on the iron latch, his back to me. For a moment, I thought he would leave it at that. But then he spoke again, his voice a low murmur that carried the weight of a prophecy.

"Burn your books. Forget these rhymes.
A woman’s prayer is not in chimes
of word and root, but bended knee.
There is no grace in sorcery."

The words hung in the air between us, a perfect, chilling echo of the cadence he had read from my own page. A verse of warning, crafted in the language of my own heart. I saw his shoulders tense, as if the shape of the words had surprised him as much as they had me. He seemed to recoil from his own speech, a flicker of confusion crossing his features before he mastered them. He pulled the door open without looking back, and the raw noise of the street flooded the sanctuary he had created.

Then he was gone. The bell gave a final, mocking chime.

I stood frozen in the sudden emptiness, my hand trembling as I reached out to touch the cover of my book. His threat was a hollow thing, a priest’s duty recited by rote. I had heard such words before. They were nothing. But the look in his eyes, and the unintentional poetry of his curse—that had undone me completely. It was not the fear of the pyre that left me shaking. It was the terrifying recognition that this man, this vessel of a faith that would see me condemned, had looked into the darkest, most secret part of my craft and spoken its language back to me. He was not my enemy. He was my echo. And I knew I could bewitch him.

The bell in St. Giles’s never stopped. It was a new, constant companion to the city’s breath, a frantic metal tongue speaking a single word: death. A week after the priest’s visit, the sweating sickness had fallen upon the parish like a shroud. It came on swift and brutal, a chill followed by a drenching, foul-smelling sweat that seemed to pull the life from a body in a matter of hours. The physicians fled. The church offered prayers and last rites, their remedies proving as useless as a whisper against a storm. Thomas’s God had turned a deaf ear to London. The ceaseless tolling of the bell was the only answer to the prayers of the people.

From my window, I watched the death-carts trundle past, their grim cargo barely concealed. I heard the wailing that seeped through thin walls and closed shutters. His warning to me, his poetic curse, felt like a distant, hollow thing now. There is no grace in sorcery. But there was no grace in watching children burn from within, either. There was no salvation in kneeling on cold stone while the world dissolved into fever and fear.

My work became a fever of its own. By day, I kept my door barred, turning away the few healthy souls brave enough to venture out. By night, my small workshop was aglow with the steady flame of a lamp. The air grew thick with the sharp, medicinal scents of boiled willow bark, yarrow, and meadowsweet. I worked with a frantic, desperate focus, my hands stained with herbs, my mind a sharp, clear instrument. I measured and crushed, steeped and strained, pouring the dark, potent liquids into small glass vials I had hoarded for years. This was my prayer, offered not to the heavens, but to the suffering flesh of my neighbors.

For each vial, I prepared a message. On scraps of torn parchment, I wrote in my neat, small script. Not incantations, not spells, but verses meant to anchor a soul adrift in the delirium of sickness. A reminder that the body was of the earth, and the earth endured.

When fever’s fire burns to bone,
The deepest root still holds its stone.
Drink deep of earth, and do not weep,
For life is held in slumber deep.

They were small acts of rebellion against the bells, against the priest’s condemning God. They were my verses, my craft, and an act of defiance against his warnings.

When the moon was a sliver and the fog from the river crept through the alleys to swallow all sound but the tolling bell, I would slip out. With a basket of vials tucked under my cloak, I moved like a ghost through the city. I crept to the doors marked with the crude chalk cross of the plague, my heart a frantic drum against my ribs. I would leave a single vial on the doorstep, the small scroll of parchment tied around its neck with a bit of twine. A silent offering. I never waited to see if it was taken. I only left my small hope in the darkness and vanished back into the shadows, the priest’s beautiful, damning voice a faint echo in my memory.

The room was thick with the sweet, cloying odor of decay. Thomas knelt by the pallet, the rough wool of his cassock scratching his knees through the thin fabric. The woman on the bed was little more than a specter, her skin slick with the unending sweat, her breath a shallow, rattling thing. He had been with her for an hour, murmuring the Latin rites for the dying, his voice a low drone against the relentless clang of the bells outside. His words felt hollow, useless stones thrown against a tide of sickness. God was silent. Only the bell answered.

The woman’s husband, a stooped man with eyes hollowed out by grief and sleeplessness, pressed something small and cool into his hand. "A moment ago," the man whispered, his voice raw. "On the step. Someone left it."

Thomas looked down. It was a small glass vial filled with a dark liquid. Tied to its neck with a piece of rough twine was a tiny scroll of parchment. He felt a familiar surge of irritation. Peasant superstition. A useless charm against the wrath of God. He was about to set it aside, to gently admonish the man for placing his hope in such trifles, but his fingers brushed against the parchment. It was the same worn, fibrous texture as the pages of her book.

He pulled at the twine with his thumb, his movements slow. The scroll uncurled in his palm. The script was small, precise, and utterly familiar. A jolt went through him, a memory of her shop, of the scent of rosemary and damp earth. He held the parchment closer to the flickering candlelight.

When fever’s fire burns to bone,
The deepest root still holds its stone.
Drink deep of earth, and do not weep,
For life is held in slumber deep.

The rhythm was unmistakable. It was the same quiet, defiant cadence he had read aloud, the same voice that spoke of strength found not in prayer, but in the dirt. It was her. The witch. While he was on his knees offering platitudes to the dying, she was moving through the darkness, leaving her poison—her medicine—on their doorsteps.

He looked from the elegant script to the vial of dark liquid. He thought of the merchant’s child, recovered. He thought of the whispers of other miraculous survivals in the parish, stories he had dismissed as desperate rumor. His prayers filled the air with empty sound. Her verses offered a tangible thing: a liquid in a vial, a promise of the earth’s resilience. A cold shame washed over him, so forcful it felt like a physical sickness. She was doing his work. She, the heretic, the sinner, was tending to his flock with a faith more practical and potent than his own.

The verse was not just for the sick. He knew it with a certainty that chilled him to his core. It was a message sent across the dying city, a secret correspondence meant only for him. Drink deep of earth, and do not weep. It was a challenge. A rebuke. An invitation into her world of root and stone, a world that was saving lives while his world of scripture and sacrament failed. He closed his hand around the vial, the cool glass a solid, real thing against his skin. The bell tolled, and for the first time, it sounded like a summons.

He found me by the river. I had gone there to escape the bells, but their sound carried even here, muted by the thick, grey fog that rolled off the water, blurring the line between river and shore. The air was cold and wet, smelling of mud and decay. I was kneeling, my fingers numb as I dug for the pale roots near the bank, when a shape resolved itself from the mist. It was him.

My first instinct was to run. He was out of his territory, a black-robed predator strayed from its stone den. My basket of herbs felt like an indictment at my side. I rose slowly, my back stiff, my hand clutching the small trowel I’d been using, its sharp edge a pathetic weapon. He stopped a few feet away, close enough that I could see the exhaustion etched around his eyes, the grime on the hem of his cassock. He looked as if he had been walking through the filth of the city for days. He was not a priest delivering a verdict; he was a man drowning.

He did not look at the basket, or the roots in my hand. His eyes, dark and haunted, were fixed on my face. The silence stretched, thick with the damp air and all the things we had left unsaid. The clang of the distant bell was the only sound. I expected the accusation, the condemnation, the righteous fire.

His voice came out low and broken, stripped of all its priestly resonance. It was the voice of a man confessing in the dark, not to God, but to me.

"The bell tolls out a hollow sound,
For souls God left within the ground.
I speak His word, I plead His grace,
And see His absence on each face.
What prayer can halt the final breath,
When Heaven’s king is lord of death?"

The words were a blade, not turned on me, but on himself. On his God. It was a verse of pure, undiluted despair, a heresy more profound than any I had ever dared to write. The rhythm was perfect and dark. He had taken our shared language and steeped it in his own private hell.

In that moment, the priest vanished. The black robes, the cross he wore, the entire edifice of his faith crumbled away, and all that was left was Thomas. A man tearing himself apart with doubt. A poet whose verses were as secret and as damning as my own. The profound, aching loneliness I had first seen in his eyes was now naked and exposed in the twilight. He was not my judge. He was my reflection in a shattered piece of glass.

I did not speak. There were no words for what passed between us. I only gave a slow, small nod. It was an answer. An acceptance. His shoulders slumped in relief, a barely perceptible shift, but I saw it. The tension that held him so rigidly in place seemed to bleed out of him into the fog. For the first time since he had walked into my life, we were not witch and priest. We were merely two souls, standing on the edge of a dying world, speaking the only language that made any sense of it.

He came to me at first light, the fog not yet burnt off the rooftops. The knock at my door was soft, hesitant. I had not slept. My hands were stained with crushed leaves and the faint green shadow of nettle. I opened it expecting one of the frightened wives who came at dawn. Instead, Thomas filled the threshold, his cassock damp from mist, his eyes too bright.

“Please,” he said, not waiting for my permission before stepping inside. His gaze swept over the hanging bundles, the labeled jars, the mortar still wet with paste. He stood in the center of my workshop as if it were a chapel he did not know the prayers for. His fingers caught on the edge of my table, tense enough to whiten the knuckles. “I need you to tell me how it works. The verses. The tinctures. Everything.”

I closed the door and set the latch with a quiet click. He was close enough that I could smell the chill on his clothes and the faint trace of smoke from candle stubs burned too long. I moved past him, my shoulder brushing his chest in the narrow space. The contact jolted us both. I lit the lamp, its small flame casting a warm circle across the crowded desk.

“You don’t believe in what I do,” I said, keeping my voice steady as I sorted dried willow bark into a neat pile. “You called it sorcery.”

“I want to understand why your words and what you make—” He swallowed, the muscle in his jaw working. “Why do they soothe a body and a mind when my prayers do not?”

The honesty in his voice filled the room more than the lamp’s light. He looked like a man stripped of armor and left cold. I gestured toward the stool. He did not sit. He hovered, restless, eyes catching on the small leather book of my poems on the corner of the table. His hand lifted, then dropped.

“It is not sorcery,” I said. “It is knowledge. And care. Plants are not devils, Thomas. Their bitterness lowers fever. Their sap draws out heat. And words—” I touched the book’s worn cover. “Words remind them they are not alone when their bodies turn against them.”

His gaze climbed to my face. Something in it made the breath hitch low in my chest. He stepped closer. The distance between us shrank to the point where I could feel the warmth of him, the steady presence. His voice dropped. “Where did you learn? Who taught you to mix root and verse and turn despair into something that feels like mercy?”

My heartbeat answered him, quick and insistent. I could have lied. Instead, I reached for his hand. He flinched, then allowed it. His palm was rough, chilled from the morning air. I pressed his fingers around a sprig of dried feverfew. “From the women who lived long enough to teach me. From trial. From watching what the body does when it is held gently instead of condemned. From listening.”

He stood very still as I spoke, his breath slow and controlled, the way one stands at the edge of a cliff. “And the verses?” he asked. “They read like prayers to something older than my altar.”

“They are,” I said, throat tight. “To the earth, to the stubbornness of bone and blood. To the way a person will fight to stay in their own skin for one more day if you tell them they matter.”

His hand tightened around the feverfew. He stepped that last inch toward me and the exhale that left him was unsteady. “Your words linger,” he whispered. “I repeat them without meaning to. They fill the spaces where my faith thins. I do not know what to do with that.”

His mouth was inches from mine. The air between us felt charged. He lifted his other hand, then let it hover near my face, not touching. I swayed toward him before I could stop myself. He noticed. His gaze fell to my lips. When he leaned in, it was slow, like surrender. The kiss was soft, testing. His lips were warm and careful at first, then deepened when I parted for him. He breathed me in like he was starved of air.

I tasted the night on him, the faint salt of a man who had not rested. My fingers slid to the back of his neck, finding the fine hairs there. He made a sound low in his throat, and his restraint frayed. His mouth moved against mine with sudden urgency, his tongue stroking against mine, learning my heat. I felt him harden against the front of his robes, an involuntary warmth pressing to my hip when I drew him closer. He broke the kiss first, his forehead falling to mine, his breath ragged.

“Forgive me,” he said, though his hands did not leave me. One curved around my waist, the other rose, fingers skimming my cheek. He held me like something precious and dangerous. “I should not—”

“You needed it,” I said. “So did I.” My voice shook. His thumb traced the seam of my mouth, the small, reverent touch almost undoing me. Heat spiraled low in my belly. My body answered him with a throbbing need that sent a flush to my chest.

He swallowed and stepped back just enough to see my face. “I need you to tell me everything,” he said again. “I want to know how you read the body. How you choose which plant. How you decide which words will ease the mind.”

The desperate humility in him softened me. I turned to the table, my fingers steadying as I gathered a shallow wooden tray. “Then learn. Watch.” I guided his hand to the mortar’s rim. His fingers brushed mine, lingering. The simple contact sent a flare of sensation up my arm. I covered his hand with my own and pressed down. “Smell this,” I said, bringing the pestle to his nose. “Willow. It cools the blood. It will not stop death, but it will grant relief. Relief gives time. Time gives a chance.”

He closed his eyes and inhaled. When he opened them, the darkness there had shifted. Not gone. But altered by a quiet awe. “And the verses?”

I slid the little leather book toward him. “They are my hand on a fevered brow put into lines. Read them when you mix. Say them when you pour. Let the sick hear them when they cannot hear anything else.”

He touched the book like it might burn him. He looked up, mouth parted. “Isabell,” he said, my name a soft vow in his mouth. “If I do this, if I let your words into my work, I don’t know if I can be unchanged.”

“You won’t be,” I said. “Neither will I.”

He nodded once, a sharp, decisive movement. He opened the book with a careful thumb, and the sound of its worn spine giving way was as intimate as a sigh. He glanced at the page and then at me, as if asking permission. I tilted my head, granting it. He drew a breath to read.

His voice slid into the first line, and I felt it in my chest as much as I heard it. He read softly, reverently, as if speaking to someone on a sickbed. The words were mine but they sounded different shaped by his mouth, warmer, steadier. I watched his lips form the syllables, watched the way the tendons in his throat shifted when he swallowed a breath, and a tight ache spread low in me. He was a priest reading my secret prayers to the body, and something about that undid me.

I laid a hand over the page before he could finish the stanza. He stopped. The quiet between us was heavy and close. I did not pull away. His gaze rose to meet mine, a question, a plea, a warning.

“There is something else,” I said. “If you want to understand.” My voice felt bare. “It is not for healing the sick. It is for seeing.”

He went very still. I slid my hand from the book and reached beneath the worktable to the locked drawer. The key hung on a thin cord under my dress; I pulled it free, the movement brushing the inside of my breast, a small inadvertent caress that sent a quick shiver through me. His eyes flicked there and then away, his breath hitching again.

The lock turned with a quiet click. I drew out a small wooden box, no bigger than my palm, its surface carved with interlaced vines and tiny stars. The lid had been smoothed by my thumb a hundred times. I set it between us on the table. He did not touch it.

“What is it?” His voice lowered. He looked at the box the way a man looks at a sealed letter he knows will change his life.

I traced the carvings. “A draught, though it is a paste. It opens the mind’s eye. Not to devils,” I added, holding his stare, “but to what is hidden because fear taught us not to look. It is not for the dying. It is for the living who think they already know all there is.”

He dragged a hand over his mouth, thinking. “Where did you get it?”

“My mother’s mother had it from a traveler who came from the south, from the hills where the old stones are half-buried and the air hums after sunset. She said some plants make a thin seam in the world and, if you are gentle, you can lift it.” I drew a breath and lifted the lid.

Scent unfurled into the room—resinous and green, with a dusky sweetness underneath. It was like crushed pine and rain-damp soil warmed by sun, mixed with a bitter note that made the tongue salivate. The paste inside was dark as wet earth, flecked with fine gold powder that caught the lamplight. Thomas leaned in despite himself and inhaled. His pupils widened.

“It smells like… the forest after a storm,” he said, sounding surprised.

I dipped the tip of my little finger into it and smeared it on the inside of my wrist. Heat flared where it touched, not burning, but a spreading warmth that tunneled up into my arm. I took his hand before he could think better of it, and turned his palm up. His skin was callused, rougher than I’d expected. I stroked my thumb across his lifeline, feeling the strike of his pulse under the pad of my finger. He stared at our hands, at the intimacy of it, and when my fingers slid lower to the heel of his palm, his breath trembled.

“Not much,” I warned, glancing at him. “A trace is enough.”

He nodded, jaw tight. I touched the smallest amount of paste to the inside of his wrist. His skin twitched under my fingertip. He made a low sound he tried to swallow, a caught breath that turned into a soft curse in his throat. I watched his face. The first wave always moved like a ripple: scent sharpening, sound pulling close, the edges of the room picking themselves out with sudden clarity.

“What do you see?” I asked.

He blinked. “The grain in the wood,” he said, voice strained and quiet. “I can see every line. The light… it’s thicker. The lamp has a halo.” He looked up at me as if seeing me through new glass. “You,” he said, and then he stopped, because the word sounded too full.

Heat flushed my neck. His gaze tracked the rise and fall of my breath. He lifted his hand—slow, careful—and brushed a curl that had fallen forward back behind my ear. The gentleness of it made my ribs ache. Then his fingers drifted lower and traced the hollow at the base of my throat. He sucked in a breath, as if the shape of my body revealed itself to him with sudden tenderness. I felt the touch like a spark that ran down my sternum and pooled between my legs. My nipples tightened under the thin linen of my shift, the fabric brushing them with every shallow breath.

“It opens the mind’s eye,” I said, to anchor us. “Sometimes the heart’s.” My voice was unsteady. He heard it. His eyes darkened.

“What does it show?” he asked, trying for control, but his thumb was still at my skin, resting just above the tie of my dress. I could feel the heat of his hand even through cloth, and my body leaned into it.

“Truths,” I said. “Not tidy ones. It shows what the world hides in plain sight when we choose comfort over sight. Patterns. Connections. Memory, in the bones of the city. It’s… difficult to explain. Easier to feel.”

He nodded again. He was close enough that I could smell the clean salt of his skin beneath the wool and wax. His arousal pressed at the front of his cassock again, insistent, undeniable. I wanted to unlace the fabric at his throat, to taste the warm curve where neck met shoulder. He must have seen the thought in my face, because he bent and kissed me again, a firm, unhesitating press, the kind that said he had decided and would bear the penance. His mouth moved against mine with purpose. I opened to him and let him in, meeting his tongue with mine. The kiss went hot quickly, deepening until I had to brace a hand on the table to stay upright. He followed, stepping between my knees where I stood close to the bench, his thigh finding the heat of me through my skirt. I gasped into his mouth and pressed down, seeking friction. He groaned, a raw sound, and his hands pulled me closer, his fingers bunching my dress at my hips.

I broke away first, breathing hard. His lips were swollen, a smear of my paste glinting faintly at the corner of his mouth. I wiped it away with my thumb and he caught my wrist, turning it and pressing his lips to the place where my pulse beat. His mouth was warm and wet there, and the sensation ran straight up my arm into my chest. My inner muscles tightened in a slow pulse, and I had to cling to his shoulder.

“This is not for pleasure,” I managed, though my body throbbed with the lie. “It can make you feel more. But it isn’t that.”

He nodded, and I could feel him force his breath steady. He eased back a step, and the air cooled where he’d been. He looked at the open box again, at the smear on his wrist. Awe had carved softer lines into his face.

“Opening the mind’s eye,” he repeated, quieter, as if testing the phrase in his mouth. “Hidden truths.”

I closed the lid, my finger lingering on the carved stars. “You asked me how it works,” I said. “You wanted to know why my words and my tinctures reach where your prayers have not. This is the part you have to choose. It is not a sacrament. There is no priest for it. Only trust.”

He looked from the box to me, and back again. His throat worked as he swallowed. “If I take more…” he began, and trailed off. Fear and longing warred in his eyes, both fierce.

“Not now,” I said, softly, because I cared for him more than I should. “Not yet. A trace is enough the first time. Let it move through you. Let it show you that what you think is all there is, isn’t.”

He stared down at his wrist, then lifted it to his face again and breathed, slower this time, letting the scent anchor him. His lashes lowered. “I can feel it,” he murmured. “Like a door shifting in a wind.”

I put the box away and turned the key, the small metal sound loud in the tight room. When I straightened, he was watching me with a steadiness that made my skin heat. He reached out and slid his hand around the back of my neck, pulling me in until our foreheads touched. His breath washed over my mouth. His voice was a whisper. “Thank you,” he said. “For trusting me.”

“I haven’t,” I said, but my hands were fisted in his robe, holding on. “Not fully. Not yet.”

His mouth curved, brief and pained and hopeful. “Then show me how,” he said, and the low, reverent tone of it made something in me answer. Outside, a bell tolled, distant and dull. In here, the air shifted, and the space between us felt like the narrow lip of a precipice we were about to step over together.

He took a breath like a man about to dive and lifted my hand. His fingers wrapped around my wrist, firm and careful, bringing my skin to his mouth. He kissed the place where I’d smeared the paste, a soft press that sent a shiver through me. Then he brought his own wrist to his lips and licked the faint glint there, tongue darting once to taste it. The sight of it made my stomach dip. He closed his eyes.

“Thomas,” I warned, even as my body leaned closer. “Slowly.”

He nodded, but his breath changed—shallower, measuring—and his other hand found my hip, anchoring. I watched the change take him. The tendons in his neck drew tight. A flush rose along his cheekbones. He opened his eyes and a tremor passed through him, small, unmistakable.

“What is it?” I asked, unable to keep the awe from my voice.

He looked past me and then through me, like a man watching two layers of the world at once. “The room—it’s—” He broke off and swallowed. “The lines are wrong. No. Not wrong. There are more of them.” He laughed once, breathless and incredulous. “The wall behind you has ribs, as if it were a vault, and I can hear… God.” He pressed his fingers to his temple. “Hear the scratches in the mortar as if they are voices.”

I slid closer, one hand on his chest. His heart hammered under my palm. He smelled like warmed resin and salt and a little like fear. His pupils were blown wide, almost black. He drew a breath as if air itself were thick.

“It’s all right,” I said. “Let it come. Don’t fight it.”

He nodded again and tilted forward. His mouth found mine not for heat but for steadiness, and I kissed him back, slow, grounding. His lips parted and his hand at my hip tightened, fingers digging into fabric. He groaned quietly, and the sound lived in my chest. I felt him hard against my belly and the ache low in me answered, but I kept the kiss gentle, coaxing him through.

He lifted his head abruptly, eyes unfocused. “Under,” he whispered, voice thin with wonder. “I am under the city. The floor is water but I can walk on it. No, there are stones beneath, black and wet. The arches—” He broke off with a short, shocked laugh. “They go on forever. Columns like trees, but carved. I can see the planes of the stone, how the weight sits.” His gaze tracked something only he could see, up and up. “There is light from holes in the ceiling. It falls like shafts, and in the dust I see letters. They’re moving.”

He swayed. I put both hands on him, one palm to the back of his neck, the other pressed low on his abdomen where his body was taut. He groaned at the contact and bowed his head, resting his forehead against my shoulder. His breath warmed my collarbone. “They’re speaking,” he said, the words muffled. “Whispers—the old prayers—no. Not prayers. Verses. I know some of them. Sappho. A psalm but not the way we sing it. There’s a child’s rhyme. I can hear them all at once, like a river. They’re not fighting. They’re… weaving.”

He shuddered. I felt it roll through him into me, and heat shot through my belly. I smoothed my hand up his spine beneath his robe, finding skin, the fine hair there soft and damp with sweat. He hissed quietly, more aroused than he meant to be, and I tilted my head, letting my lips brush his ear. “Breathe,” I murmured. “Let it pass through you. If you grasp, it will run.”

He did as I asked, drawing a long, slow breath, then another. His hips pressed into mine before he caught himself. He made a helpless sound that wasn’t quite a word, and I kissed his jaw, felt him swallow.

“The ground is singing,” he said, voice steadier now. “It’s in the stone. I can feel the words under my feet, moving up into my bones.” He lifted his hand and looked at it, flexing his fingers. “My hands. They’re a part of it. I want to reach into the air and touch the shapes of the words.” His eyes found mine again, and the raw openness there stole my breath. “How is this possible?”

“Because it always was,” I said, thumb stroking along his throat. His pulse beat hard against my skin. “You are only noticing.”

He drew a shaking breath and his gaze dropped to my mouth. The sight of it—my lips damp, parted—seemed to pull him back into the room for a heartbeat. He leaned in and kissed me again, deep, not controlled this time. I answered, and his tongue slid against mine, hungry in a way that had nothing to do with the paste. His hands spanned my waist and then lifted, thumbs brushing the underswell of my breasts through linen. My nipples tightened at once, a rush of heat pulsing low. I gasped softly and arched into him, and he groaned, rolling his hips without thinking.

“Isabell,” he said, breaking away, almost pained. He rested his forehead to mine, breathing hard. “The arches—they—” He closed his eyes. “They’re opening. There’s a stair. Down.”

His fingers dug into me; his body was strung tight as a bowstring. I held his face in both hands and kissed his eyelids, his cheeks, the bridge of his nose, small touches to steady him. “Go,” I said. “Go and see. I am here.”

He let out a shaky laugh and nodded. His eyes unfocused again, and he spoke haltingly, as if describing what he saw held it in place. “I’m at the top. The steps are worn. People have walked them for a thousand years. The air is cool and smells like damp earth and ink.” He shivered. “There are shelves cut into the walls. Scrolls. Leaves pressed between stones. A woman passing with a basket of… rosemary, I think. She looks at me and smiles—” His mouth softened. “—and she is you, but she is not.”

A pulse rolled through me at his words, some old recognition thrumming. He turned his wrist toward his face again, breathing in the paste, and a fresh wave passed through him. His pupils swallowed the brown. He whispered, “There is a pool. Light falls into it like a coin. Men and women in white are writing at a long table. They look up as if they can hear me. The ceiling—Isabell, it’s so high. It looks like a sky made of stone.”

He reached blindly, and I laced our fingers, squeezing. He squeezed back so hard it almost hurt, needing the anchor. His body rocked once against mine with the force of what moved through him. “I can hear them,” he said, voice breaking on the edge of laughter and tears. “A thousand poems, and they know my name.”

I felt a hot sting behind my own eyes. I pressed my mouth to the corner of his, a wet, tender kiss. “Let it mark you,” I whispered. “Let it show you what was always yours.”

He drew a breath that sounded like surrender. His shoulders eased, his grip softened. He stood very still, his chest moving under my palm, and I stayed wrapped around him, my body a ballast against the pull below. His arousal remained a hard, insistent line against me, his heat making my thighs ache, but I held the moment intact, the echoes filling the small room until even my own breath seemed a part of the whispering. He swallowed, and when he spoke next, his voice was quiet, reverent, and a little afraid.

“I can’t go back,” he said, as if to himself, not yet understanding all he meant. His eyes finally focused on me again, and I saw it there—the mark of the vision, the door now open. He lifted our joined hands and kissed my knuckles, gratitude and hunger and wonder mixed in that single touch. “I see it,” he whispered. “Underneath. Waiting.”

He left like a man walking through water. His hand slipped from mine and he backed toward the door, his eyes still holding that wide, awed darkness. When the street air hit him—damp, cold—it broke across his face and he flinched as if from light. I followed him to the threshold, but he shook his head once, a small refusal, and turned away.

He moved down the alley unsteadily, one shoulder grazing the rough brick. A cat hissed and became something else in his gaze, a flicker of pale script darting between barrels. His fingers dragged along the wall and caught on old mortar; he stared at the powder on his fingertips and trembled, whispering something too low for me to hear.

I stood and watched him until the fog took him. My pulse was still thudding in the places he had touched—my wrist, my waist, the soft space under my ribs where he’d leaned his weight and his heat. I pressed my palm there to hold the ache down and closed the door.

He crossed the square with its wet stones, the faces of the poor lifting at the sight of his robe. He nodded in habit, but their features wavered and became carved masks from another century. He blinked and they were only tired men and women again. The bell in his church tower tolled, and each strike sent a ring through the air he could see, fine circles widening and intersecting, a geometry of sound that made his breath catch.

Inside the nave, the familiar chill gathered at once, that thin, clean cold that had always steadied him. Today it felt like a narrow cell. He shut the heavy door and leaned against it, eyes closed. When he opened them, the stone ribs overhead were wrong. Too simple. His vision filled in more. He saw, for a sliding second, the vault of the place under the city laid ghost-like over this one—arches reaching with grace the church did not possess, light falling in living shafts instead of the dim, sooted glow from his candles. He laughed once, a broken sound, and then covered his mouth as if it were a sin.

He walked to the altar, his steps echoing too loud. The crucifix loomed; the carved Christ’s eyes, which had always seemed to watch him with sorrow and stern love, were nothing but wood tonight. Beyond it, he sensed a door that wasn’t there. It itched at the back of his mind like a remembered word, the shape of a passage that led down, down to the pool he had seen. He braced his hands on the altar rail and bowed his head, and in that posture his body remembered other things—her lips soft against his, her tongue sliding against his, the weight of her breast under his thumbs, how his cock had pressed aching and hard into her hip in a desperate reflex he hadn’t meant to allow.

His breath hitched. He shut his eyes against both visions, and both were there anyway. The whispered poems brushed his ears. They braided with his own half-prayer until he could not tell which words were psalm and which were her verses.

“Lord,” he said, because he knew nothing else to say. The word felt small. It fell and did not echo the way the other words did, the ones he had heard under the earth. He stared at the place where the sanctuary lamp should have been a comfort and saw only a stubborn little flame doing its best against a mass of dark. The paste’s scent had become a memory on his skin, and he lifted his sleeve to breathe it in. A low sound slipped from him, need disguised as grief.

He went to his room because there was nowhere else to go without being seen. The closet space with its hard bed and wooden cross felt like an unkind joke. He sat and then slid down the wall to the cold floor, his robes tangling around his knees. He pressed his palms to his eyes until color flashed. The cathedral under the city bloomed again, insistent: the pools of light, the shelves, the tables, the man with ink on his wrist lifting his head as if to greet Thomas by name. He heard Isabell’s voice telling him to breathe, and his chest loosened at once. He wanted her there with a need that made his abdomen tighten. He wanted her mouth. He wanted her hand at his neck. He wanted the paste again and the way it had opened the world.

He ground the heels of his hands into his eyes harder and then dropped them, puffing out a laugh that was too near a sob. He was a priest. The word felt thinner every time he thought it. He looked at the cross on the wall and then past it, beyond it, to the idea of a God who might not be affronted by stone singing or a woman’s body, who might even have carved the world with both in mind. His pulse beat thick in his throat. He tipped his head back against the cold plaster and stared up at the low ceiling until his eyes stung.

Somewhere outside, a drunk shouted. Under it, softer but continuous, the hidden river in his ear. He could not stop hearing it. He could not unsee the stairs worn by centuries of feet. He pressed his hand to his chest as if he could push the noise back or hold it in place. There was no difference now between the ache he felt for her and the ache he felt for that place. Both were the same pull in his bones.

When he finally stood, his legs trembled. He stripped the robe off as if it were heavy and set it over the chair with his usual care, but his fingers shook. He poured water from the earthen pitcher and splashed his face. The water was cold and common and did not help. He dried himself and then traced the inside of his wrist where his tongue had been, memory sparking through him so sharp he had to bite down on a sound.

He lay on the bed and stared at the dark rafters. He thought of her mouth again and had to turn on his side, his palm pressed to the front of his trousers, not moving, just holding the ache as if it were a fever that might break if he bore it. His breath slowed by will, not because calm had come. He stared into the dark until it broke into a deeper one and saw the arches again, endless. He knew, with the quiet certainty of a wound, that the church above had become a narrow place that would not hold him anymore. And in that knowledge was fear, and in that fear, the smallest thread of relief. He closed his eyes on a whisper he did not mean to think—Isabell—and let the under-song carry him until sleep took him in jittering snatches, each one full of stone and light and the sound of her saying his name.