CHAPTER 23 - 23: MERCY IN FLESH

The morning came with the scent of olive oil and woodsmoke drifting through the narrow arrow-slit window of Ethan's chambers. A sparrow sang beyond the courtyard, its note persistent and delicate, like a needle threading silence.

Gerard entered quietly, as he did every day. The physician's movements were slower now—more deliberate—not out of fatigue, but reverence. Something had changed between them, not in words, but in posture, in the way Gerard washed his hands before touching Ethan's arm.

Ethan sat upright, already unwrapping the linen from his forearm when Gerard knelt beside him. The cloth fell away with a faint sigh of dampness, revealing skin that only weeks ago had been pale, pocked, and senseless.

Now, under the balm and mold, it was changing.

The lesions no longer wept. The outer layer had turned dry, cracked, but beneath that—new skin. Thin, pinkish, but whole. The smell of rot was gone. The swelling in his wrist had reduced. He could feel the pressure of Gerard's thumb now, faint but present.

Gerard exhaled audibly, his expression unreadable. Then he crossed himself.

"You see it too," Ethan said, voice low.

Gerard didn't look up. "It is not a matter of what I see. It is a matter of what I know." His hand trembled slightly as he dipped a linen square in cool water. "You were not meant to recover. Not from this. No man is."

"And yet I am."

The physician finally looked him in the eye. "My lord... this is not a medicine I understand. Mold does not heal. It spoils. It consumes."

"Unless it's used right," Ethan murmured, thinking of what he had once known—penicillin, spores, fermentation—but the words sounded hollow here. Medieval.

Gerard pressed the linen gently to the healing flesh. "No. This is not the craft of man. This is mercy. Undeserved, uncommanded mercy."

He sat back on his heels. "I have never seen a leper reverse his decay. I have studied wounds from Antioch to Acre. I watched monks rot while they still preached. But you—your hand tightens when it used to curl. Your fingers... move again."

Ethan flexed them. Slow. Stiff. But they moved.

"The lesions have not spread in five days," Gerard continued, as if counting prayers. "The skin warms. Your breath is no longer labored."

"I still have it," Ethan said flatly. "You know that."

"Yes. But I believe you have been spared from its sentence."

Gerard looked toward the crucifix hanging near the window. "God has not lifted your burden entirely, but He has lightened it. This is no simple healing. This is favor."

Ethan rose slowly. His joints ached less than they had. The fever that clung to him for so many weeks had ebbed, retreating like a tide.

He walked, barefoot, across the cool stone. "You believe this is divine?"

"I do."

"Why me?"

Gerard didn't answer immediately. "Perhaps because you do not ask for it."

That gave Ethan pause.

He turned toward the light. The morning sun caught the edge of his silver mask, casting a soft gleam across the room.

He had felt alone for months—caught between centuries, between memories, between bodies. But now something stirred. Not certainty. But change. Measured. Steady. A silence lifting.

He sat again and let Gerard redress the arm.

"I want you to begin treating others," Ethan said.

Gerard looked up sharply. "You are the king."

"I'm also not the only one suffering. Start with those in the leper's quarter outside the eastern gate. Use the same preparation. Clean linens. Molded rags. Rotate them daily."

Gerard hesitated. "They are already... beyond what you were."

"Try anyway."

"They will say it is heresy."

"Let them," Ethan murmured. "If God works through mold, then mold we will use."

Gerard bowed his head. "So be it."

That night, alone, Ethan unwrapped the bandages himself.

The firelight flickered off the mirror's bronze back, and when he lifted his arm to see, he did not flinch.

The skin was real. Raw in places, yes—but healing. No more the numb, ashen death he had come to expect. No more the dry decay that crept day by day toward his face. The itch of renewal was worse than the pain, and Ethan found he welcomed it.

He pressed his thumb to his forefinger and felt—faintly—the contact.

He exhaled and set the bandages aside.

He was not well. But he was not dying. Not yet.

He did not know whether to thank medicine, chance, or God.

But as he stared into the fire, Ethan found himself whispering a prayer—one he didn't remember learning, one not in Latin or English but in the silent language of anyone who has lived with dying.

He asked not for healing.

He asked for time.