Matthias

The night was damp. The moon was lost in ragged clouds when Matthias climbed over the cemetery fence, shovel in hand. The girl was waiting by the abandoned gatehouse. She clutched cloth-wrapped tools in her hands: a scalpel, tweezers, a saw—everything she had managed to steal.

"Are you sure they won't look for him?" she whispered as Matthias dragged a fresh corpse toward her.

"He has no relatives," Matthias said, already throwing away the wet earth. "In three days, the priest will bury him in a common grave for the poor. No one will notice the difference."

The girl watched as fingers emerged from the darkness, then a hand, then a forearm. The dead man seemed merely asleep. She felt sick. This wasn't the first corpse, but each time her insides twisted.

A woman doctor? That's witchcraft. Matthias was the only one who didn't laugh. A blacksmith, his hands burnt from the coals, he carried the dead for her every night so that one day she could help the living.

"Go ahead." He lit the lantern. "His heart was sick. See if you can find it."

The girl picked up the scalpel. Her fingers trembled, but she made the first cut. The skin parted more softly than she expected. Just like in those drawings from the forbidden book Matthias stole from the monk.

The silence was broken by an owl's cry. The girl froze, then exhaled and continued.

"If they catch me, they'll burn me in the square," she said, without looking up from her work.

• I know.

• You will be hanged.

• I know.

• And you still do it... Why?

Matthias chuckled and pointed to her blood-stained hands, which were no longer shaking.

"Because in ten years, this city will have a doctor who knows the body better than any man. And I don't want my children to die because some fool in a cloak couldn't tell the difference between a spleen and a liver."