Peadar suppressed a wet, hacking cough into his handkerchief. He looked down at the greenish phlegm tinged with yellow chunks and wrinkled his brow. At least there was no longer any blood in it, he thought with an acute awareness of how sadly thoughts like that passed as optimism these days.  Peadar tossed the rag off to the side of his work table and stood up from the desk on shaky legs. 

He had never had what could be considered a strong constitution, but here in Uponhill he was constantly on death’s door. Fever and chills one week, bowel emptying shits the next, then consumption a week after that. It was a bit of a running joke in the community that while Peadar Browning was a fair doctor, he was a piss poor patient.

“Physician, heal thyself,” he mumbled under his breath while he shuffled through the cabin. 

Medicine was never his calling. His father was a doctor and pushed him into the field. Peadar, never one to make a fuss, followed his father’s wishes and passed his studies with ease. In the realm of academia everything came easy to him, especially words. The sculpting of words was his true trade, something nobody here on Uponhill knew. Plenty of them had read the [i]Bowrocke[/i]r, he had once spotted some of the boys sneaking off into the woods with[i] Tales of a Country Wench[/i], and old man Miller had a copy of [i]A Kinsman’s Journey[/i] in the small library he had managed to cultivate in his time here. Yes there were many E.G. Rathais fans in the colony, but they had no idea the author and the sickly doctor were one and the same. The same thing went for Publius, the dashing radical of the all too brief civil war. 

That name, Publius, was forbidden from being mentioned or written in TIrna-Sorset and the lands under its domain. Peadar stared into the cracked and stained mirror above his dresser while thoughts turned to the night before his exile. Aenda, with all his noble and benevolent grace, had decided not to execute the good doctor after letting him languish in a dungeon for six months. Instead, guards forced him to the keep’s courtyard and placed him on a wooden stool. They held him in place, forced his eyes open when it became unbearable to watch and he had to close them, and made him watch as they took every single political pamphlet he had written as Publius, and it looked to be all of them from his vantage and burned them all in a great heap while they danced around the fire like he had seen the savages here do. They hadn’t killed him but they had killed his ideas. He was so close to the fire, the heat had dried his eyes out and made him unable to form tears even as he wept harder than he had his entire life.

“Doctor Browning.”

A voice at his door, followed by the pounding of fists on wood snapped him out of his daze. He opened the door and found young Blaine, the son of a smith. Even though he was a boy of twelve, he was already a hand taller than Peadar and a good two stones heavier.

“It’s my papa. There’s been an accident, he’s hurt.”

All thoughts of self-pity and sadness disappeared. While Peadar did not consider himself a doctor first, but he had taken an oath to heal those in need. Regardless of his lot in life, he had a duty. 

“Take me to him, son.”