Faust did not sleep that night.
He sat beside Isbert's bed, listening to the fluttering heart, and went through every cure he knew.
He had cured the plague twice, or at least delayed it long enough.
He had stitched the severed arteries of soldiers in Italian fields, set bones that would have crippled men for life, lanced the poisons of a hundred snakebites.
He had pulled Rita Frost back from the hollow edge of death with a combination of Temperance and nerve, and he had been proud of it, in the shabby, secret way a man is proud of the only thing he has ever been good at.
None of it helped.
He put his palm over Isbert's chest and felt the muscle that was honestly tired.
A heart is a pump.
It had pumped for a hundred and twelve years.
The valves had thickened, the walls grown thin, and no tincture existed that could hand an old man back his twenty-fifth birthday.
He drew the deck at some dark hour past midnight, almost against his will, and the Empress came up warm in his fingers on the first try.
The green excess.
Growth, abundance, the body's stubborn urge to thrive.
He could force a flower to bloom in a breath.
Perhaps he could force a tired muscle to knit itself younger by a week.
'And leave an old man's heart too large for his chest,' said a voice that sounded very much like his own conscience, 'the way the card always leaves everything too large.'
"Don't."
He nearly dropped the card. Isbert's eyes were open in the lamplight, grey and sharp and entirely awake.
"I wasn't—"
"You were." The old man's mouth moved in something that was not quite a smile. I don't know what you were about to do. But put it away, Faust."
"I could buy you a month."
Isbert's hand found his wrist, light as a leaf.
"I have had a hundred and twelve years. I have buried a wife and two sons and every friend I ever loved. I have held back a blizzard with my own two hands. I have been a Patriarch and a drunk and a grandfather. I am a landlord whose lease is up, Doctor. Do not insult me by pretending the building is not coming down."
Faust opened his mouth, closed it, and found his eyes were stinging.
"You are the best physician I ever met," Isbert said gently. "That is why I am letting you be the one to sit here and fail. Anyone else would have lied."
"I would give a great deal to be a worse doctor."
"Yes. I know." The grip tightened, once. "That is the whole of it, my friend. That is what it costs to be good at this."
Faust slid the Empress back into the case.
He laid his hand over Isbert's, and they sat that way until the window greyed, saying nothing at all, two old men who had been friends so long they no longer needed words.
***
"I must apologise for my timing," Reinhardt Frost said, pouring Faust a glass of the Patriarch's good Rhine wine, which he seemed already to think of as his own. "It is dreadful, to arrive while a man is dying. But one so hates to be absent at such times."
"It is an honour to have you," Faust said.
They stood in the library, a high dark room lined with leather spines and the faint smell of dust and old frost.
Reinhardt wore blue velvet and a signet ring and a rapier at his hip, slim as a needle and sheathed in black enamel.
He was perfectly relaxed.
He moved through the room like a man who had already measured every shelf for removal.
"And you must be the famous Doctor," he said, smiling. "My great-uncle writes of you with such warmth. One hears you have been a friend of the family for a very long time."
"I am older than I look."
"Ah." The smile deepened. "Everyone is, in this house."
It was a good line.
Faust gave it its due with a small bow.
Under his bandage, under the shadow of the cloth, his gold eye was drinking Reinhardt in.
A habit he could no longer break.
It did not give him thoughts, exactly.
It gave him impressions, flat and true, like a smell: the quick, even pulse of a man who has never been afraid of anyone in a room.
The warmth in the voice that cooled a degree when Reinhardt thought he was not watched.
And the rapier.
Faust let his gaze rest on it, apparently idly, a physician admiring a fine blade.
The sword was quiet. That was the wrongness. Every Arma he had met had a presence, a hum or a hunger or a faint sullen intelligence. Isbert's Frost howled at him like a dog.
This sword was dead as a doorknob, and yet there was a sensation under the quiet, the way a still pond is not still if you put your ear to the ice.
'Something is inside it,' he thought. 'Something that does not like to be there.'
"You admire the blade," Reinhardt said. He had not missed the glance. "A gift. A small thing, from a dealer I trust."
"A collector's piece?"
"A useful piece." Reinhardt drew the rapier a hand's breadth, and let it slide home again with a click. "I am afraid I am not a fighter by blood, Doctor. The Frost gift of Aura and swordsmanship passed me by, a little. One must be resourceful."
"Resourcefulness is a virtue," Faust agreed, and lifted his glass. "Your health, cousin."
"And yours." Reinhardt's smile did not move. "I shall see you at the funeral."
He left with a whisper of velvet.
Faust set down the wine, untouched, and sat for a time in the empty library, watching the door through which the man had gone.
'Not a fighter by blood.' He turned the phrase over. 'But he came armed to a house full of the finest swordsmen in Bavaria, and he is not afraid.'
That, more than anything, worried him.