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Chapter 1
Chapter 1: The Uninvited Healer
The Los Angeles Convention Center smelled like a turf war between lavender and eucalyptus, with faint undertones of money.
Candace Liu stood at the edge of the Root & Branch booth—Booth 417, sandwiched between a company selling mushroom-infused coffee and another hawking vibrating jade rollers—and tried to project an aura of success. This was difficult, given that her booth consisted of a folding table, a drooping banner, and a single iPad displaying a website that hadn't been updated in four months.
The Radiant Living Expo was the Super Bowl of wellness culture, three days of panels, product launches, and influencers photographing themselves drinking green things. Every major brand in the industry had a presence. Goop had an entire wing. A supplement company called TerraVital had built what appeared to be a functioning waterfall. Root & Branch had a folding table.
"We're doing great," Candace muttered to herself, straightening a stack of business cards that no one had touched. "We're projecting confidence. We're manifesting abundance."
Her phone buzzed. A text from her business partner, Jolene Pak, who was supposed to be here but was instead at an emergency dentist appointment in Culver City.
*How's the expo?*
Candace looked at the empty space in front of her booth. A woman in athleisure walked past without making eye contact. A man carrying a smoothie the color of a traffic cone glanced at the Root & Branch banner, squinted, and kept walking.
*Incredible,* Candace typed back. *Standing room only. Turning people away.*
*Seriously.*
*Nobody has stopped. Not one person. The mushroom coffee people next to us are doing a roaring trade. I think I'm going to cry into their product.*
*Don't cry into their product. That's a lawsuit.*
Candace pocketed her phone and surveyed the expo floor. Root & Branch had been her dream—a wellness company focused on herbal remedies and holistic nutrition, the kind of thing she'd been passionate about since college. She'd poured her savings into it, maxed out two credit cards, and convinced Jolene to leave a perfectly good marketing job to join her. For two years, they'd been building the brand, developing products, cultivating a social media presence.
The problem was that the wellness industry moved faster than a Malibu wildfire, and Root & Branch had been outpaced by companies with better funding, better influencer connections, and better booth locations. Their signature product—an herbal tea blend called Restore—had decent reviews but negligible sales. Their investor meetings had dried up. Their runway, as Jolene liked to say with the cheerful fatalism of someone who'd worked in finance before marketing, was approximately the length of a driveway.
Candace had exactly one shot left: this expo. If she could generate enough buzz, attract a distributor, maybe catch the eye of a retail buyer, she could keep Root & Branch alive. If not, she'd be updating her LinkedIn profile by Monday.
She smoothed her blazer, adjusted her name badge, and smiled at a passing attendee who was already looking at something else.
It was 11:47 a.m. on a Saturday in March, and the day was about to get significantly stranger.
---
The commotion started near the main entrance.
Candace heard it before she saw it—a rising murmur, the kind of collective human sound that could mean anything from a celebrity sighting to a fire alarm. She craned her neck but couldn't see past the crowd. The mushroom coffee vendor, a bearded man named Doug who had been irritatingly friendly all morning, stood on his tiptoes.
"Something's happening up front," Doug reported. "Somebody in a costume, I think."
Candace wasn't particularly curious. The expo was full of costumes, broadly defined. She'd already seen a woman dressed as a human chakra chart and a man in a unitard covered in printed affirmations. But the murmur was growing, and people were moving—flowing toward the entrance like iron filings toward a magnet.
Then she saw him.
He came through the crowd like a dark ship through fog. He was tall—well over six feet—and thin in a way that suggested either extreme discipline or extreme deprivation. He wore a long coat of dark, waxed leather that fell to his shins, buttoned up to a high collar. Beneath it, she could see the edges of a dark tunic. His hands were gloved in black leather. On his feet were boots that looked like they'd been resoled by someone who'd never heard of a cobbler.
But the mask was the thing.
It was the full plague doctor ensemble—a long, curved beak protruding from a leather face covering, with round glass eyepieces that caught the expo's overhead lighting and glinted like the eyes of an enormous, scholarly bird. The beak was at least ten inches long, tapering to a blunt point. The mask covered his entire face and was secured with leather straps that disappeared into a wide-brimmed hat.
He walked with the measured, deliberate pace of someone who was used to people getting out of his way. And people were getting out of his way—not because he was threatening, exactly, but because there was something about his bearing that commanded a certain radius of personal space. He moved through the expo floor like a medieval apparition, his coat swishing against his boots, his beaked face turning slowly left and right as if surveying a landscape of the damned.
"That," said Doug, "is commitment to a bit."
Candace watched, transfixed. The man had stopped near a booth selling collagen peptides. He was examining their display with what appeared to be genuine scientific interest, tilting his beaked head at various angles. The booth attendant, a young woman in a branded polo shirt, looked like she was trying to decide between laughing and calling security.
Security, it turned out, had already been called.
Two expo guards materialized from the crowd—large men in black polo shirts with earpieces, the universal uniform of people authorized to ask you to leave. They approached the plague doctor from either side with the practiced caution of men who'd dealt with their share of expo weirdos.
"Sir," the larger guard said. "Sir, can I see your exhibitor badge?"
The plague doctor turned to face him. The beak swung like a weathervane. Through the round glass eyepieces, Candace could see actual eyes—dark, alert, and profoundly confused.
"I beg your pardon?" The voice that emerged from behind the mask was muffled but distinct, with an accent that Candace couldn't quite place. British, maybe, but older somehow. Thicker. Like British English that had been aged in a barrel.
"Your badge, sir. You need credentials to be on the expo floor."
"I have no knowledge of what you speak. I am a physician. I have come to—" He paused, looking around at the convention center with an expression that, even through the mask, radiated bewilderment. "Where am I?"
"You're at the Radiant Living Expo, sir. Los Angeles Convention Center."
The plague doctor was silent for a moment. Then, very quietly: "Los Angeles."
"That's right. And if you don't have credentials—"
"I do not know this place. I was in Avignon. The pestilence—" He stopped. Through the eyepieces, his gaze swept across the expo floor—the LED screens, the smoothie bars, the crowds of people in activewear. "This is not Avignon."
"No, sir, it's not. I'm going to need you to come with us."
The second guard reached for the plague doctor's arm. The plague doctor flinched backward with surprising agility, his coat flaring.
"Do not touch me! I am treating the afflicted! The miasma—"
"Sir, we don't want any trouble—"
What happened next, Candace would later describe as either the worst or the best decision of her life, depending on the day you asked her.
She stepped forward.
"Wait!" She pushed between the guards, her expo badge swinging. "Wait, wait, wait. He's with me."
Both guards looked at her. The plague doctor looked at her. Doug, who had abandoned his mushroom coffee booth to watch, looked at her.
"He's with you," the larger guard repeated flatly.
"Yes. He's a—" Candace's brain, operating at the speed of desperation, assembled an explanation. "He's a performer. A brand activation. For my company, Root & Branch. Booth 417. I hired him weeks ago. I just—I lost track of the schedule. You know how expos are."
The guard looked at the plague doctor. The plague doctor looked at Candace. There was a moment of three-way uncertainty.
"He doesn't have a badge," the guard said.
"I have a guest pass. In my booth. I'll get him badged right now. I'm so sorry for the confusion." Candace produced her most professional smile—the one she used in investor meetings, the one that said *I am a competent businesswoman and not someone who is making this up as she goes along.*
The guards exchanged a look. The larger one sighed.
"Get him badged in the next fifteen minutes or he's out."
"Absolutely. Thank you. You're doing amazing work. The expo feels very safe."
The guards retreated. Candace turned to the plague doctor, who was standing very still, his beaked mask pointed directly at her face.
"Okay," she said. "Who the hell are you?"
---
His name, he told her, was Bertram Fawley.
They were in the back corner of Candace's booth, behind the drooping banner, and Bertram had removed his mask. The face beneath was gaunt and pale, with deep-set brown eyes, a sharp nose, and the kind of bone structure that suggested a lifetime of not quite enough food. He looked to be in his late thirties, though it was hard to tell—he had the weathered quality of someone who'd spent a lot of time outdoors in bad conditions. His dark hair was lank and unwashed, and he had a patchy beard that looked more accidental than intentional.
He held the mask in his lap like a sleeping pet and stared at Candace with an expression of profound disorientation.
"Bertram Fawley," Candace repeated. "And you're a plague doctor."
"I am a physician, yes. Trained at Montpellier, though I confess my studies were—" He paused, searching for a word. "Abbreviated. The pestilence came, and there was need."
"The pestilence."
"The Great Mortality. The plague. It swept through Avignon like—" He stopped again. His eyes had drifted to the expo floor behind Candace, where a woman was demonstrating a facial massage device that looked like a small electric eel. "What is that."
"That's a gua sha vibrator. Focus. You said you were in Avignon."
"I was. The year of our Lord thirteen hundred and forty-eight. The Pope himself had fled. The dead were piled in the streets. I was treating the afflicted in the Rue de la Bonneterie when—" He broke off, his face crumpling with confusion. "There was a light. A sensation of falling. And then I was here, in this—" He gestured helplessly at the convention center. "Palace of wonders."
"Thirteen forty-eight," Candace said. "As in, the year."
"Yes."
"You're telling me you're from the fourteenth century."
"I am telling you the truth."
Candace studied him. She was a practical woman. She had a business degree from UCLA and a deep-seated suspicion of anything that couldn't be explained by a spreadsheet. Time travel was not a line item she'd ever budgeted for.
But there was something about Bertram Fawley that resisted easy categorization. His costume, for one thing, wasn't a costume. The leather was cracked and stained in ways that suggested actual use. The mask smelled—powerfully—of dried herbs and something sharper, like vinegar. His boots were held together with what appeared to be handmade stitching. And his accent, that thick, rolling English, didn't sound like any dialect she'd heard, not even from the most committed Renaissance Faire performers.
Plus, there was the smell. Bertram Fawley smelled like a man who had never encountered modern plumbing, which was to say, he smelled terrible.
"Okay," Candace said slowly. "Let's say I believe you. Let's say you're a time-traveling plague doctor from medieval France. What do you want?"
Bertram blinked. "I want to understand where I am. I want to know if the pestilence has reached this place. And I want—" His stomach growled, audibly and at length. "I want food. I have not eaten since yesterday, and yesterday's meal was a heel of bread and a turnip of questionable provenance."
Candace looked at him for a long moment. Then she reached under the table and pulled out her emergency granola bar—the one she'd been saving for the 3 p.m. energy crash.
"Here."
Bertram took the granola bar, examined it with suspicion, and bit into it through the wrapper.
"You have to—here, let me—" Candace took it back, peeled the wrapper, and returned it. Bertram bit into it again, and his eyes went wide.
"By all the saints," he whispered. "What manner of confection is this?"
"It's a granola bar. It's basically oats and honey."
"It is ambrosia." He devoured it in three bites and looked at her with the hopeful expression of a medieval Labrador retriever.
Candace sighed. She had no idea what was happening. She had no idea what to do with a fourteenth-century plague doctor. She had no idea how any of this was going to help her save Root & Branch.
But she also had nothing to lose.
"Okay, Bertram. Here's the deal. I don't know if you're a time traveler or an escapee from a very immersive theater production, but I told security you're with me, so for the next few hours, you're with me. Can you just—stand at my booth and look medieval?"
"I can do nothing else," Bertram said earnestly. "I am medieval."
"Great. Perfect. Let's go."
