“I cannot feel it,” he said, wonderingly. “Truly, that is magic.”
“It is medicine.” She tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear. Once, they were the same. No longer.
“The ordinary folk of Castellane may not come up on the Hill,” said Kel, “but the nobles here would be lost without the city. Not only does it provide them their fortunes, it is their playground. They would die of boredom if confined to the Hill.”
“You speak as if you were not one of them,” Lin said. Taking some herbs from the bag, she sprinkled them on the puncture wound before making another stitch.
“Perhaps I would rather I weren’t.” Kel glanced down and took on a slightly greenish tinge. “I see you are seasoning me like a chicken.”
“The herbs will keep infection away. And don’t look.”
He yawned. Morphea and blood loss were making him tired, she thought. She concentrated on what she was doing. After a few moments, he spoke again. “When I was younger, I thought the Ashkar must be very dangerous, to be kept within walls.”
“When I was young,” Lin said, reaching for bandages, “I thought the malbushim must be very dangerous, for us to have to keep them out with walls.”
“Ah,” he said, and yawned again. “Perspective is everything, isn’t it?”
Having put away her things, Lin took several hammered-silver talismans from her satchel and slid them between the layers of his bandages. “These will help you heal, and sleep,” she said. “What you need is rest, to let your body knit itself together. I will be back in three days to see how you are getting on.”
“Wait,” he said, as she turned to go. His voice slurred with weariness. “Your name, physician?”
“Lin,” she said, as his eyes fluttered shut. “Lin Caster.”
He did not respond; he was breathing deep and steady. As she was about to leave, she saw something glitter among the tangle of his sheets. The talisman he had held so briefly earlier. She plucked it free and was just setting it on the nightstand when something unusual about it caught her eye.
She stood for what felt like a long time, looking at it, before placing it carefully in Kel’s palm. Mayesh, she thought. Mayesh, what have you done?
Lin had expected to find her grandfather waiting for her outside the door. He was not there, and neither, to her surprise, were the Castelguards. The corridor was empty save for Prince Conor, sitting in the embrasure of an arched window, gazing stonily out at the city of Castellane. It was little more at this hour than a collection of flickering lights in the distance.
Damn Mayesh for having wandered off. There was nothing Lin wanted less than to be alone with the Prince. But there was no help for it. She approached him, painfully aware of the blood on her tunic, and said, “It is done, Monseigneur.”
The Prince looked at her in a sort of daze, as if she were someone long forgotten who had turned up unexpectedly in a dream. Tiredness had scrubbed away the harsh lines of his face; he looked gentle, which Lin knew he was not. “What?”
“I said,” Lin repeated, “that it is done—”
He sprang down from the window, swift and graceful; Lin took an involuntary step back. “What does that mean? Is he alive?”
“Of course he’s alive,” she snapped. “Do you think, if he had died, this is how I would choose to relay that information? Kel needs to rest, and eventually to have his bandages changed. But rest first, and dry bedding and clothes. He will get no good sleep lying in his own blood.”
He looked at her, his black hair ruffled like the fur of an angry cat.
Name of the Goddess, Lin thought. She had snapped at the Crown Prince. Again.
Then he smiled. It was not a cold smile, or a superior one, though it was touched with self-mockery. The relief in his eyes was real. It made him seem human. In the small hours of the night, between the watches of sickness, between fever and recovery, perhaps everyone was a little bit the same. “Such an intemperate doctor,” he said, with a touch of amusement. “Am I to understand you are giving me orders again?”
“Well,” she said, “I did not think you would change the bedding yourself. I just thought that . . . you would want to know what needed to be done.”
He only grinned. “Indeed. It seems your grandfather was right. You are the best in the Sault—perhaps the best in Castellane.”
The grin was disarming. It flashed white teeth and lit his gray eyes to silver. For the first time tonight, Lin could see the Prince of Hearts in him, the one the city sighed over. Something about it irked her, like being stuck with a pin. Perhaps it was that to be the King’s son was one kind of power, to be beautiful was another, and to be both was entirely too much power for any one person.
Besides, Conor Aurelian held himself as someone who knew he was beautiful. Even his disarray did not mar his looks. His rich clothes might be crumpled, his sleeves of ivory silk spotted with blood, but his beauty was not the sort that required orderliness. In fact, it benefited from some dishevelment, being the kind that came from strong contrast: black and silver, fine features and untidy dark hair.
“Where is my grandfather?” she inquired, suddenly wanting very much to be away. “I ought to go; he might be waiting for me.”
Prince Conor said, “Before you do. Bensimon said you wouldn’t require payment, but I’d like you to have this.” He slid a ring from his right hand and held it out to her, with the gesture of one bestowing an expensive toy upon a child.
The ring was a plain gold band, set with a flat sapphire. Incised into the sapphire was the rayed sun of House Aurelian. A signet ring.
For a moment, Lin was ten years old again, flinging the gold necklace Mayesh had brought her, with its Aurelian stamp, at his feet. She heard Josit, protesting—just take it—and saw the stony look on her grandfather’s face as she turned away.
She did not reach out for the ring. “No, thank you. I don’t want it.”
He looked taken aback. “You don’t want it?”
The quick flash of memory was gone, but the anger remained. Anger at Mayesh, she knew, but here, made flesh, was the very reason Mayesh had abandoned her, arrogantly offering her what would be a year’s salary for herself, but was plainly nothing to him. “What am I meant to do with it?” she asked, her voice brittle as glass. “Sell it at a pawnshop on Yulan Road? I’d be arrested. Wear it? I’d be robbed by Crawlers, like your cousin. It has no value to me.”
“It is a beautiful thing,” he said. “That has its own worth.”
“For those wealthy enough to sit about contemplating an item they can neither eat nor sell,” Lin said acidly. “Or do you think I wish to keep it in a box and pine over the time I met the Prince of Castellane and he deigned to tell me I was a halfway-decent physician?”
The moment the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. His face had gone taut. She was aware suddenly of how much bigger he was than she—not just taller, but broader in the shoulders and larger overall.
He moved toward her. She could feel the force that radiated off him, even as disheveled as he was. A disheveled prince was still a prince, she supposed, with all the careless power that blood and privilege had conferred on him. It was a quality all the stronger for the fact that he had never had to consider that he possessed it, never wonder if there might be some reason for him to hold back.