“Imrāde,” Lin said. “I swear.”
“At the Malgasi Court, for many years, there was a tradition,” said Mayesh. “When the King had only one son as heir, a boy would be chosen from the city. A neglected child, with no parents, no family that might miss him or complain. They called the boy the Királar, the King’s Blade. Here,” he said, “we call him the Sword Catcher. Kel was brought to the Palace to serve the Prince when he was ten. And I will tell you what he does.”
Dawn had passed by the time Lin had returned, alone, to her little house. Sunlight streamed through the curtains. Everything was where she had left it the night before: papers, books, stone-cold mug of tea.
Utterly exhausted, she drew the curtains and began to undress for sleep. At least she did not have patients to see today; that was a small mercy. The watches of night had ended; the Shomrim would be returning home to sleep their odd daylight sleep. Strange dreams came to Lin when she had been up all night, dreams in which she wandered a world where it was always night, the darkness spangled with gleaming light that was not stars. She wondered if it was the same for the watchmen. Or for Mayesh, who also had not slept.
“Don’t you ever wonder?” she had asked her grandfather, after he had explained to her what a Sword Catcher was—and who Kel Saren was, truly. Not the Prince’s cousin at all, but his bodyguard, his double, his shield. Even the nobles did not know, he had said. Only House Aurelian. And now, her. “Who his parents are? Who gave birth to him, before he ended up at the Orfelinat?”
Mayesh had barked a laugh. “There is no need to make a mystery of it. There are hundreds of abandoned children in Castellane. One imagines he was unwanted for any of the ordinary reasons.”
Unwanted. She, too, had been unwanted, Lin thought, untying the cord at the waist of her trousers. But she had had the Sault, where children were treasure, even those who had no family. Every Ashkari life was valuable. Every Ashkar born repaired the breaking of the world and brought the Goddess closer to returning.
In Castellane, it was different. Unwanted children were vulnerable refuse, prey for the unscrupulous, invisible to the respectable. She thought of Kel Saren, the way his smile had reminded her of Josit. She wondered whether he minded being Sword Catcher, or perhaps, as soldiers did, he accepted the danger of his life with equanimity.
She would find out, she thought. He was her patient. Conor Aurelian could not keep her from discharging her duty to her patient, no matter what he said.
She kicked her trousers off and winced. That pain in her side she’d felt at the Palace—what was it? She pulled her tunic up and saw, there on her hip, a red mark like a burn. But what could have burned her? Had a wasp been caught in her tunic? She drew it off and shook it. No insect fell out. Instead, she heard a soft thunk.
Of course. Petrov’s stone. She reached into the tunic’s pocket to pull it out and realized three things immediately: One, there was a hole in the pocket where there had not been before. Two, that the hole was surrounded by scorched fabric, as if the hole were the result of a flame. And three, that the pocket, with the stone in it, had rested just over her left hip when she wore the tunic.
She gazed at the stone. It was unchanged: smooth, round, milky pale. Cool to the touch. Yet somehow, and for some reason, it had burned through the pocket of her tunic and scorched her skin, at the very moment that she was treating Kel Anjuman.
She heard again the whisper in the back of her mind, clearer now. Use me. She had thought she was simply remembering to use the salve, but now that she held the stone in her hand, the voice was louder, the memory sharper. And there was that burn, on her skin . . .
She felt as she had before she had ever read a single medical book, when she had desperately wanted to heal but lacked the tools or language. She brushed the stone with her fingertips, knowing she was groping in the dark. Answers existed, but where? Petrov might have had them, but he was gone. His books and belongings had disappeared into the Maze, a place no lone Ashkari woman would dare to go.
When she finally slept, she did not dream of darkness. Instead, she knew she was in a high place, and around her were flames, growing ever closer. The wind howled past her, but did nothing to quench the fire. When she woke in the evening, her muscles ached, as if she had been running through the night.
Suleman set out to charm the Queen. It was not hard for him to do. His hair was black as raven’s wings, his body hard as if it had been carved from stone. No other Sorcerer-King was as admired. He arrived in Aram on the back of a dragon and found Adassa to be beautiful as well as young and impressionable. He set about trying to convince her to ally with his own country. He spoke of the power of the Source-Stones and their ability to make land fertile and heal mortal wounds. Adassa fell in love with Suleman, and for some time they were lovers. He showed her how to bring prosperity into Aram using her Source-Stone. But despite all this, she refused to marry him, not wanting to give up the independence of her throne. Eventually he prevailed upon her to visit him in his own kingdom, so that she could see all that might be hers if she agreed to marry him.
—Tales of the Sorcerer-Kings, Laocantus Aurus Iovit III
CHAPTER NINE
Drowned deep in morphea, Kel dreamed.
He dreamed he lay in his bed in Conor’s room, and Mayesh came, and the King and Queen, and chirurgeons and scholars from all over Dannemore. Fausten was there: He brought out ink and quills, and marked Kel’s face, his neck, his bare arms and legs, while Kel tried to speak, to move, and discovered he could not.
The experts examined the marks and spoke in whispered, half-regretful voices about what must be cut away to leave a perfect canvas upon which they could do their work. “All that is here is flawed,” said Fausten, his rheumy eyes fixed on a distant point. “Flesh and blood must be sacrificed. Here—” and he placed his hand upon Kel’s chest—“is the diamond.”
King Markus stepped forward. In his hand was the ceremonial blade Firefly. Gold and silver enamel adorned its hilt; rubies studded the crosspiece like drops of blood. “My son,” he said. “This is your task.”
And he gave the blade to Conor. Kel tried to whisper Conor’s name, to call out to him for mercy, but the universe was tilting away from him. He could not grasp its substance, not even to beg for his life. As Conor raised the blade above his heart, Kel heard the screaming of a phoenix and felt the turning of the world.
“So you went to the Palace,” Mariam said, bumping her shoulder against Lin’s as they made their way through the market. “And you met the Prince. And his cousin. You saw their rooms.”
“Mariam, I’ve told you this story five times,” Lin groaned. It was true; she had told the story multiple times over the past three days, though she’d kept her word to Mayesh. No mention of Sword Catchers or anokham talismans had escaped her lips, nor a word of Crawlers, for that matter.
Mariam had paused at a stall that sold silks and brocades. She had come to the market in search of material with which she planned to make dresses for, it seemed, half the girls in the Sault. The Goddess Festival was a little less than a month away, and Mariam had been flooded with orders. Though the Ashkar must dress plainly outside the Sault, within its walls they could wear whatever they chose, and the Festival was a chance to parade one’s finery before the whole community.