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Still, it felt incongruous, almost grotesque, this destruction of what had clearly been so beautiful. The shape of him, unclothed, was all clean lines, perfect as a drawing in an anatomy book showing the ideal of the human form. Strong shoulders, tapering to a slimwaist. His breeches hung low on his hips. The back of his neck was a vulnerable curve. Black curls, soaked with sweat and blood, clung to the skin there.
She reached for a jar oftheriac, a clear salve that would calm pain and prevent infection. Taking some onto her fingers, she said, “When I was a child, I was angry at Mayesh. He had separated my brother and me, after our parents died. He felt his responsibilities here at Marivent prevented him from looking after us.” She began to smooth the salve onto his back. His skin was hot to the touch, smooth where the lacerations had not torn at him.
“Go on,” he said. He had turned his head so he could look up at her while she spoke. She could see his face clearly now. Kohl was smudged madly around his eyes, as if he had wept black tears. “You were angry at Bensimon?”
“Yes,” she said. “Because he ignored me, you see. He was busy here on the Hill. I was so angry I would hit things and tear at them. Curtains and scarves. Other children.” She smoothed the salve as gently as she could over the lattice of cuts that feathered like wings across his shoulders. “All that anger never amounted to anything, though. It never changed the situation. It never brought him back.”
“Bensimon did that?” The Prince sounded genuinely surprised. “I never thought of him as someone who could neglect a responsibility.”
No one wants to be a responsibility,Lin thought.They want to be loved.But she would hardly say such a thing, to him of all people. She put away the salve and began to remove amulets from her satchel.
“Well, I have had vengeance upon him for you,” said the Prince, in a low tone. His voice was rougher than Lin remembered it—though one would expect someone in pain to sound different. “Though I did not intend it. When he arrives at Marivent tomorrow, and discovers the ruin I have wrought, he will despair.”
Will he? I am not sure he can feel despair,Lin wanted to say, but held back. She was not sure she still believed it was true. She had taken out the amulets: talismans for healing, for blood loss.Talismans to prevent infection. They would help, but the scars…he would have such terrible scars. Like great claw marks, forever slicing across his back.Forever spoiling his beauty,said a small voice in the back of her head, but those were not a doctor’s thoughts. Her doctor’s brain said other things. That she ought to use lunar caustic, to make sure he did not begin to bleed again, but that the lunar caustic would worsen his scarring. That such scarring caused pain, the tightening and disfigurement of skin. He might never move properly again, for all of his life.
“Your mother,” she said. “She seemed insistent that you not scar—”
He laughed shortly, and winced hard with the pain of the laughter. “A scarred prince is a scandal,” he said. “Criminals are whipped, not princes. My father is angry I have disappointed him; he has written the words of his disappointment across my back in blood. But when the blood is washed away, there will be scars that require explanation. My mother does not want to have to make those sorts of explanations.”
“You think it is just vanity on her part?”Perhaps she, too, does not want to see something beautiful, something she made, disfigured. Perhaps she fears the pain the scars will bring. Or perhaps you are right, Monseigneur, and she only fears potential embarrassment.
“I think it is practicality,” he said, and caught his breath. “Your hands—”
“I am sorry.” She was being as gentle as she could, but her stomach felt as if it were turning circles as she touched him. She should not be surprised, she thought. Though every patient was meant to be the same to her, she could not forget that she was laying her hands on a Prince. The blood that mixed with the salve on her skin was royal blood.
She drew her hands back, just for a moment—and felt it. A hot, needle-pain against her chest, like the sting of a wasp. Just where the brooch pinned inside her tunic touched her skin…
She seemed to see the image of the Source-Stone behind hereyelids, as she had the night she’d healed Kel. The smoke moving in the depths of it, like steam rising from the surface of well water.
And she heard the whisper, in her mind. But not a whisper, now. Stronger than that. A voice—stern, genderless, unidentifiable. The voice of the stone itself.
Use me.
“Stay still,” she said, in a distant voice, and laid the first amulet across his skin. As she did so, she set her left hand over her heart, where the brooch was pinned inside her jacket.
Heal,she thought. But it was more than a thought. In her mind’s eye she clearly saw the word drift again through the smoke of the stone, but this time it broke into its component parts, into letters that were numbers, into an equation as complex and simple as a star.
Something pulsed beneath her left hand, like the pulse of blood in a heart. It seemed to quiver through her palm, unfurling tendrils through her veins. She opened her eyes.
Nothing had changed. The red welts across the Prince’s back remained, the edges of the cuts as angry and visceral as before. She felt a dull anger at herself. Whatever she had thought she was doing, it had not worked.
Still, she could not bring herself to use the lunar caustic. She reached for more amulets, the flat metal cool between her fingers. She began to place them, one after another, atop the welts on his back.
Through all of this he had not spoken. He winced now, as the talismans touched his skin, arching slightly off the bed. She could have slid her hand into the gap between the clenched muscles of his stomach and the sheet beneath.
She did not know why she had thought that. He was rigid, awaiting the touch of cold metal. She said, “I am sure Mayesh will not be in despair. You could not havewrought so much ruinas all that.”
He gasped an almost-laugh. Sweat had begun to bead along the hollow of his spine, at the base of his neck. “Oh—you wouldbe—surprised. I am not good at many things, but”—he winced—“ruination is one of them. And bad planning. I am good at that as well.”
She laid down the next talisman. “You could tell me what happened,” she said. “Perhaps it is not as bad as you think.”
He had relaxed slightly. He was still tense, but he was no longer holding his body rigid, off the bed. “I suppose I might as well. You will hardly be complimentary, will you, or tell me I am brilliant, and have made only the best decisions, as Falconet or Montfaucon would do.”
“I think I have been very clear,” she said, “that I will not.”
He brought his forehead down to touch his clenched hands. When he spoke, it was in a near-monotone. “Prosper Beck,” he said. “I owed him a great deal of money. It does not matter why, only that I was surprised to learn of it, and that it was a legal debt. I had spent the money. I owed it.” He winced, swore, as she laid a talisman across a particularly bad cut upon his shoulder. “I was able to send messages to him. I thought he would demand interest. Instead he began to demand that I do things for him.”
“Did Kel know?”
