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Surprise stiffened her spine. “The Prince’scousin?” she echoed. “Is there not a Palace chirurgeon to treat him? Some Academie graduate with a bowl full of leeches and a leather strap for patients to bite on?”
Mayesh smiled without humor. “You paint an unpleasant portrait, but I assure you the reality is worse. If Gasquet treats him, he will die. Therefore…”
“Therefore, me,” Lin said.
“Yes. Therefore, you. The Prince will welcome your presence,” he added. “He is fond of his cousin.”
The Prince is a corrupt idiot,she thought,and his cousin is probably much like him.
“And what if I can’t heal him?” Lin said. They had left the Broken Market behind and were passing through the streets near Valerian Square. Here the stucco walls were painted with advertisements for public events, from Academie lectures to fights at the Arena. The bright colors swirled together as they passed, a mix of gold and emerald, saffron and scarlet. “What if he dies?”
“Lin—”
“What of Asaph?” she interrupted.
All Ashkar knew the tale of Asaph the physician, after whom the Oath was named. He had been famous, a healer respected inside and outside the Sault for his wisdom and skill. None of that had helped him when he delivered twins for the wife of King Rolant, inthe time of the Red Plague. It had been a difficult birth—breech, and the Queen had labored for hours. Thanks to Asaph’s skill, one twin had been born alive. The second had been dead—dead in the womb for days, long before Asaph had been summoned. Not that it mattered. He was put to a traitor’s death: flung from the Hill into the sea, where he was torn to pieces by crocodiles.
It was not a story that would have endeared the Palace to anyone—especially someone already disposed to dislike the residents of Marivent.
“I am not powerless in the Palace, Lin,” Mayesh said. “I will not let anything happen to you.”
The words left her mouth before she could stop them. “I am your flesh and blood,” she said. She recalled the words of the Maharam, so long ago, the way her grandfather had turned away from them.They are flesh of your flesh, those children, blood of your blood.“Yet how long has it been since we have spoken, Mayesh? Months? A year? You have always put House Aurelian and its needs and desires before me, before Josit. Forgive me, then, if I have no reason to believe you will change that now.”
Mayesh raised his gray eyebrows. His eyes, despite his age, were clear, their gaze piercing. “I did not realize you thought me such a villain.”
“I did not realize you thought of me at all.” The carriage had begun to make its way up the steep rise of the Hill, Castellane falling away below. “I suppose you came to me because you think I can be trusted to keep my mouth shut.”
“I came to you,” Mayesh said, “because you are the best physician in the Sault.”
You did not even want me to become a physician,Lin thought.I never had your support.And yet—Chana’s words, spoke so recently, rang in her mind.Your grandfather was never opposed to you becoming a physician. There is much he has done that has earned your anger, Lin. But that was one thing he did not do.
Maybe he meant it, she thought.Maybe.
She interlaced her hands in her lap. “Very well,” she said. “Tell me of his injuries, this Kel Anjuman.”
The story came out as the carriage wound its slow way up the steep rise to the Palace gates. There had been a meeting that day, of the Charter Families. Afterward this cousin of the Prince’s had left Marivent for the city. No one knew where he had gone, specifically. (The Temple District,Lin thought. Drinking, whoring, like his cousin. What else did nobles do?) Mayesh had been working late into the night, some issue with the Treasury, when he had seen a commotion at the front gate. Arriving there, he had found that Anjuman’s unconscious, bleeding body had been dumped at the threshold of the Palace. The guards had not seen who had left him: He had appeared between one moment and the next, they swore, as if carried there by a ghost. Mayesh had been forced to half carry, half drag the young man’s limp body to the Prince’s apartments, where the extent of his wounds became clear. Soon after, Mayesh had left for the Sault.
Probably stabbed by someone he cheated at gambling, Lin thought. Or a courtesan he’d wronged. But she quickly told herself not to judge this Kel Anjuman. He was her patient, and besides, he was not responsible for Mayesh’s injustices toward her. He was not an Aurelian.
By this time they had reached the North Gate of Marivent—the threshold Mayesh had spoken of, where Anjuman had been dumped. It certainly did not look as if acts of high criminality and drama often played themselves out here: It was a quite ordinary stone arch, with lion flags flying from the vaulted top. Torches burned along the ramparts of the white walls surrounding the Palace. They illuminated the night, blotting out the stars.
Lin watched silently as Mayesh leaned from the carriage window, exchanging words with the Castelguards who stood ranged at their posts like stiff wooden statues painted in red and gold. Lin tried and failed to imagine her grandfather kneeling here at thegate, amid the green grass, cradling the body of the Prince’s cousin. Getting bloodstains all over his Counselor’s robes. It did not seem possible, unless Mayesh was leaving out some part of the story.
And no doubt he was, she thought. If he did not need her help, he would have told her nothing; as it was, he was surely only telling her what he felt he must.
The carriage rattled through the archway. The gate was behind them; they were in the Palace proper. Much as Lin did not want to be excited about it, she felt her pulse jump: She was here. Here, inside Marivent, the beating heart of Castellane.
Long ago, Lin and Mariam had followed the tale of a particularStory-Spinner on the Ruta Magna, an unfolding fable titledThe Taming of the Tyrant.Lin still remembered the moment the story’s heroine had entered the Palace for the first time. How a gasp had run through the listening crowd. Most people lived all their lives in Castellane, with Marivent shimmering above them like a star, knowing they would never enter its gates. Knowing that beyond those gates lay a sort of a magic, of a type that had not been lost in the Sundering. The magic of power, of glamour and riches, luxury and influence. The destinies of nations turned on House Aurelian’s whim. That was itself a kind of sorcery.
Various of the smaller palaces rose around them, white in the moon. Lin knew a few of their names, from stories: the Star Tower; the Sun Palace, shaped like a rayed orb; the Castel Antin, where the throne room resided. To the southwest, at the edge of the sea cliffs, rose the black needle of the Trick. Many a Story-Spinner’s tale involved a daring escape from the Trick, but in reality no one had ever managed the feat.
They rolled through a second archway, this one a vine-wrapped trellis, and into a courtyard surrounded on three sides by stone walls. Mayesh murmured that this was Castel Mitat, where the Prince lived. The carriage drew to a stop near a tiled fountain and they disembarked quickly.
The moment they were out of the carriage it sped away. Lin only had time to note that the walls of the Castel were set with great, arched windows and embellished with long balconies, before Mayesh hurried them through a double door set below a wall-mounted sundial.
Inside was a steep staircase of old marble, the center of the steps worn to deep indents by the passage of feet through the years. Few lamps were lit. They raced upstairs through the shadows, their footsteps echoing. Nearly empty at this hour, the place felt oddly abandoned, the air catching chill from so much marble cladding.
They reached the final landing and turned onto a hallway of more white stone. Rugs from Marakand unrolled in deep jewel tones all down the passage. Arched windows cast back Lin’s own reflection as they approached a pair of double doors made of wood and hammered metal. An intricate pattern of crowns and flames had been etched into their design.
