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“Hush,” Lin said to him. “You must keep calm. And Monseigneur, you will have to ask him questions later. For now, you must leave me alone with my patient.”
The Prince seemed torn between shock and anger. His mouth had flattened into a hard line. Lin was aware of Mayesh, watching them with an irritating calm. She was even more aware of the time,minutes ticking by—minutes during which infection could be spreading in her patient’s blood.
The stiff brocade of the Prince’s shirt rustled as he crossed his arms. “If I am to leave, you will need to promise me you will save his life. He will not die. Not now, and not a few days hence.”
It felt like swallowing a cold penny. Lin said, “I cannot promise that. I will do everything I can to prevent infection—”
The Prince shook his head, dark curls falling into his eyes. “I require you to promise.”
“It is not me you are making demands of, though you might think so,” Lin said. “You are trying to give orders to Life and Death, and they listen to no one, not even an Aurelian.”
As the Crown Prince looked at Lin, without speaking, she could see in his face the hardness of a nature unused to refusal. How did her grandfather manage it, she thought, each day spent with people who never heard the wordno—or if they did, were not required to heed it?
“Conor,” Mayesh said. It was gently spoken, not a reprimand. “Let her work. It will be best for Kel.”
Prince Conor tore his eyes away from Lin and gazed almost blindly down at his cousin. “If he dies…”
He didn’t finish, only spun on his heel and stalked out of the room. Mayesh nodded once at Lin and followed him. The door clanged shut behind them, plunging the room into a terrible silence.
Lin could feel her heart pounding somewhere in the region of her throat. What had she just done?She had just insulted the Crown Prince. She had ordered him out of his own room.She felt a sickly horror: What had she been thinking? But she could not fall to pieces over it now. Her concentration must be on her patient, who was moving restlessly on the bed.
“Hold still, Sieur Anjuman,” she said, bending over him. Like Prince Conor’s, his eyes were gray, fringed with velvet-black lashes.
“It’s Kel. Not Sieur anything. Kel. And if you come at me with leeches, I’ll bite,” he said, with an energy that surprised her.
“No leeches.” She shook the ampoule and tipped up Kel’s head with a finger under his chin. His skin was faintly rough with the beginnings of stubble. “Open your mouth and hold these under your tongue.”
He did as she asked, swallowing as the grains of morphea dissolved. Almost instantly, she saw the tight cast of his face ease, the taut line of his mouth relaxing as he exhaled.
Morphea could suppress breath, but he was breathing easier now. And shock could also kill. Pain loosened a patient’s hold on life; some raced toward death just to escape agony.
“That,” he said, “was surprising.”
“The morphea?” she asked, discarding the empty ampoule.
“Not the morphea. You made Conor leave,” he said. And, despite everything, he grinned. In that moment, he looked like a mischievous boy, like Josit after he had successfully poached apples from the Maharam’s garden. “Not many people can dothat.”
“It was awful.” Lin had moved to the table. “I am sure he hates me.”
“He only hates being told what to do,” said Kel, watching her as she returned with a small metal clamp, an ampoule of lunar caustic, a demiard of water infused withlevonaandmor, and a steel needle and silk thread. “Alas,” he said, glumly. “Needles.”
“If it hurts, tell me. I can give you more morphea.”
“No.” He shook his head. “No more. I don’t mind pain, as long as it’s within manageable bounds.”
Manageable bounds.That was interesting—a dissonance, like his scars. What did young nobles know of pain, and what amount of it they could or could not manage?
“You said you were bleeding out on the Key.” She spoke evenly, calmly, more to distract him than anything else. Having removed the bit of reed still in his side with the clamp, she moved todisinfecting his other wounds with herb-water. She knew it would hurt, despite the morphea. “But you were found at the Palace gates. You had been dumped there—”
He winced, his back arching, and muttered something that sounded likethe arrows,and then a name,Jeanne.So had he been visiting a girl in the city? And been robbed, perhaps, on the way back?
“Yes,” he said. “I know who left me outside Marivent. It wasn’t the person who stabbed me.”
She laid the washcloth aside and reached for the lunar caustic. It would stop any further bleeding. It would also hurt. Kel was looking at her quietly. A surprising level of acceptance, she thought. The richer the patient, the more difficult they generally were, complaining about every discomfort. He really was not what she had expected, this cousin of the Prince.
“Right. That was Crawlers,” she said, smoothing the caustic over the wounds. “I was surprised you’d heard of them.” They didn’t seem the sort of city dwellers of whom nobles would be aware.
He smiled wryly. “We all live in the same city, don’t we?”
