The first thing that struck Lin when she walked into the Prince’s
apartments was the smell of blood. Coppery and bright; not old blood, but new.
Kel, beside her, tensed. She was not sure if it was the blood—there were streaks of it on the floor, even the print of boots in a drying pool of it—or
the fact that Queen Lilibet was there, seated rod-straight in a chair beside her son’s bed, her green skirts stained at the hem with blood and dirt.
Around her throat and wrists and forehead were emeralds set in gold; they blazed like the eyes of the Ragpicker King.
And on the bed, the still, tensed form of the Prince. The thickly embroidered damask hangings had been drawn back, and Lin could see that he lay facedown on the coverlet, his head on his folded arms. He still wore elaborate velvet breeches, and soft leather boots; gems flashed on his fingers, and at his wrists—a peculiar contrast to the bare expanse of his back, which had been torn to bloody strips.
She could sense that he was conscious—clinging to it, perhaps, half dazed, but she sensed his awareness that she was there, though he did not move as she approached. Lin could feel her heartbeat in her fingertips, beating the words: the Queen. The Queen herself. Yet at the same time, her mind had focused, narrowed in on the Prince, on his wounds. Her physician’s training overrode all other things, lending her the necessary emotional distance to do what was required.
She noted that on the night table by the bed were soap, bandages, towels.
A silver bowl of water to wash her hands. Someone had prepared for her arrival. That was good. Where would she unpack her satchel? On the bed,
she decided: It was vast, and even the Prince, not a small man, took up only a portion of it.
The Queen touched her son’s hair once, lightly, her ringed fingers flashing among his wet dark curls. Then she rose and came down the few steps—the bed was on a sort of raised plinth—to where Lin and Kel stood.
“A woman,” Lilibet said, looking Lin up and down as if she were a horse at the Fleshmarket. “I have known many Ashkari physicians—they treated me throughout my childhood—but have never seen a female healer before.”
“Will it be a problem, Your Highness?” Lin asked.
“No. If it were a problem, I would not have summoned you.” Lilibet Aurelian was beautiful, up close, in a way that commanded attention. There was nothing soft about her beauty. It was a beauty that seemed made of bright pieces, like glittering tesserae that came together to form something almost frighteningly magnificent: a great archway or spired castle. “As a woman, you will have worked twice as hard to get where you are. That
pleases me. You have two tasks here. Make sure these wounds do not
become infected or spill a poison into his blood. And do what you can to see he does not scar too badly.”
“I will do what I can, as you say,” said Lin. “But”—she glanced once at the Prince’s back, the weals dividing his skin—“there will be scars. Almost undoubtedly.”
The Queen nodded curtly. “So, let us not waste time. Ashkari physicians do not like to be surrounded and bothered while they work; that much I
know. Kellian, accompany me. We will wait downstairs while she tends to my son.”
And they were gone, leaving Lin slightly stunned. Usually she had to work harder to clear the family from the room. She had expected to be, as Lilibet had said, surrounded and bothered while she worked. Had mentally prepared herself for it. Now she was alone with Prince Conor, and that was much stranger.
She could not deny that she was afraid. Of him, of the situation. She was so small in the face of all that was the Palace and its inhabitants. But then, for fifty years, her grandfather had come to Marivent nearly every sunrise. Had talked with these people, worked with and for them, demanded their concentration, even their respect. And though she was not Mayesh, she had her own skills. Did not the Book of Makabi say: The skill of a physician shall lift up his head; and he shall stand before nobles?
Forcing herself to be calm, she climbed the steps to the massive bed. The Prince still did not move, but his breathing intensified. It was ragged; seeming to snag on every inhale, like cloth snagging on a hook. Lin set down her satchel, quickly washed her hands, and returned to the bed. The first thing to do was to clean away the blood from his back, to see clearly what she was dealing with. It would not be easy, given his condition.
She sat down beside him, the mattress sinking a little under her weight.
His shirt had not been removed, she realized. Rather, it had been whipped to pieces, and blood-soaked scraps of silk clung to his arms, his waist.
Very gently, she began to sponge away the blood from his bare skin, using a damp towel. The Prince’s body tensed, his back arching. Breath hissed between his teeth.
Then he spoke, and the sound jolted her. “You must be enjoying this,” he said, turning his head to the side to avoid speaking directly into the mattress. “It must please you.”
There was strength in his voice—more than she had expected. As a physician it pleased her, but there was bitterness there, too, sharp as poison. Perhaps it was the bitterness that was keeping him alert. Strength came from strange places.
Lin slowed the movement of her hand. “Cleaning up blood? Why would that please me?”
“Because—ah!” He winced, and lifted himself on his elbows. The
muscles in his arms bunched beneath the torn and bloodied silk. “You don’t like me. We’ve been over this.”
“If you did not want me as your physician, you could have protested,” she said.
“I did not feel like arguing with my mother. It is not something I enjoy at the best of times, and I would not call this the best of times.”
He looked over his shoulder at her. His eyes were fever-bright, the pupils too wide. Shock, Lin thought. “I could give you morphea—”
“No.” He fisted his hands in the sheets. “No morphea. I want to feel all of it.”
Gently, she continued to dab away the blood, revealing the wounds beneath. “If you are doing this to show that you are brave, I should tell you honestly, this is the easiest part of what I must do. These wounds are bad.
You will be screaming like a dying seagull soon enough.”
He made a muffled sound that could have been a laugh. “I am not trying to impress you, Mayesh’s granddaughter. I wish to feel the pain so that I remember it. So that I remain angry.”
It was a more interesting answer than she had expected.
She had cleaned away most of the blood; the towel was soaked in red. She could see the angry stripes across his back now, some crisscrossing each other. Bits of white silk were embedded in the long cuts.
Jolivet had done this before, she thought. He had known to keep the
lashes high on the back, over the blades of the Prince’s shoulders, where the kidneys would not be damaged.
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 slim waist. 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 of theriac, 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 her eyelids, 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 have wrought so much ruin as 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 would be—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?”
“No. The favors were demanded while he was recovering. And I did not want to worry him. At first I ignored Beck, but he knew when I did not.
Finally, I did the first thing he asked. It seemed harmless enough. I was to put an emetic in a bottle of wine and give it to Montfaucon and Roverge. They spent the night vomiting, but assumed it was because they were drunk. It certainly wasn’t the first night either of them had spent being
sick.”
“And did Beck know?” She laid the next talisman.
“He knew. And he sent another demand. That I kill Asti. My horse. But that—I could not do that.” There was a defensive note in his voice, as if he thought she would judge him for foolish softheartedness. But in fact, it was the most she’d ever liked him. “I realized it would never end. He would
continue to request things—some foolish, some brutal, some humiliating. I knew I had to pay it all back, at once. End the whole business. I went to the Sarthian Ambassador. We agreed in secret: I would marry the Princess of
Sarthe in exchange for a dowry in gold, to be paid in advance.”
Lin was a little stunned. She had not expected something so immense in its consequentiality. A secret union between Castellane and Sarthe? There would be many in the city who would hate the idea, many who loathed
Sarthe with a passion. “The Princess—” she began.
“Aimada. I have met her before; she is agreeable enough, and sensible.
She will not expect much from me, I think.”
He sounded exhausted. Pain was exhausting, Lin knew; it wore out the soul as well as the body. But there was something else in his voice. A
weariness that spoke to a death of expectation. If he had wanted more than a marriage brought about by blackmail, he would not now have it.
“Ten thousand crowns,” he said, almost drowsily. “The cost of a Prince, it turns out. I realize I have been a fool; you need not tell me. I ought to have gone to Bensimon. Asked his advice. Told him the truth.”
Lin placed the last talisman on his back. “I will not tell you that you have made good decisions,” she said, drawing back her hands. “Clearly, that is not the case.”
“Gray hell,” he muttered into his clenched fists.
“But had you gone to Mayesh, he would only have told your father. And you would likely be in the same situation, or one very similar.”
Between the black of his lashes and the darker black of the kohl, his eyes were very bright silver. He said, “But I would not now be getting married. Which I do not want to do.”
“But you were always going to have to marry for statecraft, were you not? People like you do not marry for love.”
“You have been listening to too many Story-Spinner tales,” he muttered. “Am I wrong?”
He narrowed his eyes. “No.”
Aimada. I have met her before, he had said. Aimada. A pretty name. Lin could not picture her, could picture only a sort of drawing in a storybook of a princess in a ribboned crown.
Lin stood up, went to the silver bowl. Touched the surface of the water with her bloody hands, red threads spinning out from her fingers like thread from a loom.
“Wait,” the Prince said.
She turned to see him, chin on his folded arms. The talismans gleamed in long lines across his back, like the scales of a dragon.
“I will take the morphea,” he said, “but you will have to give it to me. I cannot move.”
She did not ask what had changed his mind. She retrieved an ampoule of morphea from her satchel and came to the head of the bed. She had to make
a space among the velvet pillows, batting them aside as if they were overly curious kittens, so she could kneel down by his head.
She took several grains from the ampoule and hesitated. Usually she would place the grains upon the patient’s tongue. She had done it with Kel, unthinkingly. But she wavered now; there was something about touching
the Prince so familiarly, so intimately—
He looked up at her through black lashes thick as fringe. She could see
the flecks of blood across his cheekbones, a bruise rising on his jaw. He was waiting for her. Waiting for the surcease from pain she could offer. She steeled herself and reached out, cupping his chin in her hand, brushing the
grains of morphea across the indentation in the center of his full lower lip. “You have to swallow them,” she whispered.
He licked across his lower lip with a flick of his tongue. Swallowed.
Looked up at her, a somber light in his eyes. “You should not feel sorry for me, you know. Feel sorry for the one who has to marry me.”
It would take a few moments for the morphea to work, she knew. Best to distract him. She said, “Why should I feel sorry for you? I doubt I will marry for love, either. Or marry ever.” She tucked the ampoule into the pocket of her dress. “I am a woman and a physician. No respectable Ashkari man would marry me. I am too peculiar.”
“Peculiar?” The corner of his mouth turned up. “I don’t think I’ve ever met a woman who describes herself as peculiar before.”
“Well, I am,” she said. “I am an orphan; that is odd enough. I demanded to be allowed to train as a physician; also peculiar. I have only one friend. I do not participate in most dances, most festivals. Oh, and when I was a little girl, I was a terror. I pushed Oren Kandel out of a tree once. He broke his
ankle.” She knew these names, these words, would mean nothing to the Prince, but it did not matter. She was talking for the sake of talking, to quiet and to soothe. His eyes were already growing unfocused, his breathing
more steady. As his eyes closed, she told him of her meeting with the Maharam, her hope to seek Qasmuna’s book in the Shulamat, how he had refused and how she had kicked Oren’s carefully collected pile of
sweepings on her way out.
“That does sound like you,” he said, drowsily. “You seem to have a problem containing your temper.”
“Is it wise to annoy me when I have a satchel full of needles and knives?” she said, in her sweetest tone. She wondered immediately if he would be angry—it was so difficult to know how much familiarity was allowed, how much humor. King Thevan, the current King’s grandfather, had once had an actor executed for performing a satirical play about him.
But the Prince only smiled wearily, and said, “What now? The morphea will put me to sleep soon, I expect.”
“Yes. You should rest.” She hesitated. “I ought to stay here with you tonight,” she said, finally. “To make sure the talismans are working, and that the bleeding does not begin again.”
He was very still. “No woman has ever spent the night in this room,” he said. “No one has, save Kel and myself.”
“If you would rather I go, I could see if Kel, or the Queen—”
“No,” he said, quickly. “It would be irresponsible of you to leave. I could bleed to death.”
“May the Goddess prevent that,” she replied, a little stiffly. She slid off
the bed, leaving him lying surrounded by pillows, his back a map of red and silver. At the door, she paused, glancing back at him, now just a shadowy
figure on the bed.
Heal. She let the word whisper itself inside her mind. Raised her hand to touch the brooch one more time; then let it fall, and went out into the corridor.
She found the Queen standing just outside the Prince’s room, her hands folded in front of her. Emeralds winked at her throat. She did not seem to have been pacing, or to have been doing anything other than standing perfectly still in the center of the hall. It was unnerving. And where was Kel?
“I sent Kellian off to rest,” said the Queen, as if she had read Lin’s mind. “He was agitated. In such situations as this, I prefer calm.”
Rest where? Lin thought. But of course there would be dozens of
bedrooms in a place like this. She felt a flash of worry for Kel, no doubt lying awake, alone in the dark, worried for his Prince.
“Physician,” the Queen said, a little sharply, “tell me of my son.”
What if I said he had died? Would I be thrown from the cliffs, food for the crocodiles, like Asaph was? And what if I were to ask why you had allowed
him to be whipped, why you hadn’t stopped it? Was there truly nothing you could have done?
Lin bit back hard on her thoughts. They were as useless as panicking at the sight of a wound. She said calmly, “There will be no muscular or internal damage, and the bleeding has been stopped. Those are the most important things. I have placed talismans on the wounds that should assist in healing.”
“And scarring?” asked the Queen. “How bad will it be?”
“I cannot know that until morning, when the talismans are removed.” Lin steeled herself. “It is likely there will be some . . . blemish.”
The Queen’s expression tightened. Lin’s heart skipped a beat, but Queen Lilibet only said, “You, girl. Do you have children?”
“I have not been so blessed, no,” Lin said; it was her rote response whenever anyone asked. She did not bother expounding: I do not have a husband, I do not know if I want children. No one who asked was truly that curious.
“Here is the thing you should know about children,” said Lilibet. Up close, it was clear to see that the Prince’s looks came from his mother: He had her black hair, her lush mouth at odds with those fine, almost too-sharp bones. “Children make you helpless. You can have all the power one can imagine, and if you cannot keep them safe from themselves and the world, it does not matter.”
Lin inclined her head, not sure what to say. “I ought to remain with the Prince tonight. Make sure his condition is stable.”
The Queen nodded. As Lin turned toward the door of the royal apartment, the Queen said abruptly, “And if you do have children, physician
—”
Lin looked back over her shoulder. Lilibet was not looking at her, but into the distance, as if recalling some past event.
“If you do have children, make sure to have more than one.”
By the time Lin returned to the Prince’s side, he was asleep. She sat down in the chair the Queen had vacated earlier. This was the physician’s task that required the most patience, and in which Lin sometimes thought one stood closest to the Goddess. To sit beside a patient as they slept through the
night, waiting for a break in fever, a change in condition. Holding their alor,
their life force, in your mind, willing it to stay tied to the body.
Of course there were times it did not succeed, and death came as a thief in the night to steal away the physician’s work. But Lin preferred to think that death was not always the enemy.
She took the copied pages of Qasmuna’s book from her satchel. She had managed to translate most of the words, and put the pages into a sort of order. Reading them again, she told herself, would surely bring more of its precepts into clarity. She would study a few sentences, then check on the Prince. Study a few more, check again. In this manner she planned to get through the night.
But she found it hard to concentrate on the words. It was so strange, to be in this room, alone with Prince Conor. This room, where he had grown up, where Kel had grown up. What had it been like when they were little boys, she wondered. Had they sat on the floor and played Castles? Josit used to roll about play-fighting with his friends like puppies did. Had they done
that? Had they talked about what it meant for Kel to be the Sword Catcher, or had it been so ingrained a part of their lives that there was no need to
discuss it any more than they needed to discuss that the sun would come up the next morning?
There were books on the nightstand; Lin had noticed them when she had gone to wash her hands. The Prince had been a figure in her life for all of her life, yet she had never thought about whether he read books or not. If
these were anything to go by, he liked tales of travel and adventure. If he were awake, she thought, she could read aloud to him. Being read aloud to was calming for patients. But he was deep in the slumber of morphea and shock, his eyes moving rapidly beneath his smudged lids.
For so many years she had hated him. She had not thought of him, in that time, as someone who read, whose fingers curled in slightly when he slept.
Who had a cluster of freckles on the top of his shoulder. Who had a white
line through one of his eyebrows—a scar or a birthmark? Whose mouth lost its cruelty when he slept.
She wondered if she still hated him and decided that it did not matter as far as this night was concerned. He was her patient still. She would remain with him, as his physician; she would stay awake until the last watch of the night had passed.
In the night, Lin slept, and as she slept, she dreamed that she was someone else. A man, climbing the high side of a mountain.
The paths had long ago fallen away, and now there was only rock, cracked and uneven. His hands were torn and bleeding, but he kept on, moving ever upward, for he was acting on the orders of the King, and to return empty-handed would mean death.
He was nearly at the summit when he found the entrance to the cave. He breathed a sigh of relief. The prophecy had not been false. On hands and
knees he crawled into the dark crevice, dust and gravel irritating his bleeding hands.
He did not know how long he had been crawling when he saw it. Gold, all gold, and of a brightness that seared into his eyes. He cried out in Malgasi: “Hi nas visík!” And knew in that moment that he was blind, that he would never see anything again save that light, that radiance, and he did not grieve his sight, only reached out his hands toward the burning . . .
It was morning when Kel came back to the royal apartment. After Lilibet ordered him away, he had gone into the small blue room down the hall
where he slept sometimes when Conor was with a girl, though the girls never stayed the night.
He had tried to force sleep to come. He visualized his peaceful place: the ship on the sea, the mast swaying in lazy, sunlit wind, white foam on the water below. But this time it had not calmed him. He had continued to see, over and over, the whip rising and falling, the blood oozing from Conor’s back. Conor shuddering without making a sound.
Eventually, he had fallen into a black and dreamless sleep, only waking when sunlight was spilling through the east-facing window, turning the
airless room into a roasting oven.
Conor. He was on his feet and out in the corridor before he’d shaken the sleep from his brain.
He’d half expected Lilibet to be there, but the hall was deserted, ghostly. He crossed it quickly and entered the room he shared with Conor. The light here was softer, laying a pale gold glaze over the odd tableau that met his gaze.
Lin was asleep in the chair beside Conor’s bed, her arms hugging her satchel like a child with its arms around a pillow. Conor’s bed was empty, a mess of tangled sheets, mud and blood. It glittered as if dusted with sequins. As Kel approached, incredulous, he saw that the shining spangles were Ashkari healing talismans, scattered across the coverlet.
“Lin.” He shook her shoulder and she bolted awake, the satchel slipping out of her hands. He caught it before it hit the floor, tossing it onto the bed. “Where’s Conor?”
She scrubbed at her eyes, blinking. A great deal of her red hair had escaped from its braids and curled in a halo of fiery strands around her face. “The Prince?” She stared at the empty bed. “He was here—at dawn, he was here, I looked—” She said something else, a blur of words in Ashkar, her
face creasing with worry.
The door of the tepidarium opened then, and Conor came into the room.
He was barefoot and shirtless, a towel over his shoulders. Loose linen trousers were cinched at his hips. He had clearly washed, for his hair was damp, and his face clean of blood and kohl.
“Conor,” Kel said. He was furious—at Conor, for not treating his injuries as serious. At Lin, unreasonably, for falling asleep. And behind the fury, beneath it, was puzzlement. He had seen Conor’s wounds; how had Conor managed to get out of bed, much less walk across the room at all? “What
are you doing? You should be—”
Conor put a finger to his lips, as if to say, Hush. There was a glint in his eyes, almost mischievous. Kel and Lin exchanged a baffled glance. Lin looked as if she were about to jump out of her skin. There was real fear in her eyes, and worry; it moved Kel’s own anxiety up a notch.
“Prince Conor,” Lin began, her voice shaking slightly, and Conor drew
the towel from his neck and turned around, presenting his back to them. Kel heard Lin give a little gasp; her hand flew to her chest, just above her heart. Conor’s back was a broad, smooth unblemished expanse of skin stretched over flexible muscle. No mark remained there, not even a healed scar. There
was no sign of any wound. No sign he had ever been whipped at all.
 |
And in that moment of the Queen’s great despair, her magic seemed to falter. She could no longer hold back the armies on the plains. The walls began to splinter, and as the enemies of Aram poured through, the city began to burn. All was flame: the sky, the rivers and lands of Aram, the palace itself. Soon Aram would be only ashes.
She turned to Suleman. “You have left me no choice,” she said.
Flame burned in his eyes. “What can you do to me? I will always be more powerful than you, as long as there is magic.”
“But now,” Adassa said, “there will be no more magic.”
And she reached out with all the strength that had been gifted her by her people, with the power of each word they had sacrificed in her name. She reached beyond the stars, and she tore free the Great Word of Power, without which no spell could be cast, and she cast it into the void. And she herself followed it into the void, for the power of the Word was so great, it burned away all about her that was mortal. The Queen was no longer the Queen; she was magic itself, and magic was gone.
—Tales of the Sorcerer-Kings, Laocantus Aurus Iovit III
