Sword Catcher (Sword Catcher, #1)

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.