Sword Catcher (Sword Catcher, #1)

Prince Conor’s head snapped up. He looked nothing like he had in Valerian Square. There was an ashy tint to his light-brown skin, and his features seemed drawn too tight. “I sent them away,” he said. “They weren’t helping, they—” He narrowed his eyes at Lin. “Is this the physician?”

“Yes,” Lin said. She did not offer her name; let him ask for it. As he looked at her, she was aware of a dark thrill through her nerves. The Prince of Castellane was studying her. This was someone who held power in his hand as if it were a child’s toy. There was a tangibility to such power; she felt it like the leading edge of a storm.

“She looks very young, Mayesh,” he said, his tone dismissive. “Are you sure . . .?”

He didn’t need to say the rest of it. Are you sure she’s the best in the Sault? She’s just a girl. Surely there’s a wise, bearded old man you could lay hands on who would do a better job. Lin wondered what the punishment was for kicking a Prince in the ankle. The Trick, no doubt.

She itched to get to the young man lying on the bed. She did not like how still he was. At least the Prince had sent the chirurgeon away; a bad doctor was worse than no doctor.

“Lin is twenty-three,” said Mayesh. His voice was even. “And she is the best in the Sault.”

The Prince rubbed at his eyes. There was black kohl smeared around them. It was a style Lin had seen on nobles before: Both the men and women darkened their eyes, and wore paint on their nails and jewels on their fingers. The Prince’s hands glittered with rings: emeralds and sapphires, bands of white and rosy gold. “Well, then,” he said impatiently. “Come and look at him.”

Lin hurried across the tiled floor to the low bed, setting her satchel down on a wooden table nearby. Someone had placed a silver bowl of clean water there, and a cake of soap. Mayesh must have asked for it. Castellani doctors did not clean their hands before they worked, but the Ashkar did.

She cleaned and dried her hands, then turned to look at her patient. The bed was a mess of bloody, tangled sheets; the young man her grandfather had called Kel lay unconscious among them, though his hands moved occasionally at his sides in the rough, spasmodic twitches that were indicative of being dosed with morphea for pain. Gasquet must have done so before Conor had sent him away.

Anjuman had also been stripped down to his trousers and a cambric shirt, soaked through with blood. Most of it seemed to be on the right side of his abdomen, but there were dark patches over his sternum, too.

She could see the family resemblance between her patient and Prince Conor. They had the same light-brown skin and fine features, the same curling dark hair, though Anjuman’s was sweat-darkened and sticking to his neck and temples. Anjuman was breathing hard, his lips purplish blue, and when she briskly lifted his hand, she saw that the beds of his nails were the same color. Though he was gasping for air, his chest rising and falling, he was suffocating.

Everything went very still around her. She knew these symptoms: He was dying. There was little time. “Move out of the way,” she said, and thought the Prince’s eyebrows rose, but she did not stay to see his reaction. Her brain was ticking ahead like a clock, sorting her next steps, deciding what her patient needed. She took up her satchel, upending its contents onto the bed; she caught up a thin-bladed, sharp knife, and bent over Kel Anjuman.

“What are you doing?” The Prince’s tone was sharp. Lin looked up and saw him staring at her, his arms crossed. His smoke-black hair was in tangled disorder, she noted, as if he’d run his fingers through it too many times to count.

“Cutting away his shirt. I need to see the wound,” Lin said.

“It’s an expensive shirt.”

Which is already ruined with blood. Lin paused, the tip of the blade against the cambric. “Between this shirt and your cousin, which one would you say you like better?”

His mouth thinned, but he gestured for her to go on. She sliced away Anjuman’s shirt, revealing a long gash along his side. It had bled freely, though it was no longer: His chest and belly were half covered in patches of drying blood. Lin could tell at a glance the gash was shallow enough. It was the puncture wound just to the left of his sternum, surrounded by violet-black bruising, that was cause for concern.

“Hold him down,” she said to the Prince, as she gathered what she needed. Her movements were automatic, swift but unhurried. There was a strange calm that came upon a physician in these moments, when quick action was needed to save a life.

“What?” The Prince looked stunned, then furious as she slid a bellied scalpel from its leather holder and laid the sharp end between two of Anjuman’s ribs. “At least give him some morphea if you’re going to cut him—”

“He’s had morphea already. And more will stop his breathing,” she said. “Blood is pressing on his heart, crushing his lungs. I have to drain it.”

“Gasquet was going to put leeches on him—”

“And he would have died.” Lin kept her hand steady; still, she was reluctant to cut with no one stabilizing the patient. He was likely too drugged to feel the pain, but if he did, and jerked with movement, the blade would skid, perhaps even nicking an artery. “Are you going to help me or not?”

When the Prince did not move, she glanced toward her grandfather, who stood a few feet from the end of the bed, his face mostly cast in shadow. His arms were crossed; he looked grim, inexorable.

“I could get Jolivet,” he said, in response to a swift look from Prince Conor, but apparently that was not a pleasing suggestion. The Prince swore, clambered onto the bed, and put his hands on his cousin’s shoulders, holding him firmly against the cushions.

“If you kill him—” he began, but Lin was not listening. Anjuman’s lips were cyanotic blue. She began to cut—a short, precise incision—working the tip of the scalpel between his ribs with a practiced accuracy. Blood welled, spilling quickly down his side; his body jerked reflexively, but Prince Conor’s arms flexed, keeping him still.

The Prince was stronger than Lin would have guessed.

Among her tools was a bag of treated reeds, hollow and flexible. Lin transferred her scalpel to her left hand and picked one up. The Prince was looking over his shoulder at her, his gray eyes narrow. The lace cuffs of his shirt were smeared with blood.

Lin began to insert the reed, feeding it carefully through the incision. She felt it hit the rib and angled it upward, away from bone, toward the cavity of the chest. She could sense the Prince’s gaze on her like the pressure of a knife’s tip, sharp and searching. The back of her neck prickled as the reed slid in farther—