Sword Catcher (Sword Catcher, #1)

Kel made a vague gesture at his torso. “Here. Landed on a fencepost.”

To Kel’s surprise, Antonetta reached out to brush the front of his shirt with her fingertips. For all her artifice, the warmth of her touch, even through his shirt, was almost too real.

She looked up into his face. Her blue eyes were wide, her cheeks pink, her lips parted. She was achingly pretty. But it was all artifice, Kel thought. She’s practicing a look of fond concern, for whenever it might be useful. For Conor. It annoyed him, and he did not want to be annoyed at Antonetta. Still, he felt it like a hot irritability under his skin.

“Demoselle Alleyne,” said Lin. She had picked up her satchel, which had been concealed behind Antonetta’s spreading skirts. “I must ask you to leave, that I may examine my patient.”

“Oh, I don’t mind staying,” said Antonetta cheerfully.

“I’m going to have to ask him to strip down, you see,” said Lin.

“I have been practicing my life drawing,” said Antonetta, “and a knowledge of anatomy is useful to anyone—” She broke off as Kel shot her a dark look. “Oh, all right. But it will be very boring in the hallway.”

Kel relented a bit. “Perhaps you can act as lookout. Let us know if anyone’s coming.”

Kel’s eyes met Antonetta’s, and for that brief moment he knew she was recalling, just as he was, the many times she had been lookout in their long-ago games. He could not have said why he was sure he knew her thoughts, only that he was, and then she was out into the hall, the door closing behind her.

Once she was gone, Lin indicated that Kel should sit down on his bed and remove his jacket and shirt. So she hadn’t just been trying to get rid of Antonetta, he thought with wry amusement, doing as he was told.

He shrugged away his coat and unbuttoned the silk tunic underneath. As he slipped it off, Lin looked at him with something close to surprise.

“Sieur Anjuman,” she said. “You really do look much better than you did the last time I saw you.”

“I should hope so,” Kel said. “I believe I was drooling blood at the time, and no doubt groaning incoherently.”

“It was not as bad as all that,” she said. “Would you have any objection to my examining the wounds to make sure they’re healing properly?”

“None, I suppose.”

She came close to him and carefully peeled away the light bandages still remaining. Kel felt oddly exposed for a moment, but it was clear Lin was utterly unaffected by the sight of a bare male chest. In fact, she regarded him with a cool impassivity that made him think of Lilibet inspecting a new set of drapes.

“You’ve healed well,” she said, running her fingers over the scar on his side before touching the puckered wound just below his heart. “Very well. Most people would still be in bed. Have you had much pain?”

He told her that it had only been recently that he had stopped the morphea. She was horrified to hear Gasquet had kept him on the dose for so long—“I never allow my patients to take it for more than three days!”—and she unscrewed a jar of salve she had taken from her bag. The room filled with a faint, peppery scent like vetiver.

She bit her lip as she began to smear the salve liberally over not just his new wounds, but the older ones as well. “So many injuries,” she said, half to herself.

“I’m very clumsy,” said Kel. The salve tingled, flooding his skin with goosebumps.

“No,” she said. “You’re a Sword Catcher.”

His hand shot out; he caught at her wrist. She looked at him in surprise, still holding the jar of salve, but arrested mid-motion.

“What did you say?” he hissed.

She drew in a sharp breath. “I’m sorry. I thought Mayesh might have told you that I knew.”

He exhaled slowly. “No.”

“I recognized your anokham talisman.” She seemed remarkably calm, considering. “It’s very old Ashkari work, not the kind of thing that is made anymore. I won’t tell anyone,” she added. “Consider me bound to secrecy, as my grandfather is. If I were to tell anyone, it would endanger him.”

Kel released her wrist. He ought to be furious, he thought, or panicked. And yet. Perhaps it was the knowledge that the Ragpicker King was aware of his true identity, as were Merren and Ji-An. In truth, Lin’s awareness of who he was did not place him on a sharper knife’s edge than he already walked. Perhaps it was that some part of him trusted her. She had saved his life; it was instinctual, a sort of recognition.

“Tell me one thing,” Lin said, screwing the cap back on the jar of salve. “Do you even remember how you got all those scars?”

Kel, who had been about to reach for his shirt, paused. He touched a scar on his left shoulder, a triangular welt like a dent in his skin. “This came from an assassin at the Court of Valderan, armed with a bow and arrow. And this one, here”—he indicated a spot below his rib cage—“a mercenary with a whip; he’d broken into Antonetta’s eighteenth birthday party, looking for Conor. Here”—he stretched to reach his back—“an anti-monarchist with an axe who managed to infiltrate the annual inspection of the cavalry.”

“And this?” She touched a patch of raised skin just over his right hip. She smelled faintly of lemons.

“Hot soup,” Kel said, gravely. “Not every story is a heroic one.”

“You never know,” Lin replied, with equal seriousness. She finished rebandaging his injury and patted him lightly on the shoulder. “The soup could have been poisoned.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Kel, and retrieved his tunic with a laugh; it was the first time he had laughed in several days, and it felt like a weight lifted off him.

“Now,” she said, looking up at him as he rebuttoned his tunic, and he expected her to give him a piece of medical advice, instruct him to use the salve each day perhaps. “I did not only come here to see if you were healing.” She tucked a braid behind her ear. “The other night, when you were hurt, you said something about arrows, and then a name. Jeanne.”

He looked at her silently.

“But you were not saying Jeanne, were you? It was Ji-An. She’s the one who saved your life that night. She carried you up here—”

“She shot arrows at the Crawlers,” he said, shrugging on his jacket. “Killed several. I imagine they’re none too pleased about it. Lin, how do you know all this?”

“We both know him,” she said, quietly. “The Ragpicker King. We both know him, and we both shouldn’t. So I thought we could keep each other’s secret.” She held out a folded square of paper. “I didn’t come here because he asked me to,” she said, firmly. “I don’t even know how he found out I was planning to come to the Palace. But when I was leaving the Sault, a little boy ran up and shoved this into my hands. ‘Compliments of the Ragpicker King.’”

Kel took the paper gingerly, as if it were coated with black powder. “What does it say?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s addressed to you—”