“Three.”
A slow smile. “I could go to the king right now and ask for your dismissal instead of waiting three months.”
Chaol clenched his jaw. “Name your price, then.”
“Oh, there’s no price. But I think I like the idea of you owing me a favor.” That dead smile returned. “I like that idea very much. Two months, boy.”
They did not bother with good-byes.
•
Sorscha was called up to the Crown Prince’s chambers just as she was settling in to brew a calming tonic for an overworked kitchen girl. And though she tried not to seem too eager and pathetic, she found a way to very, very quickly dump the task on one of the lower-level apprentices and make the trek to the prince’s tower.
She’d never been here, but she knew where it was—all the healers did, just in case. The guards let her pass with hardly a nod, and by the time she’d ascended the spiral staircase, the door to his chambers was already open.
A mess. His rooms were a mess of books and papers and discarded weapons. And there, sitting at a table with hardly a foot of space cleared for him, was Dorian, looking rather embarrassed—either at the mess, or at his split lip.
She managed to bow, even as that traitorous heat flooded her again, up her neck and across her face. “Your Highness summoned me?”
A cleared throat. “I—well, I think you can see what needs repairing.”
Another injury to his hand. This one looked like it was from sparring, but the lip . . . getting that close to him would be an effort of will. Hand first, then. Let that distract her, anchor her.
She set down her basket of supplies and lost herself in the work of readying ointments and bandages. His scented soap caressed her nose, strong enough to suggest he’d just bathed. Which was a horrible thing to think about as she stood beside his chair, because she was a professional healer, and imagining her patients naked was not a—
“Aren’t you going to ask what happened?” the prince said, peering up at her.
“It’s not my place to ask—and unless it’s relevant to the injury, it’s nothing I need to know.” It came out colder, harder than she meant. But it was true.
Efficiently, she patched up his hand. The silence didn’t bother her; she’d sometimes spent days in the catacombs without speaking to anyone. She’d been a quiet child before her parents had died, and after the massacre in the city square, she’d become even more so. It wasn’t until she’d come to the castle that she found friends—found that she sometimes liked talking. Yet now, with him . . . well, it seemed that the prince didn’t like silence, because he looked up at her again and said, “Where are you from?”
Such a tricky question to answer, since the how and why of her journey to this castle were stained by the actions of his father. “Fenharrow,” she said, praying that would be the end of it.
“Where in Fenharrow?”
She almost cringed, but she had more self-control than that after five years of tending gruesome injuries and knowing that one flicker of disgust or fear on her face could shatter a patient’s control. “A small village in the south. Most people have never heard of it.”
“Fenharrow is beautiful,” he said. “All that open land, stretching on forever.”
She did not remember enough of it to recall whether she had loved the flat expanse of farmland, bordered on the west by mountains and on the east by the sea.
“Did you always want to be a healer?”