“Yes,” she said, because she was entrusted to heal the heir to the empire and could show nothing but absolute certainty.
A slash of a grin. “Liar.”
She didn’t mean to, but she met his gaze—those sapphire eyes so bright in the late afternoon sun streaming through the small window. “I did not mean any offense, Your—”
“I’m prying.” He tested the bandages. “I was trying to distract myself.”
She nodded, because she had nothing to say and could never come up with anything clever anyway. She drew out her tin of disinfecting salve. “For your lip, if you don’t mind, Your Highness, I want to make sure there’s no dirt or anything in the wound so it—”
“Sorscha.” She tried not to let it show, what it did to her to have him remember her name. Or to hear him say it. “Do what you need to do.”
She bit her lip, a stupid nervous habit, and nodded as she tilted his chin up so she could better see his mouth. His skin was so warm. She touched the wound and he hissed, his breath caressing her fingers, but didn’t pull back or reprimand or strike her as some of the other courtiers did.
She applied the salve to his lip as quickly as she could. Gods, his lips were soft.
She hadn’t known he was the prince the day she first saw him, striding through the gardens, the captain in tow. They were barely into their teenage years, and she was an apprentice in hand-me-down clothes, but for a moment, he’d looked at her and smiled. He’d seen her when no one else had for years, so she found excuses to be in the upper levels of the castle. But she’d wept the next month when she spied him again, and two apprentices had whispered about how handsome the prince was—Dorian, heir to the throne.
It had been secret and stupid, this infatuation with him. Because when she finally encountered him again, years later while helping Amithy with a patient, he did not look at her. She had become invisible, like many of the healers—invisible, just as she had wanted. “Sorscha?”
Her horror achieved new depths as she realized she’d been staring at his mouth, fingers still in her tin of salve. “I’m sorry,” she said, wondering whether she should throw herself from the tower and end her humiliation. “It’s been a long day.” That wasn’t a lie.
She was acting like a fool. She’d been with a man before—one of the guards, just once and long enough to know she wasn’t particularly interested in letting another one touch her anytime soon. But standing so close, his legs brushing the skirt of her brown homespun dress . . .
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” he asked quietly. “About me and my friends.”
She backed away a step but held his stare, even though training and instinct told her to avert her eyes. “You were never cruel to the healers—to anyone. I like to think that the world needs . . .” Saying that was too much. Because the world was his father’s world.
“Needs better people,” he finished for her, standing. “And you think my father would have used your knowledge of our . . . comings and goings against us.”
So he knew that Amithy reported anything unusual. Amithy had told Sorscha to do the same, if she knew what was good for her. “I don’t mean to imply that His Majesty would—”
“Does your village still exist? Are your parents still alive?”
Even years later, she couldn’t keep the pain from her voice as she said, “No. It was burned. And no: they brought me to Rifthold and were killed in the city’s immigrant purge.”
A shadow of grief and horror in his eyes. “So why would you ever come here—work here?”