The corridors of the Citadel of the Sun were cold at midnight, even in summer, even after a day of processions and pilgrimages. The stone held the chill, releasing it only when the seasons turned and the sun returned and the living forgot what the dead had known. Zeid walked these corridors with Rafiq a pace behind him and to his left, the position that allowed a servant to catch his master if he fell while preserving the fiction that no catching would ever be required.
The audience with his father had been brief. Seylim had been waiting in the small chamber behind the Hall of the Fountain, the one with the carved screen that allowed a man to hear the water without being deafened by it, and he had asked three questions: whether the Esberians had behaved, whether the local Illuminants had been satisfied, and whether Zeid had eaten. Zeid had answered yes to the first, partly to the second, and technically to the third, which was the answer Seylim had expected and which earned him a look that combined paternal concern with royal exasperation in proportions too exact to be accidental.
"Rafiq will summon the physician," Seylim said.
"Rafiq already intended to."
"Then Rafiq is more efficient than my son."
"Rafiq has always been more efficient than your son. You appointed him for precisely that reason."
Seylim had not argued. He had looked at Zeid for a long moment, and then he had done something he rarely did: he had reached out and touched Zeid's face, very briefly, the back of his fingers against Zeid's cheek, as though Zeid were still a child who had fallen while learning to ride and could be healed by a father's hand.
"You did well today," Seylim said. "The city will remember."
Then he had withdrawn his hand and returned to the business of ruling, and Zeid had walked through the cold corridors to his own chambers, where Hakim Ruhullah ibn Khaldan was already waiting.
Ruhullah did not need to shout.
He was a small man, compact and precise, with hands that had been trained in Qurtaban before its schools fell to the northern dynasties and a face that had been aged by decades of treating patients who lied about their symptoms, and he was angry.
"Remove your coat," he said.
Zeid removed his coat.
"The bindings."
Rafiq stepped forward and began to unwind the linen. The fabric peeled away in long strips, and the body beneath was marked where the bindings had pressed too long, red lines and deeper grooves and a place beneath the ribs where the skin had been rubbed raw. Zeid breathed in sharply as the last layer came free, and the breath was not quite a gasp and not quite a sigh and was, to Ruhullah's ear, entirely unsatisfactory.
"Your father," Ruhullah said, pressing his fingers along Zeid's ribs, "asks your body to sign treaties your hand did not draft."
"My hand will draft enough of them."
"Your hand will draft nothing if your ribs crack under the pressure of a silk coat."
"The coat was necessary. The procession required it."
"The procession required you to ride a horse for an hour in direct sunlight in a coat cut too narrow for a boy of fifteen, let alone a man of your years and your—"
"Ruhullah."
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The physician stopped. His fingers were still pressed against Zeid's side, and his face was close enough that Zeid could see the broken veins in his nose and the deep lines around his mouth and the particular exhaustion of a healer who had been fighting the same battle for too long.
"I know what you are going to say," Zeid said. "You have said it before. The bindings are dangerous. The heat is dangerous. The herbs you give me to stop the bleeding are dangerous in their own right, and one day they will stop working, and we will have to find something else, and that something else may not exist. I know all of this. I have known it since I was old enough to understand that my body was a problem to be solved rather than a gift to be received. But the treaty requires me to be visible, and visibility requires the bindings, and the bindings require the coat, and the coat requires the horse, and tomorrow I will do it all again because the alternative is that the treaty collapses and the war resumes and everyone who died in the siege will have died for nothing."
He stopped, breathing hard.
Ruhullah looked at him.
"Are you finished?" the physician asked.
"Yes."
"Good." He withdrew his hands, wiped them on a cloth, and reached for the jar of salve that sat on the table beside the unlit brazier. "The herbs will not stop working. I have told you this four times. They may become less effective. We will adjust the dosage. I have been adjusting dosages for forty years and I have not killed anyone yet, and I do not intend to begin with the heir-presumptive to a marriage treaty that cost two kingdoms a year of negotiation and your father the better part of his remaining hair."
"The heir-presumptive is my brother."
"The heir-presumptive to the treaty, then. The grammar is less important than the salve. Hold still."
Zeid held still.
The salve was cold and smelled of camphor and something else that Zeid had never been able to identify and had stopped asking about. Ruhullah applied it with the same precision he brought to everything, covering the raw places and the deep grooves and the spot beneath the ribs, and Zeid closed his eyes and let the cold sink into his skin.
"You are angry," Zeid said, without opening his eyes.
"I am always angry."
"You are angrier than usual."
"I am angrier than usual because you are more valuable than usual, and because being more valuable than usual means you are being used more thoroughly than usual, and because being used more thoroughly than usual means you will be in my examining room more often than usual, complaining of pains you refuse to prevent and symptoms you refuse to explain to anyone except me and Rafiq, who already knows."
"Rafiq knows everything."
"Rafiq knows more than everything. It is why he stands in doorways like a ghost who has been promised vengeance. It is extremely irritating."
"I will mention that you find him irritating."
"You will not, because you need me to renew the compound before the next supply caravan arrives, and the prescription requires my signature, and my signature requires a patient who is not actively trying to die of political symbolism."
Zeid opened his eyes. He looked at the ceiling of his chamber, which was painted with a pattern of interlocking stars that had been there since the reign of the Heredan kings and which had been preserved by successive dynasties because even conquerors were sometimes stopped by beauty.
"I am not trying to die," he said quietly. "I am trying to be useful."
Ruhullah's hands paused. Then they resumed their work, but more gently, as though the physician had remembered something he usually tried to forget.
"Your father," he said, "once told me that the hardest part of ruling was sending other men's sons to die. I did not tell him that the hardest part of healing was watching his son try to live in a body that the world had not been designed to accommodate, and being unable to change that world, and being unwilling to change that body, because the body was not the problem."
He finished applying the salve and stepped back.
"The problem," he said, "is that the world is too narrow for the bodies it contains. The coat is too narrow. The saddle is too narrow. The law is too narrow. The definitions are too narrow. You are not."
He wiped his hands.
"Come back tomorrow evening. Earlier if the pain sharpens. Do not ride in silk if you can avoid it. If you cannot avoid it, drink more water than you think you need and twice as much as you want. And for the love of the One, eat something before you leave in the morning. Rafiq will lie to me about it, but I will know."
Rafiq, still standing in the doorway, made a sound that might have been assent.
Zeid sat up and reached for his sleeping robe. The fabric was loose and soft and did not bind anywhere, and putting it on felt like relief and surrender in proportions he did not care to examine.
"Thank you," he said.
"Do not thank me. Thank the mint, which you will drink before sleeping."