Lips Like Ice

XXIII

Lydia already knows that elf blood is dark purple, but to see so much of it on the Prince's face is startling. He lurches into the apartment with it running over his ice peak lips, holding himself up with the door frame.

She is on her feet before she realizes it, sewing needle and the dress she was wrestling with tumbling to the floor in front of the hearth. She presses her hands to her mouth, unsure if the Prince wants or would welcome her help. It appears he doesn't, for he stumbles in, slams the door behind him, and goes immediately to the closest chair—in this case, one of the large wing-backs by the fire. The wine decanter on the mantle place, which the seemingly invisible servants keep filled, is the next thing he reaches for, though he does so with a graphic wince and a hand clutched around his ribs.

Lydia dithers, and then makes a decision. She grabs one of the fruit bowls from the credenza, dumps its bounty out onto a plate and takes the bowl into the washroom to fetch warm water and a pile of clean hand towels. When she comes back, the decanter has been mostly drained and is dangling from the Prince's long fingers, perilously close to slipping out and smashing on the hearthstone.

The Prince himself is slumped sideways in the chair, eyes half lidded and his injured arm held tight over his abdomen. His head lolls back. The blood from his nose, and a rough scrape on his cheekbone, trail down his jaw, around his chin, and follow the line of his neck to the notch between his collarbones. There it pools, indigo and glittering in the firelight, a blooming stain against his cream silk shirt.

Lydia presses one of the towels to the hollow of his throat, and the Prince startles back to awareness. Lydia catches the decanter before it can fall, brings his free hand up to hold the towel against his neck, and puts the decanter on the credenza where it will be both out of his line of sight and out of the range of temptation. She pours him a cup of water instead, and brings that back, taking the towel back and molding his fingers around the beaten metal.

"Have that instead. You shouldn't drink with a head injury," Lydia scolds softly.

The Prince straightens from his slump and regards her through glittering, narrowed eyes. He sips the water demonstratively, making it clear that he is doing so on sufferance, and only to please her. That is good enough.

"Look up," Lydia says, ignoring his calculating, assessing stare. She has become too familiar with being on the receiving end of his curiosity to be put off by it any more. She uses another dampened towel to clean the blood from his cheek, the bottom of his nose. The water in the bowl turns lilac, then lavender, then indigo. She returns to the bathroom to swap it out for fresh twice before she is content with the state of his face. His nose is still bleeding sluggishly, so she has him hold an already soiled towel over his nostrils as she probes the bridge of it.

It is hot and swollen, and he jumps and hisses as she presses her index fingers on either side of the inflamed bridge. But nothing shifts or crunches under her touch.

"Nothing broken, I don't think," she says."Shirt off." "I do not wish for sex right now," the Prince pouts.

Lydia laughs. "I think it would kill you, the shape you're in. No way, buster, you're holding your ribs, so I want to see them."

Mulishly, he obeys. The skin of his shoulder is still mottled dark purple, edging towards green now, and his ribs are starting to blossom in sharp jabs of the same color. Just like before, there are more of the distinct crescent shapes of boots.

"You needn't nurse me," the Prince says petulantly, even as Lydia sets about cleaning these marks. "We have a Healing Wing." "And yet you came here, instead," Lydia says softly. "I

wonder why?"

The Prince sips at his water to avoid having to answer. "They'll make fun of you, is that it? If you go to a healer, or a doctor, or whatever you call them?" Lydia asks, voice gentle. It isn't really a question.