Chapter 14: The Physician

"Does she?" said Tamir. "I wouldn't know. I was asleep for both of them."

Sadeq laughed softly.

Then he closed the door.

I didn't come out from behind the screen until the footsteps were gone from the stairs.

Tamir was sitting on the edge of the cushions with his head in his hands.

"He knows," I said.

"He suspects. It's how he's stayed alive for twenty years."

He looked up.

"You'll go down by the stairs tonight. Not the pipe. And you won't come up again without Laleh."

"You don't give me orders."

"No," he said. "I'm asking."

That stopped me.

I put the grate back in its frame and went down by the stairs.

The guards were gone from his door.

At noon I found Laleh in the stable court, combing burrs out of the gray mare's tail.

"The physician," I said.

"I'd like to drown him in his own jar."

"Then he can't talk. And Sadeq buys another physician."

She stopped combing.

"He heard Tamir count the nights," I said. "He's frightened."

"Good."

"A frightened man gets rid of things."

Laleh's eyes went to the low green door at the end of the stables.

"The jar," she said.

"The jar."

I'd brought my own vial down from my room.

My father's musk, the last of it.

"A grain of good musk is still talking in a month," I said. "My father's rule."

"I'll smell it wherever he takes it."

Laleh grinned slowly.

"And how do we get him to take it?"

"You," I said. "You've got the loudest voice in the palace."

At the second hour of the afternoon, the physician's boy came down for the lamp oil.

Laleh was waiting in the stable court with three grooms and the mare.

"Tell your master," she said, loud enough to rattle the shutters, "the perfumer from Tel Zahra wants to smell his stores."

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