Darren of the House of Torasan (Prisoner)
WHILE I WAS sleeping, soldiers came for Ariadne. The scraping of the door woke me, but I didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t know what I could say to her, and I didn’t know what she could say back.
I slept more deeply then, and didn’t wake until the straw mattress rustled and an arm encircled me from behind. Thin arm. Skinny wrist. Lynn.
“Hey,” I whispered into darkness.
“Hey,” she whispered back. “Did you eat?”
“I ate. Lynn . . . ?”
For once, she didn’t ask me to make the question any more explicit. She just planted a quick, firm kiss on my shoulder.
“He didn’t touch me,” she said. “He changed his mind.”
“How long before he changes his mind again?”
“Let’s not borrow trouble. I talked him out of it once. Maybe I can do it the next time, if there is a next time.”
She combed her fingers through my matted hair, trying to sort out the tangles, but her hands stilled, and she swore beneath her breath. The damn fleas. They were like a fiery, stinging net wrapped tight around me, one that I couldn’t scrape or beat loose.
“Sorry,” I whispered. “They’re all over me.”
“Why are you apologizing? Just roll over and let me get at them.”
I rolled over as far as I could—she had to help—and felt Lynn’s deft fingers brushing my skin as she began the long and gruesome task of picking the little bloodsuckers from my hair and clothing, crushing each one between her nails.
Lynn, who knew about abuse and helplessness from the bitter inside, had given up her world to join me in captivity. And now, after gods only knew how long a day, she was picking the fleas from my stinking body, one at a time.
“You know, Lynn,” I muttered into the straw mattress, “you don’t have to tell me a thing.”
Lynn flicked a crushed bug away. “Well, you don’t either.”
THEY PUT ME on trial the next day. I pretty much slept through it.
I didn’t plan to do that. I didn’t plan, period. Lynn roused me before dawn and bullied me into choking down a meal of dry bread and pulped apple. She got most of the food into me, but my abused stomach fought to hurl it straight back out. Everything between my breastbone and groin was a gurgling bag of pain, a tidal pool in an ocean made of acid. I curled into myself and bit my fist and swallowed over and over, trying to keep the tide from rising. Lynn held onto my big toe—one of the few parts of me that didn’t hurt—and said nothing, but squeezed hard each time I groaned.
That was the state of things when we heard approaching footsteps and a rattle of chains.
“Crap,” I said into the crook of my arm. “I’m going to need you to help me up.”
“I could do that,” Lynn said. “Or you could stay on the bed like a non-crazy person.”
“Or you could help me up, because somebody’s coming and like hell I’m going to be on my back when they arrive.”
“You do realize that none of your sailors are here at the moment? Nobody to impress with your macho posturing. You don’t have to play butcher-than-thou.”
Despite the complaints, Lynn wormed her way underneath my arm and lifted me. By the time the door opened, I was up. Wobbling, but up. I even managed a pretty good scowl. Neither of the guards seemed intimidated, or even interested. One grabbed me by the shoulders, and the other slapped manacles on my wrists with all of the interest and engagement of a man combing his hair.
Lynn, none too pleased at these proceedings to begin with, lost her head when the guard stooped to chain my ankles as well.
“What’s the point of this?” she snapped. “What are you afraid of? She can barely stand! You think she’s going to kick the fortress down?”
The guard at my feet grunted as the fetters snapped shut. “Orders.”
“Don’t be too hard on them, Lynn,” I said. “Some people are just helpless without orders. I bet these two need Milo to follow along when they go to take a shit, so he can tell them when to wipe, and how hard.”
It was, I realized too late, a mistake to insult a man who was so perfectly placed to throw an uppercut. The punch came all the way from the floor and took me straight on the point of the chin. Fortunately, the guard had lousy technique—asshole didn’t know what to do with his feet at all—or I would have gone to my trial with a cracked jaw and a mouthful of broken teeth. As it was, I saw whole galaxies of falling stars, and all but crushed Lynn when she dove to catch me.
“Idiot,” she said in my ear. “This is not the time.”
“I know it’s not,” I said, and spat stringy red. “But you have to admit, it was kind of funny.”
THERE HAD BEEN changes made in the Great Hall. The throne was gone, and so was the raised dais where the high table used to stand. Milo’s simple wooden chair rested on the same level as everyone else’s. Subtle.
For me, there was a little barred pen like a pigsty in the middle of the room. Less subtle.
They probably meant for me to stand in the pen, looking all forlorn and sniffly as I gripped the bars. Lynn had other ideas. She plopped down to the floor, arranged herself cross-legged, and raised an eyebrow at me meaningfully.
Well, honestly, why the hell not? I sat down beside her.
Milo read out the charges against me. I don’t remember exactly what they were. I was accused of at least a couple of murders, I think, plus various acts of torture, theft, and high treason. Near the end, he threw in a few counts of bestiality and public drunkenness—just for the hell of it, so far as I could see. The phrase Milo kept throwing around was crimes against the gods, crimes against man, crimes against nature. He could have cut through the bullshit and said, You’re a giiiiiiiiiirl, and I think you’re icky, since that was what he was really getting at.
While he rambled, I let my eyes roam the crowd. At first, I was playing spot-the-bastard, wondering whether every man in the crowd with darkish hair or a hooked nose was a distant relative of mine. Before long, though, I got interested in the people themselves. The hall was packed, not just with rebels armed to their broken teeth, but with commoners in their everyday clothes, cooks and farmers and fisherman. And not all of them seemed thrilled to be at my trial. There were divisions in the crowd, little groups and huddles; here and there, a pale and anxious face. You know how every time a bunch of friends goes out drinking, there’s always one spoilsport who spends the whole time worrying about the bar tab.
I was trying to find Talia in the mob when Lynn’s feather-light hand traced a path down my face from forehead to chin. “You should sleep, you know.”
“Sleep?”
“Yes, sleep. It is a thing that humans do if they want to stay functional. Can you think of a better use of your time right now?”
This was one of those strange floating moments that came up from time to time in my life with Lynn, when I suddenly wondered whether I knew the rules of reality as well as I’d believed. “Lynn, I’m on trial. If they find me guilty, then they’ll probably insert lots of sharp objects into me and light them on fire. Don’t you think I should pay attention?”
“Is there really any suspense about how the trial’s going to turn out? They can handle it without you. And anyway, I’ll fill you in later. Go to sleep.” She patted her thigh.
Feeling stupid, and probably looking stupider, I scooted down until I was lying half-curled with my head on her lap. The pen was too cramped for me to stretch out my legs—which made it just like our bunk back on the Banshee, except the chains were on me for a change.
I thought maybe I’d rest for a second, just to stop Lynn from fussing, but as soon as my eyes closed, I was out. Properly out, dead to the world. Even though I’d spent most of the previous two weeks lying down, I’d slept only in short snatches filled with violently coloured dreams that felt more like madness. This time, with Lynn’s warmth beside me, I slept deep and soft, and the whole world went away.
After some time—don’t ask me how long—I woke to an ear-splitting roar.
I opened one eye. The rebels were yelling, shouts of approval and cruel glee. I caught a few words here and there—mainly kill and the and Torasan and bitch, in that order.
Craning my head around, I crooked a questioning eyebrow at Lynn.
“Milo just found you guilty,” she said.
“Oh,” I said, and fell asleep again.
Before long, there was another round of shouting. I didn’t bother to open my eyes, but poked Lynn in the side, and she spoke in a tight, thin tone. “Milo just sentenced you to death.”
“Oh,” I repeated, and yawned and snuggled up against her.
This time, I didn’t have the chance to fall all the way under. Once more, the Great Hall rang with shouting, but this time, it was jangled, discordant, cries of protest and confusion.
“He’s not going to execute you yet,” Lynn said, as I opened my eyes crankily. “He said that you might be useful to the cause, so he’s going to keep you around until he can figure out whether you’re—how did he put it?—teachable.”
“Interesting decision.” I scrubbed at my sandy eyes and slapped my cheeks, trying to wake up. “Sounds like a good way to piss off everyone who wants me dead and everyone who doesn’t.”
Milo’s mouth was flapping open and shut, but whatever he was saying got lost in the roar of the crowd. Most of the rebels, it seemed, were not on board with Milo’s domestication project.
“There’s been a change in the weather,” I told Lynn. “The night Milo took the Keep, all his Freemen were slobberingly loyal.”
Lynn shrugged. “Well. He’s been lord of the Isle for two whole weeks. Plenty of time to start disappointing people.”
“Fact.”
In my experience, being in charge means disappointing everyone pretty much constantly. Hard to keep a hero’s halo when you’re deciding on a daily basis who has to clean the shitter.
I would not weep for Milo if someone happened to hack his head off and beat his internal organs into slurry . . . but if he lost control, that might be the end of the road for me. The screaming, frothing people in the room had all kinds of plans for my future, and none of their plans involved a tea party.
Lynn caught my elbow. “Hang on—he’s going to try something.”
Up at the head of the Hall, Milo stood in a huddle with two of his lieutenants, talking tersely. Giving directions. When Milo stepped back, the other two jogged from the room. Seconds later, they were back, followed by Ariadne, who shambled along with her eyes fixed on the floor, and Jada, who looked as if all her birthdays had just come at once.
Jada had a new toy, a thin rattan cane of the kind schoolmasters sometimes use. I winced at the sight. One of my nastier math tutors was a believer in canes. It hurt several orders of magnitude worse than being spanked with a bunch of reeds, and the sting didn’t go away for days.
Ariadne watched the cane warily, wearily, as Jada flexed it between her hands. It was too noisy for me to hear Jada, but I could read her lips: Down. Now.
Ariadne would have gone down on her own, I think, but either she moved too slowly, or she wasn’t allowed to avoid punishment just by obeying. With a lunge, Jada grabbed her by a handful of her close-cropped hair, and threw her at the floor. Ariadne went down and stayed down, crouching on her knees and knuckles, and trembling.
“Freemen!” Milo called, and this time his voice cut through the noise in the room. “Freemen, I hear you. That thing”—he pointed at me—“that thing is everything we’re fighting to wipe off the face of the world, and she deserves to be cut down where she stands.”
I was sitting. That didn’t seem to matter to him.
“But I have to fight the urge,” he said. “For the sake of the Isle, and for every one of you. If we keep her caged, we have a better chance of living free. That’s the only reason I haven’t nailed her pelt up on my wall yet. But in the meantime, let me prove to you that I know what to do with parasites.”
He nodded to Jada, who snapped into motion. The cane whistled through the air, crashing into Ariadne’s collarbone. She gasped, but the cheering drowned it out.
Lynn, beside me, had gone very still. “Tell me again how Jada was always a good kid?”
“She was, damn it.” I watched, helpless, as Jada dealt out another savage, cutting blow. She was smiling with clenched teeth as she did it, and her pupils were blown so wide, they looked like black stones. What the hell had happened to her?
As if she’d heard my thoughts, Jada’s head snapped in our direction. “You. Come up here.”
I shifted, but she was pointing at Lynn. “Yes, you, the Torasan whore. Come up here and we’ll see whether we can find you some honest work.”
“I think, on the whole, that I don’t like your sister,” Lynn said, in a quiet, measured voice. “I may have to do something about that.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Something. I’m still working on that part.” She darted a look at me, apologetic for once. “It may end up being something kind of stupid.”
“Do what you have to do. I’ll understand.”
“Even if it’s the kind of stupid that could make us both dead?”
“Especially then. I mean, come on. This is supposed to be a partnership, and I’ve been doing all of the stupid-that-could-make-us-both-dead for years. You need to step up and do your share.”
Lynn huffed out a tired laugh and clambered over the bars of the pen. It seemed to take her a long, long time to walk to the front of the hall, while some of the onlookers snickered, and some looked sick. All that weary while, Ariadne stayed where she was, curled on the ground, head bowed. I rocked back and forth, willing her to stand. She should have had enough strength for that, at least.
Lynn stopped six feet away from Jada. “Well?”
“We all know you love taking orders.” Jada stalked forward, closing the distance between them. “So here’s one. Make her bleed.” She pointed the tip of the rattan cane at Ariadne.
Lynn showed no surprise, and I felt none. We’d both seen it coming. It was only Ariadne who flinched, slumping even lower to the ground. Shaky breaths, trembling.
“Do you need the help?” Lynn said. “Looks like you can handle it on your own.”
“I know, I know, but it’ll be educational.” Jada drew the tip of the cane down Ariadne’s back, and watched her shudder. “The poor little chicken hasn’t figured all this out. She still thinks that this can’t be happening to her. Still waiting for a hero to break down the door. We need to get her focused on reality.”
“This isn’t necessary,” Ariadne said tightly. Cracked voice, through cracked lips. Her eyes never left the floor. “I’m going to do what you say.”
Jada considered her, letting the cane slide between her fingers, then lashed out. One vicious slice. Ariadne convulsed, and a new whip-weal bloomed on her cheek, the same shade of red as watered wine. Jada grabbed her by the neck and yanked her upwards, and only then did Ariadne try to stand upright. Her bare feet scrabbled on the stone.
Jada pulled her in close, mouth next to Ariadne’s ear, as though she was going to whisper a secret, but the words were loud enough for the whole room to hear. “Oh, I know you are.”
With a quick shove, she sent the princess staggering; one kick, two kicks, and Ariadne fell back to her knees. There was a belch of laughter from the crowd, though I saw one woman in the audience close her eyes tight. Ariadne crouched low, and her head shook slowly to and fro; I can’t do it, I can’t I can’t I can’t.
Lynn didn’t look at her sister, though they were only inches apart. When Jada tossed the cane at her, she caught it deftly.
“I don’t need to spell things out for you, do I?” Jada asked. “Take the skin off her back. Do it like you mean it. Do it well enough and I won’t make you do it over again—or send her back to the whipping post to have the job done right. Do it or she’ll spend the next week screaming curses at you for not doing it. Is there any confusion at all about what you’re about to do?”
Lynn said nothing, and now even the watching crowd was quiet, waiting.
The waiting was too much for Ariadne, who choked out, “For the love of all the gods, Gwyneth, just do it!”
She’d mistaken Lynn’s stillness for hesitation. I knew better, and Ariadne should have, too. Lynn had already decided on her course of action, and was taking a second to work out all the angles before she followed through.
Lynn breathed in, held it, and raised the cane. Jada grinned savagely, and Lynn returned the smile. She was still smiling when she opened her mouth and, with neither hurry nor hesitation, thrust the tip of the cane down her own throat.
I have never had to dodge a spray of vomit myself—a record which, gods willing, I hope to keep intact—but I don’t think Jada handled it very well. She did manage to turn her face, but the reeking spray still caught her head on, splattering her from cheeks to knees. Before she had time to do more than gasp, Lynn pounced. Still retching, Lynn thrust her hands into the mess on Jada’s shirt, smearing it over Jada’s face, into her mouth and eyes. Jada lost all sense of control, shrieking and spitting. Lynn made full use of the opening, hooking an ankle around Jada’s leg and taking her down hard onto the bare flagstones.
Lynn squatted down beside her, raked a vomit-smeared hand through Jada’s hair, and forced her chin up. “You see that?”
“That” was Milo, who was bent over as if racked with terrible cramps. But he wasn’t in pain—he was laughing, his whole body shaking with laughter, gripping the arms of his chair in a useless attempt to keep quiet.
“He doesn’t love you,” Lynn said. “You knew that, of course. But he doesn’t respect you either. Is that part a surprise?”
Jada came out of her paralysis, flailing, kicking, punching. I’m sure she was doing her best to make Lynn dead, but it was hard to take her seriously, that moment. With her face screwed up in a wet purple scrunch, she looked like a toddler mid-tantrum.
Which was appropriate, since that was pretty much how she was acting. A stern sisterly talking-to was in order.
I banged my manacles on the bars. “Lynn, shove her over here!”
Lynn glanced at me, nodded, and aimed a kick at Jada’s head that made her scrabble backwards across the floor. Milo wasn’t laughing anymore, but he seemed almost gleeful, a hard glitter in his eyes. When one of the Freemen started forward, Milo waved him back.
Jada managed to wrench herself to her feet, but in the process, she took her eyes off of Lynn—always a mistake. Lynn lashed out with the cane, swinging it up and down rather than left and right. We used to call that “the bacon-slicer” when our tutors did it to us, and it hurts like a particularly unpleasant hell. Jada clutched at her ear, blood oozing between her fingers, and flinched back when Lynn raised the cane again. I’d been waiting, measuring the distance between us. One careless step brought Jada in range.
An open message to the peoples of the world: If you want to get bonked on the head real hard, then get yourself a prisoner, put some wrist shackles on her, and stumble into her reach. I don’t know offhand why you would want to get bonked on the head real hard, but I am not one to judge people’s hobbies.
I balled my fists together and swung. The metal cuffs smashed against Jada’s temple, and when she staggered, I threw an arm around her neck and dragged her back against the bars.
An experienced brawler would have grabbed my fingers and bent them backwards until either they broke or I had to let go. Jada just shrieked and kicked. I put a stop to that by squeezing her throat, increasing the pressure until the shrieking turned into gurgling. Then I gave a little extra squeeze, just to be sure I had her attention.
“You’d better listen to me, Jada—are you listening? You really should be listening because you’ll be dead in less than a month if you don’t get smart.”
“You piece of shit,” she gasped, almost sobbing with fury. “Filthy pig. Coward. Liar—”
“Sure. Plus, I’m reliably informed that I’m a pervert, and also I snore. Forget about my personal failings. Start thinking survival. Don’t you get that you’re walking on fire? If Milo didn’t need a Torasan wife to have a claim on the throne, he’d have killed you already—”
She thrashed against my grip. “Stop lying. Stop lying, you’re lying, stop it!”
“You know this already. You’re just too chickenshit to look truth in the face. You’re his useful idiot, not his girlfriend, and your usefulness is going to run out.” Milo had finally signalled his Freemen, and they were almost on us. I yanked Jada’s head back until my mouth brushed her ear. “Think, Jada. For once, think. I’m more valuable to Milo than you are, and he doesn’t need us both.”
I let her go before the Freemen reached us and backed away, hands upraised. Jada reeled, swaying, purple-red blotches covering her face.
“Get them out of here,” she choked out. I figured that her throat was a bit sore, and grieved not. “Get them out of my sight, take them all away!”
Someone took Ariadne by the shoulders and bundled her through the nearest doorway. Lynn was in a less docile mood. The first man to grab her got a gouging thumb in his eye, and limped off howling. The other rebels didn’t make the mistake of attacking one by one. They all piled on at once, and Lynn vanished underneath the heap.
To hell with self-preservation, to hell with keeping my head down. I took three quick breaths and threw myself against the bars of the pen. Once. Twice. My ribs screamed, but the fence cracked, and one wall toppled. I scuttled towards Lynn, dragging the chains behind me, dragging a length of fence along with the chains.
By now, they had her upright, holding on to her by the arms and the hair and the neck and I couldn’t make them take their stinking hands off of her, so I put my hands on her too.
I touched her shoulders and I touched her face and framed her cheeks with my hands and leaned into her and against her. In the middle of that screaming crowd, in a room still charred black with my family’s ashes, I kissed her with a fierceness that would have been pathetic if she hadn’t been kissing back the same way. I pressed close, covering as much of her as I could, and grinned into the kiss when I felt her right hand moving. Clever girl. Clever, clever girl.
They yanked her away from me, before the kiss had gone on nearly long enough, and more hands clamped onto me when I tried to follow.
She twisted in their grip, trying to look back. “Darren, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t you dare,” I told her, and kept telling her, getting louder and louder as they pulled her away. “Don’t you dare be sorry. Give the bastards hell!”
But I don’t know how much she heard before they dragged her out of sight.