Murtagh stared without seeing as cultists stripped him of his clothes. All of his wounds had been attended to; where Bachel had inflicted her tortures upon him, his skin was again smooth and seamless.
From her raised seat, the witch watched with an impassive gaze over the rim of a dented brass goblet. Grieve stood beside her, stone-faced.
“Turn about, my son,” she said.
He did.
By the middle of the chamber sat Thorn, wings furled, shoulders hunched high and tense. No shackles bound his scaled limbs, yet he did not stir.
“Stop.”
Murtagh stood with his back to Bachel, eyes fixed upon the pale beams of sunlight that crept in about the edges of the distant doorway. The mosaic floor was cold against his feet. He shivered, but it was a reflex; no thought accompanied the movement.
“A most unsightly scar lies upon him, Grieve.”
“Verily, Speaker.”
“I wonder, ought I remove this blight from him? He is to be our shining paragon, after all. Our faultless champion. Our king of kings.”
Murtagh’s lips twitched, but he could not speak.
“If you so wish, Speaker.”
“Hmm.” A slosh of wine in the goblet as the witch took a sip. “No, I think not. It is good for him to remember that he is not without flaw. And that he is not all-powerful.”
“Very wise, my Lady.”
Thorn’s limbs trembled, and the slightest sound escaped his throat.
“Turn now and face me, my son.”
He did.
The witch leaned forward in her seat. “You are as you deserve to be, Kingkiller. Never forget that. Your father’s hate marks you, and I shall not be the one to lift that burden. Not until you bring yourself to accept Azlagûr, myself, and the Draumar as your family. For that we are, and we love you more than you know.” She looked then to Grieve. “See to it that he is well fitted. After all, he is our most honored son.”
Disapproval crossed Grieve’s face, but his voice remained deferential. “As you say, Speaker.”
“I do.”
For a time, Murtagh stood fully exposed. His skin felt strange upon him, and he knew not who or what he was. An unaccountable sense of grief formed deep within him.
Then the cultists brought clothes in which to garb him. Fine woolen trousers—red and black—soft leather riding boots that reached to his knees, and a thin undershirt overlaid with a padded jerkin. Atop that, a tabard of archaic scale armor, the metal velvet grey and the tip of each scale adorned with a line of embedded gold that traced the shape of the scale. A gold-studded belt cinched about his waist, and upon his head they placed a crown-like helm, such as some long-forgotten king might have worn into battle.
“There,” said Bachel, leaning back in her seat. “Now you look as you should.”
Murtagh did not answer. Words seemed of no import. Behind him, he heard Thorn’s heavy breath as they waited upon the witch’s command.
Bachel’s eyes were cold as she studied them—they her vassals, she their maternal sovereign. Her voice rang with a stony determination that overrode the soft cries of the crows above: “The time has come. We have not arrived at the end of the end, nor the middle of the end, but I say now that this day marks the beginning of the end. And it shall be a calamity to all who oppose us.”
Many things Bachel had Murtagh do. He did as he was told—listless, unresisting, his mind muffled as if bound in batts of felted wool. On the few occasions when a coherent thought came to him, he wondered whether any of it was real.
Nights he spent in the cell beneath the temple. The Urgal opposite him kept trying to speak with him, but none of the creature’s words held in Murtagh’s mind. They were not from Bachel, and so he did not remember them.
Days he spent sitting to the right of Bachel in the temple’s inner sanctum—while Grieve glowered at him from across the chamber—or else riding beside the witch as she led him about the valley. Evenings they feasted in the courtyard: leisurely banquets of roasted boar meat, aged wine, and mushrooms cooked in every possible way. And always Bachel was talking to him: talking, talking, talking, an endless stream of words that shaped his actions and ordered the world about him.
As she spoke, she sometimes rested her hand on his arm, not with any passion, but as she might with a valued possession, and her scent mingled with that of the ever-present brimstone.
Thorn accompanied them most times, but not always. Twice Murtagh saw Grieve climb into Thorn’s saddle and ride on the dragon high into the sky above Nal Gorgoth. And once they flew out of sight beyond the jagged peaks and did not return until several hours thence.
When they did, Thorn landed in the courtyard and crouched there, cold and shivering. Murtagh stared at the dragon, miserable, though with no means to give voice to his misery.
From among the pillars along the front of the temple came Alín, bearing a pitcher of water and a basket of bergenhed and a ragged piece of cloth. She placed the basket before Thorn’s head and then wet the cloth and began to wash dirt and dried blood from the healing wounds that striped Thorn’s side.
Murtagh’s lips trembled, and he clenched the belt around his waist.
At Bachel’s command, the cultists began preparations for a grand festival to be held in a week’s time. “I have had a premonition,” she announced to the assembled village. “The time of the Black Smoke Festival approaches. Send forth raiding parties that we may gather the means to properly worship Azlagûr the Devourer.”
Then Nal Gorgoth became a hive of activity. The cultists swarmed about in constant, frantic pursuit of their duties. Three groups of armed warriors left on horses, shouting their praise and devotion to Bachel, spears held high. Murtagh watched them go from beside Thorn, and he wished he could leave with them—to escape the valley and breathe fresh air untainted by brimstone.
That day, Bachel took him on another boar hunt. She gave him a spear to wield, and he held it without feeling, though the weight of the weapon stirred an obscure desire within him.
The witch rode before him on Thorn, her hair bound up in feathered tufts, her arms bare to the wind, her teeth flashing with fierce delight. It felt strange to have another upon Thorn with him—strange to Murtagh and strange to Thorn. But neither of them complained of it.
Bachel’s honor guard followed on the ground while Thorn flew from Nal Gorgoth into the mushroom-laden valley where the boars rooted and rutted.
The hunt went much as before. At Bachel’s command, Murtagh took his place by her side and set his spear against the arch of his foot and waited while Thorn drove the beasts toward their position. He waited, and no fear quickened his pulse, nor excitement nor joy nor any form of normal human feeling.
He watched what was happening as if viewing it from a great distance, as if nothing he saw could affect him or Thorn and, thus, was of no real consequence. Even his own actions felt as if they belonged to another person: a stranger without a name who wore his face but contained nothing of his self.
The boars drummed across the beaten ground, a wall of snarling, snorting animal flesh, intent on trampling a path through those blocking their way.
A shock of impact: blood and heat and the smell of viscera.
He killed his boar, as Bachel did hers.
Afterward, Bachel reclined on her litter and had Murtagh sit at her feet while her warriors tended the wounded and dressed the slain beasts. A circle of broken mushrooms surrounded them, and the air was heavy with the earthen scent.
Murtagh stared unblinking at the sky beyond the high mountain peaks, at the pale emptiness that beckoned, impossible and unreachable.