He grinned at her, his rich brown eyes crinkling. “Ah, that’s my Nikys.”
She couldn’t scream here. She couldn’t even yell. Another ten minutes of ferocious undervoiced argument moved him no further. He should have been made a siege commander, she thought.
Only the frightened jailer stopped it. He cracked the door and hissed, “That’s enough. Madame Khatai, you must come away now. I can’t stay out here any longer.”
Adelis pushed, the jailer pulled, and she found herself once more on the gallery, bewildered in the dark.
He led her back down the stairs. Out the side archway to the entry with the postern door.
Where they found a troop of six guardsmen and a senior captain waiting for them.
The jailer had not revealed her; he whimpered, too, as they were roughly seized. Another lantern was unveiled and raised, pushing back the shadows.
“Where is he?” asked one of the guardsmen, sounding confused.
The captain stepped forward. Cornered, she yanked back her hood and raised her chin. Protests and subterfuge and lies jammed up in her mouth, choked by fear. Wait. Give nothing away.
“Madame Khatai.” The captain grimaced. “Imagine meeting you here at this hour.”
Oddly, his ironic tone steadied her. This was a man who would talk, not strike. Or at least talk before he struck. “If anyone here had possessed the common courtesy or holy mercy to let me see my own brother in the daytime, I would have. I took what I could get.”
His glance seared the shrinking jailer. “So it seems.”
“You mustn’t blame him. I cried at him, you know.” Which was true, if incomplete. The captain, she suspected, was not a man whom feminine tears would soften. But let him think this was just an anxious visit from kin, not an escape attempt, and perhaps the poor man would get off more lightly.
“And where is your brother?”
“Right where you people put him. Unjustly.” Her lips drew back in something that was hardly a smile. “He claims the Father of Winter will support him in his innocence.”
The captain vented a faint snort, but stepped aside to murmur to two of his men, who departed at a run. They returned in a few minutes to report, “The general is still locked in, sir.”
The captain stared at her in some frustration. Had he hoped to catch her in the act? He said, conversationally, “We have your horses and your servant, you know. Rather a lot of baggage for an evening jaunt through town, don’t you think?”
It wasn’t as though she’d left them waiting at the prison’s front gate. So, she’d been spied upon—make that, more effectively spied upon—than even she had suspected. Not that anyone who’d really known the general and his widowed sister could have been too surprised at this turn of events, but how many people in Patos was that, really? She lived retired by choice, and seldom taxed Adelis at camp; he in turn was respectful of her privacy.
Betrayed from before the beginning, it seemed.
Her dead silence was apparently not the reaction for which the captain had rehearsed, so he gave up trying to draw her out, replacing his heavy irony with sternness.
“You efforts on your brother’s behalf are understandable, Madame, but pointless. If you return here at midday tomorrow, the general will be given back to you freely, without impediment. In fact…” He narrowed his eyes at her. “In fact, we will escort you home now, and guard your rest. And escort you back tomorrow. Just to make sure of it.” He added after a moment, “We will, however, be keeping the horses.”
“He is to be released?” The soaring thrill his words engendered died in her chest. That Adelis was innocent—or, be frank, something like innocent—she had no doubt. But he might mean only that her brother was slated to be summarily executed, yet have, as a pious mercy, his body returned to his family, such as she was, for burial instead of being hung on a gibbet outside the city gates as a lesson to other would-be traitors. Whatever the answer, the captain already knew. And the pity in his face frightened her far more than the sternness.
He didn’t reply, but just surrounded her with his men and marched her out into the winding streets of Patos.
So, they’d both been right, she and Adelis. Her pathetic escape scheme was doomed to failure. And his remaining in his captivity was a horrible, horrible mistake.
At noon the next day the soldiers came once more for her, as threatened, and escorted her in reverse back to the same side entrance of the municipal prison.
The captain swept through, saw them, and grimaced. “You’re too early. Keep her here. You three, come with me.” And to Nikys, “Wait.”
So they waited, shifting from foot to foot. No one spoke to her—nor to each other, no small talk or barracks chaff or crude complaint. They offered her neither insult nor reassurance. The unnatural silence stretched. Her head throbbed, as if it held too much blood, as if she’d been hung upside down.
One of the soldiers returned leading a saddled horse—one of her own hiring that she’d thought lost last night. He joined the wait, as wordless as the horse, which blew through its nostrils and cocked a hip.
The stillness was abruptly shattered by the most inhuman scream Nikys had ever heard. Even muddled by intervening walls, it rose high and piercing, then broke, then rose again. Then cut off sharp, as if the raw throat from which it reverberated had clenched closed, or been sliced though. The horse tossed its head and sidled uneasily.
It couldn’t have been Adelis’s voice… could it? Even at age ten when he’d broken an arm falling off his pony, he’d vented no more than an odd little Eh! Perhaps it was only some thief, convicted for a fifth time and paying a hand in penalty? Such punishments were sometimes administered here, she thought. Please, please, let it be some thief…
The remaining soldiers had stopped looking at her, or around, or at each other. To a man, they stared at the ground. Afraid? Who wouldn’t be, after hearing that unholy sound? She was terrified, her body shuddering as if in the winter wind, though sweat dampened her all over.
No. Stranger than that, she realized. They stand ashamed.
At length, silhouettes appeared in the bright archway to the inner court, two men supporting a third stumbling between them. Adelis? Not a corpse on a litter, to be sure, but relief didn’t wash through her. The solid form was familiar, its constricted posture not. His body was hunched, lurching, as though he were overtaken with wine-sickness.
It was only as they came near that she saw the pale bandage wrapped around his head, and realized why they were now willing to release the genius general to no more stern a warder than his sister.
Oh gods oh gods oh gods oh gods oh gods…
They’ve put out his eyes.
III
Penric guessed it might have been ten days when the stone was dragged back and not replaced, but no hooked rope dropped to collect his empty pail. Instead, a few feet of a leather hose were pushed over the edge of the hole, though not far enough to be anywhere near in reach. The guards were silent shadows in the wavering torchlight, its wan glow grown as brilliant as the sun’s in Pen’s staring, dark-adapted eyes.
“Now what?” he called up, not expecting a reply.
“Mercy for you, madman,” someone growled back down.
“I’m not mad.” Rather angry by now, though.
“You babble to yourself all the time.”
“I’m not talking to myself.” Just to the voices in my head. All ten of them. Not, he knew from long experience, a useful thing to mention.