This was no dream. The pain in wrist, ribs, heart was too real. The terror was too real. The anger was too real.
He wasn't ready to die.
His arm dropped back to his side, the chain collapsing in on itself. Dying meant never seeing Gerek again. Right now, more than anything, he wanted to hold his son. Wanted to hear him laugh. It wasn't fair that he should lose all the years they could have had together. He wondered how long it would take Gerek to forget him. Why would he want to remember a father who'd died a traitor's death?
Exhaustion kept him from howling in frustration and rage. Tears prickled against the inside of his lids, spilled over, and burned paths down both cheeks. Perhaps he should have begged a private audience with the king, told him what the bards had done, warned him that his kingdom was being eaten away from within. But then, why would he listen?
It was impossible to lie under Command.
And I'll pitch myself right out of the Circle before I beg for anything,
Teeth clenched, Pjerin scrubbed at his face with his free hand. At least when they told Gerek of his death, they'd have to tell him that his father died bravely.
A sound at the door of his cell snapped his head around. It was still the middle of the night, barely hours into the new day; what did they want with him now? He heard the bar drawn back, then the door slowly opened.
To his surprise, the corridor was as dark as the cell.
"Who's there?" His hoarse whisper sounded unnaturally loud and, rather than an answer, it brought movement. Someone slipped inside, pulled the door shut behind them, and remained standing just over the threshold.
"Pjerin…?"
It was a woman, the voice vaguely familiar.
"It's Annice."
Fury flung him to his feet, heart beating with such force he could hardly breathe around it. Stopped short by the chain before he could close his hands about her throat and squeeze the truth out of her, he tossed his hair back off his face and closed his fists on air instead. "Come to gloat, have you?" he asked, amazed at how restrained he sounded.
Annice frowned. She'd expected anger—it was the active side of despair—but she couldn't understand why it was directed at her. "I came because I needed to talk to you."
"Why?" Was this the payoff, then? Had she come to offer him his life in return for… for what? He still couldn't understand what game the bards were playing, nor was he willing to play along. They'd manipulated him as far as they were going to. I'll die first.
"Because… well, because…" The baby rolled and kicked. She traced the motion with her fingertips and decided to just say it. "Because I don't believe you betrayed anything."
Pjerin stared into the darkness and then he started to laugh.
It was a wild, almost vicious noise and Annice wanted to Command him to stop but, listening to the pain and fear that ran beneath it, she waited silently instead. The guards were at the far end of the hall on the other side of an iron-banded door and, with the cell door pulled closed as well, they wouldn't hear.
And considering the cells they guarded, they'd probably heard worse.
Staggering back, Pjerin sank down on the bench and buried his head in his hands. "You don't believe I did it?" he managed to choke out at last. "Center it, that's priceless."
This wasn't going at all the way Annice had imagined. "What are you talking about?"
He lifted his head and smiled. They thought he'd be panicking by now, ready to do anything to avoid the block. They didn't know he was onto them. "When did you do it, Annice? When did you put the words into my head? Afterward, when I was sleeping? Or during, when I was concentrating on other things?"
She opened her mouth and closed it again, unable to find the words to answer him.
Leaning back against the wall, Pjerin wished he could see her face. "You can't lie under Command," he said mockingly. "Did you think I'd believe your lies over my own memory? That I wouldn't figure out what you'd done?"
"What I'd done?" Annice repeated. "Pjerin, I don't understand."
Had she not been a bard, he would have believed her.
But a bard could easily layer that kind of confusion onto her voice. "What I would like to know," he continued, "is why you're doing all this. Lay your cards on the table so I can tell you to stuff them up your ass."
He'd taken a number of blows to the head on the way in from the mountains—the bruising she'd seen stood testimony to that—perhaps one of them had shaken his brain loose. "You think that I put those words into your head? That I did something to you so that you'd admit to treason? That I want you dead?"
It was Pjerin's turn to frown at an unexpected response. "You. The bards. What difference does it make?"
Annice tried to drag her thoughts around into some kind of order. "You think the bards did this to you?" She didn't wait for an answer. "Why?"
"Who else could wander through a man's mind and change his thoughts?" His lip curled. "It's just a small step from Command, isn't it?"
Forcing herself to consider it objectively, she supposed it was, although she'd never heard of the step being taken. "But why?" she repeated.
"How should I know!" Pjerin slammed his free palm down on the bench. "You tell me; you're the storyteller."
"Al right." Annice took a deep breath. "You keep insisting that you're innocent even though you know that it's impossible to lie under Command. This makes you either so stupidly arrogant that you can't believe you've been found out—which, by the way, is what everyone else seems to think—or…" Or he didn't actually do it, and it was possible to lie under Command and one of the foundations of the kingdom had just been swept to sea. Annice suddenly understood why no one else found it difficult to reconcile Pjerin's personality with what he was accused of doing. The consequences of believing him innocent were just too immense to deal with.
"Or?" Pjerin prodded stiffly. So everyone thought him stupidly arrogant. Well, he didn't give a rat's ass for what everyone thought.
"Or…" If she said it, then she made it possible. If she didn't say it, she had no reason to be here and she might as well let him die in peace. "Or, somehow, you were made to lie under Command."
"So you admit it?"
"I'm not admitting anything!" He was beginning to make her angry. "Can we look at this logically? Please?" When he made no answer to her sarcastic plea, she continued. "Someone changed what you think of as the truth. Because we do similar sorts of things, it could have been a bard. But I'm the only bard who's been near you in over a year and I know I didn't do it."
He snorted, the sound an eloquent expression of disbelief. "Easy to say."
Annice jerked forward a step; a pointless movement in the complete darkness, but she couldn't stay still. "Look, asshole," she hissed through clenched teeth. "I'm willing to believe you didn't do it. I'm willing to believe something or someone made you lie under Command. But unless you start meeting me halfway, and considering the possibility that I had nothing to do with it, I'm out of here and you can… well, you can die. Do I make myself clear?"
Flung across the cell at him, the words held no bardic artifice. Pjerin shook his head, confused and unable to hold onto his certainty. "But if it wasn't you, then it wasn't a bard. Then who…?"
"Obviously someone who wants you dead." She wiped damp palms on the thighs of her breeches. It seemed that she no longer had any doubts. And that left only one logical action. "I'd ask who you've pissed off lately, but there isn't time for the list if we're going to get you out of the city before dawn."
"What?"
Annice sighed and spoke very slowly. "I don't believe you did it. Therefore, I can't just let you die. So I'm going to get you out of here. Sit quietly for a minute, I'll be right back." She groped behind her for the edge of the door, pushed it open, and reached around the doorframe.