Turning then with the rattling chains she sat against the wall. The only light from the door and the lanterns without burning and that light falling through the bars. In this world the dark was ever present and the eyes accounted for it but even so she could not see it out there in that dark. And yet she knew it was there.
“Talk to me,” she said. “Talk to me.”
She moved down the wall and knew not what time it was and sat next to the body. This also in chains, though the life had long fled it and all that remained were skin and bones. The chains loose about those ankles and wrists and running up the wall to the bolts driven into that stone with their eyehooks and they were perhaps never to be undone. This body bound forever in the dark and underground. More fitting in that way for the dead than for her, and yet she still felt the anger rise in her heart at seeing his condition.
The old rags just as hers. Nothing on the feet but leathered skin. Here in the damp the smell of it so thick. The chains holding them just out of each other's reach, though his life had fled him there at the end of his chains and she could now sit as closely as hers allowed, two bodies stretching for one another. As they had in time gone by and in life and now would do eternally.
She did not cry and had not in longer than she knew. She'd heard it said that a person could grow used to anything if they were given enough time and she now knew that was true. For he was a fixture of this place as much as chain and stone and dark, and that which had at first horrified her now brought a sick type of comfort.
The sameness of it, the consistency.
She sat and spoke to him. First of their son and the way he had stood with his back to the kingdom and the men going out below him. Also of the court and the way he held himself and the way others saw him for it. Some of these mannerisms of a king and others not. The actions of a boy learning to be a king on his own and with no one to teach him and that incredible power to wield.
Standing and working as she spoke. She was six stones up now and three removed. Every other, with those between remaining. Crude steps or a crude ladder, climbing just the height of her body. Working over her head and in the faint light of that barred window above.
Pushing the spoon into the mortar, the heavy handle first, feeling that mortar break and shatter. Older than the city, this crypt. Old and fragile in that age, as were the bones of the dead. Mortar had once been made from the ground bones of slaves and she did not doubt that this had been some of the same. Each flake just adding to his body there below and someday all mingled together, slave and ruler alike, all arriving at that same fate in this same place.
A cruel irony in that.
She pushed the spoon and felt the mortar break again and brought it back toward herself and removed a section the size and depth of her fingernail. Almost nothing at all. Brought the spoon back and repeated the motion. And again. An endless chipping and scratching in the dark. The mortar flaking and coating her fingers, the feeling of them dry against one another making her skin crawl. She almost laughed at that, the involuntary shudder over that grating dryness when all about her lay death and solitude, but she did not. She didn't know who was listening.
Continuing her speech as she worked, covering what faint sounds she made. Telling her dead husband of the word of dragons out of the northwest, in the stone cities. The man from Mraok with his long robes and fear in his eyes, begging for archers. Talking of burning outlands and dark shadows in the night sky and saying he'd also sent word to the Ringed City. As if the rust kings could still save them, the dead hunters rising from the ashes. Her son giving the man a small company and letting him go, stripping him of gold he never thought needed to be spent.
She asked him what he thought, working a pebble loose from the mortar. Did he think the dragons had returned, or was it just fear that had returned? Would the archers die or bring it down or stand in boredom on the ramparts until they were sent back?
Other things she could no longer say. Things she did not know. But always now deeply within her. Blinking that pain like sand in her eyes. Ground in. Blood slick on her cheekbones.
The pebble came free, fell with a clatter to roll across the stone floor. She stopped and waited for his answer and listened to it roll and he did not say anything.
Returning to her work. Feeling the stone move now, ever so slightly. The stones all about the same size but with vastly different shapes. Field stones plucked from the mud when the cells had been built, thrown together as they could be with that slave mortar. She moved it up and down with her thumb and nodded and commenced prying the mortar from the left side. It went easier there, where the water had been running and wearing it away before she had begun her work. Before she had been born.
At last, telling her husband about the place she still held. For the line ran through her and it was her blood in the boy made him what he was and he kept her alive for that blood. Were it all drained from her body and she left pale and cold in the damp, he'd have no further use for her. But as her heart beat and royalty moved in her veins, she still ruled this land. Until he was old enough to gather power and they couldn't take the throne from him.
Her husband knew. He knew but she told him and it covered the sound as the mortar fell.
She did not know how many were behind it. Were the common people in the village asked who ruled, it would have been her name on their lips and they would have spoken of her riding through the orchards on a white mare with a gold dress and apple blossoms in her hair and smiling on them with favor. An event that had not happened but which became as it passed from the lips of advisors to bards and to the people themselves.
They'd perhaps talk of the king's tragic death in the wastelands to the north, falling before a dark army even as he turned it back. Those black riders on their black mounts with armored horses and spines on their helms and swords forged in the fires of hell. How he'd been struck down fighting to save them with his white cape flowing behind him and the gold crown still on his brow and the city's name on his breath.
An absurdity, to be sure. For he'd never left on such a campaign and would never have fought in the snowdrenched mountains in cape and crown, but the bards made it what they made it. A scene painted in poetry that people would cling to and repeat and allow to grow. For people inevitably believed what they wanted to believe and so they still believed they were ruled by the queen with the apple blossoms and her gloriously slain husband.
The stone moved again, and she stepped back to work it with both hands. Close, so very close. She could move it now to both sides and up and down but it was like pulling that last tooth that clings to the bloody root when it should fall. She stepped back up and pressed the spoon sideways into the crack.
Those people would not know that she lived here in this underground. That her husband had withered here in agony and his own filth to die upon the stones at last, in the dark and apart from his people with his throne chamber far above. Too far like the light and air to a man caught and drowning. That his own son had at last poisoned him when starving him became too much and his death was loud and long and horrible.
That his queen sat and stretched just to wipe his brow but he could not lean close enough. That she spoke to him until the end. Her hair full not of flowers but of dirt and her dress not gold but these rough canvas rags.
She pushed upward on the spoon and the stone twisted and ground in its housing and then she felt it come loose. She pushed harder and it slid forward and she reached up quickly with the other chained hand to keep it from falling and grabbed the edge and carefully put the spoon down at her feet. Straightened again and took the stone with both hands and gently played it back and forth with the mortar raining down and scattering toward the bones and then it was in her hands. She drug it from the wall and held it and looked at it and closed her eyes and opened them and looked at it again.