As soon as the gap was wide enough, they pushed Aline inside and snapped the door closed again.
‘Watch what it does now, Falcio. See how it first terrorises the prey before killing it, as if it wants every other living creature to experience the fear and suffering it witnessed in its own foals’ eyes.’
‘Damn you!’ I screamed. ‘Damn you, woman – get her out of there! Get her out and I will do whatever you want – do you understand? You won’t have to do anything to me, I’ll do your bidding – just get her out of there!’
Aline was huddled in the corner as the Fey Horse towered above her, teeth bared and a sickening growling sound coming from its mouth. Its hooves struck the ground.
‘Now, Falcio, that’s not quite how this works.’ The Duchess turned to me. ‘What I find the most fascinating, and I hope you will as well, is that all of this hate and anger you feel will actually help speed things along. Isn’t that odd? Watching this girl get torn apart, followed by the other entertainments I have planned for you, will actually make you more malleable, not less. It turns out that the human mind has limits to what it can deal with, and once you break those limits … How can I put this? It’s like returning a statue to its original marble: you can chip away at it and make it into whatever you want, as if the original form had never existed.’
The horse was getting closer to her now, and nipping its teeth near her face, her hair. The anger coming from it was almost palpable: rage at everything and everyone. Aline’s mouth was gagged, but I don’t think she even tried to scream, so filled with terror was she.
‘For the sake of the Gods, there must be some human decency inside you—’
I heard Aline now, her screams muffled, but obviously terrified. She was bleeding from her left shoulder.
‘See how it starts with little bites? That’s what we do with the foals. It takes an age to finish the job. You’d almost think the creature was intelligent.’
Seeing the look on my face she said, ‘You know, in retrospect it seems hardly fair to call this beast a failed experiment. It does have its uses.’
I pushed myself up and threw myself at the bars. ‘Dan’ha vath fallatu!’ I shouted at the horse. ‘Dan’ha vath fallatu!’
The Duchess looked confused. ‘What on earth is that? Dannavath? Is that some kind of—? Oh my—’ She put a hand up to her mouth and started laughing. ‘That may just be the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard!’ She turned to one of the guards. ‘You know, I think he’s quoting fairy tales at the beast!’
The guard didn’t reply, but he grinned at me.
‘Fey!’ I screamed into the bars. ‘You are Fey! You are of the unbound, you cannot be controlled, you cannot be chained. Dan’ha vath fallatu! I am of your herd! The girl is of your herd! Dan’ha vath fallatu!’
I was crying and screaming through the bars like a madman. I reached towards the beast – it was too far away, of course, and if anything it was likely to tear my arm off. But it ignored me and took another bite, at the girl’s face this time.
She screamed again. Her cheek was bloody.
‘They cannot chain you,’ I screamed. ‘They cannot bind you! The Fey are free! The Fey protect the herd! Dan’ha vath fallatu! She is of the herd! You must protect the herd—’
The beast wasn’t moving away from her; if anything, it was getting wilder, more enraged. It stamped its great hooves, less than a foot from her body, then it reared and stamped again, this time an inch away from her.
‘Dan’ha vath fallatu,’ I cried again. ‘I am Falcio val Mond. I guard the herd, as you do. I am broken, as you are. Dan’ha vath fallatu: we are of the same herd. Dan’ha vath fallatu. The girl is of the same herd. Protect the herd. You cannot be bound. You cannot be controlled. Dan’ha vath fallatu. You must protect the girclass="underline" she is like you, like me—’
My eyes were bleeding tears and the world was a blur. I couldn’t tell if the girl was dead or if the beast was about to rip off my own head through the bars. I just kept talking to it, begging, pleading, saying anything that came into my head, through the sounds of hooves smashing against the ground. The growling from its throat shifted between snarling and neighing and pounded at the inside of my heart. Somewhere in the background I could hear the guards shifting restlessly and the Duchess shouting at them, and through it all I just kept repeating, ‘Dan’ha vath fallatu,’ over and over again.
Something struck me on the head and I fell back and cleared the tears from my eyes. I saw the horse smashing its head against the bars over and over, trying to break free, and I looked into the corner and saw Aline on the ground, unmoving. I thought she might be dead, then I saw the guards trying to use their poles to push back the horse so they could remove her from the cage. Her chest was moving up and down very rapidly. The horse bit at the poles and smashed its hooves against the side of the cage, and the guards would go no closer, even with the Duchess shouting at them. The horse was screaming, shoving hard against the cage with its whole body, and the iron bars were beginning to look as if they might buckle.
Ugh, still standing behind me, picked me up. The Duchess brought her face close to mine. She was smiling. ‘You marvellous, marvellous boy,’ she said, patting me on the cheek. ‘How wonderful – I’ve never seen anything like it! I do believe you’ve managed to reach through to something deep inside that monster’s brain – and do you know what that means?’
‘It means all your vile tortures have failed, Duchess.’
‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ she said, and kissed me once again on the cheek before whispering in my ear, ‘It means I can reach it too.’
She stepped back to watch again as the horse threw itself against the bars of the cage. ‘Take him back to his cell,’ she said to my guard.
‘What about the horse? What about the girl?’ asked one of the other guards, who was holding the broken end of a pole.
‘Leave it,’ Patriana replied. ‘Either the horse will knock itself out against the bars, or it will tire of trying to escape and go back to killing the girl. Either way works. I’ve other things to think about here.
‘Dan’ha vath fallatu,’ she said to me. ‘How utterly delightful!’
Ugh threw me over his shoulder and carted me back to my cell. This time, he said not a word nor made a sound the entire way back.
THE TORTURER’S CONSCIENCE
I awoke to a strange noise. My head was full of fog and I was back hanging from my wrists on the strange wooden gibbet that occupied much of the space in the small room. It took a moment to recognise that the sound I was hearing was someone crying.
I opened my eyes. It was dark in the room, apart from a small candle glowing near the door. I guessed it must be past midnight, though there was no way to be sure. I looked around for the source of the sound, thinking that perhaps I had been awakened by my own weeping, but it wasn’t me. In the corner, sitting on his stool, was Ugh, my torturer. In his hand was a knife, one of those he used to flay the flesh from those unfortunates who fell foul of the Duke’s ire. Ugh was weeping softly, sniffling periodically and wiping his nose against his forearm. Then he’d take the knife and make a small cut against his arm and watch the line of blood appear where the knife had been.
‘What are you doing?’ The croak of my voice made me realise I’d screamed myself hoarse by the Fey Horse’s cage. In my head I heard Brasti saying he hadn’t thought that was possible, and I gave a small, weak laugh.