Work Text:
The scars on his back are the worst of the lot, he often explains, and it makes things somewhat easier for him to say it. Somehow neater in spite of the implied mess. Like it can somehow become more true each time he opens his mouth.
Like, somehow, if he can say it, he can also believe it.
They live in a world of magic and unspoken rules. Why, then, shouldn’t this sort of thing work?
Well…
He’s lying when he says it, of course, but it’s a lie for the sake of simplicity. It doesn’t necessarily mean that he enjoys telling it. But it makes a great deal of things easier, so tell it he does. Frequently.
It’s like a shape he can cast with his hand before a fire which sprays a great shadow upon a wall. A thing that would echo through any story, told again and again. Instantly knowable. A recognizable arrangement of parts that has any person think that they understand it all.
The shape of him, maybe.
Him, his nature, the truth. All of it fitting neatly together as his life once did.
Certainly, it makes things easier.
So he lies about the scars every chance he gets. It’s not too hard to believe that they’d be the worst though. They’re certainly worth the notoriety.
They are a great and garish collection, frenzied and terrible, that span his whole back and if anyone thinks he’s hiding something then there it is. Clear as day, once he’s lost the shirts and doublets and capes that he wears in a great many layers.
Even the layers, his fastidious way of keeping them all year, add to the story.
He never mentions how he’d worn such things before. That what he’d truly want to hide couldn’t be so cleanly covered. But it’s somewhat useful now. Precedent. An assumed disguise that isn’t actually hiding anything of note. Only suggesting that he’d want to hide this. The same way any man would.
And he has something to hide, of course.
He’d argue that every man worth his salt must have such things to get anything done and so he does what he can to give people what they want to think of him while keeping his private business private, thank you very much.
It’s easy, with all the lies he’s sewn up in himself like so many jewels smuggled out of a treasury and stitched within the lining of a great fur coat, to give people what they think the truth should look like.
Splayed across his skin, buttoned up under his fine silks and never mentioned outside of someone’s asking. Outside of the proper time and place.
None think to look anywhere else, what with all the awful spectacle nestled there. The story Tadius has told about it. The lies he’s laid, tight as snares, around the truth of the matter again and again.
The actual worst of it. Small and obvious but only if you knew to look where you weren’t guided to. If you turned from the assistant and kept your eyes instead on the magician’s hand.
The first thing he’d learned in his position, when mapping out how to exist usefully and comfortably amidst traitors and liars and fools, was that the easiest way to hide something at court was to leave a simpler secret out in plain sight.
Falsified blackmail to stop wandering hands from discovering the secret compartment in his trunk.
A soppy letter in his hand to hide the invisible ink on the other side.
The ruin of his flesh to hide what’s well and truly become of him within.
Let them think they know his shame. The shapes of his nightmares. If they think they have him, a simple man with simple fears and even simpler shame, then he remains free even in a court like theirs.
Cursed as he is, trapped by his own hand, he can somehow be free.
He tells himself this frequently.
The truth is hidden in his mouth, packed up rightly and tightly under his tongue. Under his skin. In the sweet marrow of his bones. In the spilling of his blood.
It looks worse than it is, he tells people with a dry sort of chuckle to put any listeners at ease, because they are somewhat paradoxical in nature.
The words and the old wounds and the man they’ve been painted onto for years.
The thought of his pain and the way he wears his hair.
The way he trims his beard and keeps his teeth clean and how he must have screamed.
The way he’d been torn apart but the once and the way he now neatly fits back together again.
He can hear himself talk and see the picture he paints of himself. He’s not delusional as to who anyone would think him to be.
To most people he’s too stuffy, too straitlaced, or barely there at all. Hardly anything worth looking into or even remembering.
A voice to call out someone’s title at the crossing of a threshold so that nobody has to ask around. Someone to hold out an arm and take a coat so that an entrance remains uninterrupted. A pocket which can hold a handkerchief and produce it without needing a command so that one’s nose never runs for more than a second. A place for that hankie to magically disappear to after use that won’t complain.
He ’s hardly the sort of person to be expected to have lived an interesting life.
He’s more the sort of face in a line, hundreds strong, that stops existing the moment someone great or lovely stops looking at him.
He is composite parts, his hands and voice and back, that do not need to come together outside of their usefulness. Of the comfort he can provide.
Which is, to clarify, an image he’s worked quite hard to project. Purposefully.
An aura of forgetfulness that has him known as, “oh, yes, the prince’s man, him,” and little more to most of the people he meets or regularly interacts with.
He knows the name of every member of the castle staff and doesn’t have that many friends. He keeps to himself but not in an interesting sort of way.
Once they’ve heard the story, once they’ve taken their shares of it or inserted themselves into it, most people leave him alone.
He’s just Tadius. Him. Over there. He scurries about. He fusses. He keeps the schedule. He’ll make you tuck in your shirt and doesn’t take jokes all that well and rolls his eyes. He’s got those scars, see? Poor bastard. You don’t want him sniffing around, and so nobody does anything but count their lucky stars when he’s out of a room. They certainly don’t notice when he’s slipped away. They don’t wonder where he goes.
Nothing else to look here for.
And that’s the sort of thing, he likes to believe, that’s kept him alive.
But that doesn’t mean he isn’t trotted out, as they all are, for a bit of spectacle from time to time.
It’s always a little jarring for people to see what he’s lived through. But it’s happened enough times that he can maneuver around it. Can sort of shrug in a what are you gonna do sort of way and set about showing how perfectly fine he is.
For a crowd. On command.
It’s the delicate balance, a set of finicky scales, to entertain and assuage in equal part. To give them the horror and not have them leave frightened.
To lead them to believe that it couldn’t have well and truly hurt that much if he was capable of laughing about it now. If he was willing to talk about it in front of so many people.
All the prince had wanted was the story, and his part in it. The same way he wanted someone else to snap a sheep’s bone so he could suck out the marrow. But Tadius had whittled the whole affair down to what was necessary. Something he could use. A quick needle of bone. An ivory handle, smooth in his palm.
A tool.
Some crowds only need a tug at the collar to see the one tendril of past injury that licks up the back of his neck but, more often than not, the prince instead has him remove his shirt entirely to display the mess that had been carved from the nape of that neck to his lower back.
That had been put back together far better than he deserved. What had been far worse than he should have survived.
The puckering of the skin from the stitches (where they’d been required). The deep gauges scraped into him as a river might have long ago started carving away at a canyon. The faint lines, still visible in some places, even where stitching hadn’t been necessary, as if something had tried to dig its way through him.
Tadius, almost looked through in these moments, has no shame. It is a distinct separation, him from his body. From the story. From that night.
For the prince, it’s a parlor trick. A dog playing dead. A jester’s somersault.
Something he possesses and can use at his leisure. Something to bring out in a room with a crackling fire and a whole host of people who weren’t immediately taken with him. To turn the tide of their enthusiasm. To draw their eyes.
Everyone loves a good story, after all.
Most often it gets brought up to immediately follow a story of this knight’s scars from a noble quest or that sailor’s wounds from a recent run-in with dread pirates that had seen a sword buried in his belly and survival as nothing a distant dream on the wave-soaked horizon.
Their valorous or thrilling stories, having elicited cheers and the enamored eyes of the young and the restless, always bring the prince to stony contemplation. To the inevitable question of how he might bring the room back to him when they didn’t want to partake in a song or listen to the amorous recounting of his passions.
The prince possesses, back in the castle, the following things: a king’s ransom, a fleet of servants who leap at his very command, and the love of his people.
Never ebbing, always flowing, as if their uncrossable ocean would pour itself out over and over again to cross stones and meadow grass to lap at his window and never leave.
He has soup spoons and signet rings and has kept a total of twenty-three pets in his lifetime from jeweled macaws to trained ferrets and one dire wolf who’d escaped to deeper woods when facing down life as a well-kept pet.
He has the sun, the stars, and the moon.
But what he craves most of all, and probably always will, is more than that unnamed love. He wants closeness. Attention. Glory. He’d do just about anything to catch such ephemeral things, even for so fleeting a moment. He catches it with his hands, his mouth, and cannot stand not to be looked at.
And so, he begins.
First, he promptly drains his cup and tosses it in a random direction, which always makes an attention-drawing clatter (or, if it doesn’t then the second thrown cup, which is normally plucked from Tadius’ hands, does the job instead).
Tadius then has to stand to collect the cup, quickly, before it all gets started. Maybe cover a spill with a napkin if there had been any drink left. He might even get a chance to swiftly offer apologies and a guessed amount of gold pieces to whoever he needs repay if said cups were dented or shattered or if the resulting stain was particularly large.
He always overpays now. He doesn’t carry silver anymore unless he’s wearing gloves, which he cannot do inside except during the height of winter or when he’d found himself in very drafty buildings.
So, gold it is. Strangers simply think him generous and he doesn’t have time to prove them wrong.
One of the small mercies, as he smiles and they thank him with wide eyes, is that he doesn’t have to see any of these people again. He considers how that should make all of this perfectly satisfactory in the same way one considers a hypothetical design for a machine. It should work.
He tells himself that the tugging of scars as he moves is all in his head, all him working too hard. Stress, maybe. He can’t recall anymore if his skin had felt different before. If the new way it stretched and settled uncannily over his bones at times could be imagined.
Stories that entertain in these sorts of arenas always require scars, strange or not. Irregardless of how Tadius feels about much of anything.
The prince has never been blessed with any scars worse than the one he received at his birth when the cord was cut, but Tadius has, and the spectacle always begins with a bright cry of, “well, my man’s had worse than that,” from between royal lips and keeps going from there. They’re off to the races.
The rest of the night, for Tadius, then shuffles itself into a new configuration.
Shadow puppetry. Storytelling. Separation.
All eyes turning to him just as he starts to walk to the front of the room with a grim sort of smile. He has a moment of presentation, nothing up his sleeves, of just himself. That’s part of what makes it so harrowing for the crowd. He looks ordinary enough. He doesn’t look the type for worse than that.
Tadius then does his best to wince sympathetically at the first man whose story was usurped while undoing his doublet, just before he has to turn his face away, as if to say that he truly doesn’t see any need to compare this mincing to that mauling or any sort of keelhauling.
He truly doesn’t.
If it were up to him, but it isn’t, then this wouldn’t be happening. Or, at least, it wouldn’t be happening this way.
But it’s somewhat out of his hands, which are too busy peeling off his undershirt. He doesn’t want to seem to think anything less.
But such efforts are mostly met with the scowl that can’t be directed at a crown prince (even when he’s sitting in a seedy tavern at a wharf for both ambiance and variety, as he likes to claim for the reason of their frequent trips from the castle).
“It’s truly fucking dreadful,” the prince then says in this particular tone with which he approaches the entire incident. One that says he does, in fact, think it to be dreadful but also remains entirely fascinated by it. A story he will never tire of both hearing and telling. “Show them, Tadius.”
That is always accompanied by a lazy twirl of the royal hand to bid him to turn around and begin removing his clothing a bit faster. A sort of ‘come along now’ gesture.
And Tadius, having learned that to bluster or blush or refuse could only incite pouting or a higher demand from the assembled crowd or someone saying that he had a stick up his ass, just disrobes as commanded. His modesty is insignificant. Any who think him improper only have a second to do so before they immediately forgive him.
And then he turns around.
Someone always gasps, while others fall suddenly silent as what they’d expected is not what is revealed to them. It’s a different sort of affair from quiet anticipation. Instead, it’s the shock.
Horror can be so entirely different from anticipation, he’s come to learn. As the assembled folk realize what kind of yarn they’re about to unravel.
They’d been waiting for the standard fare, he’s sure.
A surgeon’s sloppy efforts after taking swigs of his own anesthetics.
The affairs of a fool.
A single stab wound from a thin but fine blade where nobody had been really trying to kill anybody else with much tenacity anyway.
Maybe one slash from an enterprising thief that had been tended with care and set to being only a shade paler than the rest of him. The sort of scar that only looked more pitiful when considered by folk who’d had worse than that from childhood.
The affairs of nobility. Flimsy.
But there’s still no telling what the scope of what had actually been done to him can bring out in people.
The affairs of the monstrous are so rarely considered after all. The way they make you stop and look and think.
Few retched anymore as the collection of injuries had long since healed over.
Some laughed in one, sudden, bark as they didn’t know how else to process even subtle surprises. As if they’d received a sock to the stomach instead and could only vent its effects through humor in polite company.
The inherent joke that was the idea of such a magnitude of harm befalling a man with so gilded a life. The thought that he’d gone through all that and lived even as his hands were still soft and his jackets were tailored.
Some men swore, sometimes, but in a mystical sort of way. Oddly enthralled. In awe of something that makes life seem a little more enjoyable, a little more ridiculous, if all that hadn’t killed him.
Some, strangest of the bunch, even became oddly reverent. Oddly drawn to the sight as some found refuge in pilgrimages to ancient murals. In what they revealed about the observer. In how one might seem to shrink in the scope of such a story.
Few people in present company would get up to touch him, unless they were already quite drunk, but you could always see who wanted to. Whose eyes would linger on him long after the tale was finished. Wondering what old pain and shed blood felt like. Wondering about the sorts of things tales couldn’t quite capture. That they couldn’t believe without feeling it under their hands.
Or, of course, there were those who’d always thought they were owed such things. Who just went and did it. So far, there hadn’t been many who might claim such ownership over him. Really, when he thinks about it, there had only been the one.
And just the one time at that.
The prince had already possessed so much of him, his time and thoughts and somehow whatever Tadius had in his pockets, what had made this any different?
Deeply entrenched in his own personal Hell at a banquet to celebrate the marriage of a minor daughter of Golden Hold, Tadius had been frantically changing in a linen closet. With the intent to physically wrestle the prince into Tadius’ own shirt to avoid the royal person being seen escorted out of a wedding feast covered in blood.
Said blood had been his own, not that it would matter in the spinning up of rumor, from where His Royal Highness had bashed his nose during a particularly amorous and somewhat intense embrace with the least responsible member of the bride’s honor guard following the ceremony.
Tadius had, when seeking out his suspiciously absent charge and then while coming up with this plan on the spot, been kicking himself to not have done more than notice the look between the prince and the scimitar-wielding second cousin.
By he’d been discovering them within this very closet, the blood had already been spilled.
Such an omen would have caused a scandal no matter how loudly Tadius had offered explanations. Might have earned His Highness a reputation for roughhousing (or, more rigorous activities) at events he’d been bidden to attend in the hopes of caching the eyes of other eligible nobles to kick off the courting process.
Not much else for Tadius to do then, as he’d already sent the second cousin who’d been so neglectful of his duties back to his position behind the head of the table. Waiting to protect the couple from the sudden arrival of a desert wyrm as tradition dictated.
The prince, groaning over his ruined fun, had at least submitted himself to the usual fussing.
His face had been cleaned easily enough with the sacrifice of the edge of the cape Tadius had favored before this, embroidered with golden suns, but the stain had already splashed into the deep blue silk of the kaftan His Royal Highness had been sent to wear.
Not only that, but it had already marred and mottled the fabric. There wouldn’t be much hope in getting the elaborately tied sash back into its perfect knot either.
The desert heat had long since soaked into the sand, now dyed indigo with night, and a surprising chill had left Tadius’ flesh goose pimpling in a way that might have been uncomfortable if the flush of indignation hadn't been roaring to life within his chest.
He’d been planning to enjoy a glass of wine, a conversation about some mechanical dancer that was said to exist within the sultan’s palace, and here he was instead.
He’d simply make due with the prince’s linen undershirt, accompanied by some story of his own cursed clumsiness if anyone asked, while the prince might offer instead the consideration that he’d wanted his kaftan folded back up in its fine chest so that it might return spotlessly to the castle. Where it would be cherished indefinitely (and it would…if the royal laundresses could work their ancient ways upon the stain and save the vibrancy of the silk). It would reveal him to be thoughtful, in terms of preservation, and appreciative of such a gift.
Many had already changed for an evening of revelry, and Tadius was willing to bet that none but perhaps other servants would have noticed what he’d been wearing before the wondrous parade that had lead them all from the dune-held temple to the oasis of a banquet hall within the golden palace.
So, it would be a better choice for the prince to return to the party in a shirt that was only a little out of style while Tadius made due under his cape and kept the prince’s sash held tightly behind his back.
He’d been only slightly fuming at the waste of the evening and its treasures, at the smell of iron that now clung to him as much as it had his master, when he’d suddenly been caught entirely still at the swipe of a great hand along the curve of one of the worse gashes.
Along his skin, his bones, and all the rest of him too. Hidden under the scarring.
They’d been facing away from each other, the sounds of the assembled folk a way’s away as true love was toasted and a cabal of acrobats danced, and yet the touch had brought it all to such a jarring halt.
Entirely unexpected amidst the linen and bundles of reeds, bound in preparation for their feeding to the great braziers that burned along the tented hall.
Right across his spine, that wound. The one that the nurses who’d seen to him had sworn, much later, should have left him without use of his legs had he not healed so quickly by the grace of the nine gods. Perhaps a favor paid back for all his hard work for the royal family.
For a moment, Tadius had recalled rumors that the palace was to be stalked by wicked djinns or spirits of mirth. But the palm was real. Heavy-handed. Still there even at his flinch.
The room had only one other occupant and he always did take to touching things that didn’t belong to him. To thinking that everything actually was his by birthright.
If anything, Tadius knew, that denying him things made him want them even more. That the consideration that he’d never done a thing made it all the more enjoyable. Made him step closer, place his other hand at Tadius’ shoulder as if to adjust a picture (as if he’d moved to leave and the prince had said not to) and continue his simple exploration.
That was how it started. Well that, and the words, “By the Gods, Tadius, it really is hideous.” Like he’d somehow forgotten. Like he hadn’t seen it raw and weeping when Tadius had been carried away that night.
Tadius, feeling caught in more ways than one, could only bite down on the inside of his cheek. Only try, in vain, to pretend that he couldn’t feel anything at all.
Not the thud of the words, nothing he didn’t already know, which seemed to sit in his lungs like silt along the bottom of a pond. Dragging him down just enough to make everything harder.
Humiliation, how heavy it could be.
Or the prince’s palm, kept soft with a scented cream provided by their hosts as the desert had a way of drying the skin. The smooth stroke of it. The undeniable alighting of the nerves of his spine as if by magic, a row of torches springing to blaze from nothing.
A different kind of humiliation, too.
The prince had followed the curve of that old wound as if he were applying a salve, as if he were drawing a route along a map. He hadn’t said anything else, and Tadius couldn’t see his face, but the touch had been gentle if thoughtless. As you might page through a book without knowing its age. The care it required.
Perhaps that was simply how he approached the world. A languid swipe of the thumb. The warmth of his perfect palms.
Tadius, both suddenly exhausted and somehow electrified, hadn’t been able to move. They hadn’t yet told the story to a crowd. He’d only been a few weeks free from his sickbed. He’d argued that he had to attend the wedding to the few fellow servants who’d expressed concern.
He hadn’t learned, yet, what it all truly meant for him. All he’d known was that he was glad to be alive. He’d thought he’d get himself a brighter way of living. A new lease on life.
But his leg had started aching. He’d only just had his first few nightmares. He was half-starved from a day of travel and then wouldn’t notice how the pit of his appetite would grow once he finally was permitted dinner.
The reek of blood sang in his skull like a hideous clarion bell and all he could guess was that the wine wasn’t agreeing with him. That travel could make a man truly hideous. That it’d all be fine once they returned to the castle. It had been a taxing day. He could admit that, and it had clearly addled his state.
Left him so desperate for comfort that he couldn’t consider its source. Couldn’t consider how little it could mean.
And he couldn’t imagine what the prince was thinking. What he’d wanted in that moment. Why he’d come to stand quite so close.
It could have been easy to take one step farther, to bend down his great head and have his mouth meet some tender place amidst the horrors that so spattered his man.
The consideration of the space had actually made it worse and Tadius hadn’t a clue as to what was happening. What could happen. What either of them were thinking.
But he didn’t do such a thing and Tadius, certainly, would never step back into such things. He would never want to.
Instead, it was just a singular touch. Nothing to fret over. Easy to open the door and bustle the prince away from once they’d both been wrestled into their new garments. Harder to loosen once it had sunk deep into the pit of his stomach, but still something he’d still found himself able to carry.
The moon had been bright out amidst the sand. It had hurt his eyes to look at in the swirl of the perfumed air. It had made it somehow very hard to think.
Maybe he’d been thinking on the story he’d one day tell, or thinking on the truth. Maybe he’d almost forgotten that it was real. That the pain had been there, once. Something that had become part of Tadius as any part of life did.
He’d never admit to the shiver at the slow sweep of another’s hand, not even to himself. To the almost fraction of his own motion, unable to stop himself from caving into it as slightly as he could manage, before he’d remembered his station and snapped back to attention. Before he’d turned around, disrobed, and demanded the prince’s kaftan just to give him something more distracting to laugh at.
To cover the word hideous, all its sharp curves, and leave things smooth again.
They’d never mentioned it. And Tadius tried to tell himself that he never thought on it. Never sometimes, at his drowsiest, tried to resurrect a ghost of that hand when he was alone. Something that could, somehow, be separated from the rest of it. The thought that someone would step closer. Would reach out their hand. Any hand. Willingly, openly, and that he’d want them to.
It never worked fully. The prince and all his burdens couldn’t be separated from that moment of reprieve. From the bony spurs of shame.
Tadius could accept that. Accept what he wouldn’t have. It was a required skill for his choice of employment.
He never feared it. How unlikely it would be for anyone to ever touch him in such a way again. He never missed it. How nice it had been, in the moment. Even if it had been undignified. Crude. Not his place to be touched or His Highness’ place to be doing such touching.
Thinking on such things would, ultimately, be a waste. Self-flagellation. Mockery of himself.
After all, he hadn’t exactly been swimming in potential romantic partners before, and now, he can’t imagine doing that to anyone. Waiting for their hand to cross such distances. Forcing them to look at it, to pet at it.
Subjecting them to it.
To what he’d become.
He’d never do that. Never be able to bring one person within such confidence. Not so close. Not individually. Not when they knew him and all he’d stood for and saw what he’d been doing. What he’d been capable of, once, and was still so desperate to keep aloft.
What he was capable of now. What he couldn’t stop.
In his nightmares, he doesn’t stop.
Instead, he held the trappings of manhood around himself with the desperate clutch of a beggar. The last thing he had. The only thing left to lose that had, somehow, been shaken from his grip. But he hadn’t lost it. Not yet. He wouldn’t.
Sometimes, he’d wondered, if things would have been easier if he’d been a simpler man. Instead of this. What he’d been reduced to. What he’d have to be foolish to expect someone to tolerate, let alone love–.
It’s easier this way.
Telling only the one story. Before the crowd, he can almost pretend that all of this could belong to someone else. Another version of himself. That it was someone else’s story for the prince’s man to play act.
When he had been very, very, young, he had once wanted to be a traveling player.
It had been one of those childish whims that came about before one knew one’s strengths and least favorite pastimes. Before he’d realized that he’d much prefer lurking behind the stage, pulling at strings, he’d imagined himself reciting soliloquies and sleeping in a wagon beneath a sky of stars. Imagined applause.
An audience, drawing in close to hear his words. Following the luxurious gesture of his hand with such rapture.
He hadn’t imagined the dirt though. Or the state of the beds. That had been the first thing to pull him from such a foolish dream and it had happened young.
Now, he simply monologues to himself and has a more comfortable mattress so the trade seems fair enough most days.
But he can admit to a kernel of theatrics, still. An ounce of it, doled out sparingly, when he permits them all to look. He can feel the electric thrum of it, momentarily, in how he has them in the palm of his hand. A single moment of tension.
They’d do just about anything to learn what could have happened after he’s permitted them to feast their eyes on the worst night of his life. On how perfectly it had been going. How beautiful a scene it could have been at the start. How it all must, somehow, have gone irreparably wrong.
Nothing could be more tempting than the consideration of how it might all fall apart. He’s learned that. He makes use of it. They want to believe him, depending on how he ties the whole thing together.
Once they’ve done their ogling, and the customary uncomfortable silence has choked the atmosphere, Tadius gets to put his shirt back on.
Not perfectly, he doesn’t get enough time to fully fasten everything, but at least enough to make facing them all easier.
He gets to turn with his face pulled into something that resembles a comforting smile, his eyes heavy, and tell the assembled multitudes his tale. Beckon them closer, promising that it can’t be all that bad. He can prove it.
As the fire in the grate burns gold and dusky orange. As shadows slip around the room, perhaps giving shape to things which might hide between great trees out in the wide and wild world. Movement out of the corner of one’s eye. Impossible things. At the moment, frightening.
It, in that moment, is his responsibility to repair the atmosphere. As a magician might make a show of reattaching a finger at the end of a trick and be sure to wiggle it. To pass his hand about for inspection to show that the imagined hurt wasn’t the thing to remember as much as the grandness of the magic. The satisfaction at the trick’s completion. The healing where it shouldn’t have been possible.
He takes pride in this, somehow, even as he hates the whole affair.
He can, at least, set it all to rights when it’s just a story.
And, in a life like his, it isn’t the worst thing in the world. When the fire glows warm in the hearth and someone might buy him an ale after and the moon is far away and dim, barely bigger than a fingernail clipping, it’s an easy enough story to tell.
He tells a great deal of lies now. What’s one more on the pile?
Tadius has always been good at telling stories. He, during his first steps into manhood, had be known to burst into an ancient songs when well and truly drunk.
It had been his capitulation to himself, upon the realization that the stage would never be his. The memorization of great poetry, the walkings of heroes, which would then be recited for a crowd. Often whilst intoxicated.
It was, in a sense, the way of the ancient world and who was he to deny history its eccentricities? It was his duty to pass on the traditions, even if he did so whilst inebriated.
Pickled to the point that he never could remember the endings, he would feel the story rise within him somehow. Stalking amidst his ribs, fizzling in his wrists. That was when such tales had moved him the most. Had bid him rise. Had loved him as much as he’d loved them.
Stories about love and valor and duty. A great hammering on ancient oaken doors which was always answered by a great cry of, hold!
And whatever horrible thing had come to call would, lest it be beaten back. He’d once believed that such things never could pass the threshold.
In his nightmares, he beats on the doors with his fists. When they don’t open, he takes his hands to them and the wood shreds like paper. Like skin.
He’d stand on a table and drum out a poor beat with his foot and people would cheer even as he got his syllables mixed up or forgot some bits. Muddled through the more complicated names and felt the sun-warmed coil of satisfaction in his gut when cheers rang out at the victories they all knew.
He doesn’t get to tell those kinds of tales much anymore. He can’t muster up the same level of enthusiasm. He can’t believe them, much, anymore.
All the monsters die at the end.
Better to leave them for others to pick up, dust off, and make noise with. Younger men. Finer men.
Men in general, actually. He can’t feel right telling such tales anymore. An intrusion. Transgression. Turning, in his tower of glass, and throwing a rock at a wall as hard as he can.
And so this isn’t that sort of story, not really, though he’s certainly propped it up to look like one. As a scarecrow might resemble a man from a bird’s-eye view, so too does his story stand in heroic shapes for the sake of the listeners.
In spite of the monsters. Of the pain.
The crowd waits for him. The prince nods. Tadius begins.
He tells them, before he can get to the meat of the story, about a road.
Far off, wild, and steeped deeply with the blue of night. Shrouded in winter fog so thick that, at times, you couldn’t even see the man next to you.
You might reach into the air and feel as though you’d become the only person in the whole world. A startle every time. As if the whole of the sky had begun to hold its breath.
He paints for the gathered congregation a road so far off the beaten path that it wouldn’t be familiar to even those who’d ride it on their way home now. One of their own pathways atop the world’s face, undeniably, yet somehow made both familiar and not by the night surrounding it. A slice of civilization interceding on wild business. Bleeding savagery.
The sort of place where stories were born, at the threshold between what was possible and what never should have been. A place he probably shouldn’t have been in either.
A place that they’d never truly see unless such horrors came upon them in the same way. Unless they learned the same grisly lessons and brought the tale to a similar grisly ending.
And he hopes, earnestly and foolishly, that no-one else ever will learn such things. That none will ever be stuck standing in the same spot as him. So he lays the fog on thick and pretends, in this story that might have happened to someone else, that it could have happened somewhere else too.
Perhaps, he always thinks, some of them have already ridden past the exact spot without any pause. Perhaps, later, they will pass the place and be none the wiser.
In his nightmares, he is lost in the woods. He is stumbling. He cannot find the road. It is a good thing, as that would lead him to the homes which people occupy. He does not know where he is. He prays that it stays that way.
He takes what they know and he twists it into another world. Another place. Somewhere that shouldn’t exist. A place that makes the night beyond the tavern bristle with unseen things. That makes the wind rattle along the roof, a hand trailing lightly over the keys of a piano, to cover a sound that could be the forgotten echoes of old screams.
Or, as always, just the wind.
He does his job.
He casts his shadows. Villains. Heroes. A highwayman and a prince valiantly riding down the hill to scare such a malefactor away. A simple man in peril. Nothing much to say about him. Don’t look. You don’t want to.
He doesn’t mind spoiling the ending. It makes things easier in turn. He warns them of what is to come.
The highwayman, of course, is of the same amount of import as his trained dog. They have to understand that.
The man.
The dog.
The distinction between the two even as they’re so connected.
Tadius has schooled his face for years by now to bring himself to say it.
A dog. A flutter of severity to stave off flippancy.
After all, no man could have carved such a brutal name into the bark of his back. Not with that wild savagery.
And so, a dog.
Monsters, but only the ones you might expect to find along such foul passage.
He is copious with certain details to start. The ones they’ll want and hunger for.
The royal caravan, returning from a far away tournament being held in honor of The Night Maid’s death day, is a radiant beast returning from a place of intrepid acts. Cumbersome but ephemeral in its trundling. The ease of a good time and marvelous things.
To watch its journey along the dark path through their country’s woodlands would be like watching luminous pearls slide themselves down a chain, each more resplendent than the last. Only the finest for such storied celebrations. Such mighty deeds.
Beautiful people who’d done what beautiful people do in places such as that tourney. Made their own sorts of tales, their own kinds of fun.
They’d survived the night that had already lasted for centuries at its mistress’ whims and returned to find the world just as dark even as they’d departed from such horrible delights.
A carnival of carnivores, once a year, stuffed to the gills with the allure that was kept from them. The Night Maid fastidiously kept a tight grip upon her dark court, all those night-bound strangers, but relented for one “evening” of celebration.
One tournament, to celebrate the day she’d left the dawn behind and found her own nocturnal beginnings. To sate her courtiers and subjects, who celebrated with more savagery than she did. Surrounded by the pitiable living, watching them shriek and struggle and blush with the same rapt attention that her guests kept for the feats of strength.
It was commonly known, and often whispered, that The Night Maid kept the company of the dead, even in the taverns where Tadius told his tales.
That she held one period of festivity a year to keep her courtiers entertained.
Duels and death-defying acts of physical impossibility to elicit gasps from those who still could breathe. Clowns capering about with white paint somehow sitting ruddier on rigor mortis pale faces to shake the boughs of cold trees with laughter, warm as the first bite of a rich meal.
Treasures passed out like party favors, because that’s what they were, to watch blood pool in the faces of their recipients. Light catch in the eyes and find itself caged in gemstones.
Jousting and juggling and wrestling and bear-baiting wherein a man might spill his blood and run the length of an arena, pursued by bear.
Tadius never could tell, even after all those years in attendance, if it was that all bears upon the coast shared such dark coloring and strange markings or that one bear had lived on longer than it had any right to.
It seemed as though, at times, the man didn’t much want to be down there. Had been thrown down.
In his nightmares, once or twice, he’s looked up from the arena’s pit and smelled fresh blood. He’s started to run before he sees what he’s chasing.
It was all as close to a chase as the blood-sated nobility of The Night Maid’s court, in their finery from a thousand years ago which might still hold the dark spatterings of their final human moments, are permitted.
The barest drops of blood from the unwieldy stone that was the rule of hospitality unless they were invited to it. Unless they were spurned. Unless you ran.
It had already been a night too long, a night of monsters. What was one more?
It had been the sort of event that dared things to change. A place of upheaval that surely trickled down the road after them as an icy stream might shoot down a mountainside.
They blame him, his listeners, for attending such a thing. Just as they blamed fools who ran off after the circus for their empty pockets upon their return.
As they blamed dropped salt for the collapsing of the roof. A clumsy hand for the spilling of blood.
Even if none of them ever say such things before him, he can tell. There’s a certain settling in as they imagine the event. As they don’t consider how duty had bid him go into the night. How he’d had as little choice as the pocket becoming suddenly robbed of its contents. As the roof, suddenly collapsing. As the blood, spilt.
But he doesn’t muse on this. Instead, he goes on.
It had been a day, cloaked in eternal night, which had seen noble men fall in love and women of fine stock hear the thunderous crowds roar against a dark sky and they’d all departed with enough stories to reach the next age and still find new gossip to unveil dramatically in one’s last will and testament. Too many stories, even, to begin to tell.
With treasures won and hearts afire and, sure, a small army of servants exhaustedly accompanying them on mounts, but who were they in the face of such a story?
Tadius makes no real mention of those dusty folk, sore from riding and a day spent blinking sleep from your eyes while keeping cups full and running rumor from one end of the chosen green to the other. Nobody needs stories about them and so he doesn’t cast them in his tale.
He doesn’t forget them though. They’d been the ones to weep when he’d been brought back over the hill. They’d made signs to each god and come to his bedside when it had been deemed that he’d probably live.
They aren’t friends, but they’re probably as close as he gets to have anymore.
He won’t forget them. All the sounds, their accompaniment, which now haunted his dreams. Far off and distant life. Normalcy, somehow, now creeps behind him as much as the blood or the pain or anything strange.
In his nightmares, they sing. He opens his mouth to join in, and his teeth fall from his head. Blood from his mouth.
How they’d been dully chanting through drinking songs to keep their heads on straight by that point in the evening. Not far enough into a ride that had come to feel like a death march to see light at the end of that great and dark tunnel. A long night that just kept getting longer. Dusty laughter. Sharp calls of some names to keep anyone from a sleep, sitting up, that would unseat them from their horses.
He makes no mention of how only half of them had been granted time to grab a bite to eat at any point in the day (and several had almost been bitten, and made into meals, themselves). How some of them had considered joining the tourney beneath their own banners, under false names, just to try for a chance at glory and any who had done so were keeping it to themselves.
A few secreted wonders of their own. Treasures pushed deep into pockets. Stories settled coyly under the collar, whispering words like glory or all I’d ever wanted into the wintry air.
Some, distinctly, carried the flush of being recently nibbled on. That was being held rather close to the chest as well. A consideration. A certain flush. A tendency to turn one’s head back to that luminous white tower atop the wine-dark sea where romance still beckoned.
It was a place never caressed by true moonlight as the moon only changed out in the rest of the world. It was perpetually new within The Night Maid’s globe of endless darkness.
Later, this would be hilarious (if the word hilarious was instead used to refer to something that made Tadius want to hit things over and over again until they were dead).
The moon had been the first thing he’d noticed, high and far out over the sea and suddenly full as he’d looked back over his shoulder. Suddenly bright.
This, he pointedly does not tell them.
At the time, that had mattered more than the songs and the laughter and the few other servants who’d nodded to him or called after him as he’d hurried to the road.
He’d been grateful for the extra light to journey by.
He’d had to ride out at the front of the departing party, as that was where the prince was, even as he’d have preferred to bring up the rear to get a head-count. That had been his half-formed intention, when he’d turned his head, but then he’d looked out and seen the reddish gold of the moon and realized that (after a long day spent with only its vague shape amidst a black sky) he’d almost forgotten it could be there.
But then he’d been back in the thick of it. How much there still was to do. Miles to go before he’d sleep. Not at the break of dawn, when they’d finally return to the castle, but within twenty-four more hours.
None of them would be sleeping. Too busy brewing comfort for the drowsy nobility who’d been up well past their kept schedules. Turning down beds and brewing chamomile and sorting all tributes and treasures so that, when the sleepers awoke the next day, everything would already have a new home. As if by magic.
It would be a scramble to finish as there would also be the absences to make up for.
Not all who’d accompanied their party had been returning with them. Tadius would be expecting letters within the coming days to prove who’d taken up a residence, perhaps of the undead varietal, or at least employment within a new court. He’d also expected to then do a real headcount to see who’d simply been granted a fool’s death. Who might have tried to run, and in doing so, given unspoken permission to be chased.
None of it was worth the time it would take to truly bring any listener into the sweaty, uncomfortable, and slightly miserable eventide that Tadius had been sloughing through. Doused in.
That part of the picture would be considered inconsequential to all but him, and so he’d cut it like dead weight from a mount.
Because no matter what he told himself, or how many lies he presented to the wide world, he remembered almost everything about that night. Certainly of its impetus, though some of the ending had been scraped away by the loss of so much blood.
Departing the host of his people at his back, as Tadius had to ride up front to ensure there would be no more incidents.
After the first time the prince had been waved at by a beautiful fortune teller from the road’s side, bolted from his escort like a rabbit escaping a pack of hounds, and been subsequently robbed, there now always had to be someone within arm’s reach of him at all times.
And it had long since been decided that such a someone would, and should, be Tadius.
It was easier to do this within a carriage, but the night air had been too intoxicating (to quote the prince) to consider riding home in such stuffy conditions. He’d demanded his own mount for the whole ride, and so Tadius had joined him.
Due to this, none who might have thought to grab Tadius had been within reach either. Perhaps he would have been safer amidst the other servants.
Perhaps things would have turned out worse if he hadn’t been there.
There was no way to tell if the whole affair had been the sort of thing that would have followed him no matter where he was stationed, or if he simply was in the wrong place at an inopportune moment.
Out at the point of night that begged for misery. Within an arm’s length of nobility, where he’d lingered of much of his life. An easy target for intolerable things.
It remained impossible, at times, to differentiate between fate and coincidence in lands such as theirs.
It would be foolish to waste one’s time on such musings. It would also well and truly bring down the mood.
Better instead for a listener to look out the window to the cobbled street. To hear the strange, soft, crashing of the distant sea and imagine the luminous ghosts of the elegant riders, conjured as if by moonlight and wave foam, slipping through their darkness. Hear the bells of the horses’ harnesses. Listen for the far off jaunt of a good time as the impossible carriages wound their way home again.
They had been ten carriages strong that night, stuffed with tribute and drowsy nobility who’d spent the penumbral day sweating and cheering at great feats of strength while drinking heavily. Guarded not just by their threadbare attendants but by a most courageous guard atop sculpted steeds while the servants rode plainer beasts.
The guards might as well have been suits of armor for all their faces matter to the crowd. A breastplate, polished to a mirror sheen, where one might see one’s own face. Imagine one’s own sword, someday, waiting for use.
The road had been surrounded by a night unparalleled in its magnificence and Tadius weaves it for them. Offers it to them like a perfectly arranged plate of succulent desserts. Lets them have their fill.
Can already see, as he might be brave enough to reach for a glass and find something being poured into it at the wave of his hand, the shine of absolute focus on all their faces. Even folk who weren’t initially listening have usually been drawn in by now and left the room quiet as the grave. An attention so sharp it’s left them utterly unaware of the rest of the world. Of what he isn’t saying.
He hasn’t once mentioned the moon aloud to them, luminous and cyclopean, and how it had presided over the whole affair (even as it dogs his thoughts). How it had watched from above, larger than it had ever seemed to be before. A coin hanging in the air where it had once been a crumb. Somehow closer now than it had ever been. Anticipatory, perhaps. Or, simply, just as it always had been. As it always would be. Kept to its kingdom of the sky, silent. Celestial but immovable. Unknowable.
It truly is a gripping picture. He’d pat himself on the back, but it’s already moving on without him.
The gathered occupants of the room now wait for what will eventually go wrong. How such a night of presumed splendor could result in one man’s ruin.
He doesn’t make them wait long.
It hadn’t taken much to draw the darkness in close around them. To drag what had been unearthly, unreal, and untouchable kicking and screaming into the all too familiar tar pit of mortal peril.
Such an elegant assembly would eventually have to be saved, by the prince’s own hand, from a band of looters.
Tadius, too, would have to be saved.
Brigands. Bandits. Thieves. Criminals. Villains. Murderers. Marauders. Madmen.
What else could have appeared when dangling so fine a treasured assembly before such places? Doesn’t it make sense? Wouldn’t the crowd shake their heads at the foolishness of those who live on that high hill for daring to go out at night with their wealth winking in the dark?
It doesn’t truly matter which word he uses to paint the approaching intruders, or even the specifics as to their assembled number. It’s not the important part, though he tends to exaggerate if there are children present just to see their eyes widen.
Considering how they didn’t exist but for the sake of the story, numbers are mostly inconsequential.
He’d started at five, then moved on to ten when people seemed to doubt five men’s effectiveness against such a number, and since then the prince had slowly made it all the way to twenty the last time someone had caught sight of the slight trail of warped flesh that could occasionally peek above the back of Tadius’ collar, if that collar was low, and thought to ask a question in regards to its origin.
He doesn’t wear a great many low collars anymore.
So twenty it had been as of late, though from the prince’s peering about this particular crowd it will probably be twenty-five or even thirty now. The number isn’t as important as the thought of them, clustering close. Things glinting in the dark. Nails and knives instead of jaws and teeth. The way they’d moved together. A great beast in their own way.
A whole host of them, weaving their way out of the darkness. Bringing the fearful in the audience to clutch the hands of others and the courageous to consider how they might take on such a wave of villainy.
It really is the perfect story for a hero. They’ve been waiting for one.
Tadius gets ahead of himself.
And it’s the prince, astride his great horse with a torch in hand, who arrives at last into the story. Who has one, particular highwayman arrested and personally drives his mad dog off his poor manservant, who’d been fool enough to ride too close to the edge of the road.
But Tadius is always getting ahead of himself in the story about the fool of a manservant. Always burying the lead about the dog. Wanting to be sure that they know how alright it always is in the end.
Letting the observer paint their own picture, starting now, so that he doesn’t have to fill in all the spaces when they arrive. The unanswerable questions. How did it–? How did you–? Are you–?
After all, there isn’t much need to focus on the manservant personally. One doesn’t even need to mention his name. Just the way he’d been riding, and then suddenly was not. A riotous transition. Upright and then suddenly airborne. A moment’s confusion amidst the haze of exhaustion.
A foolish sort of man, to be so distracted that close to the road’s edge, who’d been knocked from his horse and dragged deeper into the wood by the creature which was revealed as a great hound.
Who’d been, incidentally, savaged by such a creature as it searched his person for valuables while the highwayman who’d nursed it from a pup had emerged from his hiding place and advanced upon them both. Knife in hand.
Or held aloft, biting at the air.
Or, perhaps, sheathed between his teeth if it was a daring sort of crowd.
Normally, there is a pause here as at least one man wonders aloud if he could train a dog to do such a thing. In a place of ship’s dogs and tenders of the herd and maybe, a small weaselly thing that lived on a tasseled pillow, so thorough a beast seems worth its hypothetical weight in gold.
And Tadius, laughing with all of his breath and none of his chest or eyes, says that he is not the first man to ask such a question. His tone, indulgent but not overly so, leaves the man proud to know himself as part of an enterprising number.
Tadius privately knows that this will not be the last man to think on such things. That the story always carries with it that little invention. A marvel of sorts to most listeners. How much good a creature such as that could do when removed from the grisly nature of its deeds.
He, publicly, muses that he’s never seen such a dog since and leaves them to their wonderings as to how long such training would take. How that great and lumbering shape might feel asleep on one’s cold feet before the hearth.
How much it would eat. Its teeth. Its weight, pushing down.
In his nightmares, something holds him down. There is howling. He cannot get up. He cannot move. It gets closer.
It’s an easy jump from there. So simple, the slipping of one consideration to the next, that he doesn’t have to be the one to guide them there. They imagine it themselves. They get to work.
To putting one and two together as to the gnarled shapes of the wounds. The wild swiping. A bellowing bark. The night. The ground. The hammering of his heart.
He knows, just from life, that nothing he could tell them about how such things had occurred could now match the terrors they then weave from the spinning wheels of their skulls. The delicate yarn of their own horrors is as sticky and personal as a cobweb smeared across the face. For once, the hard work is done for him.
There is a natural pause, in that macabre crafting, which is to be expected. Which leaves some folk room to shift in their seats, or consider getting up for another round or go out back to relieve themselves, and at that point in the story the prince can always be expected to leap in.
An unspoken, unprompted, cue that could only be orchestrated by someone who’d spent so much time with him.
He could be a simple man, their prince. Easily baited by the simplification of his role in the story. The tedium of Tadius’ way of telling it. The reflexive urge to say that Tadius is doing it wrong.
This is, after all, one of his favorite things to say.
He’d dispute Tadius’ summarizing of the weather if given half a chance. He often does, the same way he has Tadius redo the tying of his boots four times simply to watch him pick the knots away and start again. To watch the grit of his teeth, hear the grate of his voice, in saying, “of course, My Prince.”
So of course, he steps in and elegantly shoulders Tadius out of the way. Which is, to be frank, perfectly fine with Tadius as it allows him time to finally finish up rearranging his braces and buckles and fully put himself back to rights.
To sit down and take the weight off his bad leg. To now pretend that his part is over as the true man of the hour sets about telling the damned thing right.
And then he begins to tell his own tale. No longer creeping around the exciting bits. No more delicate draping of dread and wonder. The prince approaches the tale much as he’d approached his role in it, charging in headfirst without much thought to sense or atmosphere. He speaks like the blaze of a torch. The first boisterous sound of the horn as the trail was picked up.
The prince has never, in his whole life, ever had a reason to lie. He tells his own version of the truth. Something that he truly believes happened, even as he didn’t. If someone ever called him a liar, he’d have their tongues removed.
And there, nestled, is a secret. The first of many, shrouded in mist. A weakness that he hides perfectly because it sits in the open but remains invisible.
It is a slim number of people, within the kingdom, who know the prince to be a fool.
He does, after all, cast his own great shadow. Few but Tadius have ever seen its wonder cast upon a wall and traced it back to its point of origin. Few but Tadius ever seem to want to follow such things and learn the disappointing truth. How the light can hide much. Can make a man appear great and kind and true.
A transformative effect of sorts. A transmutation requiring no real magic. Such an inconsequential cost.
The same, though, could be said of the prince’s man within the tale. Holding up his hand to hide his face. Shrinking back so that none might see what that same light would reveal about his own hands. His own life.
If asked what he was, and he somehow was forced answered truthfully, he’d answer a blight. Nobody ever gives him a word for it. Though there are tales, scraps of things that apply, they mostly come without classification. He figures out as much as he can as he goes and sees why no man ever wanted to name this thing.
But the story that is now the prince’s, thankfully, is one that puts them all in their expected places. Men and beasts and roads.
It is a tale of peril (but only the exciting kind) when the prince tells it. Of thrills. It’s not a painful story when shaped by his perfect mouth, smoothed of all edges by his perfect, pearly, and blunt teeth.
It is, instead, a tale that starts with his foolish attendant who’d been too busy nagging to see a shape, black as ink but larger than a fully grown stag, preparing to pounce upon him with a slobbering snarl from the wilds beyond the road. He elicits a gasp here, a leaning in from the crowd as if they can see such a shape on the wall behind them, with a sly sort of smile that has Tadius only shrug in a helpless sort of way.
Again, the humiliation. Of having to nod and all but say, oh yes! What a fool I am! Ha ha! How could I have missed that?
But the tale moves on. Not long is spent on him. It’s a quick wince and done, like the pulling of a tooth. Shame, the faint dribble in his mouth from such a wound, is swallowed quickly. It tastes of watery iron.
The prince, caring even for his mouthy advisor, had tried to cry out in warning but it had been too late! The creature had already leapt through the air, completed some vast arc, and taken poor Tadius with it into the dark, leaving his horse to bolt ahead in panic. The first attack of a waiting band of cutthroats.
Chaos had then fallen over the caravan as they’d all begun to fear for their surroundings, the danger they must all be in! Brigands, bandits, some thirty in number, had begun to emerge from the shadows to surround them.
An appreciative ah goes up amidst the crowd, and the prince is pleased by the number. As proud as any artisan who’d ever turned to a craft and finally gotten the proper response. Maybe he’ll halt there. Maybe he’ll keep going until they were assaulted by an entire army. There is no way to guess.
Before the guard had assembled, preparing to protect the king and carriages stuffed with nobility and all their hard-won treasure as they had so sworn, the prince had been the one to take up command. To shout orders to the others, their valorous guard in all its multitudes who’d somehow been milling about before his call, to protect king and country before he’d reached for a lit torch.
He makes no mention as to who’d brought it out and struck the flame into being, and instead focuses on how he’d charged into the underbrush after the pitiful screams of his bedeviled attendant.
Tadius has never tried to correct that part of the story. Not once. The word pitiful flies in his space like someone has spit at him and he can almost feel it ooze down his cheek.
He’s known there to be no point in trying to differentiate pitiful screams from the sounds that had been emerging, untimely ripped, from his person.
In articulating how he might use slightly different words because, in spite of everything, he did still have a scrap of pride buried deep inside him. That was the thing that ached when the story was told, though it had shrunk greatly and probably hidden somewhere he’d never find it amidst the twisting of his guts.
He hadn’t known himself capable of such noise before that night. He’d bellowed in outrage before. Shrieked several times. He’d thought himself capable of howling from the time he’d broken his thumb while providing the prince someone to practice his his fencing on.
He knows better now. Knows that to compare such things would be like fruitlessly arguing that a sardine and a whale were twins.
The cacophony that had first erupted, as the thing had reared up above him, when there had been nothing to do but scream, was a man’s sound. And then, as it had leapt upon him, there had been such worse sounds to make. Wetter. Sliced from within. Animal.
And, now and then, he remembers other sounds. They don’t seem to belong to him, but he knows that he was alone when he’d heard them. They are a great cry indeed. A howl all their own. That was why he’d chosen the dungeons. To not let the sound escape either.
In his nightmares, there is such howling. It is nothing like the wind. He cannot know its origin. It is about him. It is behind him. It is within him.
Irregardless, the point stood: the prince’s man had been off nattering about nothing when he’d been so foolishly ambushed.
That was the only element of the prince’s story he’d interrupted on its first telling.
The only point of order that he’d once tried to offer was that the prince had in fact been pinwheeling his newly acquired ceremonial dagger through the air rather wildly. Dangerously. This had lead to the aforementioned nagging.
As a child might lean out of a high window or a fool might spin a new battle axe before slicing off something vital.
It was, undoubtedly, an interruption. It had jarred the telling to a halt. Everyone had looked at him in confusion. Even he’d been left to ask himself why this of all things mattered so much, after.
It had felt like a point of import. The hardest thing to let go of as the story had slowly taken new shape over all its tellings. As its insides had rearranged themselves into something more palatable and the thought of such a thing made Tadius feel rather sick.
There had been tomfoolery afoot and it had been likely to slice someone’s (probably Tadius’ with the way his night had been going going) finger off. He’d had a reason. He wouldn’t just ride to the side of the road and fling himself into the dark.
If he ever started playing a game of whose fault, truly, he’d never win. He simply kept away from it to mitigate such harm.
It had been like beating back the tide, trying to bring the world into his confidence as to just who their prince actually was. Utterly useless. But he had made an attempt very briefly.
Just to try and make sure that someone knew how he’d had a reason for his dithering. He always did.
And the dagger, too, had been important. Perhaps the most important, in fact, of all the details that had to be carved away.
In the prince’s version of the tale, it just appears suddenly towards the end. In the royal hand.
Unmentioned, unnamed, as if the gods had thrown it down just when it was required. An attentive listener might hold up a hand, furrow their brows, and ask dagger? What dagger?
Nobody ever had though, and for that Tadius was grateful.
It was a great and terrible thing, but you wouldn’t have known from holding it. It hadn’t been so heavy.
A gift to the young prince from The Night Maid herself, the dagger had been presented to him after what had been an admittedly impressive showing in a series of duels.
Not exactly honorable as the prince hadn’t cared much for the ages old minutia of how one instigated a duel exactly one century ago (there used to be a great deal of poetry and bowing, while the prince always leapt for such savage delights), but a fine enough showing to justify a treasure from a distant age.
If asked about it at the time, Tadius would have said that it could be a good sign as to the future king’s favor with so powerful an ally. He’d been attempting to will this version of the world into existence.
For, if not a matter of favor, then it had been an indulgence as simple as one might offer a bit of toffee to a child for a job well done. A gold star. Might set up playmates and ask them not to draw blood.
It also, though, could have been an indication that The Night Maid was considering bluer blood for her next meal. Could have spelled trouble down the road. But Tadius hadn’t brought that up to anyone.
Whenever the prince did marry and/or fall in love, Tadius had thought, it would be a perilous affair. He wouldn’t realize that this was a moment of prophecy until a troll was in the middle of ripping his head off.
The dagger, irregardless of its intent though, had been a gift. And the prince still played with gifts as a young boy did. Rarely used for its intended purposes and instead flung about wildly for everyone to see.
At the time, it had taken up residence within a corner of Tadius’ thoughts for its pointed edge. How far they were from the castle if the prince lopped something off that needed reattaching.
It had been forced to compete with all the rest of the night’s distractions. How he ached in his seat and was hungry enough to be jittery and could feel the droop of his eyelids like the inescapable bend of a tree branch beneath a great heap of snow.
Now, Tadius recalls it still for far grislier reasons. He’ll never forget it again. The weight of it in his hand.
In his nightmares, the dagger is on the ground and he cannot lift it. He is not alone. It is getting closer. He is not strong enough.
But, already too enchanted by the story, none had ever really cared for his interruption. None had really listened when he’d tried to explain why. None would recall such a detail by the end. It was an exercise in futility.
He’d had to come to the difficult realization that it hadn’t really needed to be said. His part in the whole affair was finished. He might as well not have been there anymore. Which was good. Which was the point.
But points could still sting even when they succeeded. When they held fast but had to be plucked from your skin.
It was no longer Tadius’ story. He’d, in a way, sold it for anonymity. Transferred all eyes and hearts to the prince who did well and truly know how to work a room if not tell a great story.
Like a great juggler passing all the balls from one hand to the next, the story wove its way around them now. A great and glorious machine to his simple telling. Settling smugly about Tadius’ shoulders like a great cat. Batting at his nose for his attention. Making him sneeze.
Asking him to shoulder humiliation. Exploitation. Entertainment.
Small prices to pay in the end, he’d told himself time and time again.
The prince would, in place of his man’s bitching or the dagger, instead tell of the great hound. Leaping right to the good part. The part they’d all been wondering about. Wanting to badger him about. Yes, yes, go on. But what of the hound? What of the beast?
His tone remains far more gleeful than one Tadius had ever managed. His eyes bright. His mouth affixed in some grimace that can’t hide his pleasure, trying to conjure the beast’s jaws. The pointed curl of his fingertips to affect claws. The slow hunching of his person to reveal its strength.
The hound, notedly, had already been mauling Tadius by the time the prince arrives. He doesn’t focus on this, instead attending to the beast itself.
Larger than any he’d seen before to the point that it must have been bred by something truly dire, something unknown in its blood. It had, if it would leap upon its hind paws, stood taller than its master who emerged at just that moment. Shrouded in mist like a cloak. Bathed in just enough light from the full moon to reveal his chilling countenance.
It is the first time the moon is mentioned within the tale.
Nobody but Tadius, himself, seems to notice its arrival to the story. Any listener, probably, had assumed it to be there all along as anyone would unless told otherwise.
Perhaps, and he’s at least aware enough of himself to be willing to consider such a thing, he is slightly paranoid. In regards to the moon.
For obvious reasons.
The highwayman always looks different in each telling. The moon reveals a different man each time. Always vile. Always murderous. But the details shift, depending on the crowd.
He had six fingers on his left hand and no top lip.
He had a slash of a scar bisecting his face perfectly from forehead to chin and a milky eye.
He had horns atop his head. Golden caps to his bottom canine teeth. Long and greasy black hair. A bald head sporting a tattoo of a gryphon. He limped. He leapt. He drooled. He emerged, stock still, as if summoned from death itself.
No matter his face though, the prince still ordered him to halt in the name of the crown and taken him in at dagger point.
Suddenly, he is holding the dagger.
Never mind how this meant he’d dismounted his horse, taken the torch, and somehow been clutching such a thing the whole time. That was inconsequential.
In this story, Tadius never holds the dagger. It never tastes any blood. In fact, in this story, once the prince has kicked the highwayman’s weapon away (dropped in shock at his arrival) the whole affair ends rather suddenly. The dagger is sheathed.
The deeply cut fear for his life that had been struck in the daunting cad’s very heart, finding himself so obviously outmatched, had made him throw himself at the prince’s mercy. It had then left time to at last turn on the monstrous dog which had spent the whole time (in its search of his pockets for valuables) incidentally savaging Tadius’ person.
Sometimes, at this part, particularly sympathetic people look to him with a severe sort of expression. Like they’d forgotten why the tale was being told up to this point. The looks are their unspoken apologies. He rather likes these people.
They’re looks that say, the whole time? How dreadful! He might then try to offer, with just his eyebrows and a wobbling of his hand, that it didn’t feel quite so long. Or he just shrugs again.
What truly mattered was that there had been blood. Copious amounts of it. Buckets of it! The ground had been red as anything, as scarlet or poppies or the dripping flesh of a pomegranate, as Tadius’ lifeblood had poured from his body. In the minds of each listener, they recall the scars and perhaps catch a flash of them spread open. Most don’t linger there, and he understands.
He wouldn’t want to either if given a choice.
But the dog, the prince had known, was a simple creature. Turned to such horrible work by its wicked master. As such, somehow, he’d found the strength to stay his hand.
It would be, and at this he can always find a lass or two to saunter over to as if to wipe a tear from her cheek, too cruel a fate to kill such a creature. Even with a man’s blood about its snout and teeth, it was still too sad an ending to end the life of such a breathtaking creature. A pinnacle of strength. Wouldn’t you agree?
At that point, the story is just for her, or them, and she (or they) would always sigh in agreement. Sink into the prince’s complete attention as she (or they) might drop into a warm bath. Nod at his nobility in choosing to run the thing off into the night. See the rest of her (or their) evening bloom marvelously with an idea as to how best spend their time once the tale was finished.
The rest of the room, still, seem honorably touched on the behalf of the dog. So swayed by the prince’s nobility. They look to his shadow, his story, and see a great man.
He leaves it to survive in the wilds off the road where it might sire great pups and howl freely at the moon. A majestic and beautiful creature. The stuff of legends. The birth of a protector, perhaps. A spirit. A noble beast spared by the prince’s own hand that might one day chase off a wily fairy or save some cursed nobleman. That might, if he ever needed it, return the favor someday when he was king.
Perhaps it was still out there to this very day.
Sometimes, the prince swears, he can still hear it howling.
The first time he’d heard this, Tadius had gone rigid as if someone had come up behind him and pressed the icy tip of a knife to his back. He couldn’t breathe. He’d been so sure. Nobody had said anything. He’d tried to be careful.
The rest of the night had been a blur and he’d considered himself, briefly, as good as dead.
He hadn’t recovered for the rest of the evening, and had wanted to ask what the prince meant as they’d returned to the castle even as he’d known that doing so would draw unwanted attention. He’d claimed the ache in his leg, a sudden dizzy spell, old memories when asked why he wasn’t laughing at the recounting of the evening’s ending. He hadn’t asked the question.
But it had dogged his steps, that thought, until the next time the prince had told the story. And then the third. And the fourth.
It seemed as though he could possess a bit of flair after all. Something to leave the people wanting. The sort of thing that, if pressed on it, would only have him tell Tadius to “stop taking everything so seriously.”
There is usually cheering around them then as the thieves, no, the intended murderers were arrested. Bundled up tidily and quickly. As Tadius was seen to. His life saved, as he'd clearly lived to tell the tale and that was all one needed to know. An easy hand wave. Happily ever after, in a way.
And then the story ends. And the night creeps onward. Now strung about with cheers for the prince, the room somehow warmed as if by a change in the climate, and joys abounding with the telling of a proper story.
Hip, hip, and hooray indeed.
And Tadius, having fully extricated himself from the situation, gets to settle in for the rest of it. He gets to smile, thin and fragile as a magic wand.
He has learned by now that nights can be unbearably long.
Having wandered away and sat himself at the bar, he keeps an eye for the usual signs that the prince will be making his accompanied way to a bedroom. Those chosen prey from the telling of the tale always go gladly.
Once he’s off, it will then be Tadius’ job to find the innkeeper to both pay for said room (which the prince knows about) and bribe the man well enough to avoid one that would be better suited to fleecing rich men out of their money (which he is blissfully unaware of).
And then he is alone in a room full of people who hold his secret in the palms of their hands. Who drink deeply from it and smile at him with red mouths. Who probably won’t remember his name, what with all the syllables, but will retell some version of the story on some other night to their own crowd. It won’t flow as well, but they’ll enjoy it all the same.
The prince’s man with the scars.
After that, he might find himself lucky and have an ale purchased for him by the man whose original story had originally been usurped. Who might clap him about the shoulder in sympathy. Who might see in the grim failure of Tadius’ attempt at a smile, that the story could be missing some pieces.
They don’t actually ask after such things, those sorts of people. Just as he doesn’t request they shuck off their shirts so that he might trace their scars with his finger. It’s the polite thing to do.
They generally leave him alone then, returning to their own nights, while Tadius is left to the bar. A wide berth. Duty. Maybe a sympathetic look or two if someone’s gaze happens to drift over him like the fall of hardly much spring rain. Just enough to settle on the collar and turn his hair to unruly curls.
To waiting until the prince emerges, thoroughly satisfied, and Tadius can get the names of the other participants for later and blearily guide the way to the carriage so that they might play out the whole farce again next week at another seedy venue that the prince craves.
But that’s for later. For now, there’s only his ale which doesn’t actually do much to gloss over the truer version of the tale.
It can’t soften the edges or make it into something malleable. Something that could, one day, come to resemble such an easier story.
The truth follows at his heels, its own kind of shadow. It is never far from him. And moving from the roaring hearth doesn’t banish it. It only makes it swallow him up faster.
He can’t help but think on it. Just to reassure himself, at first. It had happened the way he’d recalled it. He runs his hands along the truth the same way you tremulously reached for the face of an old friend which time had attempted to change.
Then, it’s unavoidable. Wine spilling from a bottle once you’d tumped it upside down and pulled out the cork. Red as anything. Spilling. Stains.
Memory rises, gleams, and wanes in turn. Silver. Red. Black.
~*~
He’d been lucky, at the very least, that his survival could be transfigured into such a good story that could in turn facilitate its continuing. Something that looked so good on paper.
That explained so much of it and, in turn, could permit him his eccentricities.
In considering his own luck, which he must often do, such a thing is merely the tip of the iceberg. Just as the saga he recounts for an audience and the prince’s heroic escapades are the barest glances of the truth.
The first part was mostly accurate, how Tadius had in fact come too close to the road’s edge in his bothering the prince. He’d known it to be a bad idea while he was doing it, but the whole day’s tournament had been an exercise in knowing something to be unsafe and doing it anyway.
To walk within The Night Maid’s court when notable enough to have one’s name remembered by some, but not so vital that someone important would take umbrage if someone took a bite out of you, was always a gamble.
To have to be the one tasked with keeping the prince’s blood well within his body while not offending any parties involved? It had substantially worsened the odds of his survival.
He, obviously, would have much preferred to stay in the castle. Nobody had asked him in regards to his preference for how he’d spend the day or how much of his blood he’d like to retain.
As such, Tadius had been playing with poor hands all morning. Had been making poor choices all day. It was a miracle that he’d made it that far, really. He’d never thought himself invincible; instead, he’d made the mistake of assuming the hard part finished.
After all, he’d survived the whole tournament without as much as a scratch. Not only that, but he’d possibly even found an informant within the miserable house-keeping staff of The Night Maid’s castle.
The latest scullery maid dragged from her home to tend the hordes of gilled, blood-thirsty rats within the sea-soaked catacombs had a certain look about her that suggested she would do just about anything for a change in career.
She and Tadius had become, well, not fast friends but at least a girl and someone she could desperately cling to while weeping who promised her hope.
All that was left was to journey home. To stay awake. To continue the meaningless slog of tasks that had become habit by now.
He hadn’t felt powerful, only unnoticed by life itself. He’d felt as though this were just another night in a plethora of foolish situations he’d been in. Something he’d slip through, as he always did, while pressing on.
And there wasn’t any fear in that. Tadius had been too busy, too winded, and too sore in his tailbone from riding out this morning and returning now, to even consider being afraid. To consider a moment’s hesitation for himself.
He’d been hungry to start the night. He’d be ravenous by its end.
But he’d been pushing through. He’d noticed, as he’d trained himself to, the exact moment when the prince’s boredom had begun to get out of hand (because he’d almost dropped his newly gifted dagger two times in a row).
There had been more important things to consider than his comfort, mostly that he’d be the one to have to go scrabbling through foliage for a royal finger if it was separated from the rest of the royal person, and so he’d ridden over.
Closer to the edge of the road than a man who’d been having a normal evening ever would ever have dared. He hadn’t even considered his own danger, whether based on proximity to unseen predators or the brandished dagger.
Tadius had actually been right in the middle of gravely explaining why His Royal Highness shouldn’t have drifted from his spot in the center of the caravan, having gotten so close to the edge of the road, when things had spun so quickly out of his control.
He hadn’t even gotten to mention the weapon being slung around.
He’d only been in the middle of saying, “Gods forbid something terrible should happen–,” when something terrible had in fact happened.
Just as he predicted.
IN HIS NIGHTMARES, A GREAT MANY TERRIBLE THINGS HAPPEN.
He’d actually been planning to explain to the prince the likelihood of the attack of some foul creature or the besetting of brigands. No matter the fun he was having skittering a displaced bead of moonlight into the eyes of various folk around their caravan with his new artifact, such things would remain true.
He had only just, pointedly, confiscated said dagger before someone really did lose a limb, when the next bend in the tale had arrived mostly as the prince had said. He hadn’t seen it coming.
It had arrived most suddenly, most terribly, and he hadn’t possessed the slightest inkling as to what had closed with him.
A massive creature. Dark fur. A hideous smell. A snarl like the ripping of a great chain through the mechanism of a broken winch as a portcullis slammed down and you had little time to get clear of its fall.
He’d never laugh about it, never even crack a smile, but of course it happened to him just then.
After all, he’d been doing some wild gesticulating of his own with that same silver dagger while making his argument, but he’d been attempting to make a point. Of course this was the one time that he was immediately proven right in his concerns and immediately been punished for it.
He hadn’t taken an inch of satisfaction in the arrival of the beast of coarse fur and great size, greater than any creature that he’d ever had the chance to see when he’d been forced to carry the prince’s quiver along on royal hunts.
In his nightmares, he and the prince are hunting together. In his nightmares, the prince hunts him. In his nightmares, he hunts the prince. The arrows are tipped silver in their loosing.
While he’d certainly been jolted with fear, the panic couldn’t yet pierce the baffling fog of his own confusion. With the darkness, the mist, how easy it had been to slip from the normal to the abnormal.
He’d been blissfully unaware for a short time (getting shorter by the second with his approaching the ground).
The question what, with only the barest hint of dread that he wouldn’t enjoy the answer, hadn’t had much time to do more than register before he was already in the air.
And then, the ground. He’d bitten his tongue at the meeting between the grass and his jaw. He’d continued tumbling as he’d landed upon a sloping hill because his existence was not a short joke. It was a long and complicated sort of affair that would have jesters throw up their hands in defeat.
The wind had been knocked clear from his body and whatever the thing was, its strength had been proven as they went slamming clear of the road and vanished from sight.
Tumbling into the dark, as if he had been utterly forgotten. Eaten up.
The world had become upside down and his mind had been unable to catch up, his first thought had been simply that he was falling. He’d hit his head on the way down, the slightest wound of the evening somehow. Not a scar to be seen. A bright star bursting at his temple, behind his eyes. A fuzziness that might account for his decisions.
His horse had, immediately, startled at the brush with death and charged ahead without him. This had, in turn, alerted the rest of the caravan to the presence of danger as much as Tadius’ suddenly cut off shout. The prince, somehow, had remained utterly silent. Hadn’t done anything yet.
Tadius never would know, and never could ask, what look had dripped down his noble brow at the sudden disappearance of his man. Perhaps it was the same look of bewilderment he’d worn since childhood. Eyes only a little wider than normal. Mouth agape. A look that had first appeared over a broken vase as if he’d never before realized that things could in fact be broken.
Or, maybe, it had been still. Placid. A languid blink as one might hardly bat an eye at grass as it was tread upon. A yawn before a moment’s concern when he’d realized that the dagger had gone too.
Tadius had almost forgotten he was holding it, and only considers it good fortune that he didn’t lose it on the way down.
He won’t do anything with it until much later.
His horse’s actions, at least, had set off a panic. Had indicated that something was wrong. Cries that something, or several someones, was attacking the caravan, had arisen. Suddenly, the whole of the road had seemed dotted with dangers. There had been screaming. Jumping at nothing but shadows.
Rumors would still spread from this, even after it was over. Some particularly drowsy courtiers would swear to have heard the tapping of the vagabonds' blades upon the windows of their carriages. Would claim a hook ripped from a stump at their eventual return to the castle (no matter how little sense it made or how slowly they’d eventually done so).
Would blame the absence of any item, whether it be coin lost in the day’s betting or a forgotten fan, on absconding thieves. Any hurt in the chaos, if they spoke about it, might attribute this bruise or that weeping cut to a brush with death.
Tadius had, therefore, been somewhat forced to work banditry into the story to avoid alternating accounts. Avoid anyone asking questions. To give them something else to gasp at instead of him. It hadn’t exactly been his idea.
But it was fine.
At least such a fate hadn’t befallen the prince. He tried to tell himself this to believe that, yes, a vast quantity of luck was something he was in possession of.
The potential had been right there, after all. A moment’s hesitation on Tadius’ part would have been all he’d needed. Had he not taken the knife or been a bit slower. They’d been so close together. It would have been easy for things to be different, or at least he likes to pretend as much.
Perhaps, in turn, if he’d been a little quicker or even thought of it, the prince might have been able to reach out a hand to graze the heaving side of the great beast as it had soared by. To grab Tadius’ wrist and somehow save him.
Wasn’t that a prince’s lot in life? Saving people? Shouldn’t it have been possible, somehow? Couldn’t Tadius be the slightest bit bitter, carry the barest smudges of discontent, that he’d served the only prince in an age who didn’t rescue folk from monsters?
These weren’t exactly productive thoughts. He can have a great deal of those sorts of things when he isn’t careful.
After all, if His Highness’ regal life had been a little less charmed, it could have been his lot in life to tumble down the hill and earn a few scars. To land, belly first, and find himself face to face with horrors unthinkable. To have his own story to decide whether or not it should be bandied about for spectacle.
The moon does things to Tadius’ temper. Such resentment often rips trenches through him at its approach. He excuses himself from more rooms. Feigns a headache or nosebleed when all he’s done is bitten his lip bloody or punctured the skin of his palm without noticing. He sees it happening, and does his best to work around it.
Later, once it’s over and his mind is perfectly clear again, he tells himself that such wrath has no use.
It would have been worse, probably.
He honestly believes, if their situations had been reversed, then the prince would have eaten him first. He’d have been the easiest victim, the first to approach with outstretched hands at the sign that something was wrong. Something was happening. The way it rang in your body like a bell’s sour toll. Convulsions. The first crack of a bone, breaking, like the moment before a felled tree crashed down.
He’d have been long dead, and there’d be no way to know as to how many others would have been taken with him.
There’d be no telling what life would be now if it had occurred thusly. What kind of kingdom could theirs be if such human appetites were stoked in such unnatural ways? All the strength to take what little the world had refused him. Hardly the conscientiousness to do all that Tadius has done in the name of his own survival. Of the welfare of any person around him.
There was no way to know.
In his nightmares, the crown sits upon a shaggy head. A hungry king on full moons before ladened, ripe and maggoty, banquet tables. Oceans of blood. The people’s reaching hands before perfect jaws. Too many bites to speak of. Perhaps they’d all have all eaten each other up and been done with it.
The same way there was no answer as to why the creature had attacked him in the first place. It made no sense. A whole caravan should have dissuaded a lone hunter unless it had been driven mad by starvation. And it hadn’t.
They hadn’t seen a single creature all night with the surrounding thunder of hooves. The gleam of blades so openly wielded.
He’d had no open cuts, no droplet of his blood had struck the road to summon starving things. He’d just been a man. One of many. The unluckiest of the bunch. He’d only drifted a ways.
His only guess was that it had could have been the gleam of the dagger, whether for the yet unknown threat it posed or the reflected moonlight that the prince had been casting wildly about the dark road. That sheen that Tadius had taken into his own hand without a thought.
Or it was simply something that had happened. Pointlessly.
No reason. No rhyme.
He hadn’t considered any of this, when he’d dropped down and off the road. He hadn’t thought to ask the thing and had lost the chance at interrogation rather quickly.
While the prince’s story focused more on the confusion of the caravan atop the hill, the bravery of a galavanting hero, Tadius’ story instead followed him all the way down.
The spray of stars in his eyes as his head had barely grazed the ground (but grazed it all the same). The inelegant toss of the rest of him. A moment’s separation from himself and the fall’s other occupant.
The horrible indignity. The wheeze and the scrabbling up to his elbows as he’d looked up to the road where the moonlight was free to cascade down without the interference of tree cover. Now, he was dappled with shadow, having fallen between the trees. The world awash in the hushing and shushing of the wind through their branches.
It was a singular moment he’ll later think of as blissful where, with all the rolling he’d just subjected his consciousness to, he’d forgotten that something had knocked into him at all.
For a moment, a mere flash, he’d only slipped and fallen somehow. All he’d felt was a match flare of embarrassment at the trouble he’d likely caused based on the shouting up top. A real hubbub of chaos that was almost flattering. He’d always assumed he could vanish, one day, and none would notice.
In his nightmares, he vanishes and they come looking for him. They chase after him, calling his name. He does not think they want to hurt him. This is worse, as once they catch him he knows what he will do to them.
It had been, for that beautiful moment, nothing more than an inconvenience. Something that he’d expect wry comments on as he’d caused a scene. He’d call up to them to signal that he was no worse for wear and, maybe, someone would even slide down to help him up. He’d make some kind of joke about finding himself slightly drowsy.
And then he’d looked back at a sound, and the story suddenly had more to do with his screaming. The first of such honest sounds, so pure and resonant in its horror like iron from the deepest mines, that he’d ever made.
The story had stretched and broken as the night had burst from its confines with something that shouldn’t have ever existed prowling before him. Even with the weaving of shadow, there was no hiding the truth of what it was.
He never doubted what he saw.
The stink of an animal. Claws and jaws and teeth and the certainty, scrabbling and tinged with blood, that the beast which briefly stood over him in too tall a hunch could be no mere dog. No matter what it looked like.
The truth of what stood behind him seemed to bash itself again and again into the front of his skull and fiddle with his eyes as one might desperately try to close a window. Might try to change what he was looking at somehow.
Meanwhile, squatting at the back of his thoughts, was the sudden certainty that he was a dead man. That he could not be looking upon this thing and continue to live.
Such a realization had been the heartbeat of the issue, thrumming away, while his desperate scrabble for control was the shrieking focus. The first, the air. The second, the way the body used it to speak.
It hadn’t stood upright. Instead, it had seemed almost trapped within a sort of cruel bend of its own making. Its spine neither proud nor mighty, it had crooked. As if it could only look forward, reach out supplicating hands, but find no comfort in four legs.
It could not look up to the sky. As if it had been half-finished, halfway between being crumpled or smoothed out, and set upon the world.
In his nightmares, he cannot look up. It hurts too much.
It had five sharp-tipped fingers on each hand and coarse palms he could see, though it could easily have taken his whole head in one hand to say nothing of what it could fit within the cave he guessed to lurk behind the gateway of its closed jaws.
He’d thought about madness, about seeing things that weren’t there, but the stink of it had been all too real. The way shadow sat with it, around it, as they were now hidden from sight together. The evening’s fuzziness only separated him from his body, where he might run. It did nothing to hide the lupine truth.
In landing, they’d tumbled out of sight, and Tadius had been left on his belly. Facing the steep climb back to the road with the beast behind him. An unmistakable rumble of a growl had drawn his eyes back and he hadn’t even risen up onto his hands and knees.
His hand still clasped a dagger and he couldn’t even notice which one held it. His vision had tunneled so sharply. The world had closed itself off from him to prepare for its mourning.
Perhaps a more traveled man, who’d hunted great beasts or lived the haggard life of a wayfaring ranger, would have known that to look back was to accept certain death.
But Tadius was none of those things. He was curious and truly believed, at the time, that what you didn’t know could and would kill you quicker than something you understood.
Now he knows it’s hardly a factor. It’ll kill you just as quick either way.
But he’d looked back, and met gleaming yellow eyes that seemed to burn in the dark. That held the moon’s light and gave it back. Wider than coins. Sick and weeping some fluid, thicker than tears, at the corners. Jaundiced and bright, somehow, simultaneously. Overflowing with moonlight. Life. Hunger. Rage. Lurid and foul as a snake’s tail, rattling a warning.
He’d seen the pant of its hideous breath billow into the night and the opening of its mouth had revealed hideous teeth. Yellow. Long-tipped. Newly cut. Revealed the cave of that mouth, dribbling with red at the gums, and the certainty that no words passed between those thin and hateful lips. No silver could be spun from so foul and graying a tongue. This thing had been made for the breaking of skin. It seemed somehow sickened by its very existence.
A blight, upon the world and itself, plain and simple.
He’d looked upon the world and found a walking death. Caught painfully between animal and something else. Foul, transfigured, the heinous smear of magic as obvious as the mark of a poorly trained craftsman.
And it was waiting for him to do something.
His first shout at understanding its shape died quickly, choked down, as he’d realized that he might have some kind of chance.
For a moment, he hadn’t dared move. Dazed. Frightened. Too sure that to dart one way or another was to bring about his death faster. He hadn’t moved yet, and he could only pray that such a thing was what was saving him and not chance. Not whim.
Even holding a knife, he hadn’t thought to use it. He barely knew how to hold it. Where to tuck his thumb around the handle. In having a moment to think about it, he’d stayed his own hand.
They’d been there, for a moment, only breathing. Looking at each other. Again, above him, there was a clamor growing. More chaos. But somehow, despite his initial shouts, quiet had descended quick as a carrion bird.
In his nightmares, he sits across from Talbot. In his nightmares, he runs at the other man and shoves him to the ground as if they were two boys roughhousing. In his nightmares, he slams Talbot’s head against the ground and asks him WHY. In his nightmares, Talbot sits across from him and Tadius does nothing but feel a sadness like the numbness of freezing to death.
Tadius, without a clue as to what one did in these sorts of situations, had finally been the one to move first in the end. To flinch, falter, and try desperately to flee. He’d only stayed still for about five seconds.
His mind, somewhere, had finally given way beneath the screaming thing that told him to stop just laying there. That said he was going to die in the long dark and it was going to hurt.
He’d tried to desperately fling himself up the hill (content to crawl on his belly if it meant that he’d only live) with a cry of, “Here–!”
Perhaps he’d meant down here or, I’m here or, it’s here but he’d never know now. He never got more of a chance to even finish the thought.
He’d forgotten the first lesson he’d ever been told in regards to The Night Maid’s domain. A truth about any domain. Once you ran, the chase began. And it would not stop until you were caught.
It had been upon him then. Events go slightly hazy. Intentions, even the best of them, are smeared. Dragged through the dark.
He hadn’t much of a chance to get very far, obviously. It hadn’t grabbed him, or, at least, not in the traditional sense. It hadn’t used its hands.
The beast had instead sunk its teeth into his calf, the right one that would now carry that weakness forever, to better drag him deeper into the brush as a great predator might pull prey into its den for further dismemberment.
There had been a different sort of scream then. He’d be making this sound for most of the evening.
Pain sat differently in the mouth than fear, escaping more jaggedly.
Tadius had a moment, as he’d vainly struggled, to experience the same helpless airborne sort of terror a rabbit might last see before the hounds set to tearing it apart. The complete dismantling of the idea that one could, if one put one’s back into it, save one’s own life.
How it felt to futilely scrabble at the earth with his one available hand, see trenches dug for each blunt-tipped finger, and find no purchase.
The thing had finally spat him out and thrown him down, still on his stomach, and he hadn’t had time to do much more than take in a breath (so desperate to breathe and live and run) before he stopped being able to think. He couldn’t. Not in a way that was helpful. It was all here and now and this. New holes in his skin. Dirt under his nails. The moon, lovely and too far to do anything but preside, illuminating the whole clearing in which he was likely to die.
He’s never gone back there. He can’t bring himself to. He tells himself he wouldn’t be able to find it, but knows that he is lying. It would reek. He’d know it.
In his nightmares, he travels its length. Walks it like a border. Patrols. Listens. Things move in the dark.
His leg had been bleeding. He’d known that if he could somehow make it to his feet he’d be slow. He’d leave a trail. It was hot and wet on his leg and he could feel liquid slipping against his ankle in odd places. He had aches that were suddenly inconsequential in his back from falling, his hand from where the reins had dragged across his palm in his dismount, and it was all useless to have.
Same as the knife, pointed in the wrong direction, as the thing had fallen upon him with immediacy. With its hands.
The pain, incandescent, could only be so emphasized. His mind has dulled it, somewhat. To the truth. Simple as a sword, as its strike.
It had hurt.
Of course it had.
The creature had almost dug through him, ravenously, with its claws as if searching for something. As if it had hoped in its madness that somewhere, beneath his skin, it could find an answer to a question he wouldn’t know how to pose.
If it could find something familiar. Something to hold up to itself and say, oh, we match.
He cannot think the creature was hungry. He thinks, in a way, it had been driven mad by something else.
All other facts of his existence had swarmed, as if each was some insect within a swarm that was desperate to live on its own, amidst his consciousness. Buzzing for focus. Molting to new horrible forms. Trying with an empty sort of zeal to live.
He’d been miserable for so long. All his life and what had it amounted to? Service of a monarch he disdained and it had lead him here. To this. He hadn’t even wanted to come here.
He’d known there was more he’d wanted. He’d had such lofty designs, but in the moment they’d deserted him. Melted away as if they’d only been dreams of ice.
He doesn’t pray. He doesn’t ask to live. Something had already been moving through him, as venom shot through the bloodstream and reached for the heart. The hidden truth. It had been right there, already tailoring his body to its specifications.
He’d been so hungry.
His stomach had been a scrape within him, the ultimate weakness of his body. In that moment he’d thought it a horrible thing to die starving. For life. For sustenance. For some true realization of what it had all been for.
In his nightmares, he never feels this again.
To feel emptiness within him, hot and shaky, hollowing him out as something dug to meet it.
Later, he’d know that for such a creature, it was much the same. A worse sort of hunger that emptied the head and raised the hand and pushed want out the skin with other horrible transmogrifications. That took all it could think to want and more. He never awoke full anymore.
In his nightmares, he is so hungry.
Later, he’d know what it looked like. Assemble it all in his head. The shards he managed to catch. A patchwork grotesquerie.
Its lupine ears and monstrous hands which had made quick work of his back as he’d had nothing to do vainly reach one hand the way he’d came. No chance to run. To call for help as it had shredded him to strips.
It hadn’t the intention to eat him. It could have started doing so.
Instead, it had contented itself with this.
He could only see the underbrush, feel the dead and broken fragments of the forest floor smear up his face as he’d tried in vain to do more than scream. To think of something or pray. He’d become completely lost to the world around him, so suddenly aware of his flimsy mortality, and not had a clue as to what was happening up top.
He hadn’t even considered that someone would be coming anymore. His world had shrunk to the taste of leaf matter. The novel experience of being flayed without a torturer’s skill.
The prince’s version of the tale didn’t mention how it had been the head of their assembled guard, and a knight of the realm, who’d demanded their swiftest rider head for the nearest town to bring back a nurse if they were to have any hope of saving Tadius’ life once she’d been the one to ascertain there to have been only one true danger around them.
Which, to her credit, she’d done in record time. Tadius would later consider that his screaming could have helped in this somehow.
How she’d, beneath a grizzled helm and still wearing the dust of her jousting bouts earlier that day, been the one to bring order to the caravan and have the remaining riders circle their horses to protect the carriages as a precaution when it became clear that no other figures were partaking in an ambush. To try and bring order to the chaos which had mostly been an effect of the panic.
It had been her, Syr Gwendolyn of Conliffe, who’d been the one to turn her horse and charge into the unknown with the intent of dragging what little of him still might be left back from the grip of wilds.
She had, however, only actually the second one to plunge into that sucking darkness. After all, she’d seen to the others first.
The prince had no such compulsions. And he’d been the one to take the closest torch and follow the action without a word. Though he’d probably done so more for the thrill of the hunt than anything to do with Tadius’ life. For the moment’s allure instead of the concern for the rest of the assembled troupe.
The prince wasn’t entirely wrong though when saying that he’d saved Tadius’ life. It was a statement that, by technicality, did originate from a snippet of truth.
It had been the thunder of hooves from his arrival, the call of his voice that had been bright as a horn sounding at the seeking of a fox, that had the creature stop in its savaging and look up. Scent the air once, twice, and turn as if deciding what to do as the riders descended upon the scene. Light, a far off flare, was arriving.
It had approached, slowly, as if fascinated. The call of a prince.
Tadius, excruciatingly, hadn’t needed more than a moment to begin to drag himself away. When he’d first looked up, expecting a final swipe to his head which might end everything, and not even been noticed.
He hadn’t wanted to pick apart such motivations.
He hadn’t looked back but the once, wondering why he was getting this chance at all, and in doing so had seen the thing that would (much later) bring the queasiest chill of horror to his stomach.
If he hadn’t known better, at the time, he’d have thought to himself that it looked as though the beast was puzzling out what to do. As if it were weighing some strange longing, directed towards the prince’s call, against its violent delights.
Whether or not it was worth it to finish with him or flee. He’d have thought, as it heard the approach of riders, that it was lingering almost wistfully. Something halting its beastly consequences.
In fact, as it had risen to two feet with its massive arms still long enough that its bloodied talons could still sweep along the forest floor, there had been an impossible tilt to the head. A sort of crinkling of the eyes, even as they burned from atop a snout, that had Tadius think that the beast didn’t look much like a beast in that moment at all.
It had looked, not very much but undeniably so, like a man.
Under its skin, something struck true. As a player might wear the skin of a great bear or wolf upon the stage. As he might lumber and groan and be painted red at the mouth, but you could still see something of him there.
In his nightmares, he wears a stinking cloak of fur upon the stage and tries to remember the words to an old poem. He can never finish the line after, they left it dead and took its head and–. The audience waits.
This had been no costume. Not a stitch or seam visible. But he’d swear upon it, now with more desperation than when he’d first seen it, that a man had been somewhere within that grotesque form. In its bones, perhaps. Chained in its stomach.
It was a thought born of hysteria, he’d later mused. A misstep in sorting that he’d tried to cling to and set the world to rights in how he might consider his own death. Not mauled by an animal, not swallowed up by chance, but set upon by a man, perhaps. Such a thing could have been more agreeable.
He hadn’t looked for long.
He’d then once more turned his thoughts to his own survival and kept on inching away. Eventually, the best he could do, he’d found himself scrabbling at the base of a stump.
A tree that had clearly met its own ending at the axe of a hatchet man here. For firewood perhaps as, and he always forgets this until now, the night had been bitter cold. Such a thing had been true all this time. That his own breath, on horseback, had streamed in clouds and he’d forgotten his gloves in the frenzy of departure.
It had been lost to his memory. He always finds it here. The winter’s breath, seeking heat and plucking life. Lurking just behind.
The Night Maid had been reborn at the darkest hour on the coldest day thousands of years ago. Whether it was day or night for the rest of the world did not matter, as the moment she graced the world with her moon-tipped hands and raven hair was the moment that time within her domain had begun to hold its breath for her.
Eternal snow. Eternal night.
There had been torchlight for the competitors. Warm bodies for the ever frozen members of that frost-bitten, perhaps frost-choked, court. Boxes packed to the brim with humans who’d bayed for bloodsport and might wander to a brazier to warm their hands (unaware of the envious gazes of those dead things that could only approach fire to melt the skin).
But to be working throughout the “day” was to know no comfort. To only get warm enough to feel how deeply that sluggish, dead, sensation had sunken into the skin. Was to begin the day cold and end it half numbed. Was to try and see who’d gotten so chilled that they’d started taking off their layers and had to be taken to a tent to recover.
He’d blown fiercely into his palms, rubbed them together, throughout the day. Mostly just to have something to do with his hands. Without his gloves, it hadn't accomplished much.
It had been uncanny, on the coldest night of the year, to have spent twenty-four hours within darkness and emerged from the curtain of Her power to find the same darkness waiting. New snow having fallen, leaving the road undisturbed. As if the whole of the tournament, its brutality and blood sport, had never happened at all.
As if it could have been a grand sort of horrible dream, a nightmare’s story, were it not for the things they’d carried out of there as if daring the darkness to take them back.
He’d been sneezing all day. His hands had gone dry and cracked. He’d been wearing his heaviest traveling cloak, the one he’d liked best, with thick maroon wool and a lining of fur at the collar. The man who’d sold it to him had claimed it was wolf fur, and Tadius hadn’t believed him for a second.
It had been torn to shreds, of course. That collar, of which he’d been proud but never tried to pass off as wolf to others, had been left bedraggled and ruined somewhere in the undergrowth. Fibers of wool had to be picked from him with tweezers, near indecipherable from the blood were it not for their wiry tufting. The way they’d soaked up blood and later dried in strange hardened contortions like snapped off fragments of coral.
There’s little he remembers from being pieced back together. He’d already been half out of his mind before they’d tipped something bitter tasting, still flecked with ground up vegetation from how quickly they’d alchemized the natural sedative, down his throat.
Apparently, even while missing most of his blood, he’d kept on screaming. He’d been rearing up, hoarsely shouting. The soporific tincture had been a last resort as the nurses had worried for the stopping of his heart, but it had left the world swaddled in cotton fog. Left him strange impressions from a morning (because by the time they’d begun seeing to him the sun must have been rising) that had already been stripped bare.
The world had oozed around him; the only details he remembered were ones that had somehow caught his focus like a hook embedding itself in a fish. Involuntary connection. Somehow painful to think. Something bound to him now.
Wishing he could sleep, even if it meant he wouldn’t wake again.
A hand at his forehead, its soft and weathered palm, while someone called him dove and said they’d be finished soon. Just a while longer.
A snippet of conversation, half dream, where someone said they’d need to fetch a bone needle as he seemed to be having some kind of reaction to the metal ones.
A small wooden bowl of those picked away fibers, tacky with his blood, left at his head while they saw the rest of the work finished.
Such things had given him a new appreciation for the color red. For seeing that red as anything, or so simple a word as maroon, couldn’t begin to compare with the dark spatter of blood against the snow. The last thing he’d thought he’d see.
The world had been a wet and horrible drag with flashes of vibrancy, and he’d submitted himself to it. Held on and done his best to roll to face the end. His hands wet and shaking from cold and the grip of death upon him.
He couldn’t sit himself up, and so he’d suffered to have the stump keep him at least halfway upright.
He’d known he couldn’t run, that the thing would surely be able to track him and outpace him, and decided that the only thing a man in his position was left to do was fight. Better that than being run down. Better that than wasting this, the only chance he was likely to get.
His back had been wet, soaked through with agony and damp as much as his own blood as he’d felt new wounds press with each movement, but he’d be damned nine times if he wouldn’t meet his ending head on.
People thought him a bootlicking coward. He knew that. Sometimes he’d agreed. He’d laid down time and time again. Taken everything the world had given him and forced a smile.
He couldn’t remember why at the time. Other things on his mind, and all.
But there was always time to change such things in the end. To say he met death with blood in his eyes and his own blunt teeth bared.
He had, after all, kept hold of the dagger. The only thing he’d done all evening that might have contained with in it an ounce of sense, even as it was more of an ornament than any soldier’s blade.
He could have thrown it, maybe, but even whilst in possession of all his faculties (to say nothing of his blood) he’d been a terrible shot for most of his life.
And what a sight it would have been, taking such a piece of craftsmanship and chucking it into the woods without a second thought. He’d have probably, in his state, gone in the opposite direction.
It truly was a beautiful thing. He could think this was still true and be terrified of it. His was a life of things that somehow managed to be both beautiful and terrible in their might.
The moon. The dagger. A queen.
It was the sort of silver dagger that probably cost more than all of Tadius’ earthly possessions put together. With a leather grip and its blade engraved with a breathtaking scene of The Night Maid’s Castle atop its cliff, the capped waves breaking at its base beneath a sky of stars and a beaming moon.
It was the sort of piece that would have taken an artisan a portion of his lifetime (or, for an undead one, a blink of an eye). It was the sort of wonder that was traded for favor, for friendship, or folly and now it was already streaked with his blood and the mud he’d been dragged through. It had flashed nakedly beneath the sky, throwing light. He'd caught sight of his eyes in its mirror sheen and thought, dimly, that he looked the part of a madman.
He’d never forgotten it, caged within his fist as a last hope. A final resort. The last flip of the coin as it fell through the air.
It had been in his right hand all along.
But the thought of staggering to his feet to fling himself on the beast, on where to place the point, was hardly something that came naturally.
He’d never put his efforts to studying the art of warfare, only sworn to himself that he’d avoid such situations at all costs. He used to chuckle that if a time came when he’d need the point of a blade to save his own life, then he might as well forfeit the whole affair. Might as well lay down and die.
Shows what he’d thought of the world. What he’d thought the likelihood was that he could ever be sought out by danger, let alone have it get its claws into him.
And there it had been, already in motion. A choice made to finish up here first.
It had turned. It had closed the distance between them far quicker than it had taken Tadius to make it in the first place.
And suddenly, he hadn’t needed thought anymore. There wasn’t time to stand, to assume some sort of stance that would have his weight balanced and his aim true. So he’d done the next best thing. The only thing he could think of.
He’d only had one chance as the shape had bounded towards him, and he’d very little training in ways of combat, but he’d known that all things had to bleed.
And the neck was a sure enough spot each time.
In the face of its snarl he’d let loose what he’d thought to be his last scream, the sort of final shout that might echo and remind someone that he once was here. Letting loose with everything he had just as the heroes of his songs had as they met their fate with flashing teeth and mail-shirts.
All he’d had was a ruined cloak and someone else’s dagger, but the ending had been the same.
It had been more effort than he’d thought, but the dagger, pure silver, had proven unavoidable. Broken through, though it was more likely that the beast had been more done in by its own speed and strength than any of Tadius’ paltry efforts. All he’d needed was a place to aim.
At that, though, life had departed from story.
The creature had not let out a scream, nothing great and howling, but instead only offered a gurgling whine due to the placement of its wound. And it had not fallen upon him as soon as he’d pulled the blade from its throat.
It hadn’t immediately died.
In all the poems he’d once recited and slightly changed, when men slew great beasts, they rolled over dead the moment the deed was done. They vanished in a puff of foul smoke. They let loose one last cry or cryptic message and toppled from great cliffs to scatter on the rocks. They went limp.
But for this wretch, its wound strangely branching with ill effects as if somehow poisoned, death was slow. Already inescapable, but taking its time on the approach.
In his nightmares, such veins appear on his hand as he eats at the high table. He tries to wipe them from his skin, but they only appear in other places. He has a moment to realize what it means, to wonder when he’d been cut, and then it is over.
For a moment, it had stood there over him with a mute sort of surprise. Its eyes cast up. Its arms hanging open. It still could have been swiping at him. It could have killed him by now. He’d flinched back, anticipating a retaliatory blow.
If it had been a man, he’d think it to have been asking whatever force it believed in why this was happening.
Its blood had, needless to say, gone everywhere. Especially onto Tadius. This had made his great bellow contort and shrink with undeniable disgust, as it had towered over him and seemed to seize. As if it now was finally starting the process of going through a great shock. Some great and final mechanism coming to a stop.
The lights going out. Stone crumbling.
But then, something else had begun to happen. Something inexplicable. Something unexpected. Something that no story had ever mentioned. Had ever described the way a body might somehow go to war with itself.
Something Tadius couldn’t look away from even as he’d first flinched and closed his eyes in the face of (what had seemed at the time to be) his own still possible death.
The sound of it starting, a wet fleshy shudder and sharp snapsnapsnap, had turned his head. Opened his eyes.
He’d never been a man content with mysteries. He’d never been the sort who wouldn’t have looked. If the sound had been far off, he’d have sought it. If it had run from him, he’d have followed it. But here it was instead, arcing over him as if he were studying the ceiling of a cathedral. Built in service to some nightmarish and abhorrent god.
Something had begun stirring beneath the thing’s skin. As if that imagined player, beneath his bearskin robe, were now convulsing. Something waking up inside of him. Something going wrong. An awkward elbow. A wild jerk of the shoulders. The sort of thing that brought a man down low. The machinations and ministrations of the undeniable. The ways of the flesh now polluted. Contorted against his will.
But in the ways no body could surely survive. In the ways that suggested that the player had not simply worn this costume, but been sewn into it and found himself fighting to escape that second skin. Burning, perhaps. Melting.
The thing was screaming now and terror, with no thought, spilled out of its great mouth at a different pitch than its rage. Its pain was a maelstrom. A sound that had begun changing in its timber.
Its body had been too.
Changing.
A rippling. A shrinking. As if the thing were falling in on itself and sinking to its knees within its own bones. It cracked in some places, creaked in others, and he’d have assumed it to be bellowing from the pain of such a process alone were it not also in the process of dying.
Its hands, and all of Tadius, were staining a dark red from the spray of its lifeblood but that did nothing to hide the hideous ways its fingers seemed to fold and wither. They way they spat out their great talons at the root to fall as acorns did from trees.
And the rest of it fell too. The only place it could. An inevitable collapse of shoddy craftsmanship that had been set ablaze.
It pitched closer and closer over him, draping itself, and from beneath it he had the perfect view of some hideous work at its ribcage. A reassembling of sorts. The bubbling of the body. The snapping and reshuffling of bones. The loss of fur and the nauseating crunch of a face falling in on itself as muscle melted. As if a blow had pushed its strange snout back and in. As the beast tucked itself away, one final time, and left a man to face the music.
The final crescendo of a life spent stuck between two places. Quartered by two ways of being. Hauled between them.
In his nightmares, he is underneath the body and all he can feel is the touch of its skin.
His bloody gums and red flushed skin that must have somehow been remade. The strange, viscous yellow had leaked from the eyes until they were left a fragile sort of hazel. Already weary. The panic was gone.
By the time the body had fully collapsed upon him, still in the throes of death, Tadius could already hear the difference to his moans. The cadence. The timber. The sounds of a monster meeting its end proved entirely different to those of a man.
And that was what he seemed to be now, wasn’t it?
Beneath the man’s skin, Tadius could still feel things moving at their closeness. But smaller now. The final wiggling of things scuttling back to their proper places. Shuddering beneath the skin, with an exhausted shiver, and burying themselves in stillness at last.
At the feeling, he couldn’t help his own shudder. Try in vain to shove them apart but find himself too weak. As if that, of all things, had been too much. The touch of slick skin, when his blood was already under Tadius’ lips, with things jittering around inside.
Points of light swam closer in the distance. Voices calling a word that could be his name. They were coming quickly, now.
But not faster than a man could die.
His skin was burning hot, his blood hotter, even as he grew paler by the moment. This close, the beating of his heart was a hammer held by a weak prisoner. A frantic thunder unable to keep up. Slowing down.
He was a simple man. A stranger. Short brown hair that might have been swept back from his face once, now bedraggled. Smeared up his head from his wild contortions. Wet with sweat, blood. Caught through with something coarser.
A wide and auspicious nose. He was still clearly taller, and stronger, than Tadius with workman’s hands that spoke of a life of labor. They bled at the fingernail beds, from where talons had once sprouted. Where nothing too permanent had grown back yet. He’d had all his teeth, with some to spare as pointed and yellowed fangs now littered the ground.
In his nightmares, the trees that grow from such seeds are gnarled and sharp with black furred leaves and weeping red insides. They know Tadius’ name and scream it as the wind rattles through them. They tell his secrets and he cannot chop them down fast enough. The hatchet, in his hands, is silver.
At his throat, the wound had shrunk, but the effects were even starker against his uncovered skin. Veins of furious dark purple, of some final and fatal bruising venom, kept reaching and climbing up his face.
Later, when Tadius would subtly inquire, he’d learn that the closest village’s firewood supply had dried up with the sudden vanishing of their hatchet man. A death knell for some, too weak to do it themselves, in winter.
But, at the same time, their assembled livestock was being picked off far less frequently. The gods gave, it seemed, as often as they took.
He’d been naked, but in the moment, that had been the least horrible thing to consider as Tadius had been forced back by the man’s dead weight.
Pinned between a monster and the place he’d chosen to die. The final, foolish, puff of his breath against Tadius’ ear. The weapon which had seen him dead, at last, Tadius had thrown down. His hands were pressed against this man’s chest, stalled in their pushing. Smeared handprints in the mess were what he’d left, when the body would finally be rolled away.
He could only splutter, stumble. “I–I–,” as if waiting for something to say. An apology? A question? An explanation? He’d have never thought to speak to the monster, but now he couldn’t stop the compulsion. The confusion.
Wasn’t a man owed as much when Tadius had killed him? Couldn’t he explain? Shouldn’t he have tried harder?
The man hadn’t said anything. No demands. No answers. No prayers.
Only looked down at Tadius with a moment’s pity, somehow more at peace for all his howling. Finally emptied out of all his hunger. The faulty wheeze of his breath was all he had left. Suddenly, brought to stillness, as the world might be when a cloud overtook the sky and brought about a tranquil sort of shadow.
There hadn’t been one cloud that night, as the man had suddenly looked up, and said, “Oh, the light,” in a rapturous whisper. Like he’d missed it.
He’d then promptly fallen on top of Tadius to die the rest of his suddenly quiet death. His nose at Tadius’ neck. His hair in Tadius’ mouth.
And then it had been over for a moment. Two. Tadius, having had a breath’s space, had found himself tearing up. Or, maybe, it was that he’d already been crying and only just noticed.
That was the sight the prince came upon, with Syr Gwendolyn close behind. Tadius, draped with a naked corpse, crying.
In the sudden fire of both their torches, though, Tadius could only think to point.
To say, “a dog. A dog,” and swing his hand as if to try and catch their attention. To draw them close as they broke the tree line.
The torches, somehow, were too bright to look at directly. Bright as the end of the world. They shook his grip on his own consciousness. Broke even that final moment of frozen tranquility by making the resounding shadows deeper. By banishing the silver light of the moon. Twin suns, reeking smoke. Drawing close to him.
But he couldn’t deny the need. To draw them near. To show them, somehow.
He’d been so hungry. It had become a sinkhole in his heart, his head, drawing other things into it. His thoughts had begun speeding up. Bubbling together like the strange miasma he’d just seen. Hysteria had swept through the cracks in logic as water sought escape from a reservoir any minute.
But they’d misunderstood the source of his terror. Thought them all, perhaps, to still be in danger. Suddenly, Syr Gwendolyn had been leaping from her horse to peel him from beneath the corpse. He’d already dropped the dagger, still painted with blood, but that didn’t do much in the way of hiding what had transpired. The wound at the corpse’s throat. The mess caught between them, painting them both.
She’d still thrown the body from him, barely bothering to look at it. Instead, he’d watched her assess his condition. Not startle or pale but take a knight’s pragmatism to determining how best to move him.
She’ll never tell him, afterwards, that she'd assumed he was all but dead already. She won’t have to. It sits plain as day on her face, just as it did the first time she came to his bedside. Just as it does each time they run into each other. She isn’t the sort to hide anything, Syr Gwendolyn, let alone the fact that she considers him to be either some kind of miracle or a cosmic joke that you lightly chortled at to be polite.
Of all the people to survive the impossible, him.
It had been the first time he’d ever gotten Syr Gwendolyn’s undivided attention. During every other conversation with her, when he’d broached security concerns or brought her some request of the prince’s, it had been like trying to have a discussion with the captain of a ship whose eye could never leave her heading. Her horizon. Like he was being humored each time he managed to make enough of a stink to flag down her focus.
He’d done his best never to take it personally, and the full weight of her gaze had been alarming that night. No more alarming than anything else, but still noticeable.
The force of someone determining if you’d live and seeing in their face that they’d try to tip the scales in your favor because they believed in hopeless causes. Because they didn't want to be the kind of person who’d just lay you back and let you die in the cold.
Before now, Tadius had thought she’d considered him a silly person. The sort of man who she’d only ever deigned to agree with, and never in public. But it hadn’t mattered there.
She’d still reached her warm, clean, hands to him and grasped his face to ask what had happened while the prince grimaced and groaned at the gore of the corpse. She’d pulled his attention back to the world.
Some part of the scene, and his involvement in it, must have become obvious, as he had begun to shake. To gasp. His body, finally, catching up with itself. Taking stock. All he could manage, even when frantic with words to try and explain how it had felt as if the man were boiling alive under his skin, was to keep repeating himself. His mind caught on a snag like a faulty loom, the rest of him unraveling around it.
He, obviously, hadn’t been doing well.
“A dog! A dog!”
Later he’ll wonder why he said dog. Why he didn’t say wolf, but be grateful that he hadn’t. There wasn’t exactly a word for what he’d seen, what came over that man, and what might come over others. But that had been the birth of the story. The prince wheeling around, looking for a great hound with a cry of, “a dog can do that?”
Because the prince had, in fact, been shuffling around in the background trying to piece together what had happened. He’d mostly been eyeing the body, and not spent too long eyeing the misery that had befallen his man, before he’d pivoted as if seeking a pair of yellowed eyes in the dark. Waiting for something else to happen. Sending the light sliding all over everything.
And Tadius hadn’t the words to explain that he’d taken care of it. That the danger now lay dead at their feet. That it knew no category of man or beast.
He kept his mouth open, kept trying to force it, but very little good had actually been done.
He’d been all but gone, practically a babbling lunatic, as the prince had pinwheeled to asking too many questions over his shoulder like he truly expected answers. To not seeming to grasp the gravity of Tadius’ situation while Syr Gwendolyn had tried to peel him up from what he’d assumed to be his last resting place. To suss out the damage.
At his wincing and tooth-choked wailing with the jostling, she’d hastened, and called back to where they had both been followed by now. To the guard who’d brought more light. She’d told them to fan out. To find the dog as the master was dispatched. To see such a beast join him in death. To bring her its head if they encountered it.
In his nightmares, each of them returns with a heavy sack that drips brackish blood from the bottom. The wind is at his face and the ruff of his collar reeks of dog. They toss their trophies at his feet and as he unwinds the knots he finds foxes, stags, hares, and in the last just before he wakes is a heavy shape with his own brown hair and a mouth all red.
It must have been some kind of highwayman, she’d explained to the great many people on their charging horses. Indicating the corpse (never mind his nakedness). Their blades might have been at the ready but their eyes were only for Tadius, wincing. Their mouths in such unhappy lines that, wordlessly, gave thanks for the fact that they were up on their horses and he was the one down on the ground amidst the mess.
The more people who saw him, what had become of him, the less he’d liked his chances for making it back up the hill.
He couldn’t know, at the time, that such an option was lost to him. He couldn’t die.
It wouldn’t let him.
In his nightmares, he never dies.
The youngest member of the guards, promptly, had leaned to the side and been sick.
The smell, somehow, had hit Tadius from a great distance. He’d never forget it: soupy and foul and as strong as if he’d had his face shoved into it.
Something was wrong, but he wouldn’t know how wrong until much later. Until he’d stumbled into the castle upon his return and been lost in the great flood of truths about his world. All its sounds, its long-lingering history, its suddenly flashing details that quarreled for his attention.
The whole world was a crowded room now. Was screaming at him.
He’d have to realize that this was how the world looked now. How it reeked. How something in him had already started to change, the same way his dying had already been put on hold.
It had suddenly become quite loud. His heart, warbling with life. All their hearts doing the same at different speeds but the same volume. The glittering collisions of armor as the individual joints of each piece had scraped together. The far off call of those seeking news, few folk who’d heard what had happened and gone to see. The roar of hooves not too far down the road from a rider who’d eventually help save his life.
They hadn’t understood what to look for and he couldn’t focus on minuscule enough details like how to unstick his teeth and form sentences as he’d lashed himself to Syr Gwendolyn’s arm with both hands as the pain sat with him and pressed on his brain until it demanded his utmost attention. Overcoming everything else.
He’d gotten quite loud again too, but in a way that had somehow become separate from his throat. That somehow couldn’t fully breach the cacophony that was life, continuing to spill out, around him.
Long and loud and entirely sounding like a man. A stranger. The pain, expanding, to fill everything. The whole space of him. Words became impossible.
His back. His leg. His head. His life. He was still crying a little and screaming quite a bit and Syr Gwendolyn had told him a great many things that he couldn’t think through. Couldn’t translate. Couldn’t see between the lines to how much of a carcass he must have seemed at the time. He’d lost language, both its subtleties and its simplest meanings. She might as well not have spoken.
He’d missed them completely and now, when he tries to recall them, they’re just sounds. Unknowable. Her mouth moving, her voice thudding into his skin. Her heart’s beating, somehow, had been louder. The wet sliding of her eyelids as she’d blinked.
The wind in the trees, rattling. Beasts, disturbed, deep down in cold burrows snoring. The stars, even, could be heard singing above him.
He’d been in quite a state.
She’d eventually told him, when he’d thought to ask. Much later. She’d summed it up. The world’s grisliest bit of small talk at a summer festival. The two of them, withdrawn, watching the crowds.
Apparently, she’d been grim. Professional. The only swearing she’d done had been of oaths to his memory. To finding the thing that had done this and seeing its head mounted on a wall for his viewing pleasure.
That he’d be fine if he could keep his eyes open as a nurse was already on the way and she’d spun to tell His Highness not to touch that as the prince has already picked up his ceremonial dagger and gone ahead and wiped it on his shirt. Smearing his stupid, royal self with blood.
He’d known the nurse to be close, considered the torrent of her arrival the same way a man might gaze upon the first snatches of dawn escaping from the horizon. He’d have turned to face the direction from which she rode, but he’d instead been watching the prince.
The blood, he remembers. All down the prince’s front. A lack of comprehension for why anyone might be upset at him about this that bordered on childish. A surly twist to his mouth at the idea that anyone would take the dagger from him.
In the spilling that blood had been red, but now it had gone strangely fetid and black. Like it had been left to rot in a swamp. The same was true for the whorls, Tadius noticed, left on his skin. Where he’d left handprints on the man’s chest.
The only red left to them had lingered in certain places. Had painted the stump where Tadius had waited. Had been smeared, almost mixed, at the man’s mouth. On his fingertips.
For the man’s blood, it had been as if something had been wrong with it from the start and death had only quickened the revelations as to its nature.
Tadius’, though, was still red.
It should have been their first clue. They should have noticed. They should have looked. He certainly would have, he’d like to think, if he’d been in their position.
When he looks back on it, it wasn’t cleverness that saved him. He has to admit this to remind himself why he has to be so careful now.
It wasn’t his flair for the dramatic or some cunning plan.
It’s why he has to be clever now.
He’s burnt through all the fine fortunes a man like him could deserve.
It was just luck.
That they’d been too distracted by his wounds to notice the foul stench of strangeness in the air. That they’d assumed him a basically dead man already and hadn’t started asking too many hard questions about what had assailed him (and then been too polite to press him on it later when he’d been seemingly dragged from death’s lingering shadow).
That the thing to have made such wounds seemed gone without a trace and a dead man was actually the more acceptable thing to find atop him somehow. That it all came with the details shoved together, as gauze would be packed within a wound.
That the prince had been willing to step forward and claim that he’d saved Tadius’ life in the official report. He had been the one suddenly holding the dagger and all. Tadius couldn’t recall if someone had asked the prince if he’d done such a thing, if someone had given him the idea, or if he’d leapt to it himself. If the glory had been there for the taking, defense of a man’s life, and the prince hadn’t minded how repugnant its point of origin was.
If the prince had called for the cheers himself, or if they’d arisen naturally.
The first murder of Tadius’ time at court, committed by his own hand (but not the first he’d witnessed), and none seemed to care. Sloppy but entirely defensible.
He will think on this often. Especially when a woman of such green fire, such loveliness, that makes his heart clench seems to be implying that they required such grisly lengths. It had been easy enough the first time, it couldn’t be the second time.
Or, could it?
Not when Syr Gwendolyn and the prince were happy to leave their considerations of the truth of the matter buried out in those woods where the heavy pines had surely guarded many secrets.
They’d done the same to the corpse. Syr Gwendolyn had bid the largest servant available, a squeamish personal servant to one of the dukes in attendance, to drag the body along with them to pawn off to the most enterprising grave digger to hear the tale and come calling.
That duke’s man couldn’t face Tadius anymore. Had put in for a transfer soon after and been gone.
But the body had, therefore, disappeared similarly.
It had done so suddenly, almost too much so, for something that had so thoroughly ruined his life. Changed him forever. He wouldn’t have wanted a goodbye, but felt as though he needed something.
Just another thing he’d never have. Another thing to accept.
He’d been buried unmarked and nobody had told Tadius where. Sometimes, if drunk, he mused that if it weren’t for the scars he’d have liked to briefly imagine that the whole affair hadn’t existed. It wouldn’t have been for long. Just a moment’s reprieve.
Oh, well.
At least, due to careful planning on his part, it remains his first murder (and his only murder) for a good, long time.
(Or, at least, the first he’s ever know about. Ever seen beyond some lingering collision of fear and gloaming in his mind’s eye. A place where only beasts dwelled. Where men could only dream).
In his nightmares, there are faces he does not know. Very few. They scream and shout and pray. He does not listen. He does not stop.
But it was a murder, which he never saw a trial for. And he lived, somehow.
Later, though, all sorts of people will distinctly tell him just how lucky they thought he was. At best they’ll say they were glad he’d pulled through (and show, like Syr Gwendolyn, how unlikely they’d thought such an event to be). At worst they’ll just outright tell him that by all accounts he should have been long gone by now.
Anyone who waited at his bedside when he first came to, who caught his elbow in a crowded room when he first returns to public events, and a great deal of random strangers all mention it. It’s always the first topic of conversation if they want something. If they need something to fill the silence. If they connect the dots that he’s the prince’s man who almost died and want to partake in his story like a slice of cake.
Somehow, no matter their relationship, many people all had a hand in it. His luck. His survival.
From the last man to arrive from town to the random count who’d looked blearily out the window of his carriage and seen him hauled back up into humanity’s clutch, they’ll all have been the deciding vote. The king will act as though it was only though his personally having a word with the god of fate and endings that Tadius wasn’t worm food.
And, of course, to say nothing of the prince. The hero of the hour.
The people who actually put the work in are the only ones not to say such things. He goes ahead and thanks them anyway. Frequently enough to be polite but not too much.
He’s offered his hands gratefully to the nurses or to Syr Gwendolyn and the other odd few who were genuinely involved. He’s thanked them with such heavy earnestness as to the work they’d done that he’ll never be free of it. He only learns to carry it with his head held high again.
With others, though, he’ll smile politely and wryly thank anyone who thought themselves involved.
And, of course, he’ll humbly agrees to do a little favor, if he’d have been willing to do it anyway, for such nobles who still forget his name but saved his life somehow.
He’ll drone, unnoticed in his lack of enthusiasm, to the prince about his gratitude day in and day out. It will be the opening to dozens of empty toasts at banquets. He’ll tell the story again and again on command.
And, as the moon creeps upon the world, sometimes he’ll want to break things. Very badly. But only sometimes. Only when his blood sings a wordless song and spells a similar foul mood and it would be all too easy to agree. To open his mouth and show a bit of spine, a bit of teeth.
It had been hard at first, recognizing that urge. Tamping down on it. At first it had felt good, heady and free like loosing a cramped muscle, until those first three nights.
The first, after which he’d awoken naked and lost in the forests around the castle with a dead sort of taste in his mouth.
The second, after which he’d ridden to town on business and woken to a destroyed room at an inn which he’d never returned to.
The third, after which he’d gone out to the moors, as far from that town as he could ride in a day, and awoken to find his horse slaughtered. He’d had to walk back and claimed that he’d only recently escaped from bandits (which had been helped by the fact that his clothes had been gone and he’d been forced to wrap himself in the saddle blanket).
Theirs was a world of threes. Three chances. Three wishes. Three nights.
After that, the pleasure of giving in to such temptations had been gone. Instead, he’d learned to recognize it. To release others’ hands from his grip unbroken and go take long walks around the castle. To sit in dark rooms and catalogue sounds. To bite his own lip and squeeze his own palm only when it couldn’t be helped. When it was that or something worse.
He’d long since trained himself to open his mouth and agree that yes he was, truly, the luckiest and sorriest son of a bitch who’d ever lived. Ha ha. To give that to the assembled crowds. It’s only fair in exchange.
Because it shouldn’t have worked. They should have discovered him. He should have been killed on the spot by now, and would have been if he’d been anyone more noteworthy.
Would have been if he hadn’t been the sort of person most people forgot about. If he hadn’t been the sort of person to learn the names of those hunters who’d be set upon him and send them away. Would have been if he hadn’t been granted, at least a bit, of that dumb luck that so many people accredited to him.
It just wasn’t for all the reasons most people assumed.
He was lucky because at least the nurse had so sure a rider. At least she’d thought to bring two men from town with her to haul the cloth stretcher down the steep climb. At least those men had been gentle when the’d lifted him, briefly, and laid him on his belly to carry him away.
They’d muttered prayers and apologies in maneuvering past tricky roots and been kind. Always counted before lifting him or setting him down. Giving him just enough time to brace what little self he had left. He couldn’t remember their names. He’s never seen them again and sometimes hopes it stays that way.
The moon, above, had given them good light. Had been the only thing, that night, that hadn’t looked away from him.
By that time, it all got only a little fuzzy. Muzzy, perhaps. The foul coating of gore on his hands which didn’t smear from how it had already dried. The pathetic scraps of his cloak, dangling within view. Finally noticing his chewed up scrap of a fur collar, crumpled a way’s away, and being sad to see it go.
Hearing the gasps of any they passed by, his wounds open for all the world to see. Thinking funnily about how odd it was for them all to be seeing his insides. He’d never be able to lie to them again, not when they’d seen down to his bones.
Trying to laugh but not being sure if that sound counted. Maybe more of a groan.
He doesn’t actually know if his bones had been visible. When he imagines the wound, now, it’s with a child’s abstraction. The color red, swathes of it. A second, painted, skin.
Some had started crying, mostly folk from downstairs who’d worked with him. Who, maybe, hadn’t thought him to be the nicest man in the castle but didn’t think he deserved this.
Feeling entirely exposed, with a hand trailing down to avoid it being trapped beneath him, he hadn’t seen much of that journey. Just felt the press of sour cloth to his face, the occasional brush of something against his fingertips, kept his eyes to the moon, and hoped he wouldn’t die.
His heart, it had seemed, was the only thing to accompany him amidst the din. A sound so close it was like someone holding his hand. A thunderous pounding, as if some distant giant were sounding a war drum. Was calling out one last desperate stand as quickly as it had been able. It didn’t slow. He’d thought that odd.
Or, maybe, that was the sound of the horses. Later, he’d be informed, that they’d loaded him into a borrowed cart whose owner rode in the back with him and the nurse who’d immediately started packing the wounds while shouting directions to the driver.
The owner had been a skinny man, a mercer, whose wares had been hauled by the bolt from the source of his livelihood and left in the carts of others to make room for Tadius.
All the carriages had, not surprisingly, been full.
So, instead, the mercer had spent the ride trying to keep Tadius’ hair from his face. Tried talking to him and seemed very proud about the vague fluttering of Tadius’ eyes.
His fingertips along the scalp the only thing worth remembering about the jolting, horrible journey. Where pain had sat above him and seemed to stick him with a pitchfork.
Once he was back on his feet, that mercer would come by the castle for a dressmaker’s order. Would bring him a skien or two of red wool to celebrate his return from being minced meat. Would walk with him out to the cart to point out a faint stain in the back, indicating that it had in fact come from Tadius, and refuse to hear any offer to pay for anything that might have been stained in all the hubbub.
Lucky, Tadius supposed, that such a man had been discreet. Hadn’t touched the blood which was still a perfectly normal color.
It must have been by the domain of some favorable star that the closest village had been attended to by an order of nurses. Healers in white, daughters sent to learn a trade or hide from a world that didn’t necessarily want them, who’d been ordered by the king himself (according to the nurse who’d been there) to save his son’s truest companion.
Tadius had been sure, when the nurses had told him of the care of the king, that they’d been embellishing the level of concern. Giving him something to believe in. Something to feel good about. He could already hear the moth fluttering of their hearts that sang a sad song of pity. Could tell in the way they kept his pillow fluffed and his beard trimmed as recovery had taken its toll when he’d mentioned not liking how his face felt when unshaven.
Some of them he recognized from that morning strung room where he’d been mended. Others he didn’t, but he paid them the same courteousness.
They’d liked him, once he’d come back to his senses. Or, at least, felt sorry for him in a pleasant sort of way. The way one might adopt a pet with a limp. They gave him the bed with the closest, biggest, window before he awoke from the stupor that had saved his life and moved him promptly when they’d found him awake, beating himself senseless against the glass, that first night.
He doesn’t recall this. The glass didn’t break.
In his nightmares, something is outside. Is trying to get in. He watches it stalk through the trees. Towards the door. Begins to hammer upon it. Begins to dig through it.
By daylight, he’d been polite and hadn’t argued once and only occasionally asked a question as to whether someone would mind closing a window when they had the time or if someone could scratch at one spot on his calf where it itched fiercely as he’d been forbidden from reaching back to touch it lest he pop a stitch out of place. He told them stories when they stopped by to check on him and answered any question about court he could think of.
He conjured, some lonely nights where the wind howled, ghosts of women in gowns of jewels. How they whirled in the arms of their dancing partners. He tried to tell them the steps to a royal waltz, two nurses clinging to each other and attempting to follow directions. He let them into his confidence on harmless scraps of gossip. He thanked them, sometimes daily, for his life.
His manners were courtly and he never flirted. He only was honest about all the ways they were beautiful or kind or clever but never thought that meant anything because it was just stating facts.
He’d liked them. He now sends them baskets of jams, of candles, and cookies (but only tried to sneak money into the gifts once before the matron had stormed up to the castle herself to press the gold back into his palm and furiously told him to come visit himself instead). He heeds her instruction.
He’d been so advantaged that they’d saved his legs, and his life, and he’d healed well while stitched together and packed with poultices and covered in bandages. True, he hadn’t needed such things, but now he had a reason to still be living. Still be capable of walking. Another hidden lie.
Folk believed that, if anyone could have saved him, it would have been them. And as he’d been saved, clearly they were the reason.
And nobody said that maybe he was healing too well. Nobody mentioned anything about it. He believes they must have noticed, but maybe they didn’t mind. A life saved was still a life, even if it changed.
Even if he’d taken a slight allergy to silver needles. Even if he’d spent some nights waking all the other patients and the night nurses with his screaming.
He’d had nightmares, they’d said, but he can’t remember them. The first ones, when he’d still have come apart were it not for the bandages. He can’t know if they were the same as the ones that follow him now.
He just knows what they’ve told him.
He’d been bellowing like all the devils in Hell had been chasing him, most nights, and they’d even had to go so far as to restrain him to keep him from hurting himself or one of them. He hadn’t hurt anyone.
He’d asked, and then begged, to know if such things were true. He’d kept a careful eye on their faces, their hands, for marks and found none.
In his nightmares, they lied. They reach out to greet him in the receiving courtyard and their hands are livid with scratches. Bite marks. Something, behind a locked door with chains across it that should lead to the ward, slams against the wood and screams. They smile at him and the sun is setting overhead and–.
And he’d prayed, sometimes daily, that they’d told him the the truth. That his nails remained blunt and his strength manageable. That he worried too much. They said he did. None of them shy away from him. None of them hesitate at his hand and maybe that scares him more.
They swore to do no harm, the first oath they ever took.
He’d never made such promises. He doesn’t like the idea of vows he can’t guarantee.
They’d feared infection, inflammation, or a fever of the brain but each day it had been like the gods had personally seen to his health. Each time the bandages were peeled back, he’d looked a little better. Craggy tissue had crept up through the slits in him like the dawning sun.
The rebellious, and the youngest, had toasted home-brewed plum liquor to his health and taken bets on whether he was married apparently. Whether he was to walk from their hallowed halls, given in a sense to the goddess of reunions and returns, with a cane or not. Some had thought such a thing would only make him more distinguished.
He could tell which ones were smitten with him. Their hearts fluttered up under their jaws like cages full of birds. A soft sort of cooing. A rearranging of feathers. He’d done his best to remain polite without doing anything that might lead anybody on.
Whatever malady that had that had once plagued him, stalking his sleep and sending him screaming, had eventually fallen away. He could stand. He could walk. He could lift crates of supplies while they told him to stop and wonder if it was just the marvelous experience of standing that made the whole thing seem easier; it wasn’t.
They’d let him return to the castle and he’d thought the story to be over. He hadn’t been poised, waiting, for the other shoe to drop.
It had been over. He’d gone back to his life.
And then it had come upon him so suddenly. The moon in the window. A step that had faltered. A sick toll in his bones that something was wrong. A glass, requested by the price, which had been left to shatter upon the ground. A promise that something was so wrong. His hand, on the wall, had rippled.
Later, he’d realize that nothing had ended. Nothing had left him. Only disappeared into the brush for a while, waiting to drag foul things back to his feet when the time came. But how could he have known that? Life had still been an undoubtable gift. The cycle still new, unobserved. Nothing had happened for so many days.
He’d thanked each auspicious star. He’d said his prayers. He’d thought life his to live and then he’d learned.
He’d been losing his mind in that bed in the few weeks it had taken him to heal. Chafing. Itching. Both under the heavy drag of inaction and the skin at his calf which could keep him up half the night sometimes.
And that was where the truth of him, lean and almost blink-and-you’ll-miss it, waited. Where it had hidden itself, some subconscious survival mechanism.
The worst of it all had been the wound at his calf, and it was the strangest of the scarring too.
While the gauges and slashes were undeniably deeper and taken more time to heal, the first time Tadius had been able to sit up and look at, he’d been stricken into sudden silence by the perfect replica of the thing’s teeth.
The first wound, before he’d even been in the thick of it, had already sealed his fate. The undeniable proof, right there, if anyone thought to look at it.
Already healed to smoothness, it’s still stark white against his skin. A mark he knows better than any other part of his body now.
At the time, he’d traced a hand over that and only thought that it was uncanny.
It would never go away.
And, in fact, it would hurt worse than anything else.
He somehow suffered no pain in his back. Found no faults in his ability to stand or lift or run. It was almost uncanny, and he’d even started pretending to ache in places just so people would stop looking at him funny.
And then there had been a week, suddenly, a step onto that bad leg when it had started to twinge. When it continued to do so, no matter what he did. No ice or odd massages or elevations or needles. No potions or poultices or charms.
That twinge, in fact, had soon became a pang. A gasp. The sort of thing that had him sitting back down. Had him sending messengers on his behalf as the pain had snapped about him like a sprung trap and forced him to halt. Had him eventually begging the castle apothecary for a numbing cream that some men used when rain brought about aches in war wounds.
He’d only begged the once, and used the whole jar over the course of three days and three nights. The cream hadn’t helped. Pain had kept him up, his forehead pressed against the cold glass of the window, where the moon was waxing.
He’d wondered if he might have a fever coming on. He’d been burning. The moon.
Tiptoeing closer. Hounding him.
What else could it have done but become a consistent ache? That set him in a foul mood. That came along with a hunger. Two servings at breakfast. His eyes following plates of meat across diplomatic events and wishing they could be served a bit bloodier. Sneaking down to the kitchens to content himself with scraps and bones.
No time to ask what he was doing. No thought to spare.
He’d assumed it was just the way life sharpened when dealing with pain. The way it seemed to cost more to keep up. For all that had happened, he still had a scrap of pride in his work (if not himself). He’d be damned or grind his leg to a stump before he gave in.
It was truly a blessing that he’d found his schedule too taxing or time-consuming to make his way down to the apothecary to catalogue his issues after that first complaint.
The apothecary was well-versed in folklore. In strange curses. She burned sage in the catacombs as often as she made anti-venom. She might have noticed more than a few somethings as to his condition. She might have realized, if given the chance.
The worsening of his temper, a foul storm brewing. A bad moon rising. The nightmares, old and new, stalking his sleep. Keeping him from rest. Escalating, each night. Having him wake, clutching his sheets which were slick with sweat, and find himself so unsettled that he couldn’t return to his dreams.
He’d known something was coming, or at least felt it like a breath on his neck, but hadn’t a clue as to what.
And then, one night, it had happened. Death on his tongue. Grime on his body. A tea which he was late for and couldn’t listen to a thing anyone said. His nail beds, bloody.
And then a second. Glass in his knuckles. Shaking in his hands as he’d tried to count out how many coins would pay for a room’s redecoration to leave on the bedside table before he climbed out through a window.
And then a third. Blood on his face. Chills in his hair. A long, numb, walk to consider his options.
He’d initially considered himself to be going mad in the approach. He’d hated having nothing to point to as to why he felt so unsettled.
It depended on the day as to whether or not he thought this was better or worse. Because then it happened again. And again.
And he’d decided that something had to be done. He’d paid attention. He’d been clever. He’d gathered what information he could.
Soon, he could chart it. He could predict its arrival.
He’d started keeping a book of days and nights under his mattress. Nothing damning unless he put it in code. He’d gone down to the dungeons and selected the farthest cell in the deepest pit that he could find.
And it wasn’t something he could deny. He might have been rather good at deluding himself once. At keeping it all running while something within his heart stretched out thinner and thinner until it might as well have stopped existing.
But this wasn’t a matter of his heart, or his head. It was a matter of flesh, and blood, and bone.
And teeth.
He couldn’t ignore it. It wouldn’t be responsible.
He still, to this day, doesn’t want to see anyone hurt.
In all of his nightmares–.
But even he’d needed a period of adjustment. Even he’d woken, in the woods, completely naked once or twice or three times despite his best of intentions.
Trial and error had been precious and little. He’d had to get it right quickly.
First, because he hadn’t known. Then because he’d only locked the door. Then because he’d tried going out to the woods on his own, leaving his clothes hidden in a tree so as to avoid ruining another perfectly serviceable jerkin, and he’d woken in the wild with blood on his mouth each time irregardless.
He’d told himself it belonged to an animal, each time, when wiping his mouth with his shaking palm. When scrubbing his hands raw in the basin. When looking at himself in the mirror, long and hard, to check for yellow in his eyes.
It was the only way to live with himself.
In his nightmares, there are screams of some man Tadius had barely recognizes but knows. Not a complete stranger. A poacher, he’d guess by the bow, robbing the king’s table of its venison. He has made a mistake.
Or, maybe it would be more accurate to say that he hopes it was merely a poacher. The same way he hopes, and prays, and tells himself that it’s only a dream. That such a face was a figment of his imagination, just like its terror and the way such a man had begged.
After that, he’d done what he did best. When, after he’d awoken on the morning of the fourth day and found himself ache-y and bleeding from the tips of his fingers where his nails were all but gone, he’d been clever about it.
He’d buried the teeth, scattered a way’s off from him. He’d bandaged what he could. He’d made due.
He sometimes agreed he was lucky, in terms of his current situation but never for the reasons people thought.
It was auspicious, and by auspicious he meant that he’d done the best with what he’d been given, to have access to the dungeons, where a great many hunted monster had been collected and left to live out its life in a stone cell. Some of the bones still there.
Where screams could echo and roil but nothing could happen because The Old King had been on a bit of a humanitarian kick a few decades ago and decided to stop employing a jailer.
It was a comparatively blessed life he lead, to have complete dominion over his schedule, and the prince’s with the right amount of finagling. Such things meant that he could do all that he needed to ensure that he wouldn’t be asked after over the course of three nights, and to have excuses prepared for if someone did seek him out and find his bed turned down but not slept in.
It all wound together splendidly. The trips down to the seedy taverns. The long vigils within candle-lit cathedrals. The balls. He could lay it out, a chessboard, and predict how it all moved.
He was fine.
Prosperous, even, to have the wounds on his back which drew attention and kept any and all from asking too much about the single, cleaner, scar on his leg from where he’d been dragged into his new life.
He counted it as one unit even as it was assembled from forty-two smaller and separate pieces. He’d counted each fleck, using a hand mirror. He’d diagrammed it within the first pages of his book of days and nights. Found a dental record staring back at him in perfect condition.
The worst of it. Somehow all neat and tidy. The first wound. The one that had killed a man instantly and left something else to piece itself back together in his place.
He’d given hundreds of answers to its origins by now, questions asked in close quarters, and they’d all been taken simply as a pill. As truth. It looked so much older than all the rest, after all. None had seen him dragged off. The wound hadn’t even been bleeding by the time the nurses had seen to him.
So, he got a little creative.
“A hunting accident.” Too long ago to have any association with that night.
“Ran afoul of the family dog.” A whole lifetime ago, and wasn’t he standoffish enough to probably be hated by animals? Didn’t dogs now tuck their tails and show the whites of their eyes while rats scuttled away from him when they did run into each other in the middle of the night when he couldn’t sleep?
“Lion taming.” He says it around the sort of person who would have no way of distinguishing one predator’s teeth from the other. The strange click of his smile. An inside joke. “A foolish dream for younger men.”
He simply acted as though the bite, and its limp which worsened as the pain returned to him (steady and unavoidable as migration), were there before the rest of it.
And, as it turns out, nobody had been paying that much attention. Nobody questioned him. Nobody seeks answers which is good because he truly has none to give.
He can’t offer a name. Can’t explain any of the complicated things like how or what or why.
He’s made the effort to check. He’s gone to strange shops where folk whisper of bizarre things, a hooded cloak over his head and a mask on his face, and seen strange skulls preserved to perfection.
Counted the teeth. Compared. Found many different horrible jaws, but few that could match identically to the mark he now bears.
Once, a silver cane with a wolf’s head had turned his stomach and he could not speak a lie while standing before the man who’d carried it.
Thankfully, he’d only asked for the time, seemingly unaware of what sort of thing he’d caught in his trap. Only wanted directions to the stall where goblins sold milk teeth for cheap.
Strange charms, painted eyes on blue stone and sigils drawn in blood or ink on blessed paper, twist angrily when Tadius walks by. A light pushback, which forces him to request entry to their places of business, stops him at certain thresholds.
But as long as he’s polite, and doesn’t touch anything without asking first, none who sit behind counters seem to care. They don’t fault him his business. He pays well for other things to justify his arrival and never gives his name. Little charms and powders. Luck and strength and all the things a man would usually want in those sorts of low places where incense smoke twirled and jars bubbled with strange viscous liquids.
Flowers for his button holes in various colors, excluding the alien purple-blue bells of aconite. That, instead, brings tears to his eyes. A rattle to his lungs that has him retching flecks blood just from a single tentative sniff before he’d come to know better.
He learns all its names. Aconite. Monkshood. Devil’s Helmet.
Wolfsbane.
He’s heard tell of silver, and can sniff out tin or something that’s merely plated from miles away. It’s how he learns which of the pieces within the castle’s collection are real, and which are fakes that had simply been sold well.
He acquires this knowledge during one holiday dinner where he’d picked up his salad fork and pain had erupted across his palm with all the suddenness of someone dousing it in boiling water straight from the kettle.
When he’d flinched, sworn loudly enough to interrupt the proceedings, and run from the hall with his hand bound up in a napkin. When he’d then had to lie that he’d been allergic to the greens on his plate (never mind what they were).
That had been the true inconvenience, having to somehow weasel out the name of something he was supposed to have been allergic to (and must have eaten before) in a conversation with the cook to keep up appearances. To pull his airs about him, look down his nose, and be as stubborn and inconsiderate as many people thought him to be. He’d been unreasonable, inconsolable, and now told everyone that he couldn’t eat rapini.
He ensures that the fake pieces are removed (because he does still have standards for the royal table) by making a stink about it, publicly, and embarrassing the silver polisher with obscure facts about artisan marks from the sixth century that he makes up on the fly but says with such confidence so as to have the distinction made.
Now, he handles the real pieces in gloves that he claims are to keep the oils on his hands from smearing across genuine history. He memorizes the designs pressed into their handles and smuggles in a set of fakes for his own use. He pays through the nose, in all gold pieces, for only those to be set at his place and makes it out like he’s paranoid about being poisoned.
People withdraw from him. It is not enough.
The castle, unavoidably, is draped in history. In an array of alloyed metals, some old as the hills. Gold drips to adorn the ceilings. Bronze collects warm heat like a child plucking stones from a sun-baked riverbed.
The castle, and he’d not really noticed before, weeps with silver.
Silver goblets which give him hives. Silver teaspoons which leave him with unstirred tea for the rest of his life, no matter how he’d preferred sugar. Silver pendants about ladies’ throats which have him seem rude for how he refuses to help with the funny little clasps because to do so would brand his fingertips with their shape.
They all repel him naturally. Some cursed thing turning from true north. Later, it will make looking at Ella Ashmore difficult but he will muscle through.
And, a silver dagger is mounted on a wall after the prince claims to still see the slightest dark sheen along the blade that can’t buff out no matter how many trips the thing has taken to the armory.
That oil-slick spatter had gotten worked into all the clever grooves, all the little channels, that had been shaped out of the blade. Foul black blood, crusting away on a wall, outlines the picture. Something strange but unnoticed. Tadius walks by it twice a week and he doesn’t look at it.
In nightmares, he’s out in the clearing and reaching to find the dagger again. He can touch it again. He finds it, clean and beautiful as the first time he’d held it, and when he lifts it to his face his eyes are yellow.
He’ll never learn the truth of what first befell the woodsman named Talbot to set him upon this road. Only assume that it had to be something much like what had happened on that night. That something had run him to ground and, if Tadius were to somehow go back in time to observe the corpse, he might have found a pale bite somewhere on the body. Beneath the smear of his own blood. Healed, strangely, quicker than the rest. As if it had been there for years already.
Or, who knew, maybe he would have already been whole and healthy. Maybe such a thing moved from person to person.
Maybe, now that Tadius carries it, he is free in all the ways that Tadius never can be.
Because he’d always find himself back in that tavern. Waiting, patient as the moon’s pull on tides and the bodies of things that were not men, for the prince to finish his business.
He’d always be walking, three nights every twenty-nine days or so, down into the dark. Splitting his life into clean pieces that never touched. He’d always be afraid, always be miserable, and never tell the truth again.
For a while that’s what life was.
Not much of a story worth telling when you really think about it.
Better to keep things simple.
~*~
There are numerous reasons Ella doesn’t knock upon following Tadius into the closest hidden room in relation to the castle’s private library (which was distinct from the star library, the dank chamber where they kept foul tomes in dead tongues, and the lending library which saw use from vetted heroes who needed to find ancient prophesies and translate star runes upon ancient maps).
She can list them, and she does (in her head) when she comes upon her most trusted advisor with his tunic off.
The private library was apparently used more for some of her petitions than for actual reading. Tadius had told her that she could start combing through these books, but the way he’d waved his hand when he’d said it made her think he thought this somewhat optimistic and unrealistic.
Being queen, it turned out, did keep one quite busy. Came with a lot of grand tasks that required the presence of the many people, and a lot of little small ones that were tucked into more sequestered places like the private library.
Apparently, these meetings where she’d be petitioned by a powerful occupant of her kingdom (or their representative) were kept more on the down low.
These were not the requests officially made before her assembled court, where people asked for impossible favors or begged her assistance, but the sneakier ones.
She’d assumed, at first, that these sorts of meetings were held all over (in the gardens, in the bathing courtyard where salt pools bubbled up from the earth, and in the private library to name a few) to keep the castle aired out. To justify having so many rooms. After all, why have them if they never saw any use?
But then Tadius had even told her that, really, about the precedent that had already been set decades ago. How each room had a specific meaning. The gardens were for friends. The bathing courtyard for mostly family or older members who had health problems.
The private library, specifically, was selected to host only those people who wanted her to think they were smart. Who wanted to feel important enough to be shown past the throne room and consider how many of the well-bound books they’d read.
“Where do you bring the actually smart ones?” She’d asked idly as they’d made their way from the observatory (where she’d noticed a strange flickering of a certain star which somehow felt as though she should be on the lookout for someone lying to her).
Sometimes, when she asks Tadius a question, she can tell that she’s the first monarch to do so. She can tell because he smirks, like she’s just caught him in a lie and he’s glad that she did, and then looks at her the way people do now.
The way that says, I’m so glad you’re here now. It was a nightmare without you. I don’t know how I managed.
It had taken her a while to get used to that look on so many faces. In most crowds, before now, she’d been ignored. Or sneered at. Or, once or twice, spat at. But now, whenever anyone looks at her, it’s disarming.
In her dreams, everyone turns to look at her in a crowd as vast as the sea and their eyes are green fire and their mouths open and they ask, “Daughter of Ash, what is your will?” They speak in the same, wonderful and dreadful voice.
He’d taken a moment to think, pausing to swipe his fingers along a banister to check it for fairy dust (there was a pixie infestation somewhere in the castle), and shrugged. “Those wisest would ask to meet in the kitchens.”
Clearly, he hasn’t thought so highly of anyone to put such a plan into motion. She’d wondered if Tadius liked anyone without having to keep track of so many things. If anything could be so simply sorted like the rooms.
And then, they’d met with The Speaker of The Weeping Keep (which had been how he’d introduced himself) in the private library and she’d seen why he was relegated to that particular category.
Ella had heard of Speakers before, servants who went so far in presenting messages from their masters that they were supposed to have removed all of themselves from such conversations. They were just the speaker, the same words and intent passed along great journey, and nothing more. They ate at their master’s table and kept their master’s confidence and were supposedly given a great many gifts.
It had been a meeting suddenly cut short, and it had seemed an even shorter walk to hurry after Tadius. He hadn’t gone far. She hadn’t thought before following him, with the aforementioned reasons having her do so without knocking
She wouldn’t consider them until later, but they were there and it hadn’t been that she’d presumed such importance as to barge into places (even though she was queen now).
A lifetime ago, her governess had once informed her that it was a pirate’s job to burst into rooms and cause scenes while good little girls from proper families should always do their best to glide. To enter and exit a room with demure silence. To slip across a room like a swan across a lake (though Ella had always thought her governess had never seen a swan hiss when you approached its nest).
But Ella Ashmore had, once upon a time, been preparing for such a life. Very different from the one she had now. She’d been quiet for a good long time.
She had been much better at sneaking than Justine, who paled at the thought of being somewhere she shouldn’t be, or Lucy, who’d giggled at a job well done and given the whole game away.
Ella, instead had been quiet. She’d been quick. She’d been clever. But, for a time, she was never afraid. She never hesitated upon entering a room and her parents would not teach her to be.
She’d played a game with her mother, when they were often left to their own devices in their beautiful house, called Lady Swans-About (after Ella had explained her governess’ thoughts on such things and the governess had been sent away).
In the game, they would both promenade about any given room together while trying to outdo each other. To see who could have the most comedically graceful gait. You couldn’t laugh, or smile, but you had to try to make the other do so beneath your own facade of complete seriousness.
The winner held the character longer while the loser had long since fallen to giggling at the question of, “Oh, how do you do, Marjory? What do you think about the year’s begonias?”
Lady Swans-About didn’t knock. She burst into rooms and dithered.
Ella had gotten very good at that game. She’d seen many such ladies in town, in the few local parties she’d been permitted to attend when her house still stood strong. Her mother had told her that there were times in life when you needed to be quiet and clever, but there were also times when you needed to enter a room like you owned it.
But she’d also been polite. Regretful when causing a scene.
She’d never wanted to intrude and would be the first to apologize if her bursting through a door caused the cook to drop a basket of eggs in surprise.
She’d go out and collect more and return promptly with hay stuck in her hair. She’d promise to do better.
But she was still an only child. Knocking had been the sort of thing that was politely reinforced after she’d already pushed into her father’s office and caused an incident with an inkwell or started darting in and out of houses where people already liked her and didn’t mind too much about the intrusion of their lord’s daughter.
And, obviously, such things had been folded up and put away with the arrival of her new life. All but quiet. But clever.
When she most wanted to be invisible. When she at times tried to take the most confusing route through her home in the hopes of avoiding another brash game or disgusting task. Of not leaving a trail that would be so easy to follow.
When it would have been better if she could somehow have stopped existing just to get from the foyer to the second floor to see about the chickens someone had loosed upstairs and how many she could save.
When doors had been broken down if she’d closed them. When she'd known better than to enter a room, unless she knew it was empty, without thoughts to her own survival.
So, it isn’t surprising that she hadn’t thought to knock.
She assumed that most queens didn’t knock, and the prince hadn’t exactly seemed the sort of person to wait for anything, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that everyone would be fine with her behaving like that. And such a feeling had her furrow her brows and start considering how things should change around the castle.
How maids should stop hurrying out of rooms when she entered them if they hadn’t finished stoking the fires. How someone should bless one of the banner men in the great hall when he sneezed as she took the arduous walk to ascend her throne. How Tadius should relax a little, please, before he hurt himself.
Oh.
Of course she hadn’t knocked. She’d thought he’d been hurt.
She had been concerned.
After all, she’d once watched a dancer trod directly on Tadius’ foot with his full weight and he’d hardly done more than grit his teeth behind closed lips. She’d seen him have his hand shut in a door and only wince when he thought nobody was looking. She’d watched him get a paper cut, look up, seem surprised that she’d noticed it when they’d been working in the library together, and only then (and seemingly for her benefit) said, “ouch” in a dispassionate and pointed way.
For him to have left in the middle of a petition, when he’d been the one to explain that until she was married or considered more fearful it was best to have some sort of attendee or chaperone in the room with her, it had honestly been startling.
Whatever had been done to him, it had clearly hurt.
She’d heard the involuntary hiss between his teeth, watched him shoulder his way past The Speaker, and hardly had time to do more than leap to her feet before he was gone.
She hadn’t liked The Speaker for The Weeping Keep much before he’d walked over to Tadius and dumped his teacup’s contents into his lap, but that certainly had her calling for a set of guards to escort him from the premises promptly.
Based on the looks on the faces of her men, nobody liked the man much.
But it was more than dislike in that moment. It had been a similar feeling, though heavily diluted, to how she’d wound up here.
A feeling that had her snarling in his face, which was somehow lax with shock as if he hadn’t even considered her batting an eye at the direct mistreatment of one of her people, that he was to tell his master that it was his cruelty that meant she would need a written apology delivered by hand before the crown would see him in her court again.
That he was lucky she didn’t demand him jailed for such insolence in her home. Or, in what Tadius would probably call a slight overreaction, have his master’s lands revoked and name erased from history for permitting himself to keep such a Speaker.
At times, she knew, she could be rather…intense when it came to retribution. When she knew it was owed. Sometimes she wondered if it was an effect of how she’d come back. Vengeance had been one of the first things returned to her.
In her dreams, she stands upon a balcony and sees the wicked fall past her like rain. She stands and sees them all, the trolls and the people who’d hurt her and any who would dare continue down so rotten a path, plummet. She holds the stone and she smiles and her head is so heavy.
It would not have been the first time she’d had such a reaction, but it would have been the first time that Tadius wasn’t there to interpose himself between her and the target of her rage (who’d been cruel or foul or too crass to even keep talking to) and delicately remind her about things like diplomacy. About how a queen’s word was law and he wasn’t sure she wanted to set such a brutal precedent over this specific thing (but if she was then he’d absolutely step aside).
This was, however, the first time that she would call the castle her home. The walls rang with it, the same way your heart would echo the first time someone said that they loved you. It was good and right in a universal sort of way. In a magic sort of way. It should have been glorious.
But she didn’t get to bask in the moment as she’d suddenly found herself alone in a private library that was technically hers, none of whose books she’d had a chance to open, with flushed cheeks and a wish that all detestable people could be dispatched as easily as trolls. Without things to consider like riots or political intrigue or chains of succession or dread queens who were as beautiful as they were terrible.
In her dreams, the world promises her, she can be quite terrible.
Ella Ashmore hadn’t thought herself capable of the tone she’d just used, all honed edges and imperious sneers, but in it she'd heard the ghost of her father ripping into a sailor who’d thought himself capable of skimming off the top of the pay. Heard the phantom her mother, who’d once shaken stones in outrage at a man raising a hand to his wife.
And her own, bright and terrible as the dawn, when she’d called down the dawn into the throne room and shattered all the windows.
It had been nothing like the uncanny, guttural, howls of her stepmother. She’d certainly been glad of that.
In her dreams, when people open their mouths and call out WITCH she screams louder. She drowns them out. She can only hope it is heard as the scream of a woman and not a creature.
It was just that Tadius hadn’t even said anything to the man. Had only been sitting there, attentive and telling in the rolling of his eyes or the scrunching of his nose. He’d told her that it wasn’t his place, or at least The Speaker wouldn’t consider it his place, to interfere with negotiations of this nature unless she asked him to.
And he hadn’t said anything before his exit either.
That, more than anything else, had been so jarring.
Tadius had once said good night to her four times because he’d kept trying to exit a room but kept remembering things to wish her. A good night’s rest, good dreams, a good day tomorrow, and one oh-you-know-what-I-mean-good-night-stop-laughing-at-me-you’ll-hurt-my-feelings.
He’d never once entered a room without greeting her or left one without a farewell (or some kind of signal as to what he’d be doing if she was dispatching him to sneak off).
And in the bluster of his rising, the clattering of his chair and the breaking of the fine teacup and the shuffle of two bodies, there had undeniably been a bitten off gasp of pain as Tadius had bent over himself before pushing out of the room without a moment’s warning. Without a sneer or a cutting word.
No an assurance to her either. And it wasn’t that she’d needed or expected one, but not getting one had made the world sharper. Made something in her wake up and sneer.
He’d been hurt, somehow. The scald of the tea. The shatter, perhaps, of the cup. Something more than his pride.
And she had been furious, already across the room, on that fact alone.
The Speaker hadn’t been an impressive man before, but he’d collapsed in the face of her fury like she’d grabbed him by the nose and pulled him down.
He’d been a watery-eyed sort of man with listless blonde hair and a nasally sort of voice, perpetually suffering from hay fever he’d said, quick to take insult and prioritize that over the merits of his discussion in spite of his position. He’d been dispatched to ask for the crown’s aide in settling The Forest Where No Man May Dwell.
The master of that mournful keep, according to the rundown Tadius had provided her with before, had been requesting the crown’s assistance in such matters for years now.
He’d been wanting to send workmen in with blade and torch to beat back the brush in the hopes that, through the logic of such specifically worded magic codes, if the forest were removed from the area then the dryads might stop choking the trade routes between him and the Dwarven coalition lead by Old Rockhammer.
The Speaker had explained the difficulty his master had been forced to go through in orchestrating traveling bands of women to escort and drive the caravans, all forced to pay tithes to the dryads and druids who’d been permitted a relatively untouched life across the centuries. A fine system in and of itself, but the more obvious solution had been dangling in front of them all this time.
To burn down the forest was to expedite the matter, and to save them all a great deal of effort. Couldn’t she agree? Couldn’t she see the benefits in such an arrangement?
The Speaker had been certain to provide, in a small box resting upon a satin pillow that might fit a very rich mouse, a finely bound amulet of sapphire and gold hammered so thin it could have been hair plucked from a lady’s head. Dwarven made. He’d handed it to her with the accompanying promise that such treasures and more would, of course, be paid in greater number to the crown for its assistance in such matters. And, of course, his master would be sure to remember such assistance down the road.
It wasn’t that she hadn’t been expecting bribery, as much as she hadn’t believed him to look so self-satisfied while doing it.
This sort of request had been attempted for years. The certainty with which he was approaching this, their first meeting, was jarring. After all, he hadn’t once been victorious in asking for this aide. He didn’t know her at all. Why didn’t he assume she’d take offense at such behavior?
According to Tadius’ retelling, The Old King had often been too distracted by other concerns throughout his reign to get around to terrorizing that particular corner of the kingdom.
It had always come up, somehow, at a bad time.
This man, specifically in fact, always seemed to arrive to court with another petition and another abalone sculpture from the shallows to the west or another treasure from the Dwarves to the east to try and curry favor, just after something had gone wrong. A time when the thoughts of sacking a forest and forcing ancient dryads to bend the knee was the least of a king’s problems.
He’d been invited first after the queen had absconded with a knight of the court, again when the king was seeking an immortal champion to engage in a duel to the death on The Isle of Ruin, and most recently before today at the start of the prince’s refusal to get married.
Each time he’d returned with a more costly gift, a deeper bow, a more frantic disposition, and each time he’d received a command to return some other day.
The Speaker of the Weeping Keep, according to Tadius, simply had terrible timing. Bad luck.
He was the sort of man who’d ride along a road and miss a witch, a talking cat, and a girl who spat diamonds anytime she opened her mouth because he wouldn’t look out the window.
Tadius, clearly, hadn’t liked him much either.
They’d been walking through a hall Ella didn’t particularly like, with its marbled floor in such big black and white slabs that it made her feel like a chess piece, and all it had taken was a raising of her eyebrow for him to stop at a window and remind her of a child she’d known.
There had been a boy in Bog’s Hollow named Jack who couldn’t keep a secret from his mother all his life. He’d leapt over candlesticks, stuck his fingers into too many pies in too many windowsills to count, and once traded a prized show cow for a bag of beans that he’d tried to pawn off on the other children in town as magic.
You could always know what his truth was because he’d lie to your face but do it with a curl to his smile like he’d been sucking on a lemon. A flicker to his eyes, not steady enough to match the somber nature of his tone, like flame balancing on the head of a matchstick.
She’d watched Tadius lie to a great many people already (and do so very well). He’d intercepted party-goers who sought her when she was already engaged or needed a moment’s reprieve and tugged them away with some made up task from her.
He’d spoken at The Old King’s funeral of the man’s faithfulness and dedication to the kingdom and how he would surely be missed.
He’d told a courtier’s youngest son, who’d given him a still wet painting in thanks for his help fishing a lost brush out of a pond, that such a work was the best thing he’d ever seen.
It had all come easily, perfectly, to the point that if she hadn’t known him as well as she already did (which both wasn’t all that much but clearly was more than most people got) she’d easily have believed him in his claims about The Speaker.
And yet, when she’d looked at him, it was as if he couldn’t help but show her the truth. It didn’t seem to make him miserable, that chink in his armor.
In her dreams, she stands beneath The Old Oak and the soil bubbles red and brown and black and green and silver and white. Sometimes she stands and miserably watches it, this strange thing she’s conjured. Other times, someone grabs her hand to lead her away. She turns and sees–.
If anything, he seemed to enjoy having someone to talk to. To finally have someone to see the real reason that the master of The Weeping Keep couldn’t get an audience with the king. The cleverness behind it.
“Well, whoever might see to such a thing would have to have kept control of a king’s schedule. Would have to have gone down to the calligrapher and remedied the dates for such meetings so that they might be changed on the invitation. And I wouldn’t know anyone in court who’d fit such a description, My Queen.” He’d clearly been enjoying himself, smug. “After all, I was hardly ever seen in such places.”
Ella Ashmore didn’t care to know anything else about The Speaker of The Weeping Keep. She didn’t care to know his name or his reasons for pursuing his vocation or anything more than the startled way his gaping mouth had resembled a carp hauled up from The Uncrossable Sea.
But she could guess, from the naked vitriol that had come upon his face when seeing Tadius stationed at the side of the room, that he’d at least had a guess as to whose hand had been behind his ill-fated arrivals. That he’d waited until he’d explained himself, and then taken the chance to humiliate him like this because The Old King or the prince wouldn’t have done anything.
But she was nothing like them.
She’d gone after him, of course, and known his most likely destination because he’d been the one (coyly offering his arm in their first walk along the castle where he’d loudly pointed out old paintings with boring stories) to point out all the hidden rooms he knew of. Side chambers for private discussions. Hidden chapels for secret rites. Passageways and closets and the occasional panic room.
“In case you ever need them,” he’d said under his breath. “Though, and I do hope you’ll forgive my impudence if it offends, My Queen, I don’t think you the hiding type.”
She hadn’t told him about all the times she’d tried hiding in her own home. Hadn’t told him about being tucked away, out of life and time, until her sudden resurrection. Instead, in his revealing a hidden bathing chamber with a very squat tub, she’d said, “I’d have once told you that all things have a purpose, but that’s truly ridiculous.” She’d then made him show her how it worked.
As such, it wasn’t hard to remember the pearled handle of the nearest slip of a room. Tadius had called it a place for panicked, last-minute meetings. Apparently, it was most often used for coordinating interruptions of meetings in the private library. Where someone inconsequential like him might slip to drag another member of staff in and demand they go outside and start lighting off fireworks or sounding some kind of alarm.
So it isn’t surprising that he’s sequestered himself there.
The same way it isn’t surprising that she doesn’t knock.
Instead, she opens the door while calling his name in a half-hushed sort of hiss. She’s already taken a step inside, and therefore cannot deny the fact that even the secret closets of the castle were beautiful with wood-paneled walls and clean floors any more than she can deny the sight of a half-naked man.
Even if that man is Tadius.
Her hand still flies to her mouth at the surprise of it, at the way this sort of thing only happens in stories or whispers that wouldn’t have been out of place when she, Justine, and Lucy still shared her bed and stayed up half the night giggling about who they’d marry one day.
She can’t help the bit of a shriek at the sight of more skin than she’d been expecting, the sort of thing that older women in town had once said could strike a woman blind for leering at.
He’s, meanwhile, already in the middle of a flinch as they’re both stricken into sudden silence, at the same time that she’s closed the door behind them because if there’s one thing she assumes it’s that more people in this situation would in fact make it worse.
But, as quickly as he curls inwards, he unfurls a bit. Stands straighter. Rolls out his neck. His tunic isn’t all the way off, is still clutched to his chest, but that doesn’t seem to do anything to help the nature of their situation.
She feels the blood in her cheeks, furiously rising, and it’s such a shock (though not nearly as bad as the day she’d met the prince) that she almost doesn’t account for the scars.
If her father had ever imagined her to be alone in a closet with a shirtless man, he might have collapsed on the spot. But she can’t suppose he imagined any of her life before this either. She wants to imagine he’d think about the scars. He’d be kind.
It’s a tricky business, balancing her own embarrassment and taking them in. Realizing the foundation of some of that weight that he carried.
Because she knew he had them. She’d seen the stripe of pain running up the back of his neck and made assumptions as to their severity. By now she’s heard whispers of them, something about an attack on the road, but they’ve never spoken of them. And she is the sort of person who wants to make her own, informed, decisions.
But there they are. A cacophony of pain stamped onto his person. His back, strong and straight, in spite of them.
She wants to reach out a hand to him. She wants to turn him around and look in his eyes. She doesn’t move.
“I came to see if you were hurt,” she says with focus to avoid tripping over her own teeth because she’s been queen a few weeks by now. She can dictate that this be as normal a conversation as can be salvaged.
“Ah, hurt, no.” He says, sounding somewhat frazzled. He’s trying to sound as if he’s tossing each word lightly over his shoulder, but there’s a clench to his voice that’s giving him away. A pause fills the room as quickly as a noxious cloud.“It was the tea,” he finally says. Then stops. Then starts again. “It was quite hot.”
He’s never sounded like this before. Stilted. Strange. Like she’s talking to someone else.
“Oh, do you need me to–.” She’s going to ask if she needs him to call down to the apothecary for a salve, or to the kitchens for some ice, or maybe if he wants her to look at it.
She’d never used an oven before the sacking and subsequent devouring of all her house’s servants and had gotten burns to spare in her time at the kitchen. She could tell him if it was bad enough to merit such things.
She only takes a step forward, moves a hand through the air as if to reach to help if he’d let her.
But at that he spins around, his face a clamped on smile. A smothering look.
Not at all one he’s given her before, but not the icy smirk he’s offered to people he hates either. It’s desperate, just as his voice is in his cry of, “No! No, thank you, that is. Your Majesty. I can…I can manage it fine. It startled me. That’s all. I’ll be just a moment–.”
But then the smile slips off his face, slow as a spring thaw that kept being kicked down the road. A settling in, sort of look. He’s kept his arms, and the puddle of his tunic, tight to his chest.
“I apologize for my state,” he says and if his face is settled into something almost sad then his voice is carved from a block of wood. “And the…” He doesn’t finish his statement, only nods his head towards his shoulder.
“You don’t need to apologize!” This is something Ella Ashmore hates about being queen. People keep apologizing to her, genuinely, for the smallest of things.
It stands strangely against her time with her stepfamily who made her apologize so frequently.
Rancilda, who’d once locked her in a closet for an hour because she wouldn’t let her out until she answered all her riddles but got frustrated at the time it had taken.
Putrice, who’d pulled her hair and demanded the name of every boy she’d ever met and descriptions of the quality of his kidneys.
Her stepmother, who’d done it all. Shoved her. Screamed at her. Thrown her things away and mocked her before people in town and killed her father. Who’d made her apologize, every day for a week, for being born.
In the castle, people apologize when they speak to her. When they look at her. When they make noise or are kind.
She wants to fold up those apologies in her hands, like collecting fragments of broken glass or a baby bird who’s slipped from its nest, and hand them back. Her tone’s more desperate than bitter. More unhappy with herself that she’s put him here. “…I didn’t knock.”
At that there’s a peek of a smile in the corner of his mouth. The thought of a queen saying such things to him. A ghost of that look, though somehow now far away. As if peering sadly through a mirror. I’m glad that you’re here. I’m sorry it’s with me. I’m sorry you have to see.
He doesn’t let it touch his tone though.
“Queens generally don’t have to.” At that they both force a chuckle, and he seems to catch the sound and use it to push himself forward. “Besides, this sort of thing was bound to happen anyway. Before long it would be strange if you hadn’t seen my great and terrible collection.” He says great and terrible like the punchline of a joke that he doesn’t find all that funny.
In her dreams, the words great and terrible beat in her blood like drums. She was. She is. She can be. She will be.
She doesn’t like how he said that and it clearly shows on her face somehow, because some of the wind is loosed from his sails. He looks down at their feet and doesn’t lift his gaze.
She thinks he misunderstands.
“You can…if it might help put you at ease, My Lady,” he finally offers to their feet like he couldn’t bring himself to say such things if he met her gaze. “I’m quite alright. They’re…old, of course, and hideous, but I understand it’s quite a shock. So grisly a scene and all that. But if you’d like to–.” He takes in and releases a breath, managing to seem more knotted up inside upon its release. In and out. Tension sitting in the back of his neck. The tangle of his voice. “You can look. Many do. You can…I’d trust you to…touch can help–.” And before she has much of a chance to say anything more, he turns again to face the wall.
Somehow, in the moment, with his back to her and nothing hiding it now that the shock had been dispelled, it had been like she’d met someone entirely new.
There’s something about the way he said it, a sort of sigh that was only really half a breath, that tells her how he’s truly been waiting for their arrival at this moment. That he’s been resigned to it all the while.
It’s already quite a small room, made more for the most fervent of whispers than anything else. Even with her barest of steps from the door, if she put out her hand, only another hand’s length would separate them. They’ve found a room like a joint between two bones. They stand there, together. A crown on her head. His worst night, given entirely to her.
Propriety is something one of them should consider. This she knows. He already stands before her in such a state that if she were to shriek he would be whipped (at best).
He would be the one in any other situation, she knows, to be its fiercest defender. If he’d come upon her and anyone else in such a state his head might have caught fire or he’d have demanded a duel for her honor.
And yet, with so grisly a secret, he offers it to her without another word.
She should tell him to put himself back together. She should tell him that she’s seen far worse. That scars, if they meant life, could carry nothing but their own sorts of strange magic. Born of luck and blood and old world considerations of power and how best to keep hold of it.
What else is she to do but step forward? In a moment it’s like its own sort of spell. A compulsion. She can’t help but recall the comparison the first time she’d noticed the farthest lick of it, moving up his neck.
In her dreams, she stands in a crowd and knows one of them to be false. She shoves and cries and points and begs for someone to see the thread. Nobody ever does.
The seam always entailed the overlapping of flesh, the faintest raise, bound in coarse black thread. She’d first seen it at the wedding between her stepmother and father, to which she’d been the only witness in her house’s little chapel. She’d gathered a bouquet of hyacinths from her father’s garden and told herself to smile and there it had been.
The barest stain of dark thread beneath the drape of the veil that her father hadn’t mentioned. That she’d only thought to be a smear of soot or her own mind playing tricks on what she desperately wanted to be a happy day.
She’d remembered the seam when she’d first noticed his scar. She’d been afraid even as she hadn’t wanted to.
Now, with so rare an opportunity, she can’t deny herself the confirmation. The moment. The strangely hallowed way she watches her hand reach out and brush, just a moment, against the haggard skin between his shoulder blades.
The star from which the jagged points burst and flare. Beneath which there is no thread, as she knew. No strangeness other than the expected. Just the knob of his spine. Only three fingers worth of skin reveals itself, for all its tatter, to be warm beneath her touch.
He’s gone very still. As if he’s holding his breath. As if he can’t bring himself to speak, his mind perhaps having gone finally blank.
Though, to be fair, she can’t think of a thing to say either. She knows the pain of each scar she’s been painted with. As intimate a detail as anything else within her reach. These are worse. Deep. He should be–.
She swiftly recalls the hissing flinch of nicked fingers from her first days in the kitchen. The sort of pain that, in the end, had been more about the shock than the actual slip of her skin. How, the first time she’d spilled more than a little blood, she’d realized that such things could be too dangerous if she wasn't careful. Nobody would save her here.
She’s known the ache a muscle could hold the next day from hours spent clenching in mortal terror. The flexing of the wrists. The way that pain echoed from within the bone.
But in the end nothing had compared to the true sort of pain that sang of endings. She should be–.
The horrible drag of the saw, wave after wave of agony which had found no ceasing or diminishing even as bone had cracked, until everything had dripped away with the sluggish pumping of her blood from her body. She’d been alone, by the time it had ended.
Something that had been intended to last and last it had. Until she’d come back.
And it’s with the sighing ghosts of each of those pains that she knows, in a way that she’d already expected but wanted to be wrong about, that something hurt him. That something, undoubtedly, tried to kill him and it was a miracle that it didn’t.
“They come with quite a story,” he says without a drip of passion in him, and she already knows he’s fond of a good story. He’s told her more stories than she can count already.
And that’s part of it. She notices something about the hang of his head. Can almost see the fluttering of his thoughts like a great dome of water, clear as crystal, which was populated by nervous swarms of beautiful fish. Silken fan tails, fluttering. Big eyes. Desperation.
There’s something in the room with them, too. She feels it. A certain thought that this was what was expected of him. That he’d done this sort of thing before. That he’d been expecting, at some point, to show this to her. That he’s accepted, maybe, the impropriety of this even if he doesn’t want to.
That, in turn, has her draw her hand back. Not too quickly. She doesn’t want him to think that she’s frightened, or disgusted, but he doesn’t owe her any of this. She imagines telling him to kneel, raising the hem of her dress, and giving him his own chance to reach out and feel the strange sort of scar revivification could cost but imagines that might be too much for him in turn.
That might really do him in.
So instead, she says, “I’ll give you a moment,” softly and waits for him to turn and meet her gaze before slipping out of the side room. She wants him to see that she isn’t afraid. Wants him to know that, if he wants to talk, she’ll be there to listen.
But only if he wants to.
That’s something the castle staff keep being surprised by. They mutter, murmur, whisper, and speak at times like she isn’t there. Or, more accurately, like they don’t expect her to notice they’re standing there.
It’s always with a furious blush that a footman who’d just muttered about the ache in his leg turns down her offer of having a chair fetched.
It’s with the panic-blown eyes of a rabbit that a maid apologizes when all she’d done was offer, offhandedly, that some of the housekeeping staff always kept the good bath salts on too high a shelf and Ella had only mused that such a thing could change. Or that they could acquire a stepladder.
It’s, here and now, Tadius realizing that she’s waiting for him. That she’s here for whatever he wants. If he’d tell it or leave her in suspense.
There she sees it, again, the faintest bit of shock. A slight hang to his mouth that he only leaves open when he’d have thought there to be words to offer but found himself lost instead.
“Thank you,” he finally says hopelessly, gesturing with one arm to see her out of the room and close the door behind her. “Truly.” The other he keeps tightly bound to his chest.
And with that, and as much ease as she can muster, that she turns back to the hall and makes her way back to her empty library.
It’s all the lovelier for its emptiness. For The Speaker’s departure. He’d even polluted the place’s quiet with his snuffling and sneezing. Now, that air of fragile charm has returned.
It’s one of many such alcoves in the palace which exist for no purpose other than beauty. Than providing an elegant backdrop to have discussions against. Than subtle insults to people who don’t know they were being disrespected.
She moves not back to where she’d been perched, an elegant chair at the front of the room which had creaked ominously if she’d moved too much, but onto the closest thing to comfort that such a place can provide. A settee that couldn’t hold more than two people or do anywhere near enough to call itself a couch.
The box with the amulet has been spirited away. The tea set has been replaced. One of the simplest ones, painted with pale green ivy along the handles, waits instead of the fanciful set which had been brought out for official proceedings.
She already has two cups poured, one in an empty spot next to her, when he emerges in a new maroon tunic. Simpler. Hardy adorned. The sort of thing that he wouldn’t miss for stowing it around the castle at random.
She isn’t slightly surprised that he’d stashed a change of clothes in that sort of room. It’s the way his composure seems pulled taut, shows the barest press of effort, that gives her pause. Has her reach for her own cup and sip from it, giving him a moment to sit. But not so long that he’ll discuss The Speaker.
“If you want to tell me,” she says, “what happened?”
He considers it, back in the beautiful room with its beautiful light. Which had been built to hold just a fraction of the legion, a simple regiment amidst an army that could topple empires, of tomes and volumes. There were pockets of life within the castle that had even Ella, who’d spent a childhood in comparable luxury, taken aback.
The appearance of opulence is all around them. In books, propped up in glass cases, to show illustrious illustrations. Whole illuminations. Maps of the world unrolled next to cuneiform tablets. Books that seem to rarely be touched. To have been placed here as a painting was hung upon a wall.
A room to make a statement about one’s possessions, about how worldly one must be to own such things.
Tadius had told her that royalty had been having meetings amidst this room for decades, and it is there that she sits with him. That he looks up at her, one leg jogging up and down in nerves.
Across the room, at the foot of the simple chair by the door, a teacup and its fanciful spoon have been tidied away. But a patch of the wood paneling remains spattered with tea. The air is perfumed by the spilling of jasmine.
For a moment, he seems to gather himself. A look on his face, as a man might make when he was setting up to tell you a joke he’d told many times, that halted somewhat. Realized he’d forgotten part of it. He reaches for his tea, takes a sip, and sets the cup back down with purpose. He’s clearly swallowed it without tasting it.
He leans back, hides his mouth behind two knuckles of his hand, and goes through the motions of crossing his legs. He breathes. He begins.
“The scars are the worst of the lot, obviously,” he tells her with a chagrined sort of smile, but the story stops there. She’d almost say that he seems confused.
It’s a hard story, she imagines, so she only takes another sip of her tea. She tries to tell him, with her eyes alone, that this can take as long or as little as he needs.
That hardly seems to help him. If anything, it has him shift and recross the other leg. He winces. It’s his right leg this time.
He tries again.
“It was cold, that night,” he offers unsurely. “We were…returning from a tournament. It’s held yearly for The Night Maid’s death day. Remind me, won’t you, to tell you more about it? At another time? You’ll…have to attend.”
She nods. He seems to find a little more peace. It helps him find some kind of rhythm.
And then he tells her a story. About a man riding along the edge of the road. He calls this man a fool, and she shoots him a look that makes him stop. Somehow, this seems to make him more nervous. He describes how a trained dog took that man from the road, where a highwayman waited.
He doesn’t do much to describe what the dog had been doing and she doesn’t fault him.
He does falter, slightly, at a fork in the tale. The man in the dark. The dog. The highwayman.
A pause that allows her to refill their cups. Hers, now half empty. His, only missing the one sip.
He chuckles a bit, as if waiting for someone to say something and realizing that they weren’t coming in, and he leans closer to her. Tells her a secret. He tells her that the prince had been why he’d been so close to the road. He’d been in the middle of chastising their deceased monarch for drifting from their group, when it had all begun.
She knows he hasn’t said that part often and tells him, “Well, I’m not surprised.”
No, surprise is what she finds when he tells her a different sort of story even as he smiles at her comment. When he tells her about a valiant prince coming to save his attendant. A thoughtful prince who seems to care more for the dog that had attacked than the victim.
The story is wooden, sitting strangely in his mouth. She only interrupts when he says the highwayman, whom he hasn’t stopped to describe in near as specific details as the dog, is taken in by the point of the dagger. The prince’s dagger, raised aloft, and she’s confused.
“What dagger?” She asks, and he falters like a sudden crack in a mirror. A large one. Leaving only shards.
He pauses, stumbles, and starts into an explanation about The Night Maid. About treasures.
He reaches for his cup too suddenly with shaking fingers and knocks into it with his hand. Catches it frantically before too much tea can list over the lip of the cup and stain anything but his palm.
And it’s at the dart of his arm that she sees something else. Something newer than any scar. Angrier.
A bright red burst of raised skin, a slash of welts in furious scarlet, drips nearly from his elbow to his wrist. The arm he’d kept close. The thing that had hurt him so. Lesions, perhaps, that don’t cover the whole of the skin but spatter out from the worst of it in a single hideous trail. Not a burn at all but something else.
It’s only a flash, but lurid enough against the pale length of his forearm to stand out.
“Oh, Tadius,” she says and immediately reaches out to take his wrist in her hand. Turning his arm this way and that to assess the damage. “This isn’t a burn at all.”
A moment passes between them. More forgetful than he’s ever been. He can’t seem to think of a thing to say. He’s staring at the grip of her hand.
“No, of course not,” he finally says in that strangled voice. His eyes have locked onto the effect painting his forearm before rising suddenly to her face. His mouth works, open and closed, for a moment. Then he looks back down. Then up again. “Don’t know what I was thinking.”
She hovers a thumb over it, considering it, and says, “I’d think it more some kind of reaction. Maybe to the–.”
“Yes!” He says it as he takes his arm back. “A reaction. To the tea, surely. Of course. A burn. How silly of me.”
His voice is getting rather high-pitched. He’s talking faster.
Does he think she’ll use this against him somehow? Is this part of the reaction?
He doesn’t seem to be thinking about anything silly. He seems to be going somewhere in his mind. “I think I should, actually, see the apothecary about this. It’s dreadful, isn’t it? Truly dreadful. Who’d have thought, me, allergic!” He stands, suddenly, and slams into the table with his knee. It shoves the whole thing out of the way, leaving a little scratch on the floor, and he goes to move it back with frantic expediency.
He doesn't even wince at the bruise he must have just earned.
“Tadius–.” She says and she’s going to ask what’s wrong when his gaze grows heavier. His face more severe. She reaches out and at that he pulls back, instinctually and suddenly, so she keeps her hands to herself and stays seated.
He’s breathing hard. His face, pale and strange, makes her think something else is going on. Physical or emotional. Perhaps she shouldn't have asked.
He blinks at her; he straightens up and looks to the door before he stops. “Was there anything else you needed to know?”
She’s found herself with a handful of questions, details that she’ll turn to when night is still and sleep eludes her. How they’d gotten him out of there. How long the recovery had been. If he’d had any family to come calling. If he’d be alright to ride with her to a similar tournament this year, but such questions could surely wait until closer to time and she had a feeling she knew what answer he’d force out of his mouth.
So she’d said, “no,” and he’d immediately left the room as quickly as he first had. Though, this time, he does stop at the doorway and bow almost like an afterthought. He says, “forgive me, Your Majesty,” and promptly flees from the room.
She blinks to herself a few times. She listens after him but doesn’t hear him crash into anything. She tidies up the tea set and pulls a chord that hangs in the corner of the room. She asks the maid who arrives to go and find Crumb.
She has almost an hour before lunch, so she figures she’ll use this time to start reading some of her books. It was an idea she’d been prepared to offer to Tadius, but there’s no sense in doing it alone.
She proceeds to have what should have been the rest of a lovely morning, if it weren’t for the niggling suspicion in the back of her head that something was wrong.
The questions follow her. They will for the rest of the day.
And, in the dead of night when she couldn’t finish the whole question, one will stand out. What dagger?
Stranger still, hadn’t he sipped from a cup of the same sort of tea without issue? No scald of welts had dotted his lips and it had been the same brew. Hadn’t she seen with her own eyes, a few splashes of that same tea, run down his palm when he’d caught the cup in his strangeness?
She’d seen him at dinner that night and he’d been fine except for a bandage around that arm.
But she’d told herself such things were similar to her thoughts of black thread at his neck. Her fear at sounds in the night. When people laughed too loud. When things crashed down. It wouldn’t do to think on such things, and she’d imagined herself tucking such thoughts away in a great chest of drawers just for the night. So she could sleep. She’d deal with it tomorrow.
And she won’t think, until later, on how Tadius took his tea with only a pour of milk. Hadn’t touched the sugar bowl even as he’d once have liked to.
There is no way for her to think on so minuscule a detail until later. Until each strange piece, snaggle toothed and inexplicable, at last comes together to make one shaggy head.
It is a detail that Ella Ashmore, for all her quick-wittedness and clear eyes, wouldn’t consider. A forest for the trees. A detail that hid in sight so plain that it would have been the case in House Ashmore or any other scion of nobility. A law of propriety. Of wealth.
Something that had remained true of her own table even when she’d been forced to set it, tight-lipped, for monsters.
Each cup, in that fine first tea set, had come with a saucer and fanciful little spoon. Carved with a curling pattern to match the flowing shapes painted onto its pot and cups.
The Speaker, in dumping his cup’s contents into Tadius’ lap, had sent the spoon too.
The spoon, hardly a consideration for most people, had been made of pure silver.
And, its touch had wreaked its havoc across his skin as a dagger might once have if he’d tried to pick it up again after the night that had seen his life saved and doomed in equal parts.
There was no way for Ella Ashmore to have guessed at such things. But, much later, she will walk in the sun past a wall in the castle. Upon that wall will hang a silver dagger.
And she will stop. And she will wonder.
At the time of their birth, ideas had no words. Had no real sense of details until evidence had come to support them.
But when they were first born, they were like a set of teeth clasping around a small shape. Something that wouldn’t let you go. A feeling you couldn’t shake, plain and simple.
In her dreams, there is a certain configuration of stars. And she wakes up in bed ringing with what it had told her in the observatory.
Someone is lying to you.