“So this is the boy king who has caused us so much trouble?” he sneered. “I’m not much impressed.”
He removed the boot, then bent on one knee beside me. I kept my head turned away from him but felt his hot breath as he spoke. “I wish I could report that the girl died quickly and without pain,” he said. “But I found her alive at the bottom of the hill — barely. She begged me to have mercy on you. I told her I had no such intentions. And in the last breath of her life, she asked me to give you a message, from her heart straight to yours.”
This time I did look at him, though from his tone I knew he was bringing me anything but words of love. He grinned wickedly and showed me two of his fingers, wet with blood. Her blood. He ripped at my undershirt until he got my bare chest and brushed his fingers across the skin, creating two red lines there. It stung like acid, and hurt almost as much as if he’d stabbed me.
“Get him inside and locked down,” the commander ordered. “No rescuer will come within a mile of him!”
Someone pulled a dark sack over my head, and then they picked me up and carried me away by the chains. Several minutes later, I was deposited in a nearly black room filled with cold air that suggested I was in some underground location.
From there, I was transferred to irons fixed on the wall. It eased my situation somewhat because there was enough length on the chains that I could move my arms in front of me and slide to a sitting position. But nothing else improved. In the privacy of the room, one of the men who had carried me there kicked at my legs and gut, cursing me and telling me he’d had friends on the wall I exploded. He kept at it until another voice finally told him to stop.
After that, I withdrew into my own mind. I kept going back to those final moments. Imogen’s expression while I untied her. There was fear and doubt, but it was more than that. Anger that I’d rescued her, but maybe relief as well. Roden had said that Imogen looked at me as if she loved me. Had there been love anywhere in her expression?
I didn’t know. All I could think about was why she had stopped the archer. Why couldn’t she have just kept running and saved herself?
Aware that I wasn’t giving him any attention, the man who had kicked me before started at it again, harder this time. His foot connected with the very spot where Roden had broken my leg, and the pain of it forced a reaction from me.
“Ah, you have a weakness there,” he said. “I’ll remember that.”
“All of you are dismissed.” That voice belonged to the person who had kept a boot to my face. The men who responded called him Commander Kippenger.
I heard the room empty, then noted the sound of a knife being removed from its sheath. He placed the blade at the base of my neck and I hoped he’d make my death quick. My heart already felt as though it were full of holes, so he couldn’t make it worse. I just wanted it over fast.
But that was not his intention. He ran the knife back down my torn undershirt and sliced it off me in pieces. I wished he had removed the blood too. I couldn’t bear to feel it on my skin. Then he reached down and pulled the king’s ring off my finger. Finally, he removed my boots, I assumed to keep me from running away. I had no thought to even try. When all was finished, he pulled the sack off my head. I should have blinked as my eyes adjusted to the light, but there was so little, no adjustment was needed.
I was in a hastily dug prison cell, almost entirely buried underground, and lined with rough wooden boards to hold back the earth. The only existing light came through cracks in the roof high above us, but those gaps also leaked dirt and water and likely invited rats inside as well. Due to the nearness of the swamplands, the ground beneath me was muddy at best. Yet the irons on my wrists and ankles were anchored deep in the wall. I couldn’t pull free from them, even if I had the will to attempt it.
Kippenger was tall, with dark blond hair and a prominent nose. I supposed there’d be women who found him handsome if they didn’t stare too long and see his flaws. Namely that he was obviously a cruel sort of devil who seemed to take my capture as his personal badge of honor.
“There,” he said once he stood back to look at me. “Whatever you were before, you are nothing now. To the rest of the world, you will be dead. King Vargan is on his way here. He thought he was coming for the interrogation of your servant, but he’ll be pleased to see we now have a much higher prize.”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t care.
“Vargan will spread word of your death to the farthest reaches of these lands,” he continued. “Robbed of their king, within days Carthya will be extinguished like a candle in a breeze.”
My mind was already wandering again. I wondered whether Herbert and Evendell had survived. If Mott had gotten away, if he had seen what happened to Imogen. If he had seen me. And what they’d do to me here if I refused to surrender in this war. The blame for the destruction of my country lay solely at my feet.
And I had no will to make any of it better.
The most difficult time to be hungry is when the pangs first start. When the body realizes it’s missed a meal and signals that it wants food. But after a while it gives up asking; it gives up expecting anything. The pangs will return, of course, and the hunger never goes away. But once a person has reached this stage, he has bigger problems than the next meal.
Hunger was the least of my concerns.
In the first couple of days following my capture, I was left almost entirely alone. My prison was well guarded — I knew that from the conversations that filtered down through the boards over my head. But I remained in the darkness, was given nothing to eat, and had only the muddy water that dripped from the earth above to drink. The few visits I did get were only to be sure I was still there, and to add to my injuries in whatever way entertained the vigils. In all that time, I never fought back, never said a word, never gave a single indication I registered their presence. As far as I was concerned, if they were going to tell everyone I was dead, I might as well behave that way.
On the morning of the third day, their treatment changed. A couple of Vargan’s soldiers came with a bowl of soup they insisted I eat. I gave them a thorough description of where they could shove it and waved it away. The taller of the men threw the bowl at me, as if I cared about that, and they left.
Later that evening, a plate was carried in with a chunk of stale bread and a cup of dirty water. I tossed the bread into the corner, hoping the rats would prefer chewing on it rather than getting any closer to me. I tried to hit someone when I threw the cup, but didn’t manage to throw even as far as the vigil’s feet.
Commander Kippenger was immediately summoned, and yelled a lot about how much trouble he’d be in if I didn’t start eating. Somehow, that single fact made the hunger easier to bear.
The next morning, a woman was sent in with a towel that she used to wash me up. I begged her to wipe whatever was left of Imogen’s blood off my chest and she did. Only then did I feel able to breathe again.
“I helped take care of the girl once they brought her here,” the woman said. “They offered her every possible reward for information about you, but she always refused.”
It hurt to hear about Imogen, yet I realized not hearing about her was worse. I had spent much of the past two days thinking back on things the priests of the churches had taught about an afterlife. If they were right, that all good people became saints in heaven, then surely that was where Imogen now rested. My family would be there as well. Whether it was true or not, I chose to believe that’s where she was, happy and free from any worries or pain. It helped.