Prince Aldric Thorne's Arc

Chapter 2 of 8

Aldric woke to the sound of the deadbolt again. His back throbbed against the stone. The fever had thinned overnight but not broken, and his legs shook when he tried to shift his weight in the wrist-chains. The door swung inward. The same guard stepped through with a clay pot and a roll of clean linen tucked under one arm. Aldric watched him without moving. He tried to read the man the way his father had taught him, but the fever blurred the edges. He could not tell if this visit was an order from above or something the guard had decided on his own. "Going to change the bandages," the guard said. He set the pot down on the floor. "Name's Owen, by the way. Figured you should know it." He waited. When Aldric said nothing, he did not press. He unwrapped the old linen from around Aldric's ribs with careful hands. The cloth came away stiff. Aldric hissed once and bit down on the rest. Owen dipped two fingers into the pale salve and started at the shoulder, working down. "Rained last night," he said. "You can smell it through the grate if you stand under it. Broke the heat some." Aldric held still and said nothing. He kept his eyes on the iron bars across the cell and counted them to keep from flinching. Owen talked while he worked. He said he had grown up on a farm two days' ride from the capital. He said his mother kept goats and his father was a wheelwright. He said the road there ran along a river that flooded every spring and washed out the low bridge. His voice stayed level, the way a man talked to a nervous horse. He never asked a question. He never touched skin that was not already torn. By the time Owen wrapped the fresh linen around Aldric's chest, the shaking in his legs had eased. The salve pulled the heat out of the wounds. Owen unlocked one manacle to pass the bandage under Aldric's arm and locked it back before Aldric had finished registering the click. He held a cup to Aldric's mouth. Aldric drank. Then Owen tipped a spoon of something bitter past his lips and Aldric swallowed that too, because refusing took strength he did not have. "Fever'll be down by morning," Owen said. "You'll stand on your own." He packed the pot and the leftover linen and left. The bolt shot home. Aldric leaned his forehead against the stone and felt, for the first time in days, that his body might obey him again. The relief was not clean. Owen had given him a name, and a name was a debt. Aldric had learned young the kinds of things men asked for in return for helpful gifts. He closed his eyes and began, already, to plan how he would refuse. How he would scream, and kick, and struggle. Even exhausted, he’d fight. And then he’d count the stones on the wall, and keep the tears from spilling down his cheeks, and choke the traitorous moan off his lips. He’d go somewhere far off, deep inside his mind, hidden and unreachable. And there he’d stay until it was finished. No, Aldric couldn’t trust anyone. He’d learned that lesson after what happened when he was twelve. Every good deed always had some ulterior motive behind it. They always wanted something. All the prince could do now was pray that Owen would not ask for something he couldn’t (and wouldn’t) willingly give. Perhaps he’d beg for mercy.