Prince Aldric Thorne woke to hands on his throat. Two guards dragged him from the bed before he could speak. He had slept in the enemy king's guest chamber for six months, a prisoner dressed as a hostage, waiting for word that his defeated kingdom of Vael was safe. He wanted his own freedom. More than that, he wanted his people fed through winter. Neither goal survived the moment a guard shoved a leather pouch into his face and said his family seal was stamped on it. They pulled him through the corridor in his nightshirt. He read the guards the way his father had taught him at seven years old, when he first learned to smile at strangers. Angry. Certain. Beyond bargaining. He tried anyway. He said the pouch was not his. He said he had never seen the white powder inside it. A steward held the pouch up to the torchlight and pointed at the seal pressed into the leather, and no one looked at Aldric's face after that. The courtyard was already full. The post stood in the center, thick wood bound in iron rings, chains hanging from the crossbeam. Aldric saw the king on the high balcony, watching without expression. Aldric dropped to his knees on the stones. He begged. He said he would swear on any relic they brought him. He said his father had sent him here in good faith. A guard cut the nightshirt off his back and lifted his wrists into the rings above his head. The first stroke opened him from shoulder to hip. He counted to four before he stopped counting. The whip had small barbs along its length, and each pull took skin with it. He heard himself cry out and hated the sound. He thought of the grain stores in Vael and how a dead prince could not argue for them. He held on to that until the eighth stroke, when he stopped holding on to anything. They cut him down and dragged him across the courtyard by the ankles. His back left a wet trail on the stones. The cell they threw him into was stone on three sides and iron bars on the fourth. A guard locked heavy manacles around his wrists and ran the chain through a ring in the wall. No water. No bread. The door slammed and the torch went with it. By the second night the fever came. Aldric hunched in his semi-standing position, hung upright and stationary by the shackles on his wrists. Something small moved along the wall near his feet, and he saw a rat watching him from the dark, its eyes catching the thin light from the corridor. He tried to pull his foot out of reach but the chain stopped him short. The rat’s eyes appeared to gleam with evil intention, and the wounded prince shuddered openly. But whether the rat was real, or a figment of his ill mind remained unclear. Aldric shivered, telling himself that the beast would leave him alone if he stopped watching it. When it moved again, a ragged shriek left his throat - but the creature made a hasty retreat. From the hallway outside his cell, there came the sound of rapid footsteps. Then the grate at the top opened, and a pair of eyes squinted into the darkness. “…Everything alright in there?” Aldric didn’t know the guard, and he was afraid to show weakness, but the tears that spilled down his cheeks at the humanizing question didn’t care for his dignity. “Please…” His voice crackled with emotion as he squeezed the words through. “I need water. I… I’m going to die like this.” The guard paused, considering the request with a careful quirk of his eyebrows and a deepening frown. Then he turned and walked away. Aldric cursed his desperation. He cursed this awful kingdom who only seemed to produce heartless monsters. He cursed his heart for daring to hope— The footsteps returned, slower this time. The creak of a key in the lock, and the deadbolt snapping open, before the door swung inward, and his small cell was invaded. “Here.” The guard held a small cup to the prince’s lips, and Aldric drank greedily from it, momentarily uncaring if he did so politely. When it was empty he sighed and settled back into his uncomfortable crouch, with a suspicious glance at the guard before a soft thanks left his lips. The knight seemed surprised, but said nothing more as he left. The sound of the deadbolt snapping back into place a declaration in itself. Aldric didn’t know his name, but it seemed the guard had taken pity on him, and he was grateful. His eyes closed again, as the fever raged, and he fell into restless dreams. When Aldric awoke next, his cell was again being visited, but this time it was a woman in white robes that entered, a healer. She cleaned and treated the princeling’s back under the watchful supervision of the guard. Aldric hardly had the words to thank them. Seeing the young prince tremble, the guard brought a blanket. Aldric was stunned by the man’s unexpected kindness, but he couldn’t help feeling suspicious of the altruism. Nothing was ever free in this world, and with a growing sense of dread the princeling wondered what this knight could possibly want from a prisoner - albeit a noble one. What was he planning to make the prince do? A brief flashback had the weakened prince shuddering under the memory of rough handling and a dark room. He opened his eyes to see the guard watching him carefully. Prince Aldric, quickly put up a wall between them, unwilling and unable to show his fear to this man. The guard smiled half-heartedly, and then escorted the healer from the room; leaving Aldric alone in the dark once again with only his troubled thoughts for company. Aldric fretted until an exhausted sleep took hold of him once more.

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.

Aldric woke to the scrape of the bolt again. His shoulders ached from the pull of the wrist-chains, and when he shifted, a hot sting bit under each shackle. He turned his hand over as far as the iron let him. The skin beneath was raw and weeping. A ring of red circled each wrist where the metal had ground through overnight. He knew what came next if it went untreated. Swelling. Pus. Fingers that would not close on a cup, let alone a sword. The door swung open. Owen stepped in with the water cup and a heel of bread on a wooden plate. He set them down and crouched to look at Aldric's wrists without asking. "Let me see the wrists, kid." The word hit before Aldric could catch it. Heat climbed his neck. "I'm sixteen," he snapped. His voice cracked on the number and he hated it. "Not a kid." Owen paused with his hand halfway to the manacle. He looked at Aldric's face for a moment, then at the raw skin under the iron. "Sixteen," he said. "Noted." For a moment Aldric had braced for the backhand, or the laugh, or the slow smile that meant a man had decided what he wanted. None came. Instead, Owen carefully took Aldric's left hand and turned it toward the light from the grate. His mouth thinned. He touched the cuff with a fingertip, testing the fit, then let it go. "These need padding or you'll lose the use of them. I can cut strips off the clean linen and wrap under the cuffs. You'd have to hold still while I unlock one at a time." Aldric's throat closed. To let a guard unlock him, one wrist at a time, in a cell no one watched, was to hand over the last thing he still owned. He thought of screaming. He thought of kicking. He thought of the sores splitting wider each time he lifted the cup to drink, and of the fingers going stiff, and of a life after this cell in which he could not hold a sword or sign his name. He weighed the two things against each other and found, to his shame, that the hands mattered more. "Do it," he whispered miserably. "Left first." Owen knelt and unlocked the left cuff first, held Aldric's wrist steady, and wiped the sores clean. Aldric watched his own hand shake in the guard's grip and could not stop it. Owen thumbed the salve into the last layer, and wound a strip of linen twice around the raw skin, and closed the iron over it. He tested the give with two fingers. Then the right. He did not speak while he worked. When he was done, he pushed the cup and the bread within reach and stood. "Eat," Owen said. He picked up the medicinal pot. At the door he stopped without turning. "Sixteen's old enough. I'll remember." Then the knight slipped out the door and the bolt shot home. Aldric turned his wrists in the low light. The linen held. The iron no longer bit. He flexed his fingers and they answered him. The panic in his chest thinned to something smaller and harder to name. Owen had not asked for anything. Owen had heard him and had changed one word without argument. Sixteen. Noted. That was not how his father's men had ever answered him. He reached for the bread with steadier hands. He chewed slowly and watched the door. A guard who listened was a new kind of problem. Aldric did not know yet what it would cost him. Owen had asked for nothing again. Two gifts now, and no bill. Aldric had been trained since he was a boy to know that no man gave twice without meaning to collect. Whatever Owen wanted, he was building it slowly, letting the debt grow until Aldric could not refuse. The prince closed his eyes and tried to think who in this castle would send a guard to be kind to him, and why. He could not name one. That frightened him more than the shackles ever had.

The bolt scraped back before Aldric had finished the last of the bread. Owen stepped in first, quicker than usual, and set a bucket of clean water on the floor. "Wash your face," he said. "A court man is coming down. Amfridus. He questions you now." Aldric's hands stilled on the wood plate. He knew the name. His father had spoken it once at table, with the small careful voice men used for people who could not be bought. Aldric wet his fingers and dragged them through his hair. Amfridus came alone. He was short and round-shouldered, with a monocle, a quill already uncapped, and a folded sheet of paper pressed to a small board. He did not greet Aldric. He looked once around the cell, noted the chains, noted the linen under the cuffs, and wrote something down. "Prince Aldric Thorne of Vael," Amfridus said. "The pouch bearing your seal held white powder. The king's taster is dead. Explain." Aldric had rehearsed this a hundred times in the dark. He had planned to weep, to plead his youth, to name his father's enemies. He looked at the quill and understood that any story he told would be written down and read back to men who would hang him for the parts that did not fit. He set the plate aside. "I did not carry that pouch into the hall," he said. "I have not touched my seal since I was given over. Someone in this castle used it. I do not know who. I will not guess, because a guess on your paper will kill me." His voice held. He did not add anything else. Amfridus wrote for a long moment. Then he raised the monocle and looked at Aldric properly for the first time. "Sixteen," he said. "Your father dressed you like a whore and sent you to war. Now you sit in iron and refuse to lie." He paused. "Irritating." "My lord?" "I came to ruin you on paper." Amfridus tapped the quill against the board. "You have made it difficult." He folded the sheet. He drew a short, thin dagger from inside his coat and laid it on the straw within Aldric's reach. "Not for me. For the next man who comes. If the guard is honest, you will not need it. If the guard is not, use it once and use it well." He looked at Owen without expression. "Blackwood. You heard nothing." "Nothing, my lord," Owen said. Amfridus left. The bolt shot home. Aldric stared at the blade on the straw, then at Owen, who had not moved from the wall. The charge was not dropped. The rope still waited. But a court official had walked out with his quill dry, and Aldric was still breathing, and there was a knife in his cell now that no one had written down.

Aldric hid the dagger in the straw before Owen was locked out for the night. He pushed the blade under the wall where the stone met the floor, then dragged the thin pallet over the seam. His shackles rattled with every movement. He stopped, waited, listened. Owen had lingered at the door longer than usual. He had said one word before the bolt: "Careful." Aldric did not know if it was warning or advice. He sat back against the wall and waited for the corridor to go quiet. It did not stay quiet. Boots came down the corridor near midnight, more than one pair, and a laugh Aldric had learned to read in his father's halls. A drunk laugh with money behind it. Torches passed the bars, then stopped. A noble stood at the door of the cell, tall, wine-flushed, a barbed whip coiled at his belt. He held the whip like a favorite dog's leash. Behind him, a bored guard fumbled with keys. "This one," the noble said. "The pretty one. Open it." Aldric read the room the way his father had taught him at seven. Drunk. Angry at something not in this cell. Wanting to be watched being cruel. If he drew the dagger now, the guard behind would see it, and the whip would come down, and the blade would be gone by morning along with any plan. He slid his hand off the straw. He put his eyes on the floor and made his shoulders small. He let his hair fall forward. He did what he had done since he was twelve. He smiled once, quick and shy, the way that had always worked on men like this. The noble laughed. He stepped in, boots loud on stone, and lifted Aldric's chin with two fingers. The whip stayed at his belt. He said things Aldric did not answer. He pulled a ring off his own finger and pushed it onto Aldric's, then tapped Aldric's cheek hard enough to sting. "Tomorrow," he said. "I'll send for him tomorrow. Clean him." He turned and left. The bolt shot home. The boots went away. Aldric sat with the ring on his finger and vomited quietly into the straw. He wiped his mouth and pulled the dagger out from under the stone. The blade was still there. The plan was still there. But the noble had marked him, and a summons was coming, and whatever chance the corridor offered had shrunk to the space between now and tomorrow's bell. Aldric wrapped the dagger in the hem of his tunic and tied it against his thigh under the chain. When Owen came at dawn, Aldric would have to decide, finally, whether the guard was the honest man Amfridus hoped for, or the next man the blade was meant for.

Aldric did not sleep. He sat with his back against the cold stone and the blade tied against his thigh, and he watched the slot of light through the grate go from black to grey. The chain on his wrist was long enough to reach the wall beside the bolt if he stood. He measured the distance twice. He worked out where Owen's throat would be when the door opened, and where his own good hand would need to go. He did not think about the noble's ring on his finger. He thought about the summons bell, and the number of steps from the cell to the courtyard, and the fact that he could not run far on legs still weak from sickness. The bolt scraped back before the bell. Owen came in alone, a tin cup in one hand and small washing basin and a folded cloth in the other. He shut the door behind him but did not throw the bolt. Aldric moved. He got the chain around Owen's neck from behind and pulled him back against the wall and put the blade under his jaw. The bowl hit the floor. Water spread across the stones. Owen did not shout. He didn’t fight. He did not even drop the cup. He kept his freehand loose at his side, and his chin up off the edge. Owen glanced at Aldric's face and held still. "Careful," the guard said again, quiet. Aldric pressed the point in until a bead of blood ran down the blade. "Call out and I open your throat." Aldric said. His voice came out ice-cold. "I know," Owen said. "I won't." Aldric watched his eyes. No flick to the corridor. No breath drawn for a shout. Aldric pressed the blade harder. A tiny trickle of blood ran down onto the flat of the steel. Owen swallowed against it and did not move. "Tell me," Aldric demanded. "When the noble from last night sent for me. Were you planning to take me to him, or would you have taken me out?" Owen's eyes did not move. "Out," he said. "Say it plain." "I will not walk you to that man." "Why." Owen swallowed against the edge and was silent a long moment. "Because I know who he is. And I have my own reasons for wanting him answered for." Aldric watched his mouth, his throat, the small muscles under his eyes. Owen did not lie. Aldric had watched enough men to know. “The summons is supposed to happen at first bell. The noble sent word. I was told to clean you and bring you up when it was time." He paused. "I wasn't going to." Aldric kept the blade where it was. "Prove it." Owen shifted his weight, slow, and lifted the cup so Aldric could see. A key sat inside, wet at the bottom. "For the shackles," Owen said. "I took it off the ring an hour ago. The captain who raised me was killed six months back. They called it robbery. It wasn't. I've been waiting for a reason to walk out of here. You're it." He met Aldric's eyes. "Kill me or trust me — it’s your choice, Prince. I cannot make it for you. Either way, the bell will ring in a quarter hour." Aldric's hand shook. He had read people since he was seven, but even years of practice couldn’t read this one. He lowered the dagger a finger's width and took the cup. The key was real. He fit it to the shackle at his left wrist. The iron opened, and the prince allowed the chain to drop to the floor. He did not put the blade away. He put it in his other hand and stepped back from the wall. "Move," he said. "You go first."

He had told Owen to move, and now Owen was moving, and Aldric had no answer for what came after the door. The bell would ring soon. The corridor beyond ran in two directions. Aldric did not know which way was out. He did not know which path led to freedom, and which to his downfall. And he did not know what a prince in a torn tunic did in a castle full of men who wanted him under their control — either laid out on a bed or in the ground. He had planned the throat and the chain. He had not planned the next step. "Wait," Aldric said hoarsely. Owen paused, hand on the wood, watching Aldric the way a man watches a dog he isn't sure of. The dagger was still up. Aldric's arm shook from holding it. "Which way?" Owen tilted his head. "Left goes to the yard. Right are the stairs down to the kitchens. The yard has two men at the gate. Stairs have one cook and a locked door." "Do you have a key to the locked door?" "No." Owen paused. "But I have a knife for the cook." Aldric almost laughed. It came out as a short breath. He had been ready to open this man's throat a minute ago and now he was leaning on him to think. Owen continued, "Past that door, there’s a cart that goes out at first bell. Carries bread crates. The driver drinks. I've watched him a month." "And after the cart?" "We slip into the woods above the river. I have clothes stashed there. Coin too. And a pair of horses at a farm I paid last week." He stopped. He did not add why he had paid, or when he had decided. Aldric understood that the plan had not been made for him. It had been made for Owen, and Owen was opening it up now to fit two. Aldric's mouth was dry. He wanted to ask a dozen things. He did not have time for a dozen. He picked one. "If I say no… If instead, I decide we go through the courtyard to see the king, and I plead my case..." Owen's face did not change. "Then you die by noon." It was not a threat. It was the answer to the question. Aldric felt something in his chest let go and something else tighten. He had spent the night measuring a throat. He had not spent one minute measuring what came after. Owen had. That was the whole difference between them in this cell, and it was enough. Aldric made himself stand straight. He willed strength into his trembling limbs. The ring the noble had pushed onto his finger caught the grey light. He pulled it off and dropped it in the straw. "Alright, we go through the kitchens," the prince declared in a voice far more steady than he felt. "The yard will have more guards arriving by first bell." Owen nodded once, but his eyes still rested on the princeling. Again, Aldric could not read them. "Here," Owen finally said, after a long moment. "You cannot walk the hall in that." He pulled off his own guard cloak and held it out. Aldric took it with his free hand. The wool was warm from Owen's back. He put it on. It covered the tunic and the marks on his wrists and the blade against his leg. Owen looked him over and adjusted the collar so the white hair tucked under. His fingers briefly lingered, smoothing the fabric into place, before the guard stepped back. "When we go out," Owen said, "walk behind me. Keep your head down. If someone speaks to me, you do not answer. If I draw, you run for the stairs." "And if you fall?" "Then you run anyway." Aldric held the guard’s eyes. He had trusted no one since he was seven and he did not trust Owen now, at least not fully. However the moment for wavering had passed. He’d made his choice when he’d let Owen go. Still, the prince felt more at ease with a bared threat on his lips and a blade in his hand. He brandished the dagger. "If you turn on me, I swear I’ll put this under your ribs before you finish the turn." "I know," Owen replied, a small smile tugging at the corner of the guard’s lips. Aldric wondered what on earth that was for. The knight opened the door. The corridor was empty. Somewhere above them a bell began to ring, slow and even. Aldric pulled the cloak close and stepped out of the cell behind Owen. The iron door swung shut on the wet floor and the empty chain, and for the first time in twelve days he was walking without a wall in front of him.

The kitchens smelled of yeast and old grease. Aldric kept his head down and followed Owen past the bread ovens, past a cook who never turned from his dough. The locked door at the far end stood open a crack, propped by a boot. Owen slipped through. Aldric followed. Beyond it, the bread cart waited in a narrow yard, crates stacked high, the driver slumped on the bench with a jug between his knees. They climbed into the back and pulled a canvas over their heads. The cart lurched forward. Aldric counted his breaths and pressed the dagger flat against his thigh. They rolled through a gate. Voices called. The driver grunted something. The wheels kept turning. When the sound of stone gave way to soft earth, Owen lifted the canvas an inch and looked out. He nodded once. They slid off the back of the cart into wet grass and ran for the treeline. Owen led him uphill through birch and thorn to a hollow where he had buried a bundle. Rough tunics, a belt, a purse of coin. Aldric shed the guard cloak and pulled the plain shirt over his marked back. He tucked the dagger into the new belt. Owen pointed through the trees. "The farm is over the ridge. Horses. Then north to the river." Aldric had opened his mouth to answer when the first bay reached them, thin and far off, and then a second joining it, and a third. Owen's face went still. "Hounds." He listened another breath. "They ran the kitchens. They have the trail off the cart." Aldric felt his stomach drop. He had walked through flour and grease and old blood on those floors. He was the trail. Owen was already moving, pulling him by the sleeve toward the sound of water below. They half-slid down the bank to a shallow stream. Owen stepped in and dragged Aldric after him. The cold bit through the boots at once. "Walk in the water," Owen said. "As far as you can. Downstream, then up. Split the scent." Aldric obeyed. His legs shook. The barking grew louder, then confused, then farther. They walked the stream until Aldric could not feel his feet. Owen climbed out on a stone shelf where no print would show and hauled Aldric up after him. They lay flat in the fern until the baying moved off east, following nothing. By dusk they reached the croft over the ridge. A thatched cottage with a small barn beside it, both quiet. Owen whistled once. A man came to the barn door, looked them over, and jerked his chin. Inside, two saddled horses stood waiting, breath steaming. Aldric put a hand on the nearest mare's neck to steady himself. He was wet to the waist, shivering, and free of the castle walls. The hounds were behind them. The road north was open. He mounted.