Nevermore: A Cal Leandros Novel (27 page)

“But when they caught me”—we’d separated, the easier to lead those chasing us into circles—“when the edge of the hill collapsed and I fell”—fell forever—“landing on the rocks by the stream and breaking my leg”—I’d seen the snapped bone and a shard of it spearing through the meat of my calf and my threadbare trousers—“they were there, and I said nothing.” I’d screamed when one had kicked my brutalized leg viciously, but screams weren’t words. “When they’d tied my wrists, yanked them up over my head, knotted the rope around a horse’s saddle, and dragged me back”—along the ground, aiming my leg at any good-sized rock or broken branch, laughing as I shredded my bottom lip to a bloody pulp
when every step of the horse felt like it was tearing off that leg, piece by piece—“I said nothing.”

There had been a castle five or six miles outside the forest, a small and blocky building, not the kind I’d picture now and the dungeon wasn’t underground. It wasn’t a dungeon at all. It didn’t have a single chain. It was just a room with a window high by the ceiling, no bigger than one foot by one foot. No way to get out of that if you’d had two working legs, but you could see the sky. It was gray every day I was there. I thought it had been three days then five, but after the first day, I didn’t know. It could’ve been a day, a month, or a year. I did know one thing.

I didn’t see the sun again.

My leg had gone bad in hours. The cloth below my knees frayed to nothing and let the open wound and bone crust with dirt. It smelled so strongly of infection that some of those holding knives for cutting and knives heated until they glowed red hot and a heavy poker for shattering bones had gagged, staggering out. I’d laughed, lying tied stripped naked on a rough wooden table scrounged from the kitchen along with the rest of their makeshift torture devices. Wasn’t that a sight? Torturers with weak stomachs. And I could laugh. The pain of my leg had gone past agony to a place I couldn’t feel it anymore. I was cold, the cold that seeps into you and holds you down when you fall through the rotted pond ice in early spring. It was a cold that numbed you to anything, even to the pain of fiery blades that had me screaming after the first ten burns despite swearing I wouldn’t give them that. I wouldn’t give them anything: words, screams,
nothing
.

My laughing brought more sliced and seared flesh but I didn’t feel it. The sheriff, a man who would’ve done his sworn duty for free when it included this, wasn’t one to give up. He pulled out two fingernails before the blacksmith’s tongs broke. He’d hurled it across the room. If he was trying to hit the wall, he was too angry to aim. It slammed into the forehead of one of his men, who swayed, a dent deeper than my thumb in his forehead,
then fell to the floor. Deader than the doornail that had been hammered into the back of my left hand. If he hadn’t been mad before, the sheriff was now, flecks of foam and the glassy sheen of insanity in his eyes.

He burned Robin’s name on my chest. If I was that stupidly loyal to an enemy of the crown, I could wear my stupidity for the rest of my life. That joke was on him when he was the one who gave me the key out of that life. After that it had been a fog, heavy inside my chest. It had me coughing, but it passed. There was a morning mist that if you’d had a small cottage and a blanket or two, you could’ve lain on a pallet of straw and watched it through the window. I’d never had a home like that, but I could imagine it. The mist and sprinkle of rain that covered up any voices shouting to tell them now or they’d pour boiling water meant for their dinner broth on my arms until the skin peeled off in long pieces like the ribbons in a girl’s hair. Screaming at me to breathe, you worthless son of a whore. Breathe and say where he was, where he would be, one word, tell them or I’d boil. I let the rain turn the shouts into whispers too far away to make out.

I didn’t think they’d gone through with it. I knew they would have if they’d had the time, if I’d still been there. But I wasn’t. The weight in my lungs was gone and the air was fresh with the smell of wet grass. Getting up, I’d wrapped the blanket around me. I left the cottage on two strong, whole legs, with skin whole and unmarked, no pain—none anywhere, and I walked into the mist. When I left the cottage that never was, I left the room that shouldn’t have been.

I had moved on.

“They tied me to a table in some random room they decided would be the dungeon. They had to raid the kitchen for whatever they could find for the interrogation. The sheriff was purple he was that furious. He finally gets to torture someone with real information, something he wanted more than anything he’d wanted before and he had to depend on the Betty Crocker Line of Torture and Interrogation Devices.” They had worked
just as well. Humiliated as he’d been, I thought he’d gone the extra mile and made them work with greater efficiency.

I checked behind us again for the weasels. “I died on a fucking kitchen table waiting for John and . . . for Niko and you to come for me, but you didn’t.”

“Don’t. Zeus, please don’t say that.” The appeal came out with the same pained grunt as a kick in the gut would cause. “Don’t
think
that.”

“I’m an Auphe. Isn’t that right? We think things you couldn’t in your darkest nightmares.” It was stated blandly and without emotion as there are occasions a lack of emotion inflicts a hurt sharper than the slice of the malicious ones. “I don’t think even an Auphe could come up with slow torturous death by kitchen utensils though.

“I hope you didn’t tell anyone the humiliating truth about that. Where I died.” I went on to snort bitterly, “Those were the days no one sang heroic songs about that kind of shit.” Tortured with heated spoons and dull knives, had several bones in both feet broken with a metal poker and that had been the first few hours. Necessity is the mother of invention and Betty Crocker was a bitch and a half.

“We found you,” Robin talked over my last few regrets about no heroic songs for me with enough agitated denial to drown me out. “We
came
for you. We shouted at his men to tell him I waited for him outside, and they laughed. They didn’t believe I’d risk certain death to save a peasant boy who followed me with the others. I was a would-be king and they thought you were nothing. Kings don’t give up their lives for common trash who were as wannabe as I was, but wannabe soldiers. They didn’t believe and they didn’t tell him. It took us two days to kill enough of them ringing the castle that the rest barricaded themselves inside. We surrounded the place with the straw we’d gathered and set it on fire. Cutting down a tree and using it as a battering ram to break through the door. We searched through the smoke and we”—his jaw worked—“we found you in a room on the second
level. Two days and you were already cold. Colder than the room. Cold as the night before.
Two
days fighting and killing without stopping. Using anything as a weapon when our swords shattered and we ran out of arrows. Smashing men’s heads in with stones. Pushing their heads under the water of the pond and drowning them. Our bare hands strangling the life from them. Anything we could make work. The morning of the second day we had fought our way close enough that you might hear us.”

He looked behind us, too, but I didn’t think it was for the weasels. “We shouted your name. We told you that we were coming for you. Screaming and swearing again and again at you from sunup to sunset when we finally broke through. We’re here. Don’t give up, Will. Don’t give up. But we were shouting at ourselves. You were gone. You’d been gone since the end of the first day. You’d died in the night and you didn’t hear us. Weren’t there to hear us. You thought, Gods Above.” He struggled and tried again, “You thought you were alone. You
weren’t
. Even when you couldn’t hear us, we were there. You were never alone.”

“Huh. Only a day. Seemed longer,” I said distantly. “Much longer.”

Reluctantly, I did have to be honest. “I thought I was alone. But I didn’t think it was because you and Niko wouldn’t come for me. I thought it was because it was impossible for you to come. Impossible was all that would stop you two.”

His running had slowed and I pushed him along with my shoulder. “Aren’t you going to tell me what they did? What he did?” he asked, his shoulders braced as anything I said would be as equally physical as verbal a blow. Wasn’t I going to punish me for losing me and not saving me in time?

“You said you found me”—he and Niko, because Niko would’ve been there, no stopping that—“said I was cold, dead since the night. So you saw me. Did you see your name burned into my chest? The sheriff did that
personally, had his fingers crossed you wouldn’t miss that. That was a present to himself.”

Goodfellow nodded, his throat moving, but he didn’t get out any words. I put them out there for him. “Then you know what they did. As long as you’ve been around, I know you saw everything those motherfuckers did to me. But here’s what you don’t know because I’m pretty damn sure that Niko went looking for whatever soldiers and sheriff’s men he could find and fought them, ten men, twenty, fought and didn’t stop until they finally killed him. And I’m just as sure after that you left. Maybe you buried us if you could get to our bodies, but you left. When we leave, you leave too.” He’d told me that. When Niko and I died, he would put countries between him and our latest graves.

“So this is what you don’t know. While they were doing all the rest including hammering a nail through one hand, during all that they went from asking where the other six of us were to just where you were—you who convinced us freezing and starving in the forest for years would somehow lead to a plan that put you on the throne. You with all that gold on your head and me with all the pain they said they would take away if I told them all the bolt holes where you hid, but I didn’t care about the gold. And I didn’t give you up. I
never
fucking gave you up.” I twisted around, impaled the beam of light into another weasel’s head, turned back and ran faster.

“I went through it all, with the last face I saw that of a man who hated you enough that he would’ve taken me apart piece by piece if I’d lived that long, and I didn’t say a word about you. Not one. Hell, I tried to bite off my tongue so I couldn’t say anything if my fever went higher and I became delirious. But I couldn’t get through the damn thing. It’s tougher than you’d think. Too tough from all the talking I did. I never did shut up in that life until then, the one time I made myself,” I laughed, the same one from that room with the gray sky long from here. Then I sobered to tell the rest of it. “I was lucky
though, three times over. They only nailed my right hand down.”

“No.” He saw it coming, but not exactly. He’d known all along, but Robin was the best liar born. That trumped having seen every kind of death there was and learning to recognize exactly how they had happened. “He sliced open your throat. I saw the cut. I covered it with my hand as if that would make it not disappear. Make it not true.”

I kept going. The lies he told himself were his own to come to terms with. “Lucky that I couldn’t feel any pain by then. I lost some skin when I twisted my left wrist free from the rope knotted around it, but I didn’t feel it. By that point I didn’t feel much.” The blood had actually helped by making my skin slick.

“No.”
It made sense if you could lie to anyone, you could lie to yourself as easily. Denial would be your best friend. “He killed you with his prize ruby pommeled
gamisou
dagger he flaunted in everyone’s face and then he left it there on the floor. Threw it away because he was the sort of bastard who thought your blood on the blade made it trash.”

Robin stumbled over a jumble of warped metal and concrete. I had no idea what it was, but I caught him as he fell face-first and kept him on his feet. He didn’t notice it had happened, distracted, refusing to stop the fight between what he wanted to believe and what he’d realized was true from the first moment he’d seen my body. That was a lot of years of denial to overcome—if he could at all. “Isn’t that how it was? He murdered you, didn’t he?” he demanded or he tried. It fell flat. You don’t need to demand when you already know the truth.

When I didn’t answer, he almost fell again, the difference being there was nothing to fall over. “I murdered you. Not him. I did.” The statement was a disjointed spill of fragmented syllables meant to be words but too broken to want to be.

“Same dramatic ass now as you were then. And I’m a fucking idiot. Was a fucking idiot, I mean.” I smiled, cocky, warm, and sad. It was the smile I’d had over five
hundred years ago for two people, no others. “I thought you’d be proud. The skinny little bastard with a dead mother, no father who’d claim me. The kid in rags who begged and stole food, fought dogs for the scraps their owners threw out for them. The boy who, when the assholes were angry at their wives or drunk and pissed at the whole damn world, was kicked instead of those dogs. But you said I was more, that I was strong inside, and my body would catch up. You told me I was as good as anyone and better than most, fuck what the hypocrites in the village said. You took me in and beat half to death any man who laughed at the thought of me fighting for you.

“I proved you right. I grew and I fought for you. I died for you and I wasn’t sorry.” Not through the pain, not through the blood. I’d never been sorry. “I was as proud of what I did as I thought you’d be.” But that wasn’t the end of the story that wasn’t merely a story. There was nothing merely about it.

This . . . this was the end.

“The sheriff wouldn’t let his favorite dagger be ruined heated in a fire. That dagger was at his belt and when you’re burning letters into someone’s chest, you have to be close. Close enough I hardly had to reach but a few inches.” Close enough to save Robin from what I might say when the fever did reel me under and I wouldn’t know where I was or who was who. But too close to get my hand between him and my chest, to slide between my ribs into my heart.

I slit my throat instead. It wasn’t as quick a way to die. But it felt oddly familiar . . . oddly right. That it was how I should die with the warm rush of my own blood filling up my lungs.