Prince of Dogs

Page 31

Gent had fallen, and he would have died protecting her, only he could not die. That was the curse his mother had put on him at his birth: “No disease known to you will touch him, nor will any wound inflicted by any creature male or female cause his death.”
He could not sleep, and when he was lucid, he wondered if the periods of madness, the shaking, the fits of insensibility when he would come to suddenly and realize it was night when last it had been dawn, were a mercy set on him by the Hand of Our Lady. An educated man might have known disciplines of the mind with which to combat this prison that was as much of spirit as of chains. But he had only been trained for war. That was his lot, the bastard son of the king, the child whose birth gave Henry the right to be named Heir to the throne of Wendar and Varre: to become a fighter and defend his father’s realm.
He had always been an obedient son.
Would his father send soldiers to rescue him? Yet surely Henry thought him dead. It was Gent they must rescue. No king could leave such an important city in barbarian hands.
And even if he were rescued, what if his father no longer wished to acknowledge him, seeing what manner of creature he had become?
He vaguely recalled a dream in which two children had visited him—except there were no children in Gent, not any more. She had led them to safety, long ago.
Once children had flocked to him, but these two children had been afraid of him. They had seen not a prince but an animal; he had seen their reaction in their eyes. Were they only mirrors created in his mind? A vision through which he could see himself and what he had become? Or had they really been here?
As rats scurried through the refuse, he searched under the rags that were all that was left of his clothing—and found knife and badge. Their knife. Her badge, the badge of the Eagles. Only it was not her badge, it was another badge, that of a man who had fallen and whose name he could not recall. But it represented her, it held her warmth, for she had been like a warm thing, like a star fallen to earth and trapped in a human body as he was trapped in these chains.
The rats scrabbled among the bones. Slowly, he eased the knife out from under his torn and ragged tunic. This knife had been a gift, of sorts, an exchange—though he would have told the children the secret of the saint’s tunnel without any gift. He would have told them because it was his duty to aid them, to aid all of the king’s subjects. He was captain of the King’s Dragons and obliged by his oath to the king, his father, to protect and defend the king’s possessions and everything and everyone that the king ruled.
Rats were not subject to the king.
The bones lay within reach of his chains, and he was quick and silent but for the scrape of chains as he moved, sticking one on the point, grabbing another by the tail. It squeaked wildly and scrabbled helplessly at his fingers. He killed them. The dogs stirred, waking. The Eika slept on.
He growled the dogs down, and they subsided. They fed better than he did, because they did not scorn human flesh. He skinned the rats and, because he had no fire, ate them raw.
No better than the Eika, less than a man, more than a dog, he would have wept at his own savagery, but he had no tears. He never got enough to drink. Sometimes the priest remembered to set out water for him. Once a slave had done so, and been killed for her pains.
The Eika slept on. He sawed at the chains with the knife, but the work only dulled the blade. At last, he tucked it away again and curled up among his chains. The iron collar at his neck chafed his skin, and he shifted to ease the raw ache. The Eagle’s badge lay cool against his skin, next to his heart.
Ai, Lady, if only he could sleep for one night, soundlessly and without dreaming, without interruption. If only he could rest. But the dogs panted, wakeful now, smelling death.
4
AWAKE.
Something was wrong. Hanna knew it instantly, but it took her three breaths to identify what it was. A cold hard wind blew into the loft, scattering hay and chilling her limbs, and a soft cold thing settled on her lips. Without thinking, she licked it. Snow.
More snow settled on her face, blown in from outside as the wind rose and moaned in the beams. The unlatched loft door banged incessantly. A dog barked. Distantly she heard voices shouting an alarm, and then the wind gusted so hard it shook the very timbers of the stables and jarred the Lions awake.
She rolled up onto her hands and knees, groping in the blackness for her boots. She found Wolfhere’s blanket with her hand.
He was gone.
A bell began to toll, a dull reverberating sound that shook through her. It seemed to call in a thick oppressive voice: Fire! Storm! Attack! Awake! Awake!
She got hold of her boots and tugged them on, then crawled, found the trapdoor and the ladder by touch, and eased herself over and climbed down. Above, one of the soldiers called to her, but the wind howled and screamed at such a pitch outside that she couldn’t make out his words. She found the floor and stood, clutching the ladder, trying to get her bearings. The horses had gone wild with fear; the voice of the monk in charge of the stables was a murmur running beneath the roar of the storm as he attempted, in vain, to calm them. The bell tolled on and on as if for a hundred newly dead souls being rung up through the seven spheres of Heaven to the Chamber of Light above.