after The Prisoner Would Not Relent, and he Would Not Speak

The bath attendants moved around the prisoner, their cloths wiping off layers of dirt and blood. The woman stood in front of him, unmoving, her gaze locked on him.

It seemed to the bath attendants that the two of them stayed like that, in silence, for forever. By the slow removal of the filth from the prisoner’s skin, it was less than a quarter hour.

She spoke first. That was both meet and unsurprising. She spoke in her own language, too – also as was correct. The building they were in and everyone and everything in it, all of that belonged to her.

“I understand why my father failed.”

He said nothing, simply tilted his head to one side. She smiled in response, a humorless expression her attendants knew well.

“Strength. Your people value strength.” She held one hand above his bicep, and then pushed away in negation. “To look at you, to look at your family – my father assumed that you valued strength of body. I imagine you do. It is one road to true strength.”

The bath attendants did not pretend to understand, but they listened nonetheless. They were not forbidden to gossip, after all.

The prisoner smiled. At first, it was a small thing, but it grew into a grin. He made a noise, and all but the bravest attendant jumped back. He might be bound and collared, but they had seen what had happened to those who had bound him.

The noise turned into a chuckle. The bath attendants waited, cautiously, until their liege gestured them forward. Then, although they were all still frightened, they resumed their long job of cleaning the grime off the prisoner.

The prisoner’s laughter stopped. He spoke three words in his own tongue, and then, with a polite nod at the attendant in front of him, spoke again in their language. “Strength, indeed, Queen Quedra.”

She nodded her head, the closest to a bow a Queen should ever make. “So, there will now be peace between our nations, King Hadrio.”

The prisoner nodded. “It is all in your hands.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/992287.html. You can comment here or there.

Content includes unwilling capture, allusions to violence, broken bones, blood, and gore.

In the end, it took three guards to hold him down and two more to force the collar around his neck. He broke seventeen bones, only one of them (a pinkie) his own, knocked one of the guards unconscious, and came within a hair’s-breadth of killing a second – and that with his teeth.

Once the collar was on, however, he seemed strangely docile. He stopped fighting the guards at all, allowing them to put on the manacles and shackles, to take what was left of his clothing, and to lock the chains binding him to a loop in the floor. He spoke, quietly and constantly, from the moment the collar locked around his neck, in a language foreign to most of those in the cell.

“Leave us.” One woman had stayed distant from the act of binding him and thus remained unscathed, although a long splatter of blood decorated her robe. “Count to three hundred,” she aimed this order at the sole uninjured guard, “and then send in the attendants.”

The cell door closed behind the last guard. She took the prisoner’s chin in her hand, heedless of the tangle of beard or the trickle of blood. In a voice that would not carry and yet still filled the entire cell, she spoke back to him in the staccato syllables of his own language.

There was no-one to record the conversation, and neither of them would ever speak of it. But when the bath attendants came in with their basins and their scented soaps, they heard him say six words, the only words anyone had ever heard him say in their language.

“My life is in your hands.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/991739.html. You can comment here or there.