Page 83 of Heart of Winter
“Oliver.” Erik’s voice brought him up short. And Erik’s expression, when he turned toward him, was etched with faint confusion. “It’s this way.”
It wasn’t a command. He didn’t sayyou’ll come with us. Oliver knew that he could beg off and flee to his chamber if he wanted to.
But Erik had kissed him, had said all those things to him – wanted tokeep him– and he was including him in this now, in official, potentially dangerous royal business.
Oliver took a breath and said, “All right.”
Bjorn led the way out of the bathing chamber, back down the tunnel, and turned down a darker hallway. The cressets burned lower, here, were spaced farther apart, so that the shadows crowded in closer. An uninviting passage, and Oliver supposed that was the point of it.
Erik walked alongside him, still emanating warmth from the bath, hair still wet on his shoulders.
Oliver hadn’t lived thirty years without learning how to stow all his various anxieties away when the time called for it. He stuffed down all his lingering shakiness and uncertainty and focused on the moment at hand. He was still him, and Erik was still his kingly host – his friend, even – and he could act like a man grown about this.
“Bjorn said ‘another break-in,’ didn’t he?”
“Aye.” Erik sounded grim. The hard note in his voice elicited a pleasant shiver that Oliver covered with a cough. “We had one just before you arrived. I’ve had all my people questioned, and all claim they know nothing about it. Nothing’s been stolen, no one is missing, but someone’s stealing his way onto the palace grounds.”
“Hm.”
Erik sent him a questioning look as they walked.
“It’s only – subterfuge is a Southern game. I imagine Northmen are more about hooks, and ladders, and outright sieges.”
Erik smirked. “For the most part.”
The hall ended in a series of heavy iron doors that a waiting, stern-faced guard unlocked with keys, a different one for each door. When they were through the last one, a guard handed Bjorn a burning torch, and, holding another, led them down a long hall studded with barred doors. The only light came from behind them, at the main doors, and from the sputtering torches, their uneven glow dancing and spitting across the stone.
Depravation. Of light, of comfort, of company.
Oliver chafed at his arms against a sudden chill.
Erik’s hand landed, briefly, at the small of his back. A warm, grounding touch, supportive and comforting.
Then they arrived at the correct door and the guard picked a key off the ring he carried. He paused, before he unlocked it, and glanced between Bjorn and Erik. “He’s…well, you can see for yourself, your majesty.”
The door opened soundlessly on well-oiled hinges, and Bjorn stepped through, ducking beneath the low lintel. The guard stayed in the hall.
Oliver took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and when Erik glanced back over his shoulder, checking on him, he nodded, and followed him into the cell.
It had been carved out of the rock of the cave: stone walls, floor, and ceiling, though there was a stool, and a cot, and a pail, and fresh straw had been laid.
The torchlight flickered across a man sitting on the floor, with his back to the wall. His head was shaved save for one fat, pale braid that ran down the center of his head and trailed over one shoulder. Starkly pale eyes peered out of a face that was streaked all over with blue and black pigment of some sort, a thick paste that made it hard to pick out any of his features, an unnerving mask of paint. He was dressed all in furs, and bits of old, cracked leather. A necklace of various bones and teeth hung around his neck, some the long fangs of bears or wolves, others alarmingly human in shape.
“Look, Erik,” Bjorn said, voice thick with disgust. “It’s a little bear cub.”
The man shifted forward with a rattle, and Oliver realized he was chained to the wall, thick iron manacles around his wrists.
“Beserkir,” Erik said, and then spit on the floor at the man’s feet. “What did your master send you to steal?”
The man stared mutinously up at Erik, and kept silent. Everything about him bristled with a challenge, and Oliver’s belly clenched – unpleasantly, this time. All the heat of the baths had left him.
Erik took the torch from Bjorn, and crouched down so he was on eye level with the prisoner. Slowly, he reached out with the flaming end of the torch, closer and closer to the man’s face, until Oliver caught a whiff of singed fur. The light chased the shadows from the prisoner’s painted face, so they could see the shape of his nose – broken at least twice before – and thin lips, the narrow jaw and slanted cheekbones. He was young – as young as Leif, or maybe even Rune, his beard still thin and patchy.
“You’re too young to have been there,” Erik said, and his voice had taken on an edge that Oliver hadn’t yet heard. “But you’ll have heard of it – they’ll have told you. You know what happened to your clan brothers when they set upon a man of Aeretoll on the road.”
The man – boy – kept his composure admirably, but his eyes widened a fraction, and his throat jumped as he swallowed.
“Your people killed my brother-in-law. My sister’s husband. And then I lined them all up, bound hand and foot, and I took their heads. One” – he lifted the torch in an arc over the boy’s head – “by” – swept it in close, flames licking at the end of his nose – “one.”
