The Broken Eye
Page 180

The carriage door opened. He was bundled out, hands bound behind his back, hobbled by his chains so that he had to take tiny shuffling steps. They didn’t help him. After walking hundreds of paces through winding corridors beneath the very hippodrome itself—the roof rumbling with hoofbeats as the chariots raced overhead, the roar of the crowd barely rising to perception—Gavin was put in an iron-barred cell. More a cage, really. It was fitted with chains connected to gears, and high above, there was a panel that slid back. This cage would take him directly up into the stadium floor.
“On your knees,” a soldier said. He waited until Gavin complied before he came into the cage himself, carrying a bucket full of black liquid. Or dark liquid, anyway. The soldier was careful, too. He didn’t keep the key, but handed it off to another, outside the cell, and locked the door behind himself.
“Dunk your head. Not your skin, just your hair,” the soldier said. He didn’t seem to relish the duty. Gavin looked up at him, not understanding what he wanted.
The man locked up suddenly, muscles clenching so obviously that his friend called out, “Something wrong?”
“No,” the soldier said, after a brief hesitation. “I got this. I’ll call for you.”
And then Gavin recognized him.
“Captain Eutheos. Citation for Extraordinary Bravery at Blood Ridge, wasn’t it?” Gavin said. He remembered belatedly that that was his own memory, pinning that ribbon on the man’s chest. He’d been Dazen then. As Gavin, he should have no memory of Eutheos. Oops.
Ah well. What would have been a gigantic blunder at some other time now seemed a bit trivial.
There was a gigantic clatter and roar of wheels and hoofbeats pounding overhead as the massed chariots passed, but it was obviously a familiar, inconsequential sound to the captain.
The sudden joy on the soldier’s face bloomed and died in an instant, an abortion of hope.
“It can’t be,” he said. “They ordered me to dye your hair and eyebrows and make you look scruffy. I didn’t know why, but … High Lord Prism … Dazen Guile?” the soldier whispered.
A crushing weight settled on Gavin’s chest. There had been a time when he would have tried to turn this man, when he would have blithely ordered this man to do something that would cost him position, and reputation, and family, and probably life, all for the slimmest chance that Gavin might, might, escape.
But he’d been young then. All his invincibility had been built on other men’s bones.
“It’s not your fault,” Gavin said. “It’s mine.”
“I swore you my fealty, my lord, all those years ago, but … I swore them my fealty, too, after the war.”
“It’s not your fault,” Gavin said.
“I, I, I gave him the key. If I, if I have to call him back, I’ll have to steal it from him, hurt him—he’s my brother-in-law, and devoted to this land something fierce. He wasn’t in the war. He doesn’t know what it was like.” The captain looked around like a trapped animal. “Which oath does a man hold, when holding one means breaking the other, and he never saw it coming?”
“I wouldn’t ask it of you,” Gavin said.
“That’s why the hair black, and the charcoal. They don’t want to chance anyone recognizing you like I done—as either Prism or as Dazen, I s’pose. But how are you alive? What do I do?”
Gavin was still on his knees. “Eutheos,” he said. “Be still.”
And the man was still. This, at least, Gavin still had. His voice was sometimes magic over other men.
“Breathe.”
And Eutheos breathed.
Chariots passed overhead again, but they seemed far, far away.
There was no escape from here. If Eutheos unlocked Gavin’s chains, Gavin could go no more than a few hundred paces. He wasn’t strong enough to fight. He couldn’t draft. He couldn’t get out. And there was no point ruining a man and his family for a futile gesture.
“Captain, before I release you from your oaths, as your last duty to me, dye my hair, and black my eyebrows as you’ve been told. I ask only that you keep the dye from my eyes. They will burn soon enough.”
And so he did. He did his job thoroughly, and well, and silently, tears streaming down his face. He dried Gavin’s hair with a cloth, and blacked his eyebrows with coal, and then ground dirt and ash onto his ruddy skin to make him look no more than a beggar.
Gavin said, “I’ve no more right to compel you, soldier, but as a man, as a comrade who once took up arms with you, I ask a favor. Will you send a letter to Karris Guile at the Chromeria of my fate? And tell her that I will be murdered by the Nuqaba’s assassin as I arrive in Big Jasper. Don’t put your own name on this letter, nor anything that can be traced to you. It will be death for you if it is intercepted.”
Former Captain Eutheos nodded and swallowed. “My lord. You made me feel part of something. It was the only time in my life that I—” He cut off, clearing his throat as his brother-in-law the soldier came back, this time not alone. Eutheos said gruffly, “Let me outta here, would you? Got some dirt in my eyes.”
He was let out, and the other man unlocked and locked the door carefully, as if the still-bound Gavin might attack at any moment. The woman who was with that soldier, though, surprised Gavin. It was Eirene Malargos, not the Nuqaba. She dismissed them and they moved out of earshot.
She looked tired. “I didn’t want this,” she said. “You’ve done nothing here that would exact such a penalty under Ruthgari law—but you also know that I can’t let you attack my ally and do nothing. Were she forgiving, she would let us handle this in our way. She’s not chosen that route. I see why she is feared.”
Gavin simply stared at her. He reckoned from her mood that Eirene Malargos would shut down instantly if she felt she were being manipulated. Gavin’s golden tongue was suddenly worth what his eyes would be, soon.
She said, “I’ve been looking for any avenue that doesn’t lead to war? You damned men, always trying to prove who’s bigger. I just want to live. I want my people to live. I don’t know how to avert this. Do you know I tried to align us with the Guiles?”
Gavin’s eyebrows must have twitched, betraying his disbelief.
“Even after the insult of you rejecting our proposal that you marry Tisis, I proposed your father marry her instead. A temporary alliance, perhaps, given that your father is probably too old to give her children, but a gamble worth making with so many lives at stake.”
My father? With Teats Tisis? Me with her?
A thunderous clamoring resounded overhead as a mass of chariots passed all at once.
“But he spurned her,” she said.
“Outright?” Gavin asked. “That doesn’t sound like my father. Does he not know how close you are to betraying him?”
“I don’t know what he knows. I sent a ship with my diplomats and instructions for my sister. It was intercepted by pirates. Perhaps you remember?”
Oh. In more ordinary times, that the ship Gavin had been rowing on had intercepted the very ship that his enemy was depending on for vital communications would have been a stroke of extraordinary luck. It still was extraordinary luck, he supposed, just not the good kind.