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Two guards were stationed at the door that led from the main cellar down to the wine cellar, Southern soldiers in lightweight, leather tunics with only hammered steel pauldrons for armor; gloveless, bearing short swords and spears, no helms. Dressed for comfort, rather than practicality, sure that their strip-searched prisoner didn’t pose much of a threat, chained as he was.
Ragnar himself didn’t favor armor, but he thought these two were fools. Most Southerners were, he thought, too used to comfortable living and fine weather. Before the Sels invaded, the worst they dealt with were poachers and pickpockets, the occasional rapist, quickly dispatched by a lord’s justice: a headsman in a mask, or a guillotine, rather than the fall of the lord’s own sword or axe.
Weakness. They were all so weak.
“Evening, boys,” Ragnar greeted them, and received only nods, and then an exchange of glances in response. He didn’t think they’d let him pass, especially not with the way he was grinning at them, but one opened the door and the other ushered him through.
“You may have ten minutes,” the first said, and the second added, sneering, “And we don’t care what for.”
Ragnar turned to speak back over his shoulder as he descended the stairs. “Come now, you don’t think I could find a better pair of legs to get between if I was that desperate?”
His answer was a swift thud of the door closing, and the flame of his candle bent double, flickered, and nearly extinguished.
It recovered, and when the flame was steady again, he cupped his hand before it, and continued down.
The bottom step creaked – something he’d noticed earlier – and he leaned all of his weight on it a deliberate moment, so that it creeeeaaaaked. Doubtless his footfalls had been audible the entire time, but, well. He’d always liked toying with people. Especially his cousins – they were so easy to rile, and so delightfully flushed and righteous when he did so – but enemies were fun as well.
The Sel – Cassius, if he’d told the truth about his name – was sitting upright against his patch of wall, legs crossed, hands resting in his lap, now that his chains had been lengthened to allow it. His head was tipped against the wall, and his eyes were closed, but Ragnar could tell by the rhythm of his breathing, and the fractional twitch of his white lashes against his white cheeks that he wasn’t sleeping. Only resting – and waiting. His tension was a finely controlled thing, but detectable all the same in the minute shifting of cloth that no human could have heard; the lifting of his heartrate, a quick rap visible in the side of his throat.
Ragnar didn’t need the candle, but he carried it anyway; walked up and set in on the floor in front of the Sel, just beyond his reach should he care to test the length of his chains. Ragnar sat down opposite him, legs crossed in mirrored posture. He waited a beat, and then put two fingers in his mouth and whistled sharply.
The Sel opened his eyes. Purposefully – he hadn’t been startled. In front of Leif, in front of all of them together, he’d reeked of fear, and panic, the cloying stink of desperation. Now, though, his scent was calm; cool and soapy from his bath. No whiff of magic remained – the cut-off tattoo had gone to a vial in the surgery, where the pasty and charmless Colum wanted to poke and prod it and do gods knew what with it. Without that hint of the supernatural, the sight of the Sel didn’t put Ragnar’s hackles up. In fact, he felt nearly cheerful.
The Sel stared at him a moment, and when Ragnar didn’t speak, only grinned at him, silent, finally said, “You’re the thrall.”
“Aye. S’pose you read about that, too, did you?”
“We are alike in that respect,” the Sel said. “We live at the mercy of others.”
Ragnar snorted. “Don’t compare me to you. I’m not chained to a wall.”
His head tipped a fraction. “But you have been. Haven’t you.” It wasn’t really a question, and Ragnar felt the bitter edge of his smile. This wasn’t how he’d planned on this going.
Time for a redirection.
Ragnar said, “All right, then, no more chitchat from you. Tell me, since you think we’re so similar – since we share that bond,” he said, mockingly. “Prisoner to prisoner, like. What’s your angle?”
He frowned. “Angle?”
“You speak the king’s own Continental, but you don’t know what I mean by that? What’s your game, man? What are you trying to get out of playing the good little dungeon dweller? Why cooperate?”
The Sel’s brow smoothed, and he was the portrait of serenity again. “It’s as I already said: I wanted to return to Seles. It’s what I want still.”
“And you…what? Think if you cooperate like a good little boy Lady Amelia will send you back on the next ship? Maybe blow you a kiss from the docks?”
The Sel – Cassius – studied him a long moment, gaze tracking back and forth across his face, and down to his torq, and back up again, so that Ragnar felt like a specimen pinned to a board, wriggling at the mercy of a passionless scholar. He resisted the urge to shift his weight, and forced his grin – surely now a rictus – to stay fixed in place.
“You think I have ulterior motives,” Cassius said, finally.
“I know you do.”
Cassius’s head tilted the other way. “Is that because you have them, and therefore assume that I do?”
Ragnar couldn’t hold his faux grin anymore. When it dropped, he didn’t attempt to hide his snarl. “I’m not ‘assuming’ anything, you bastard. Nothing you told the others is true – except wanting to get caught. That bit you weren’t lying about, but you had to get caught so you could infiltrate the enemy ranks, and work on them slowly from the inside. Get them to trust you, get them to come to you for advice on fighting your countrymen. And all the while you’re leading them into a trap.Wham.” He clapped his hands together, and the sound echoed off the stone walls around them; Cassius didn’t flinch from it. “Just like that you’ve got them.”
Again, the Sel stared at him, cool and assessing, face betraying no emotion save detached puzzlement.
“Well?” Ragnar demanded. “Aren’t you going to say something?”
