The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

“Umm. True enough. But the highborn won’t like the stench.”

“Nor will any man, low or high. I can scarce endure it.”

“True words. This creature is something rarely seen. We’ve got us a real prize here. He looks strong enough still.” The point of a stick prodded him in the chest, but no hands touched his body. “He might last months more on the wheel.”

“Years more!”

“Do you think so, Captain? Think you so? That would be a miracle!” Foucher snickered, enjoying this thought as another man might enjoy the sport of laughing, innocent children.

“You feed on our misery,” he said to Foucher.

Silence from his captors, fed by drawn-in breaths. “I thought he couldn’t talk!” exclaimed the Captain.

A switch whistled, snapped against his ear.

Pain exploded in his head, that had for so long now been a half-forgotten dull ache.

“So he shan’t!” said Foucher. “We’ll take him over quickly. Parade him before the duke and whip him if he speaks, then haul him back down below.” Foucher hissed hard between his teeth and the stick prodded him again, this time in the stomach, but its thrust barely penetrated the pain raging in his skull. “You’ll keep quiet, Silent, if you know what’s good for you!”

“Maybe this isn’t wise—” protested the Captain.

“Nay, I already told the duke we’d a fine strange sight for him, so he’s waiting. I hate to disappoint him.”

“Ai, indeed. He might do anything if we displease him. He’s that angry already that there isn’t more ore, nor did he like the sleeping conditions for the prisoners.”

“As if they deserve better!” The switch slapped against his buttocks. “Get on! Get on!”

He stumbled forward. As the pain throbbed with each jarring step, vision flashed on and out as a man might catch glimpses in a dark room when a candle was covered and uncovered.

He saw feet so grimy and mottled with a scaly growth that they didn’t seem human feet at all; then nothing, blinding darkness; then a swaying distant ocean of yellow and orange; then darkness; then the ocean again, but these were trees seen a long way away only it had been so long since he had seen trees painted with the colors of autumn that it had taken him this long to recognize them; then night as the clamor of the workings muted as they walked out beyond it; then mushrooms growing in sparse grass, only these weren’t mushrooms but pale tents and graceful awnings sagging and rising in the wind with brightly colored creatures laughing and chattering and walking out under the sun. A magnificent, broad-shouldered lord stood among them whose skin was dirty yet after all not dirty but burned a deep brown complexion like that of Liath. Beside him clung a frail, pallid woman with hair the color of wheat. Her belly was swollen with pregnancy. She and her noble husband turned to see the curiosity that the foreman of the mines had brought for their amusement.

He saw her face. She was repulsed by the grime but otherwise disinterested. Yet he recognized her.

“Tallia,” he said, the word like the throttling gasp of a man as a noose tightens around his neck. A nail burned in his empty hand.

His voice woke memory in her. Her expression shifted and altered.

“She’s pregnant,” he said. “Tallia is pregnant.”

But it was a lie.

Her shriek cut through the pain. Darkness swallowed the brief stab of vision. He drowned.

“Conrad! Take him away! Make them take him away!”

“I pray you, Your Highness, we meant no offense,” gabbled Foucher. “An amusement only, meant for your—”

“Lord have mercy!” swore the duke as the woman shrieked on and on and on, a grating wail that dissolved into hiccoughs and a whining sob. “Take the creature away, Foucher. I know you meant no harm. It’s a miracle, indeed, and he looks more like a goblin than a man with so much filth caked on him, although I wonder if you wouldn’t get higher yields if your criminals lived under better conditions.”

“But my lord duke—”

“If I starved my soldiers and let them sleep out in the rain, they’d be too weak to fight. Why do you mistreat these poor souls?”

“The miners are hardworking free men, my lord duke. As for these others, they are only criminals. Half of them had a death sentence imposed on them for their sins but were shown mercy by being sent here instead.”

“A strange sort of mercy. It wasn’t so bad last year, as I recall it. I never saw so many sickly creatures in my life. Look at the sores on that man!”

“He’s no more than a mute beast, my lord duke. It’s a miracle that he turns the wheel as well as he does. Think of it as his penance for the crime he committed.”