The Broken Eye(279)

Because I still loved you. And love you still.

A Guile’s love is a bullet through the brain.

He bowed his head even as the sounds of the hippodrome floated down into the street. A race must have been under way. The streets were packed, and though carriages had the right of way that came with crushing power, it still had to slow as they approached the enormous crowds around the hippodrome. The carriage added its tinny bell to the din: shouting voices of vendors, angry yells from other drivers, a distant yell decrying a thief, the throbbing roar of the crowd inside the hippodrome swelling in time to their favorite chariot coming round, the hoots and jeers of fans outside, the rattling of tuned bamboo wind chimes and more, cowbell and brass and drums competing among the fans.

But the colors were mute. Gray on gray on dark gray on black. The smell of cooking pork and curries and roasted nuts in caramel was far more vivacious. Gavin peered through his curtain and saw a little boy in rags, lean to the point of starvation, staring back at him.

A lookout for the rescue?

But the boy merely watched him go by.

The carriage turned and went down a long ramp, accompanied by many shouts, and then was swallowed by darkness. A gate rattled shut behind them. This area was off-limits to the public.

And Gavin’s last ember of hope died. They didn’t know he was here. Like so many other things, his father had been able to keep it secret. Gavin was going to lose his half-useless eyes, and then he was going to die. Funny how he was more worried about his eyes than his life.

They have stolen light from me. What is life without light?

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?”