Chapter Thirty-Five
Rheda
“Show me,” I hear the words leave my lips before I can stop them. “Show me, please.”
He holds my gaze for a minute too long, until something drips behind us. It’s slow at first. A soft, hollow tap somewhere in the dark. Then the sound deepens, thickens, until it seems to echo inside my skull, and the world folds in on itself.
Stone rises around me. Cold, wet and miserable. Three walls of slate curve inward around rusted metal bars, closing tight like a fist.
A cell.
Torches burn low against the walls. Their light flickers over illegible scriptures carved into the stone, deep grooves filled with soot and moisture. Letters that have decayed over time.
Something moves.
Deogal.
The realisation hits me with a punch.
He’s on his knees, chains biting into his wrists, shoulders folded inward. His breath comes jagged, like he’s trying to swallow air that breathes itself. His spine juts beneath thin fabric. He looks... emptied.
“They starved me.” Someone is next to me.
I turn so sharply my hand flies to my throat.
He stands beside me, too, the version of him I recognise, older, angrier.
“For months.” He murmurs, voice more like gravel than honey now. “Maybe years. I had no concept of time down there.”
The bars open, a deep groan of metal against stone echoing around the room.
Three men enter without hurry, hoods up high, their orange robes dragging across the stone with a soft, deliberate whisper that makes my skin crawl.
The hems swallow their feet entirely, and for one sickening moment it looks as though they are not walking at all, but gliding—silent, unnatural, drifting toward the centre of the room like something summoned rather than human.
The light catches them badly. Their faces exist only in fragments; the sharp edge of a cheekbone, the hollow beneath an eye, the brief glint of skin before shadow takes it back.
I can’t make out their features properly, only the shape of them, and somehow that is worse.
My body reacts before my mind does, every instinct recoiling, something deep inside me staggering backwards like distance itself might save me.
A fourth man lingers behind them, slower, letting the others move first.
“The Friars.” I hear Deogal’s voice in the back of my mind, low and quiet. “Holy men.”
It’s only now that I recognise, they’re each carrying something different.
The first carries a wooden bucket, water sloshing softly against the sides with each step, the sound small and intimate in the silence.
The second holds a length of cloth draped over both hands.
It hangs heavy, stained dark at the edges, damp enough that I can smell it from here—old water, mildew, something metallic underneath that my mind refuses to name.
The third presses a book flat against his chest like scripture, fingers wrapped so tightly around the spine his knuckles blanch white, as though if he lets go of it, something terrible will happen.
But it is the fourth that makes the room change.
He carries nothing.
His hands hang empty at his sides, calm and still, and somehow that terrifies me most of all. The others look like preparation, ritual, he looks like the reason for it.
He stops a few feet from me, close enough that the air feels thinner, as though even the room is holding its breath for him.
For a moment, he says nothing. His head remains bowed beneath the hood, the fabric casting him in deeper shadow. I find myself staring at his hands, at the stillness of them, at the terrible patience in the way he stands there.
Then, slowly, he lifts one hand.
The movement is unhurried, almost reverent, fingers catching the edge of the hood with the kind of care that makes my stomach twist. The fabric drags softly as he pushes it back, inch by inch.
First, the line of his mouth appears—too calm, too composed. Then the sharp cut of his jaw, pale beneath the torchlight, the shadow of hollows beneath his cheekbones.
When the hood finally falls back, the sound of it settling against his shoulders is louder than it should be. There’s a bold shine on the cap of his head, a ring of hair wrapping in a circle below it.
His pale eyes fix onto Deogal.
“Well,” he says, voice hoarse. “Look at you. Still here.”
Deogal lifts his head slowly, as though the effort alone costs him something. Fear fractures across his features like cracked glass.
“Please,” he whispers. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard him plead. It hits me in the chest like a blunt object.
“Let me go.” His lips tremble once. “I’ve got nothing to offer you.”
The Friar crouches slowly, robes folding around him like a blanket.
“Do not cry, my boy.” He says, almost gently. “You’re doing so well.”
The softness is the worst part.
He reaches out and tilts Deogal’s chin with two fingers.
He angles his head upward, forcing his face into the spill of warm light overhead, and it slides across Deogal’s skin without kindness—the tension locked in his jaw, the fear he cannot quite swallow, the way his mouth tightens like he’s trying to hold himself together by force alone.
There’s a silence that feels thick enough to choke, before he turns his attention to the other men.
“Brother Cillian,” he says over his shoulder. “the cloth.”
The Friar with the cloth moves.
“Brother Eamon,” he continues. “the water.”
The bucket-bearer shifts.
The lead Friar rises, dusting invisible dirt from his hands as though touching Deogal alone could dirty him.
“Violence is for the wicked,” he says, his voice calm. “We are men of mercy. Break him gently.”
Gently.
The word lands wrong. It settles in the space like rot dressed in perfume, soft on the surface and foul underneath. My stomach turns at the sound of it.
He turns then, his gaze shifting to the final man.
“Brother Jude,” he says, “read. Keep his soul clean.”
Clean.
My skin prickles.
The two Friars move as one, taking Deogal’s shoulders, hauling him down to the stone floor. He thrashes twice, but his body is weak and fatigued. They overpower him easily, lowering his head down as though it was made of glass, but letting his body flop against concrete with a thud.
I can’t stand to watch the fear in his eyes, sharp and terrified. He screams, and it rips out of him more like a frightened child than something from my nightmare. It tears right through the cell.
They do not flinch.
They do not relent.
The cloth is pressed over his face and water follows, not even a second later, slowly, with an awful amount of control, poured from a bucket.
He does not thrash this time. That’s the worst part.
He groans. The sounds dragging through his body. I resist the urge to throw my hands over my ears. I want to scream. My face is hot. Bile scratches at the back of my throat.
The water pools against the fabric. His chest rises once and then twice. Bubbles leap from the fabric violently. Then falters.
Brother Jude begins to speak. His voice is steady, rehearsed: “Truth is found in surrender. Grace in obedience. The flesh may resist but the soul—"
“Must be purified,” the lead Friar finishes.
The water continues.
“This was a daily occurrence,” Deogal says softly beside me. I jerk my gaze to him. His fingers fall loosely by his sides, eyes soft but not unfocused. He watches his torture as if he’s devoid of all emotion, like it’s happening to someone other than him.
“They called it baptism,” he breathes. “Purging me from sin.”
I drag my eyes back to the boy on the floor. It’s like watching someone drown in slow motion, like watching the moment a person realises they are not in control of their own breath.
The bucket finally lifts.
The cloth is torn away.
He coughs once, sharp, brief, like a gunshot. He sucks in another breath. His lips are blue. His face pale.
There’s a pause.
The lead Friar’s hand is in the air. He holds it for a beat and then drops it to his side.
The cloth returns. Water returns. Suffering returns. And he watches with satisfaction, hands clasped behind his back, posture tight.
“Good,” he murmurs, though I’m not sure who he’s talking to. “Let’s see how long he lasts.”
Deogal’s body shakes now, bones rattling under skin as he fights for oxygen. The sound that tears from him is worse than a scream.
It’s the sound of someone trying to live.
I step forward instinctively.
My feet make no sound.
My presence changes nothing.
“Stop,” I choke.
And still, a part of me watches. Counts how long he lasts.
No one hears me.
Brother Jude turns a page. “Blessed are those who endure. Blessed are those who submit.”
Water pours again.
I step forward, heart hammering.
“Stop.” The word scrapes out of me again.
The water pours anyway. His chest heaves beneath the weight of drowning that never quite kills.
I change tactics, squeezing my eyes shut tightly as if I can force the world away. Blood rushes through my head. I gasp for oxygen, but it doesn’t come.
They remove the cloth and return it a breath later.
“Enough!” I shout.
Nothing.
“Again,” he says, and the bucket tips.
Deogal’s feet thrash violently against the floor, the chain clattering sharp and frantic beneath him as his body fights on instinct alone. Every muscle locks and jerks. His chest strains uselessly, his throat working around panic, around pain.
And for the first time, he looks small. Not the man they warned me about. Not the murderer wrapped in silence.
Just a boy stripped bare of every defence. There is something horribly young in it, in the helplessness of him, in the way fear cracks him open until all that remains is something fragile and human and terrified. It doesn’t look like evil. It looks like innocence dragged to slaughter.
My vision blurs.
I don’t realise I’m crying until the first tear slips free, hot against the cold of my skin. It horrifies me almost as much as the sight itself—that my body would betray me like this, that some part of me is grieving for him, for whatever he was before the world made him into this.
“Enough!” I exclaim, louder now. “I can’t see anymore. Enough!”