Chapter Seven Knowing Death #2
“Should you wish to live, you will never use that title again,” she hissed. She had drawn one of her daggers, and the steel bit ever so slightly into his neck, causing a burning sensation. He felt a drop of blood crawl across his skin and fall to the ground.
“You misunderstand,” he whispered, not trusting himself to speak normally with the gleaming dagger pressed so fiercely against his throat. “I was trying to be respectful. I don’t know your name… I meant nothing by it.”
“Good,” she hissed. She pushed herself off of him and disappeared into the trees. She didn’t return for almost an hour, and when she did she pretended he didn’t exist.
But he remained determined, and his second chance came soon after.
It was the first night the Prince was allowed to move around the campfire.
True, he wasn’t completely unbound: his hands were still tied together, though far enough apart that he could use them, and his feet were tied as well so that he couldn’t do more than execute a sort of shambling half-walk, but it was progress.
As soon as he’d been untied from the horse, he set about being “helpful.” He hobbled the pack horse in a nice patch of grass, as he’d seen the Exiles do each night, then began to set a ring of stones for a fire, and finally untied the Exiles’ packs from their horses.
From the pack horse, at least—the charger still wouldn’t let him anywhere near it.
When the Exiles noticed, they commented on it to one another when they thought the Prince was out of earshot. He, of course, was very carefully not out of earshot, but he did what he hoped was a decent job of pretending to be.
“He’s being helpful,” rumbled Tomaz, “it’s… sure sign… changing.”
The Prince, even though his back was turned, allowed himself not even the hint of a smile as a thrill of triumph coursed through him. He could risk nothing.
“No,” he heard the girl respond savagely, “he’s… at worst, conspiring to kill or… in our sleep. At best… imitating us… trained monkey.”
The Prince almost faltered in the act of retying a saddlebag as anger, white hot and blinding, roared up into his throat at the insult.
Imitating them like a trained monkey, am I? I should strike her down—
No. He calmly tied the bag closed and finished going about the chores that needed doing in order to set up camp for the night, giving no sign that he had overheard a thing.
Soon he had everything ready except the fire.
He looked around for wood, but there was none, so he was forced to wait for the Exiles to finish talking.
“It‘s been too long since I‘ve had some fresh meat—I’m off to hunt,” Tomaz rumbled suddenly, breaking away from the girl.
He reached into a pack tied to his charger and pulled out a sling.
Before seeing the big man fight, the Prince would have found the sight of the small sling in the hands of the giant quite amusing.
Now, he thought that a stone from that sling in the hands of that man could kill a full-grown ox at a hundred paces.
The girl nodded. “I’ll get the firewood,” she said. “There should be enough around here that I won’t have to go far. I’ll just tie up the princeling.”
A thought occurred to him then. A dangerous thought. One he probably should have let go lest he risk everything; but his anger at being insulted spurred him on.
“I’ll go with you,” he said to the girl, doing his best to make it a request and not a command.
The Exiles paused, Tomaz in the act of stretching his right arm, the girl in the act of crossing to the Prince in order to tie him to a tree again.
“No,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Because I said so.”
“You sound like my Mother.”
A ringing silence descended as that comment, completely unplanned on the Prince’s part, fell with a thud into the middle of the small clearing.
After a few days of learning how to banter with Tomaz, the words had just slipped out.
There were several beats where no one said anything, and then, in a rumbling snort like the sound a volcano must make before it erupts, Tomaz began to laugh.
The snort turned into a full-throat guffaw, and then the giant was roaring so hard with laughter that he made the forest and mountainside almost ring with the sound, bright and clear and rich.
“TOMAZ!” the girl shouted. “Shut up! You’ll give away our position!”
“I’m surprised they can’t see your swollen pride from here,” the Prince said. The delivery was awkward and flat, and he was relatively sure it wasn’t a good joke, but it was at least effective enough that the girl turned a bright red and Tomaz doubled over, slapping his knee in mirth.
“Tomaz,” the girl repeated, growling his name deep in her throat. “I mean it.”
The giant gave a final trumpeting bellow and then was silent as he wiped a tear from his eye, though he still shook with aftershocks of laughter.
“Ah, well,” he said. “Sorry about that, eshendai. I haven’t had a good laugh in a long time.”
“I don’t care!” she replied. The Prince could tell that she was trying to be taken seriously, but the effect was ruined by the beet-red color that had spread over her cheeks. “We’re trying not to be followed, and we can’t sacrifice that because you feel like having a good laugh!”
Tomaz shrugged and looked at the Prince.
“Is there anyone nearby?”
After a brief moment of confusion, the Prince realized the giant was asking him to check the surrounding area for signs of life. He paused for only a second, and then realized there was no reason not to.
He reached out through the Talisman, as far as he could, and felt nothing aside from the strange static-like background that he was coming to recognize as the muted life of the trees and plants and the simplistic minds of the animals that lived in them.
He let the connection slip away and opened his eyes to find the big man looking at him. It was strange, being in the company of someone who simply took what he could do as a matter of fact, not as something to be feared or worshiped.
“No one for at least a mile,” he replied. “Probably not beyond that either.”
“You can’t trust him,” the girl said angrily.
“Yes, you can!” the Prince shot back, frustrated. For some reason the fact that she wouldn’t trust him when he was actually telling the truth blew on the banked coals of his anger and set him into full blaze.
“You’d kill us in our sleep if you could,” she spat, contemptuously.
Something in him snapped. The way she spoke, it was as if she thought that death were nothing to him. As if death itself were… nothing.
“You have no concept of what it means to kill,” he hissed through teeth clenched in a snarl.
His vision had gone red around the edges, and his anxiety, frustration, and anger had formed into a hard, twisting fist in his gut.
Fury like he had only felt a few times in his life took him over completely.
“You know nothing of death. You know nothing of taking a life. You perform the act, but it means nothing—to you it is no more than slicing a thread, trimming a nail. It is no more than dispatching nameless faces. If you knew what I know of death, knew the feeling of being inside a person’s mind as your sword cuts through their skin and bone and their life and mind and body go dark, as the spark that anchors them to this world is smothered and they spin endlessly into space, you would never again speak so lightly of taking a life.
I have no desire to know you, and so have no desire to kill you.
How many of the Death Watchmen did the two of you kill?
Not the constructs, but the soldiers. Twenty did you say?
Such a brave Exile. I killed one and I nearly lost my mind.
I did it out of need, out of base necessity, to continuing living.
And even then I knew him, inside and out, as he died; I knew his hopes and dreams and fears, the way he loved his wife, the pride he had in his children—the glowing hope that, even as the steel cut through him, he would live to see them again, to make them proud of how he had served the Empire!
Death is emptiness, death is taking, death is the end!
So stop accusing me of the willingness to do something I understood better at the age of five then you will EVER understand in your ENTIRE LIFE! ”
Somehow during the time he had been speaking he had taken several steps toward her while she stood rooted to the spot, staring at him.
He took another step and came so close that he was breathing in her face, his midnight-black eyes meeting her emerald-green.
Her hands grasped the hilts of her daggers, but he did not care.
“Never speak lightly to me of killing. I am the Lord of Death, for my Mother cursed me as such on the day I was born. I know it as you never shall, and my life is tied to it as you should wish yours will never be.”
He stopped talking, and then took a step back, his anger spent. He suddenly felt awkward and vulnerable, as if he had stripped and laid himself bare.
She stood staring into his eyes, her own very wide and round, and her mouth open in a small “o”, until she seemed to realize what she was doing.
When she did, her eyes narrowed, and her mouth snapped closed.
She held his gaze, still, though, and another minute or more passed that way, with the two of them staring at each other.
The Prince refused to look away. He had nothing to hide. He had meant every word of what he’d said, even if it made him uncomfortable to be so vulnerable in front of them.
Finally, she turned to call back over her shoulder.
“Tomaz, I think that—”
But the forest behind her was just trees. Tomaz had disappeared. The Prince didn’t know when the big man had left, but he was sure somehow that it had been after he had finished speaking.