What He Believed
COLSAR
The stairs down to the dungeons were narrower than he remembered, or perhaps he simply remembered them less often than he should have.
Torches burned low along the walls, the air turning damp and mineral the further he descended, and by the time he reached the last landing the sound of the palace above him had disappeared entirely.
The guard at the bottom straightened. "Majesty."
"Leave us."
The guard hesitated only a moment before he went.
Colsar found Edrin curled against the far wall of the cell, knees drawn up, exactly where the guards had left him days ago.
"Where is my father?” Edrin said. Not a question by then. He'd stopped asking it like one.
Colsar did not sit. "Tell me what you did."
"They took him." Edrin's voice was flat, worn down to nothing after days alone with it. "Yorali. They told me I would have him back once I finished what they asked. Give her something to make her sleep."
"You knew it might kill her."
Edrin did not flinch. "I knew."
"And you did it anyway."
"You left her for a year. Sevrin mistreated her the whole time you were gone. I decided that whatever happened to her, sleeping or dying, it would be better than the life she was already living." His eyes were dry, still. "I still believe that."
Colsar's hands curled at his sides. "Where is your father now?”
"I don't know." For the first time something cracked in him. "They said I would see him again once it was done. That is all I know. That is all they ever told me."
Colsar studied him for a long moment, a boy who had traded a woman's life, knowingly, for a promise he had no way of verifying, and felt nothing close to sympathy for either bargain.
"You poisoned my wife knowing it could kill her."
"I did." Edrin looked up at him, and there was no lie in it, which was somehow worse than if there had been. "I would do it again. Trust cost me my father. It will not cost me anything else."
Colsar left without answering him.