Gent had fallen, and he would have died protecting her, only he could not die. That was the curse his mother had put on him at his birth: “No disease known to you will touch him, nor will any wound inflicted by any creature male or female cause his death.”
He could not sleep, and when he was lucid, he wondered if the periods of madness, the shaking, the fits of insensibility when he would come to suddenly and realize it was night when last it had been dawn, were a mercy set on him by the Hand of Our Lady. An educated man might have known disciplines of the mind with which to combat this prison that was as much of spirit as of chains. But he had only been trained for war. That was his lot, the bastard son of the king, the child whose birth gave Henry the right to be named Heir to the throne of Wendar and Varre: to become a fighter and defend his father’s realm.
He had always been an obedient son.
Would his father send soldiers to rescue him? Yet surely Henry thought him dead. It was Gent they must rescue. No king could leave such an important city in barbarian hands.
And even if he were rescued, what if his father no longer wished to acknowledge him, seeing what manner of creature he had become?
He vaguely recalled a dream in which two children had visited him—except there were no children in Gent, not any more. She had led them to safety, long ago.
Once children had flocked to him, but these two children had been afraid of him. They had seen not a prince but an animal; he had seen their reaction in their eyes. Were they only mirrors created in his mind? A vision through which he could see himself and what he had become? Or had they really been here?
As rats scurried through the refuse, he searched under the rags that were all that was left of his clothing—and found knife and badge. Their knife. Her badge, the badge of the Eagles. Only it was not her badge, it was another badge, that of a man who had fallen and whose name he could not recall. But it represented her, it held her warmth, for she had been like a warm thing, like a star fallen to earth and trapped in a human body as he was trapped in these chains.
The rats scrabbled among the bones. Slowly, he eased the knife out from under his torn and ragged tunic. This knife had been a gift, of sorts, an exchange—though he would have told the children the secret of the saint’s tunnel without any gift. He would have told them because it was his duty to aid them, to aid all of the king’s subjects. He was captain of the King’s Dragons and obliged by his oath to the king, his father, to protect and defend the king’s possessions and everything and everyone that the king ruled.
Rats were not subject to the king.