The City with its Towers
do you truly feel this is a cage?
Mithrigil Galtirglin
"But without proof of your birthright, you are powerless," Uncle Halim had said.
How dare he, Ashe thought, and not for the first time since waking.
Halim had set her up in rooms that were not those of her childhood; these faced north, and were closer to the Marquis' own. Policing her, she reasoned, monitoring her, exerting the control he prized more than the rings on his fingers and the prop in his fist.
Ashe kicked the bedpost. It would have creaked plaintively, pleasantly, if someone had not knocked on the door as well. Once soft, once hard—
"Basch," she spat, and did not quite believe it. She remained as she was, in her traveling clothes, sitting staunchly on the edge of the bed and clutching the hem of the nearest drape, half-set to tear it to shreds.
He must not have heard her; he knocked again. Good. "Your Highness?"
She sneered fleetingly in the door's general direction. "Your business?" she called, throwing down the cloth and pulling herself to stand.
"The Marquis sent me," he answered, and however low his voice was set, it carried.
"So readily you resume your guard," she said, and rolled her eyes.
Apparently, he took that as leave to enter; he opened the door rather tentatively, almost sneakily, though time was she had measured the man's stealth for none at all. Before she turned away, she caught his face, and the swathe of red scar tissue slashed through his brow and down to his ear; and you would have otherwise? he seemed to say, through sunken cheeks and unrelenting eyes.
"I suppose it cannot be otherwise," she dismissed, turning away, toward curtained windows that face the wrong direction entirely. "Even in a house filled with my Uncle's men, he entrusts me to you," and she has never felt the need to invest such contempt in a word directed at him.
"I come of my own volition."
"Of course," she sighed, and that she believed. "So you will be without."
"As I have ever been."
"As much there to cage me as shield me."
He did not respond to that. Perhaps, Ashe reasoned, he could not.
She felt her voice lighten, almost mocking, as she faced him. "Would you?" she half-sang, saccharine. "Heed his commands over mine?"
Framed by the open door, he seemed smaller, almost cowed, in his hodge-podge of fragmented clothing and armor. So much of him was still her Captain, coarse-cheeked and implacable; yet he stood heavier, chin stretched higher, a smattering of defiance in his eyes that Ashe found, in that moment, infuriating.
"Nay," he stated. "My heart is with you."
Ashe scoffed and turned aside again. "Such pretty words."
"None the less to be given voice."
The sky was darker out the north window, the view of the wings from this new room sparse and clouded. She glared at the absence as much as at him. "And yet they fall leaden with all you invest in them."
His breathing reached her ears, when she recalled the weight of his silences.
"For two years I have cursed your name," she said to his reflection as it began to invade the glass. "I have cursed Archadia for executing you not because I wished you to live; because I wished to be there as you died…even to end your life myself."
The reflection reacted not at all.
"I have honestly looked back on all your loyalties and taken them for farce," she went on, faster. "Every game we played, every smile, every confidence has been tarnished. Some have near rotted. The acid of the sewers is strong, the winds of the desert are harsh. I have grown more powerful for my hatred of you," she finished, and regretted it as soon as she said it. It was true.
"And stronger still were you to cast it off—"
"Words will not win you back my trust," she near shouted, whipping around to face him. "As far as I am concerned you have broken oaths before."
He did not flinch, as he had not when she slapped him on the Leviathan's bridge.
"You are at my side because my trust for Vossler remains, and you have won him. And that is a step toward winning me, I will admit. As is your part in our escape," she remembered. He had taken a swipe of Ghis' fan that had been meant for her, and before that the swords of several lesser Judges and hoplites, and she cursed herself for remembering these things, now.
"Deeds, then," he conceded, hanging his head, eyes ever closed.
She refused to let him move her. "…And time."
That yielding of his head rose once, and became a nod, and it was almost sullen. "I will take my—"
"Stay," she commanded.
His stance of attention settled deeper into the carpet, and it crunch-rustled beneath his sandals. He was curling his toes, Ashe realized, and pried her notice from the hidden gesture. She came away from the window, stride sure, and held his eyes; Basch could always look her in the eyes, where Vossler could never, and regarded her with such courtly innocence that now it was wrong, sickening, how dare he—
Warmth, Ashe noticed. That patronizing warmth, under a guilty, guarded expression that did not suit the new gauntness of his cheeks.
She strode past him, grinding her teeth and hissing, dire, and felt him startle as she thrust the door closed. "I will not have you cage me," she seethed, and was close enough to hear his own back teeth grinding.
"What will you have me do?" he almost whispered.
"I," she began, and then knew not what she would have said. Perhaps it was the words themselves, that he never seemed to understand the hidden meanings of, but there was no answer for that.
Vossler had explained, in brief. A twin. A child's excuse for a broken vase.
"First, tell me of that night," she decided. "The whole of it."
He did. He began when they learned that the trap had been laid, and raced through the desert with what few knights remained them, and it was in tune with Vossler's story, two years ago and counting. He let Vossler ahead, but Basch reached the throne room first, and the ambush that awaited. And Ashe listened, patiently seething, and sat down without realizing she was on the edge of her bed, as he told her that his twin brother had him dragged off in irons—
"It is almost as if you sing one of your old tales," Ashe scoffed, dousing her unbidden sympathies.
"Did you ever believe those?" he asked, all complacent innocence.
"Yes."
He whispered down to her, "Do you still?"
She looked up into his small, foreign eyes, and noticed the bedclothes clutched in her fist. "…Some."
Closing his eyes, and slowing his breath, he settled his shoulders and sang, in his secreted rasp of a voice, "Am fernen Horizonte erscheint, wie ein Nebelbild, die Stadt mit ihren Türmen, in Abenddämmrung gehül—
Upon the horizon, she tried to remember, like a trick of the Mist, the city with its towers from the twilight rises—and she did not want to be convinced, did not want to be betrayed. "No matter the language, they are words still—"
He opened his eyes. She could not continue.
As he knelt, she un-craned her neck and followed his face until his head bowed. "No," she stammered, and hated the stammer, "look at me."
Just as slowly, and with a silent stammer of his own, he obeyed.
She regarded his new scars, that she could see. "…Remove your shirts."
Still kneeling, he began to do so. He unclasped the pauldron and set that aside, then that ill-fitting red jerkin after. The undershirt he pulled over his head simply, unabashed, and Ashe stared exactingly throughout. The last article, a patterned swatch of braided leather, he half-wrenched from, clatters of air escaping his shoulders as they stretched. He bowed lower still on one knee, when he was done, like a novice, or a wary hound.
She started, "Wait," but his skin silenced her, the red and unchecked mess of his back and sides, creeping over his shoulders like overzealous vines, or more like fiends from a pit of fire. Nearly red at their deepest, crossed over each other in the pink of meat on the chopping block, raised to a dead whiteness where his veins could no longer reach, and some of them, the worst of them, rimmed in soot-black. And one curled about his chest where the motley leathers had hidden it, brown-edged and veined thick with disease, and quite recent, right where his fist would rest as he saluted.
Ashe could do nothing but open and close her mouth like a simpleton and bite her lips, all of her paling dry and wrong and loathing.
Through all of this Basch looked up at her from the floor, almost pleading, until he finally closed his eyes and turned to the carpet. "Forgive me," he said, in a hoarse rasp, an echo, the same words he had given her over the dead body of her husband.
And Ashe clawed at the covers and the edge of the bed and stared, and could not stop staring, and muttered without meaning to, "…no man would inflict this upon himself."
"—and yet I have," he corrected in that same whisper, "by living."
The thought surged through her and almost made it past her lips, do not blame yourself, but she bit down on the words and crushed them with the threads of the bedclothes. "Rise," she commanded instead. "And turn."
He did, and both in the same lion-graceful motion. His back, rent beyond reason, passed too close to her face, and she could almost smell the ruined flesh. Old scars, the most of them, but raised and indelible, and they wove into each other without a pattern, like shattered glass. Ashe had to wonder if Basch had always been so thin, or if the slack of his arms was lost strength, if where his bones and veins breached the skin had always been so frail.
She found herself rising from the bed, and reaching for the scars—and stared instead at her hand as it began to tremble, then pried it away. His breathing quickened, so slightly that only she would know, and she watched the gashes stretch and creak with each spread of his chest and the ribs beneath it. She could count the bones, more easily than the scars themselves, too far apart for a hand to splay its fingers between, and she stood and had nearly done just that, stretching her hand that she might test that skin, and her breath raised the broken hairs between his shoulder-blades— "The rest of that story."
"Which?" he breathed.
Quickly, she stepped back and caught herself before she would fall onto the bed. "The boat returns to the city at sunrise," she panted, and hated the weakness, the urgency. "The wind stills."
"…und zeigt mir jene Stelle, wo ich das Liebste verlor," he concluded, his back quaking with the humid, choked tones of the song.
And saw I then through the stars, where I lost my most beloved.
Holding her teeth and lips in a line, Ashe laid a hand on his scars—thicker than leather, more like frozen sand—and then pulled her palm back from it though her fingers remained. She could not move after that, nor even think, beyond his ever present, quietly labored breathing, and she found that her fingertips hand tilted forward, the nails bearing into his skin. He did not seem to feel this at all, and so she knotted her brow and tightened, pointing harsher until a low inhale became a laden hiss. "Your Highness—"
She wrenched her hand away, eyes flashing low. "What manner of cell was it?" she spat, glaring at her hand as if to reprimand it, or threaten it outright for its betrayal.
"…A pit like any other," he answered, craning his face toward the ceiling as his breath settled again, heavier, "save interrogations."
"And that is when they gave you these?"
Again, heavier. "Aye."
Ashe found her voice was lowering as that trespassing hand fell to her skirt and ceased to tremble. "Your brother as well?"
"He did not strike me," Basch took his time to say, and though she could not see his face, she heard his eyes close.
She raised her hand again, and bade him, "Turn."
Looking down at her—when had she sat on the bed again? she wondered—Basch did so, and again went down to one knee before her, lifting up his face to hers.
Her hand hovering near the scar on his face, she murmured, "Not even this one?"
He shook his head no, and on one of the turns the scar met her fingertips—and she tried to keep it. "It is like all the others," he told her, "a misfire of the whip. Or perhaps I was not sufficiently quick to dodge," he admitted, and briefly looked askance.
"And hard enough to split your ear…" she wondered aloud, and traced the insult. It was the color of his lips.
When he opened his eyes again, they sought hers, and she could feel them but not meet them. "Do you truly feel this is a cage?"
Her attention, and her hand, lowered to the scar on his chest, but at some point ceased to touch him. Do I have the right, she thought, to take this for a cage?
With each breath, the rent skin pressed nearer to her own.
"I will not be bound by it," she declared, clawing once down the scar and breaking past him for the door. He winced, but did not cry out, and Abaddon-quick his hand clamped around her wrist, sand-coarse and strong and the same as ever.
"Your Highness—"
"Release me," she demanded.
He did not.
Ashe tore herself free, writhed, kicked even, and only then did he suddenly let go. She rushed toward and opened the door, slamming it back in his face as she made for the docks, for the Strahl.
A mummer, a pretender would have obeyed.
-
He offered to escort her, in Vossler's place.
She acceded.