Lord Bosco was ranting again, and Aaron stared at the spittle flying from his lips for the lack of anything better to do. He knew every stone and every corner of his tiny dark cell by heart by now, and even the lord's ugly, hateful face presented a more interesting sight.
The sound, though, he tuned out: the content of the raving hadn't changed overmuch from the time he first awoke in this cell, groggy with the aftermath of the drug he'd unthinkingly drunk, kneeling on the cold floor with his hands chained over his head.
"Barbarian," and "dirty thief" and "tainting the Prince and Princess with his heathen ways," and more like that, Bosco sliding from invective to fantasies about how exactly he had corrupted Darvish and Chandra that Aaron was almost sure excited Bosco as much as they enraged him, and over again.
He'd never paid much attention to Bosco before, beyond knowing that he was one of the minor nobles of the court who awkwardly tried to suck up to Darvish for royal favors with flattery and extravagant gifts. Darvish had rebuffed him, not particularly gently, and Aaron dismissed the matter from his mind.
He shouldn't have. Bosco had managed to learn about the precise nature of the - arrangement - between him and Darvish and Chandra, and had constructed a narrative around it that blamed Aaron for all of his misfortunes.
When he first woke up in the cell and heard the charges Bosco had laid against him, he laughed in his face. He got a heavy backhand for that, but it was fine; the man was obviously insane, but he was Aaron the Thief, the Royal Thief nowadays, and the moment he was left alone he'd slip the chains and be free. In the evening he'd tell the whole story as a joke, and Darvish would slap his back and Chandra would frown and chide him for missing the drug in his goblet, and that would be that.
Then Bosco called his bravos in, and one of them took hold of Aaron's right hand and stretched his palm and fingers flat against the cold stone, and before Aaron could react, the other struck his fingers with the heavy pommel of his dagger, shattering them one by one.
Aaron fought them like hell for the other hand, but he was still groggy from the drink and dizzy from pain, and the chains were tight. He hung in them afterward, panting and shivering, and Bosco leaned over him, mouth stretched in smiling malice, and pulled his head up, his hold in Aaron's hair providing a separate, bright point of pain.
"No smart little tricks from you, Master Thief, not a single one. You'll stay here and you'll die here, and nobody will mourn you."
That was at least several days ago. No way to tell time for sure, with no windows in the cell. They gave him no food; one of the bravos threw cold water into his face from time to time. His pride demanded he press his lips closed, to take nothing from the hands of his enemies. Darvish and Chandra, worried and disapproving in his mind's eye, made him catch what he could in his mouth, sputter and choke and drink. He hated them for it, a bit.
Bosco kept coming back to scream at him and slap him, his ostentatious rings splitting Aaron's lips, leaving raised welts on his face. He was vaguely aware that the man was probably trying to get some kind of reaction out of him, some kind of answer, and if he was Darvish, clever Darvish who understood and liked people, maybe he could have used it to his advantage, to talk his way out.
He wasn't, though, and it was good, it was excellent that Darvish wasn't here, in this place of filth and darkness and vulgar threats, that he was left untouched by this. Neither him nor, Nine forbid, Chandra; the very thought of her in this dark place made him want to break his head against the wall.
Or maybe that was the rising fever. His hands were unbearable to think about, and so of course he thought about them with fanatical focus, trying over and over to make his mangled fingers obey him, and every time he did the pain was so horrible he felt he shifted just another degree closer to insanity.
"Nobody is coming," Bosco kept saying to him, "nobody will know where you disappeared to, they'll think you left them, betrayed them," and he thought yes, yes, good, let them think that, let them imagine him running, disappearing, stealing jewels from foreign palaces, let them be angry, bitter, betrayed, let them not know about this cell with its stench, its shame, its misery.
They'd come if they knew how, he thought, and touched this thought with his swollen tongue like a piece of sweet forbidden fruit. If they knew how, they'd come. I believe that now. I'm grateful to die knowing that.
How the old woman would laugh, if she knew. So much time chasing his death and here he was, dying like a trapped animal, and he wanted to live! He wanted to see daylight streaming through the windows of their room, wanted Darvish's arms around him, wanted to see Chandra bite the end of her braid in concentration over her books, wanted to, wanted to...
He raised his head and spoke for the first time in that darkness, his voice tearing his throat. He said, "They'd come if they could," and made his lips stretch into a bloodied smile.
Bosco spluttered in outrage and whipped his dagger out, and Aaron stared his death in the face and saw Darvish and Chandra and sunlit mosaics and a white stucco ceiling, and then the dagger fell -
- the dagger fell, with the arm still clutching it, and Bosco squealed in pain and collapsed to his knees, and Darvish stood behind him, disheveled and furious, his sword red with fresh blood.
Aaron gaped. Chandra stepped into the cell from behind Darvish's shoulder, disdainful and pristine, and made a complicated, weirdly ungraceful, jerky gesture that made the stones of the cell shiver and groan. The chains still holding him fell apart, and his arms flopped down like dead, leaden things, and he curled over them and howled in agony.
Some hazy, quiet time later he came to being carried, and Darvish was saying "Just a bit more, just a bit, okay, I promise, just a tiniest bit," and his voice was so wrecked Aaron wanted to ask if he was drinking again, but he couldn't make his throat work. The air around him felt sharp and crisp, vibrating with power, which meant that Chandra was nearby and very, very angry, and he thought he knew why but couldn't remember.
They were here, that was important. He closed his eyes.
The stucco ceiling, by now, felt like an old friend. He made himself tear his gaze from the familiar whorls and looked at the heavy lumps of his bandaged hands, licked his lips.
"First I burned them, now I've broken them. I'm starting to think the Nine are trying to tell me something about my profession."
Darvish swatted at his head, very gently, and then immediately reached to feed him another grape. Aaron had been made to understand he was to submit to his and Chandra's obsessive feeding routine until he was up to his normal weight, and if he was honest with himself, he was about a week of recovery away from being annoyed by it.
The grape tasted heavenly, too.
"Don't be absurd," Chandra said sharply from her cross-legged seat at his feet, "your hands are going to be perfectly fine, I'm taking care of that. Don't you trust me?"
He smiled at her, and grimaced when it tore one of the scabs open. Darvish leaned down at once and swiped the drop of blood away, and on another day and on a different dose of endless pain-relieving potions that alone would have made him weep.
"I do," he said, "I do, it's just..."
Chandra's face went from determined to miserable in an instant, and he hated it.
"I'm sorry we didn't come earlier. You know that, right? We didn't believe that you just left, not for a moment, we looked and looked and - "
"I know! I'm not angry, Chandra. But if Bosco figured it out, others could, too."
He swallowed and made himself continue. "And next time they could come for you instead of me, and I can't - I don't want - maybe I should go away, after I'm feeling better. It will be safer."
Darvish had stiffened at his side, and Chandra jerked away from him as if he'd struck her; the air in the room became too hot, too charged.
Darvish put his arms around Aaron's shoulders, and said in a carefully even tone: "If somebody didn't know yet how important you are to us, they will be aware after Bosco's execution, believe me."
He opened his mouth to argue further, and Chandra said over him, "Aaron, if it did become a problem, if it was impossible for us to have you and the kingdom at once, do you know what would happen?"
Aaron gaped at her, aghast, because this was beyond knowing that they would come if they could. It felt too big, too horrible, and he wanted to rise and stop her from saying those words, to close her mouth, but his body felt heavy and his hands hurt and his head hurt and Darvish was warm and solid behind his back.
"We would leave the kingdom to my brother," Darvish said into his ear, quietly, "and take to the road with you, and find us three a house. Never doubt it, beloved heart."
The tears should have been unbearably bitter with shame, but Darvish kept holding him and Chandra flitted over and touched his face with stern gentleness, and maybe. Maybe he'd grown large enough to swallow it.
Imagine that, old woman, he thought. Here we are.
He swallowed the last sob and leaned into their arms, and said, "Then I promise to stay."