AN: Thank you so much for everyone who's been reading, and to everyone who's commented! (Shout out to Juliet'lovestory, who misremembered Owen as Oliver. Coincidentally, the day you posted your comments was the day I saw a production of Oliver! the musical, and there was one song that reminded me a lot of this Owen. { youtube/} watch?v=sNefYCKI34A if you're interested. Wrong time period, but still, it reminded me a lot of Owen and what's in store for him.) Please enjoy this next chapter!
On watery days like today Owen usually likes to get Mara and Duncan and the others and go down to the lake in the woods. It's more of a pond than a lake, but Owen likes to call it a lake so he can pretend there are vast underwater kingdoms, because no one ever heard of vast kingdoms in a pond –– unless it's a Sidh kingdom which Mara likes to pretend, but Owen is the prince and Mara isn't, so a lake it is.
They plunge into the water and come splashing up into the rain to watch the surface dance and pop all around them. Owen pretends his magic is doing it.
He would have liked to bring his friends inside the castle so they could all play hide and seek in the many rooms and corridors– Owen knows of a particularly good hiding place underneath the stairs he's itching to try out– but Mother doesn't like having common children in the castle.
"They'll bring in the mud and squalor," she says every time Owen asks her if his friends can come out of the rain just this once, "It isn't their fault they're filthy, but it's not ours either, so there's no reason why we should live in their filth."
"But that's not fair!" Owen protests, and Mother silences him with a glare and tells him to blame the bigger kingdoms, because it's their fault the people of Doria are poor and can't wash themselves.
Today winter air is riding in fast on the late autumn winds, and the rain is chilled into freezing streaks through the air. Mara and Duncan will be inside by their fires today, too poor to risk getting ill.
Owen doesn't want to play with them today anyway. He stayed up late after the sun went down last night wondering about his new friend in the dungeons, that mystery he was determined to discover – who he was, why he was there, what he'd done to lose his tongue. Owen's sure the man has wonderful stories to tell, if only he could talk.
He'd looked so sad yesterday when he tried to tell Owen his name. Mm, Mm, Mmmmuh?
Owen shivers. The fire in the fireplace died during the night and now the cold winds are seeping in through the cracks in the windows and cooling the stone. Long ago Mother told the servants not to keep Owen's fire going in the night in the hopes of encouraging his magic to warm the room. So far Owen had managed to warm things as he touched them, but he couldn't yet figure out how to keep them warm when he pulled away.
The man in the dungeons is probably very cold, Owen thinks, so he pads over to this plain wooden cabinet, warming the stone under his footsteps, and pulls out a blanket. He wraps it around himself – if his magic can't warm it, his body heat certainly can – and leaves his chambers without changing from his sleeping clothes.
The castle is quiet as Owen runs through it, except for the rumble of thunder. It's too early, too cold for people to out of their beds. There are people working in the kitchens, of course, but they're too far away in the east wing of the building, so all Owen can hear is the pit pat pit pat of his bare feet slapping the floor.
He slows as he nears Mother's chambers. Her door is opening and someone is emerging, looking up and down as he goes. A hand follows him, touching his arm, and then Mother's head appears. Owen waits just out of sight for the man to leave before he keeps going.
"What are you doing?" Mother frowns at him.
"I was going to play," Owen answers.
"It's so cold out. Is your father coming with you?"
Owen shakes his head.
"Where are you going with that blanket?" Mother asks.
"I was cold."
"Can't you warm yourself?"
"I have," Owen says, and holds out one blanket-covered arm for her to feel. She does, and seems pleased when the blanket feels as though it's been hanging by a blazing fire.
"This is good!" She exclaims, and bends down to kiss the top of his head. "You'll be heating your whole room soon enough."
Owen nods.
"I don't want you going outside today," Mother says, "You'll get ill in that rain. Alright?"
Owen nods again.
"Good. Go along, and I don't want you to be late for your lesson like you were yesterday."
"Yes Mother," Owen replies.
He runs off, still clutching the blanket around him.
The man is huddled in the corner of his cell when Owen arrives, tracing idle circles over the surface of Owen's ball. He looks up with hopeful eyes when the light from the torch falls on him.
"Good morning!" Owen says cheerfully, "Did you miss me?"
The man nods, and Owen grins. The distant clap of thunder sounds, muffled by the layers and layers of thick stone separating the dungeon from the outside.
"I brought you a blanket," he says, and unwraps the blanket from around himself to stuff it through the bars. "I tried to warm it up as much as I could. I expect you must get cold here. 'Specially with winter coming. Mother won't let me keep a fire in my room unless I light it myself, only I have to use my magic to do it."
The man pauses in the middle of placing the blanket around his own shoulders. He cocks his head at Owen and blinks.
"I don't have very much magic," Owen explains sheepishly, "I can do little stuff, but nothing big like Mother wants."
Now cocooned in the blanket, the man raises one eyebrow and creeps forward on his knees, sticking out one hand and wiggling his fingers. The chains jingle softly.
"I was born with the magic. Mother says I was given my powers to rule Doria, except she doesn't have any powers and she does an alright job. Father doesn't do much," he adds, "He sleeps most of the time and lets Mother do the work. I don't think he cares about being king too much. Mother gets mad at him for it, and she said when I'm king I'm going to have to work extra hard to bring Doria back to greatness after Father let it down."
Owen frowns.
"I don't know how I'm 'sposed to do that. Doria already seems pretty great to me. You should see it."
The man is watching him with something close to rapture on his dirty face. Owen wonders if he can even see through the white film that covers his eyes, but the man is watching so intently that he must be able to see a little bit. Those faded blue eyes are fixed on Owen's face with such ferocity as though Owen is the most important thing in the world.
"Did you grow up here?" Owen asks, "Have you seen Doria at all? There's a great forest just outside of the city where me and Mara and Duncan go- those are my friends, but they're peasants so they're not allowed in the castle. But we can go anywhere we want as long as it's outside. Yesterday we went digging for worms, after my magic lesson with Mother."
Owen grins excitedly at the memory. His head still hurt from the strain of trying to turn water into wine, and he was still reeling from Mother's disappointment at his failure. He'd wiped his tears by the time he caught up with his friends, and they'd shown him how fat and long the worms were and how they were going to take them into the forest and create a little worm village.
"Mara found the biggest worm," Owen tells the man, "It was this long! So her worm got to be chief of the worm village, but she was nice to the other worms so it was alright. We made them little houses, and I dug them a pool for them to go swimming in, even though it was a little cold. I warmed it up for them," he says proudly, "except I had to keep my finger in it."
The man's eyes are shining, but it isn't the sad kind of shine that Owen saw in him yesterday. He looks happy, huddled in the blanket and listening to Owen tell him all about his game. He sticks his hand out and wiggles his fingers again, smiling.
"You wanna see?" Owen asks, and when the man nods vigorously Owen sticks out his hand and points it to the little pile of rat bones in the corner of the cell. At his command, the little white pieces start to move, one after the other, until they're lying on the floor in the form of a smiling face, two dots and a line.
The man's face breaks out into a wide grin and he claps his hands together fast. The loud sound echoes all around the dungeon.
"Small stuff," Owen shrugs, "Mother wants me to do better."
The man just nods and grins and looks strangely happy.
The thought of his mother makes Owen falter. He has another lesson today, and Mother said today he will have to try harder. She was so disappointed yesterday, what will she do when she sees that Owen still can't do what she wants? She will be angry and sad and it will all be Owen's fault.
The man must see that Owen's smile is falling, because he reaches through the bars to pat Owen's hand in comfort.
Owen looks up. The man is smiling at him.
"Let's play a game," Owen says suddenly, "I am the dragon who rules this land and I have captured you!"
With that he banishes his anxious thoughts from his mind and climbs up the horizontal bars of the cell so that he towers over the man on the floor. He twists his face into a scowl.
"Raaargh!" He roars, "Tremble before me!"
The man obliges and places his hands above his head in surrender.
"You dare come into my castle which was forged from my mighty breath to…" It's then that Owen notices a ring on the finger of the man's left hand, reflecting the torchlight so that it glowed. "...steal my treasure! How dare you steal my treasure? I will take it back!"
He leaps back down to the ground and sticks his hand through the bars to get to the ring.
"Give it back! Rarrgh! Rargh-"
But the man, realizing what Owen is reaching for, suddenly shrinks back, holding his hands to his chest and shaking his head frantically.
"The treasure is rightfully mine! Rarrgh!"
If possible, the man shakes his head harder. He isn't smiling anymore. Suddenly there's an uncomfortable feeling in the air while the man, distraught, clutches his ringed finger to his chest and shakes his head back and forth, back and forth.
Owen doesn't know what to do. Just as they start their game, the man suddenly doesn't want to play when he was happy just moments ago.
"Did I upset you?" Owen asks, "I'm sorry. It's just a ring."
The man whimpers.
"May I look at it? I won't take it."
The man hesitates, then extends his left hand for Owen to examine, watching him carefully all the while.
The ring is silver fringed with gold, decorated with intricate shapes that might once have been swirling words or vines, but which time has worn down to a series of jumbled lines half smoothed into the surface. It was once nice, Owen can tell, and would still be worth quite a lot of money for the silver and gold.
"It's a very nice ring," Owen tells the man, because the man is looking at him so hard now and Owen can see the way the hand twitches with the desire to jerk back to keep the ring safe and hidden.
"Is it a wedding ring?" Owen asks, because this isn't like the rough warrior rings he's seen other men wear as trophies from their battles.
The man nods.
"Oh."
A look of incredible grief settles over the man's face and Owen doesn't quite know how to respond to it. Something of a greater magnitude pokes at him as Owen realizes how sad this man must be, to be lost from this love of his and trapped down in a dark cell for so many years.
"What happened to them?" There's no corpse in the cell with the man, no indication that they might have been here together.
The man shakes his head.
"I'm sorry."
The man holds his hand against his chest and sighs. With his other hand he rubs the ring over and over, pressing and twisting it around and around and around. That must be how the ring lost its detail, Owen thinks. He imagines the man sitting here in the dark, all alone, wishing for his beloved and caressing the only object left that connects them. It's like the stories Mother tells him before she sends him to bed of maidens trapped in towers while their love must go on a quest to rescue them, how the pain of being apart is so great that it breaks their hearts.
"I'm sure you'll be with them soon," Owen says awkwardly, unsure of how to behave because the man is hanging his head and looking miserable. "They'll come for you soon enough. That's how it goes in the stories. The prince quests all across the land and slays every beast in his path to find his love. It will happen, you'll see."
Owen isn't very convincing, but the man gives him a watery smile anyway.
Through the stone walls, they hear the sound of thunder.
"Come on," Owen says, eager to change the subject, "Let's play a different game before I have to go to my lesson."
So they play, and Owen is feeling energetic and happy by the time he has to leave. Mother frowns and asks him where he's been all morning, and Owen's skin crawls just a little bit at having to lie directly to her face. But Mother accepts his story of being at the library and sits him down at the table and places a goblet of water in front of him.
The same icy rain and thunder is raging the next day, so Owen goes down to the dungeons again. The rain lasts for days, and by the time its lightened enough for Owen to go outside with Mara and Duncan he's developed a habit. Each morning he will run downstairs to see the man in the dungeon until it's time for his lesson with Mother, and then he will go and play with his peasant friends.
It's a nice routine. Owen likes spending time with the man in the dungeons, even if the man can't talk or leave his cell. As the brutal winter keeps Doria locked in her icy grasp, and keeps Owen trapped inside the castle, it's great fun to have a friend to play with to distract him from the cold. The man plays whatever game Owen wants to play and doesn't complain when Owen is the leader every time. He participates with enthusiasm for each make-believe scenario Owen comes up with and somehow they work out a way to play even when they can't cross the bars. One day Owen brings down a game of chess, because Father just taught him how to play and he thinks the man in the dungeons would like it. They unroll the sheepskin board on the floor just outside of the cell and sit cross legged on either side of it and play until Owen has to leave.
Owen brings other games, and he also brings the man things he thinks he might need: food and a pillow and a candle for light for when Owen can't be there with his torch. As months go by the man's cell becomes littered with objects, then cluttered, then cramped, but the man refuses Owen's offers to take some of the unnecessary things back.
The man does a strange thing sometimes. When they're not playing chess or make-believe, Owen will sit with his back resting against the opposite wall and talk to the man about his life in the castle, about his lessons with Mother and his games with Mara and Duncan and how beautiful Doria is, or he will tell the man a story that he makes up on the spot about mighty beasts and valiant knights and strong kings. In the middle of talking Owen will look up to see the man listening and looking so softly at Owen with a gentleness Owen has never seen before directed at him. The man will see Owen looking, and then he'll do the strange thing: he will pat his chest over his heart and then point at Owen, a gesture Owen is clueless to interpret.
"How did you stay sane down here all these years?" Owen asks the man one day, "If you were just here in the dark all alone."
The man can't answer, but he pats his chest and then points at Owen, and then does it again, but Owen doesn't understand.
Time goes by.
Owen goes to the dungeons every day and never tells anyone, not even Mara or Duncan, for fear that word will get back to Mother. Besides, he wants this to remain his secret, his friend that is all his and nobody else's to steal.
At Yule Owen gives the man a wood carving of a dragon that Owen spent a whole week making. It's a shabby, misshapen lump of a thing, but the man cradles it like it's the most precious gift he's ever received. When the world thaws and spring begins to bloom, Owen brings the man a flower and describes the way the birds are singing again and the way the air glitters with water melting from the rooftops and shining in the sun. He's ecstatic when he shows the man the crossbow Father gives him for his eighth birthday, and taken aback when the man presents a tiny figure of a dog crudely made from the wax of the candle.
Owen tells the man about his Mother, and when he does the man listens with a solemn gaze. Owen tells him about how he doesn't think he will ever be as powerful as Mother wants him to be, and how sad it makes her and how he should try to be a better son to her, really, because only a horrible son would not try their absolute best to please their mothers.
It's the middle of the next winter when Owen enters the man's cell for the first time.
Mother is upset with Owen again. He's failed another lesson, this time trying to kill a little bird mother has put in a cage for him.
"Kill it, but don't touch it," Mother tells him, "If you do it right the thing won't feel any pain, it will just go to sleep and not wake up again. You can do that, can't you Owen?"
The little bird is looking at him inside the little cage, staring at Owen with two innocent black eyes.
"But Mother, the bird hasn't done anything wrong."
"It's only a bird," Mother says harshly, "There are plenty of other birds. Don't be so sensitive. It will be your downfall one day."
The bird has gray feathers that look so soft, carried by delicate legs that look like they would snap at the lightest touch.
"What will you do when there is an enemy soldier trying to kill you? Will you refuse to kill them too?" Mother asks, "No, Owen, you must know how to kill with your mind so that your body cannot fail you."
Her hand falls on his shoulder and grips it painfully tight.
"Kill it," she commands with a rough shake to his shoulder, so Owen swallows his protests and stares at the little bird.
He's never been asked to kill anything before, at least not like this. He's squashed bugs and things that crawl in his chambers and the dungeons, but Mother has never made him kill like this.
"You will have to kill entire armies one day," Mother tells him, her voice like waves against a hard rock cliff in Owen's ear.
Owen tries. He looks at the bird and tries not to look at its eyes, the way it shifts all around the cage like it knows what's about to happen to it. Fear and darkness rise up inside of Owen to rattle against his bones, pushing and bursting out, out, and Owen tries to channel it towards the little bird to somehow end its life.
It will be painless if he does it right, he thinks, and he tries. His head starts to pound.
The bird's cage isn't so much as rattling.
"Focus, Owen, all of Doria is depending on you!"
Owen's head is filled with knives and white-hot coals, burning him up. He wants to take off his head and throw it far away to stop the pain of it, but it's eating him up, and the bird is looking at him.
He pushes with his mind against the bird. Nothing happens. He pushes again. And again. His head throbs, he's going to explode, he's going to die, not the bird. He stares so hard he thinks his nose starts to bleed.
"I can't do it, Mother!" He cries.
"You will do it!"
"I can't!"
"You will!"
And then there's another pain, and another, and Owen realizes that Mother has struck him twice across the face.
"Mother!" He screams.
"Shut up!" Mother screams back, "and kill the bird!"
"I can't! I won't! I can't!"
Mother hits him again.
"No!" Owen screams, and screams and screams because there's so much pain in his head and his face and all over his skin, and even in his heart because Mother is angry with him now because he is a bad little boy.
Mother grabs him by the arms and hauls him out of his chair to stand before her and shakes him hard.
"All of Doria rests on you, don't you see that?" She screeches, "Look at me!"
But Owen has screwed his eyes shut to keep the tears from falling, because he's sure now that if she sees him cry it will only make her angrier. He doesn't want to look at her, he doesn't want to see her wild, angry face.
"God damn it, Owen!"
It becomes too much. Owen wrenches himself free from Mother's grasp and flees from the room. He wants to grab the cage with the little bird to take with him, but he doesn't have time. So he runs, and as he runs he can hear Mother screaming after him.
He pushes people out of his way who stare at the crying little prince, red faced and sobbing and doubled over because he wants to clutch at his head for the pain in it.
He doesn't bother with a torch when he rushes down the stairs to the dungeons. There's a soft light from the candle in the man's cell, and Owen runs towards it.
Immediately the man is reaching for the bars at the sound of Owen's sobs. He looks alarmed, his eyes wide and worried, and he makes a gesture as if to reach towards Owen to comfort him.
"M-Mother…" Owen sobs, but he can't even say the rest of it, the pain is too much and he's crying too hard. "My head," he whimpers instead, "it hurts."
He almost collapses there on the floor of the dungeon corridor with the man staring worriedly at him, but then he notices the latch on the bars.
It's rusted over and stuck fast, and Owen doesn't have the key to it. He pulls and pushes, and he cries out in frustration when it won't give. He roars and sends out a burst of magic, and then there's a groan and then the cell is unlocked.
The man is frozen. Through the pain in Owen's head and the sobs wracking his body, Owen doesn't realize what he's just done. He only pushes at the bars until they open enough for him to throw himself inside and into the man's arms.
Immediately the man encircles him with his arms and lets Owen cry into his chest. He squeezes a little too tightly, but Owen doesn't care, just burrows into the warmth and cries and cries.
The man strokes Owen's hair and presses his own face into it to rock them back and forth, hugging Owen tightly all the while. He doesn't let go when Owen's sobs quiet into whimpers, then silence, and the position must be uncomfortable but the man refuses to let go, hugging and petting until Owen falls asleep.
Later on, Owen will wonder why the man held into him so tightly that day. For now it's just comfort he seeks.
Upstairs, where Owen cannot see, Lady Beatrix is throwing the cage with the bird against the wall in a fury. It lands on the ground with a satisfying crash, but it isn't enough to sooth the rage in her, the absolute fury and frustration of seeing all of her hopes and plans fail.
That's when a knight knocks and enters her chambers, looking nervous about the crashing sound he just heard, but bravely entering all the same. Lady Beatrix shouts for him to leave, but the knight says he has come to inform her that there has been trouble in the East, serious trouble.
Lady Beatrix stares for a moment, blinking, as the meaning of the words settle in. The explosion of her fury snaps back into her mind and suddenly she realizes, with such horrifying clarity that she needs to sit down, that everything she's worked might now crumble around her.