Mathias returned each morning. And each morning I watched him, searching for the thread that might unravel him.
He was no soldier; that much I knew. There was no crest on his coat, no polish on his boots, and his gait lacked the rigid cadence of command. But there was discipline in him all the same – a kind carved from habit rather than order. He brought water, food, once a salve for the bruises along my temple and spoke only when he hadcause. No wasted words, no questions without purpose. Just a steady presence, maddening in its composure. There was a patience in him that unnerved me more than cruelty ever could. He didn’t wear it like armor—it simply settled on him, still and unshakeable, as if endurance was something he’d learned too young.
I sometimes wondered if he was waiting for me to break – if each morning he stepped through that arch, expecting to find me frayed at the edges, gentled by hunger or weariness or whatever he thought might soften the monster he’d brought here. If he did, he gave no sign. And if he hoped for anything else, I could find no trace of it in his face.
So, I studied him the way I would have studied terrain before a march – slowly, with attention to shape and weight, listening for the places where the ground might give way beneath a wrong step. He was careful in a way I couldn’t yet read; no wasted movements, no slip of tongue or temper to seize upon. There was something about the way he set down the flask just far enough to make me reach, the way he waited for me to speak first, as if he was charting his own kind of map – one with no interest in conquest, only in whether the way forward could be survived.
On a morning that could have been one day or ten after I’d woken in this gods-forsaken ruin, he brought lentils. Overcooked, clumped at the rim of the wooden bowl, but warm. I took them without thanks, letting the heat sting the raw patch on my palm where the rope had rubbed skin to tenderness. He didn’t linger, only crouched a few paces off, arms resting on his knees, his gaze fixed on the slab of discoloured stone across from me, where thin strands of red swayed in the draught. I let the food sit in my lap untouched, watching the wind tug at the hem of his coat.
“The cloth,” I said then, nodding toward the platform and its frayed decorations. “What is it?”
Mathias didn’t answer straight away. He followed the motion ofmy chin and, for a breath or two, just looked at the tangle of faded, fluttering ribbons. “They’re old prayers,” he said then. “Tied and left for the old gods, long ago.” He pointed at the lonely slab of stone. “That used to be a shrine.”
I raised an eyebrow, though I wasn’t sure he saw it. “Prayers,” I repeated, as if tasting the word for poison. “People still think that works? After an age or two since the gods left their creation to rot on their own?”
His gaze didn’t shift from the ribbons. “Most don’t. But there are those who still come. Who still tie their hopes to whatever’s left of the old ways, just in case.”
I let that sit a moment. The wind caught one of the strands and twisted it, slowly, like it couldn’t decide whether to rise or fall.
“They must be desperate,” I said. “Or stupid.”
This time, he did glance at me – just once, just enough to let the weight of it land.
“Maybe both,” he said. “But can you blame them when they’re just counting days to when the Queen’s mercy comes upon them, and even bending the knee might not save their lives or those of their loved ones?”
“Is that why you didn’t leave me to die, why you’re keeping me here?” I asked then, my voice sharp as a knife. “Because you’re hoping that the Queen’s mercy passes you by?”
“I’m keeping you here,” he said, “because I have seen what happens when her army marches. Because I’ve walked the ash fields where a village used to be, and I don’t think mercy was anywhere near it.”
I turned the bowl in my lap, letting the lentils slide in a slow arc along the wood. “You think holding me buys you a different end?”
“No,” he said, and for once there was no softness in it. “But I think letting you go might bring it faster.”
“And did you consider that it mightmake no difference whether I was here or not?” I raised my eyes to meet his. “That the Queen will not care if you hold her General, that she will burn your little town and everyone in it regardless?”
Mathias blinked, and for a moment I thought I saw in his eyes the slow realisation that whatever plan he was nursing may not be going the way he hoped.
“If you thought that she would spare your people on sentiment’s sake, you are gravely mistaken.” My words were slow and deliberate, as I attempted to capitalise on that small thread of doubt. “She does not care whether her General, hells, whether her daughter is in the pyre – if burning it brings her what she wants, she will not hesitate to call the flame.”
Mathias didn’t look away. He watched me as one might study a wound they didn’t yet know the depth of, his mouth set in that unreadable line he wore so well. “And if I let you go,” he said, voice low and even, “would you spare them?”
The question hung between us, heavier than I’d expected, burdened not only with the fate of his town but with whatever hope he’d bound to this crumbling plan of his. I met his gaze and held it, though something in me shifted beneath it – like standing barefoot on glass and pretending it didn’t cut.
“I might,” I said, tasting the words as I let them go. “If I make it back in time. If there’s still something left to spare.”
It was a poor lie, and worse, it showed. I could feel it in the way my throat tightened, in the half-second too long it took to speak, in the way I couldn’t quite keep my voice from catching on the end. I had lied before – countless times, with far higher stakes and far colder blood in my veins – but something about this place, about him, made the lie sit wrong in my mouth, like a rotten tooth I couldn’t stop tonguing.
He let the silence stretch. Then, with a faint nod, he rose to his feet and dusted his palms against his coat. “Then perhaps I need to rethinkmy approach.”
He turned, already moving toward the archway. Frustration rose sharp and sudden, faster than I could catch it, and before I knew it I’d snatched up the bowl in my lap and hurled it after him. It struck the stone with a crack that echoed through the ruin, lentils scattering across the floor like spilt pebbles. He didn’t flinch, but as he stepped into the shadowed passage, I could’ve sworn—just faintly, just once—I heard the ghost of a chuckle.
The next morning, I asked to be taken outside.
I didn’t dress the words up or blunt them. I felt by now, we would be well beyond modesty. I just asked to go for air and to piss without the stink of mildew clawing at my nose. The words weren’t meant to provoke, not exactly, but I knew what I was doing. I wanted to see how far things might bend, whether there was any give in the lines he’d drawn.
Mathias stood a while as if he was taking the measure of me and not the other way around and then crossed the floor with quiet purpose, a coil of rope in one hand, and knelt beside me. I watched as he looped it through the bindings at my wrists, his fingers steady, the gesture practised. Only then did he unfasten the tether that had bound me to the wall since the moment I’d first woken here. I didn’t move. Even if I’d had the strength to run, I wouldn’t have known where to go, or who waited beyond the ruin’s walls, or whether they had less patience than him. He gave the new line a firm pull, then straightened and tipped his chin toward some fallen wooden beams on the side of the shrine.
He led me through a narrow passage I hadn’t seen before, where the stone pressed close and the light slipped in only in thin, greenish threads. At the end, a warped door hung crooked in its frame. He shoved it open with one hand, and the wind answered first – sharp and briny, pulling at my hair and the trims of his coat like it meant todrag us both off the ledge ahead.
