Chapter 134: Drowned in Darkness
JAEHAERYS
Cold woke him before the pain did.
Jaehaerys was sitting in water to his chest, hands roped behind him, and there was iron on his left ankle with a chain running down from it into the black. When he tried to stand, the chain gave him four inches and stopped. One lantern burned on a ledge above, and its light moved on the water in slow rings that went out and came back.
Somewhere off in the stone a gate ground open. He felt the sound in his teeth before he heard it. The water climbed a finger's width while he listened.
"That's the tide gate," said the man behind him. "It works on its own hours. Nobody down here votes on it."
A hand closed in his hair and tilted his chin up, out of the wet. It wasn't cruel about it. That was what he couldn't get past. The man held his head above the line the way a careful servant holds a full cup, and did it again every time the boy sagged, and would keep doing it.
"Sloane." A second voice, across the chamber. "Set him higher."
"He's high enough. He's meant to remember it."
"He'll remember it from the ledge just as well. Drowned's no good to anybody."
"Frightened is the good," Sloane said. "Dead is a different letter, and I'm not the man who writes that one."
Jaehaerys turned his head as far as the hand would allow. "You're going to give me back."
"I am."
"Why?"
"Because a boy who comes home wet tells it better than a boy who doesn't come home at all." The hand adjusted him, patient, unhurried. "Your mother's protector will hear it out of your own mouth for the rest of his life, and every time you wake in the night he'll hear it again. That's the payment. You're the coin it's counted in."
The water reached his collarbone. Jaehaerys thought about his sister, and about the wooden sword he'd dropped somewhere back in the passage, and then he made himself stop thinking about either.
Watch the feet, Ulf had told him on the sand, three torches burned down to stubs. Everyone watches the hands. The hands lie. And then, later, quieter, the other half of it: a man who thinks he's finished with you stops watching you at all. Give him what he came to see and he'll give you the seconds back.
So Jaehaerys gave him it.
He came apart. He thrashed against the rope until his shoulders burned, he made a high thin sound that scraped his own throat raw, and he begged, and none of it was hard, because most of it was true. He only had to let it run further than he'd have let it.
"Please. Please, I'll tell him anything you want, I'll say it exactly, please don't—"
"Gods," said the second man. "Listen to it."
The hand in his hair loosened. Not much. Enough that his head came down an inch and he could breathe from lower in his chest, and he took that breath, and the next, deep and slow between the sobs where nobody was counting them.
"Does my mother know?" he asked.
Sloane didn't answer. Somewhere above and behind them, very faint, stone shifted, and water that had been still for a hundred years began to move.
With the torch guttering in his fist and no plan past speed, Ulf came down through the third passage.
Soru carried him in bursts, ten feet, twenty, each one landing him ankle-deep in filth that stank of silt and old rot, and the flooded stretches ate the momentum so he had to build it again from nothing. An archway near the cistern mouth had already half fallen. No straight run cleared it. He went through the gap sideways instead, body flowing loose around the collapsing stone, Kami-e turning his shoulders past an edge that would have opened him, and he was out the other side before the arch finished coming down behind him.
The first agent was waiting in the antechamber. Wiry, dark leathers, a curved dagger. The man lunged and Ulf didn't dodge. His weight dropped to almost nothing for a single heartbeat and Soru carried him past the blade. Then it came back, all of it, full force, and the agent went into the wet stone wall under the pressure of a body that suddenly weighed ten times what it should. He crumpled, unconscious before he hit the water. Ulf hauled him onto the ledge by the collar without breaking stride.
Two more waited in the main cistern.
Jaehaerys was between them with his hands bound and his face gone grey, and the heavy chain on his ankle ran down into the dark, and the water was at his throat. They weren't in any hurry. That was the whole message. Slow, so the boy would feel it arrive, and so the man who came for him would have to watch it happen.
"Let him go," Ulf said. His voice was quiet. It carried anyway.
The taller one turned. "The dead prince sends his regards." His palm settled on the boy's head, proprietary, almost gentle. "He says to tell you: debts are still owed. The boy is the first payment."
He pushed Jaehaerys under.
Ulf moved. Soru threw him across the chamber in a blur and the water took the speed out of him the instant he hit it, so he went the other way with it, dropped his own weight until his boots found the cistern floor, and ran along the bottom. The torch died. The world came down to pressure and black and the burn in his chest and the pale sinking shape ahead of him that was a seven-year-old boy.
He reached him as the chain pulled taut. The struggling had already stopped. Small body going limp, bubbles trailing up out of an open mouth, and Ulf got both fists on the links and shifted, and it wasn't fast enough. The iron held. He shifted again, harder, everything he had, and the iron still held, and the boy's hand brushed his wrist and didn't close.
Something in him tore.
It came up out of nowhere with no name on it, past whatever ceiling he'd spent two years learning to trust, and it went through his arms like fire poured down a pipe. The links came apart in his fists like wet paper. One pull. He tasted iron, his ears filled with a roar that had nothing to do with the water, and every muscle from his jaw to his heels seized at once and kept seizing while he kicked upward toward the faint grey line of the surface with the boy against his chest.
They broke through together. Jaehaerys coughed and sputtered and vomited black water onto the stone ledge. Alive. Shaking. Crying, raw, helpless tears. Alive.
"Stay here," Ulf said. His voice came out wrecked. "Don't move."
The agents were still in the chamber. He dealt with them in the dark, badly, slower than he'd ever done it. Rankyaku blades that didn't need light and cost him something each time he threw one. Soru dashes that left the water churning and left him breathing like a bellows. Kilo Kilo shifts that dropped his heels through the cistern floor and brought a ceiling course down in a slab of ancient stone. When the noise stopped, one man was pinned beneath it, barely conscious, worth keeping. Ulf left him for Stark's interrogators.
Sloane was already gone into a side drain, limping on his left side, and Ulf's legs wouldn't answer when he told them to follow.
He carried Jaehaerys out on his back instead, the boy's arms locked around his neck, his small body still shaking with cold. Every stair up cost more than the one below it.
"I'm sorry," Jaehaerys whispered. "I just wanted to help—"
"I know."
"The prophecy. Jaehaera's vision."
"Was right. A boy who should be king, drowned in darkness."
Torchlight came down the stairwell to meet them, and Helaena was in it, with six of Cole's men behind her and her skirts already soaked to the knee. She had stopped at the stair head. She was looking at her son over Ulf's shoulder and her mouth was moving before any sound came with it.
"A boy who should be king," she said, barely above the water noise, "drowned in darkness. I saw it in the summer. I wrote it down and I could not read my own hand."
"She just didn't see that someone would pull him out."
Then Ulf's knees went. He got the boy off his back and onto the dry stone before he dropped, and after that he was down on both hands with the torchlight swinging over him and his arms shaking so hard he couldn't hold his own weight up.
Guards took Jaehaerys and carried him toward the upper corridors, and Helaena went three steps after her son, and stopped, and turned back. She stood over Ulf with the torch in her hand and didn't offer it to him. She was looking at his hands.
"Ulf," she said. "Your hands. What have you done to your hands."