“Lady Arisine,” he said.
She sat looking at him a long moment before speaking, feeling that voice move through her, that name she hadn't used since she truly sat the throne above. Here there were no names for this was a place in the world in which they weren't needed. Names were a thing born of necessity and they died when that was stripped from them and she had expected him to say anything but that.
“You know me?”
He nodded his head and it was the smallest movement, just a twitch. The hair flicking and the eyes blinking twice. “The queen.”
“Who are you?”
He lowered his hand, slow and careful. She had expected the scars below to cross his face and twist or torment his features, his lips spilt and rolled back from his teeth, his nose gone. But it was not so. The scars faded to nothing and his face below was wrinkled with age but whole. The lips and nose thin and slender, the skin pale.
“What do you need from me?” he said.
“What?”
“You've been trying to talk to me. What do you need?”
She just looked at him. It had to be something said in jest, she thought, but there was no humor in his eyes. A soft kindness perhaps, and something else as savage and untamed as a wildfire, but no humor. It was a question to which he actually wanted an answer.
And that frightened her in a way she could not explain.
“How did you break your chains?”
“Ah, you want freedom.”
“Of course.”
“Not all want it. Only some.”
She shook her head. “You do.” Waving a hand toward those hanging chains at ankle and wrist.
“Do I?”
“Do you not?”
He sat then, slowly, on the stone floor. The dim light falling from above. He glanced once at the door as he did it and listened and she listened also, but all was quiet. He sat with his legs crossed and looked back at her and ran one of the broken chains through his fingers. “I don't know,” he said at last.
“Why are you here?”
“Crimes against the crown.” He grinned. “As are you. But that's your son up there.”
She nodded and did not speak. Suddenly her throat tight and her eyes on fire, but she fought it down. He watched her do it and she felt from the way he looked at her that he could see her doing it. Inside. The way it ripped through her body and the tearing of tissue. Clenching every muscle in some desperation to bring the world back under her own control. That little she still possessed.
“I can help you with those chains,” he said. “If that's what you want.”
“How?”
The old man reached into his dirty robes and from them drew a thin metal file. The edges worn down and beaten. Slightly rusted about the wooden handle. He held it up to the light and the light would not catch that worn metal. But he nodded and tossed it lightly and it landed at her feet. Bouncing on the stones.
“It took me three days,” he said. “And your hands will feel like fire. But you can cut through the chains.”
“Do they know?”
“The jailers?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head. “They don't bring me out. When they bring my food, I sit against the wall with the chains and I don't speak and they don't ask.” He nodded toward her. “You can't, though. They take you out. They'll know if you cut them.”
Elation had been growing in her, and she felt it evaporate like water and blow away with the wind. But still she said: “I'll be faster.”
“Perhaps.”
“I'll have to.”
He looked up then at the ladder above her, where the stones had been removed. That climbing series of rough steps in the darkness, barely visible in the gloom unless you knew to look for them. The high window and bars above. Then he shook his head. “No,” he said.
And she looked also and did not want to but knew he was right. For she had to cut them off, then climb and remove more stones, then find a way to remove the bars at the top. It was a thing that could not be done. With time, it could, but not in a night. Not between meals, between being called up and paraded in front of her subjects as if she were still the ruler and not the boy at her side.
“I can help you,” he said then.
“How?”
“I'll do it is how. But you must wait. I'll climb it, I'll dig them out. I'll get rid of the bars. Then we'll try to cut you free and you can run. But you can't do it yourself.”
“You'd do that for me?”
“No,” he said.
She wanted to ask him what he meant but she was at once sick of his dancing around the points and yearning for his help and so she said nothing. Just looked at him. He was not looking at her now but was instead wrapping and unwrapping the links of the chain around his wrist. Rolling it first one way and then the other. Looking at it and nodding and rolling it again.
“Talk to me,” she said.
“Talk to me.” He looked at her and grinned and again she saw moving in his eyes those elements in such contrast, the kindness and the wildfire. Something loose and wrong and ravaging. But also rooted there something else, something she no longer saw in her son's eyes.
“Please.”
“I'll do it,” he said. “For myself.”
He worked the next three nights above her in the dark. When the guards left he came over in his chains and robes and took from her the spoon and put it between his teeth and smiled with his lips only and then climbed barefoot the tall steps, his chains rattling against the wall. She moved aside as he dug so the dust would not fall on her and when he got a stone free he called out softly and dropped it down out of the darkness and she caught it and carried it back to the bones and put it down with the others.
Then returned and waited again until there was another. This over and over, his form rising in the darkness to twice and then three times the height of her chains. Until at last he reached the bars above and dropped the final stone, one she could barely catch to prevent the noise as it struck the floor, and then he stood with his feet in the mortar and his hands wrapped around the bars and for the first time since she'd been cast down here—that dark and horrific first night—something moved across the light.
A shadow passing. His face pressed to the bars.
He looked out for a time and said something but she did not know what. And then he began to work, pushing the spoon again into the mortar. By now that lone instrument bent and battered, mangled by this hard labor. But still the mortar and stone drifting down.
It took two more nights before he had the first bar free. He did not drop it to her but put it in his robe and tied it and climbed down with the spoon in his mouth and handed it to her. It had been set into the mortar when it was poured and it was of black iron and the ends brighter where the stone had ground at them. Just as long as her arm from the elbow to the tips of her fingers.
“It will be close,” he said. Holding the bar sideways against her body and nodding and sliding it up and down. “But you'll fit.”
Then he climbed again and set to work on the second one.
She'd asked him his name many times and he would not give it. Would not speak to her about anything regarding himself. He went through periods where all he would do was repeat what she said and others where he spoke on his own. There did not seem to be anything else different about him at those times, save for what he said, but still she was afraid. She did not know if he saw it, but she felt it clutching her heart and hoped he'd work faster.