Page 40 of Tending the Ache

"Where is he?"

"The cells beneath the keep. Bound to a chair. He hasn't said a word since they brought him in."

"Let's go say hi, Bohdi."

***

The cells beneath the keep are carved from the same bedrock as the hot springs. Natural stone, grey and damp, the air thick with the mineral smell of earth and water. Oil lamps in iron brackets line the narrow corridor, their flames throwing unsteady light across the rough-hewn walls. The sound down here is different from the rest of the keep, muffled and compressed, as though the weight of the stone above is pressing the air into a denser shape. Footsteps echo. Breath echoes. Sound carries in ways it should not, bouncing off stone and arriving at unexpected angles, which is useful for the purposes of this room.

The prisoner is in the last cell. Eskil can see him through the iron-banded door as the guard unlocks it. A man of perhaps forty, weathered, with the kind of face that exists in the space between memorable and invisible. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Medium build. If Eskil passed him in the street he would not look twice, and that is the point. A man nobody remembers is a man who goes everywhere unquestioned.

He is bound to a heavy wooden chair with thick rope at his wrists and ankles. His clothes are plain, the rough-spun shirt and leather apron of a lumber worker, now smudged with dirt from the detention. There is no visible weaponry on him, which means the guards were thorough. A bruise is forming on his jaw, the mark of a man who did not go quietly, but he is otherwise uninjured.

He stares at the wall behind Eskil's head with the practiced blankness of somebody trained to resist interrogation. His eyes are fixed and glassy and deliberately empty. He does not acknowledge Eskil's entrance. He does not flinch when the door clangs shut. He does not react at all.

Eskil has seen this before. Men taught to swallow their tongues under pressure, to let the pain wash over them, to give nothing and endure everything. It is effective training. It works against impatient interrogators, against men who rely on volume and speed, against the kind of crude questioning that mistakes cruelty for competence.

It does not work against Eskil.

It does not work against Eskil because Eskil is not in a hurry and does not need this man to suffer. He needs him to talk. Those are different jobs and most men doing this work cannot tell them apart, which is why most men doing this work are shit at it.

He takes off his coat and hands it to Bohdi, who has followed him in and is standing by the door with his arms crossed. Eskil rolls his sleeves to the elbow, slowly, one fold and then another, revealing the tattoos that climb his forearms in dark intricate patterns. The knotwork. The runes. The marks of a man who has inked his history into his skin because the history is worth remembering.

He picks up a wooden stool from the corner and sets it in front of the chair and sits. Their knees are close. Close enough to touch. Close enough that the prisoner can see the texture of Eskil's hands, the sword calluses, the scars, the thickness of the fingers, without looking up.

"What's your name?"

Nothing.

"You have one. Everybody does." Eskil's voice is conversational. Almost pleasant. A man offering a drink to a friend, remarking on the quality of the evening light. "The mill foreman says you told him Aren. It isn't Aren, but I'll use it, because I would rather not spend the next hour calling you you."

The stare does not move.

"We're going to start slow, Aren. You're welcome to answer at any point." Eskil leans forward, forearms braced on his thighs. "But if you don't, I'll have to get creative. And I promise you don't want that, friend."

***

He asks simple things first. Where he was recruited. How long he has been inside the walls. What he has sent out and to whom. The questions are delivered calmly and evenly with pauses long enough for the silence to become a pressure of its own.

Aren stares at the wall.

Of course he does. They always do, at the start, and Eskil always gives them the chance not to, and they never take it, and the whole rotten business proceeds exactly as it was always going to proceed. He could have skipped the questions. He asks them anyway, every time, because the day he stops asking is the day he has become something else entirely.

Eskil sighs, the small put-upon sigh of a man facing a longer afternoon than he had hoped for, and takes the prisoner's right hand.

He turns the bound hand over and presses the palm flat to the arm of the chair and holds it there, and the fingers splay on instinct, the body bracing without being told to.

"You have twenty-seven bones in this hand," Eskil says. "I've broken most of mine at one time or another. They knit badly and they ache in the cold and there's a knuckle here," he taps his own, "that has never sat straight since I was twenty-two."

He draws the dagger from his belt. Six inches, double-edged, the steel dark with a finish that does not catch the light.

"I'm not going to break any of yours."

He drives the blade down through the webbing between thumb and forefinger and into the wood beneath.

The scream is enormous. It comes off the stone and doubles and comes back and fills the cell with copies of itself, and the man's whole body convulses against the ropes, his spine arching off the chair back, his free hand clawing at nothing. The eyes that were blank thirty seconds ago are wide and wet and entirely present.

Eskil does not let go of the hand. He holds it flat, pinned around the blade, and waits out the noise the way a man waits out bad weather.