The Rogue Guardian

Chapter 58: Traitor

This is a short chapter, so mayyyyyyybe we'll see about a bonus chapter on Wednesday to make up for it? Unless this chapter wraps up too neatly for you guys to want the next one so soon, of course! You can let me know ;)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Three days had passed.

He'd known it would be this way. Known it ever since they caught him-- a traitor, within their own safe stone walls. The worst kind of rotten filth. A man who betrayed his own king for another.

"You will regret all your lies," the Sage promised him, and his words cut deeper than steel, though the knives his torturers wielded cut plenty deep.

His own brothers-in-arms had escorted him to the dungeons, hands clamped around arms already weighted with manacles. They brought him to the back of the warren of freezing, damp cells, and set about slowly killing him.

Tell us, they demanded. Confess. It was a repeating drumbeat, a siren call of redemption that they dangled in front of him, punctuated by traitor, traitor.

They had found his incriminating papers in a sweep he hadn't had time to prepare for. So the command to confess was irrelevant-- they had all they needed to know. This, the beating, the breaking, was an indulgence in their anger. The punishment for his crimes.

Pushed flat against the cold wall he tasted all the pain they could come up with. Beatings and brandings-- the latter was the worst. They used the cherry red tip of the branding iron to seer the emblem of Solangia on his chest, over his heart: the seal of the royal family.

"Do you remember now what king you serve?" The Sage asked him mildly, leaning over the slumped puddle of shredded clothing and bloodied skin he inhabited. He cried and he whimpered and he prayed, but he did not bother praying for mercy. He prayed for death-- the one thing they were even more unlikely to give him.

They were going to break him, and then ship him off-- a present from one king to another. A warning.

The man who heated the branding iron had chatted easily while he worked. "See," he'd said, "the point of this one is to burn the loyalty into you, 'til you understand what it means. Don't worry, there-- it hurts, but it's an honorable sort of punishment, you understand?" He'd laughed in an almost friendly way. "We'll make a truly honorable guardsman of you yet."

After they finished the branding, when he was conscious once more, they demanded the names of his conspirators. There are more of you rats out there, they snarled. Tell us. Confess.

He growled and spat fake names at their feet, and the Sage slapped the burning ache over his heart so he passed out again from the pain.

These, and a thousand more little pains and humiliations. After all, who was coming to save him? Not his king-- the one he served or the one he betrayed.

So it went as he'd known it would, everything short of killing him, nothing less than the worst they could do. In the endless dark and damp he pictured glimpses of blue skies, sprawling forests, a city painted in violet and gray. But every image was marred by a splatter of dark blood, a sky brewing trouble in dark clouds and ominous hushes.

He would get no last words. He thought of that sometimes in the first two days, how he would never get to make one last mark on the world. And when they wrapped his head in crude strips of fabric, stifling the cuts across his face and hiding his features, he thought of it again with sudden agony. When they stuffed a gag tanged with blood into his mouth he nearly choked on his sobs. No last words, indeed-- he couldn't remember the last time he had formed coherent sentences out loud.

He had been captured, starved, beaten, weakened. Burned, slashed, bruised, his sanity shredded. He had been humiliated and hurt in more ways than any person could keep track of and denied any last comfort he could have dreamed of-- a glimpse of the summer-green forests, the cloudless sky, the city spread like a tapestry below the castle. But in the end, it didn't go quite as he'd thought he'd known it would.

He was told, as they knotted the rags around his head, that there had been a change in his fate. One last chance for him to prove useful to the regime he had betrayed, and if he acted with honor, he would not be sent, in even more pain, as a message to his king. He could have the death he wanted instead, he would be hurt no more if he obeyed, and his family would not be punished for his behavior-- they would be rewarded for having given Solangia a son who, though a traitor and a piece of filth, had salvaged his honor in the end.

And all he had to do, to insure the torturing stopped and his family was kept in comfort and wealth, was to go to his death with dignity, with his rope-bound hands steady behind his back, with his steps sure as a commander across a battlefield, with his chin up and his shoulders back. Without a single flinch at the scrape of the rough hanging rope being drawn around his neck. As if he had no shame, no regrets, as if he stood by his word and his honor to the last. As if he were an unbroken man, a captain who had never bowed, never lost.

At noon on the Green Gallows they hanged a broken man, a spy for Englescroft named Alan Mikoren, and they told the crowds who came to watch that he was Captain Joshua Blaisze.