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The castle was always quiet, but never more so than in the dead of night. It was the kind of silence that could be felt, heavy and cold and endless, and Holland was never more aware of the strange way sound seemed to travel in the castle than he was when he walked down the deserted stone hallways, his ears expecting to hear the echo of his feet on the ground but instead being met with nothing at all. The castle had an odd way of swallowing up sound, and any sound that did manage to make it any significant distance was often manipulated in strange ways by the endless hallways and the high ceilings and the sheer emptiness of the place. The sources of noise that seemed directly ahead never being found, the speakers of distant mutters revealing themselves around the next corner. The silence of the day was a constant guessing game, but the silence of the night was just that: silence.
Holland had never slept well. Growing up where he had, sleeping deeply was never advised; even before the blackness had crept over his left eye and marked him out as fair game, he had never slept well. As he had grown older the habit had stuck, solidified into light dozes, sleeping with his back against a wall and his eyes constantly on the room around him, his knife under his pillow so he could draw blood immediately. Now Holland slept even less, even when he hadn’t been ordered to stay awake or keep himself otherwise occupied, but he couldn’t say that he minded. Sleep wasn’t pleasant for him and hadn’t been for a long time, and with the castle so quiet at this time of night and the Danes asleep themselves, it was really the only time that Holland could call his own.
He was not permitted to leave the castle grounds at night, not unless he was on a specific job on behalf of one of the twins. Holland got the impression that Athos and Astrid resented the fact that they had to sleep like normal people would; undoubtedly they didn’t like the idea of Holland being awake and alert while they slept, despite all their teasing about his being their guard dog. Any sign of strength from Holland, no matter how vague or seemingly insignificant, seemed to annoy the twins on certain days, and his lesser need for sleep was one of those things that could flare up from time to time. Athos rarely ever ordered him to sleep, perhaps hearing how childish an issue it was to have, but Holland could tell the man was tempted, and he wouldn’t lie and say it wasn’t satisfying; wasn’t a kind of compensation for the long, cold hours where he might wish he could sleep after all. Such times were rare, but times like tonight – when he was beaten, bruised, exhausted – he wished he could sink down into sleep for a few hours. There would be the nightmares, of course, but Holland had long since learned that sometimes it was nice to leave one nightmare behind and step into another for a while, just for a break, a respite from the current situation, or perhaps just to see an old face again.
Sleep had not come, and Holland had eventually given up, pulling his aching body from his bed and resigning himself. He had been wandering the halls ever since, walking slowly, his pace dictated by both pain and a lack of having anywhere to be. He had a few set routes that he would walk, taking him along the longest halls and the widest circuits, mainly just so he could walk for the longest possible time without having to think too much about where he was going. He passed nobody aside from some of the black-eyed guards, but they didn’t count as an interruption. Their eyes paid no interest to Holland as he passed by, not a flicker of movement passing over them. They saw only what they were told to see, and walking past them felt no different to walking past one of the once-human statues in the courtyard, or the suits of armour mounted in the entrance hall. They had unnerved Holland, once, but he was constantly realising just what he could get used to. He barely noticed them now, even though he had once promised himself he always would.
He didn’t know why he deviated from his usual route the second time around, but he supposed it had been the distant echo of a footfall, one of those strange acoustic anomalies of the castle. He was mostly convinced he had imagined it and was only investigating for something to do, but as he grew closer he became aware that he could definitely hear someone – footsteps scuffing back and forth, as though somebody were trying to restlessly pace but didn’t quite have the energy for it. Holland climbed a brief set of stairs and turned right into the main hall, and he soon found the source of the noise in one of the smaller side-hallways, a short thing with a dead end.
Athos’s newest plaything was there, the boy he had picked up shortly before Kell’s visit. He was pacing after all, walking to the end of the short hallway and then turning back again; he was wearing only a thin undershirt and trousers, his feet bare, and Holland could see him shivering.
Beloc, Holland remembered, as the boy turned back around and spotted him standing there. Holland saw a flash of shock pass over his face, and then his cheeks coloured slightly and he dropped his gaze, sighing at the floor with no small amount of annoyance. Holland supposed it was still an embarrassing thing for Beloc; the last time he had seen Holland, Holland had been watching passively as Athos had been admiring his work, Beloc’s back shredded and his chest mutilated, one of his eyes so swollen he could barely open it. How ironic, then, that one of Holland’s eyes was now in much the same state – his green one, of course. Athos would never risk harming his black one.
“What does he want?” Beloc eventually asked, addressing the floor.
“I am not here on his behalf,” Holland replied, and Beloc looked up, surprised.
“So why are you here?”
“I was passing by. I thought I heard something.” Holland looked at him pointedly. “Apparently I was right.”
“I suppose you want to know what I’m doing?” Beloc asked. “Keep tabs on me?”
“You act as though I roam the halls actively looking for things to report back,” Holland said. “I report to him on command, not out of any desire.”
“Right,” Beloc said. “Just like what he can make me do, I guess.”
“If he so desired,” Holland said. “Regardless, I don’t need to ask what you might be doing here. I can probably guess.”
Beloc looked back at the ground again, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He looked decidedly uncomfortable, exhaustion seeming to drag his body towards the floor in his sloped shoulders, his slumped back. Holland was all too aware that if it wasn’t for the magic binding Beloc, he would have probably slumped to the floor long ago.
“He told me to stay here,” Beloc eventually muttered, and Holland wasn’t surprised in the slightest. “He said I’m not allowed to leave this hallway. I’m not allowed to rest; I’m not allowed to sleep.”
“How many days ago was that?” Holland asked.
“It must be nearly two days ago now,” Beloc said, his voice bitter. “I thought I would pass out eventually. Collapse or something. It’s not exactly going to be fun getting to that stage, I reckoned, but I thought it might be worth it just to piss him off. But it never happened.”
“It won’t,” Holland told him, and the boy’s shoulders seemed to slump even further, as though he had expected the news but still didn’t wish to hear it. “The magic will keep you obeying the command until Athos revokes the order. Then I imagine you’ll collapse.”
“Will he let me?” Beloc asked.
“I am not sure,” Holland admitted. “Sometimes he does, and other times I think he allows a person to fall just to watch them struggle to get up again. It all depends on how he’s feeling on the given day.”
The first time Athos had done it to him, he had let him collapse. Holland had been standing there for days, holding the knife to his own throat; finally Athos had told him he may stop, and Holland had hit the stone floor in a state of such sheer exhaustion that he hadn’t felt the pain. He still didn’t know how long he had stayed there for, every inch of him screaming in agony, focusing on keeping his breathing even and forcing even the slightest hitch of discomfort from it; he did remember Athos, making himself comfortable on a nearby chair, watching him with intense interest as he tried to comprehend the pain; to reconcile with it.
The second time, Athos had decided to test the limits of his magic, to see just what it was capable of.
“That’s the most wonderful thing about having an Antari on hand,” he had said then, pacing around Holland at an excruciatingly slow pace, Holland not even permitted to follow him with his eyes. “You’re so difficult to kill. Of course I have full faith in my magic, but everyone else just goes and dies before I can see what I’m really capable of. It’s so rude, don’t you think?”
Holland had agreed it was very rude, of course, because that was what Athos wanted him to say, and the threads of magic binding Holland to him could pick up on Athos’s intent; on his whims. Orders didn’t have to be verbal; they didn’t even had to be anything more than a passing desire. Holland’s body would act upon it immediately, and oftentimes Holland wouldn’t know what Athos intended him to do until he was slitting somebody’s throat or repeatedly driving a knife into himself.
Athos had spent hours on him that day, once he decided Holland’s exhaustion matched the first time – perhaps even exceeded it. He had revoked the order and Holland had collapsed again; Athos had then reinstated the order, forcing Holland back to his feet. On and on he had done it, until Holland’s body was inexplicably catching itself before he could hit the floor, wrenching him back up to his feet from some unnatural half-collapsed position. There had been no end to the bone-deep ache, to the incomprehensible exhaustion that had been so eager to pull him down, kept at bay by Athos’s will.
“Interesting,” Athos had murmured, at the end of it all, while Holland had lain gasping at his feet, trying to hold back the nausea sweeping through him. It had all been for nothing, of course – Athos had simply commanded him to let his body react naturally, and that had been the first time Holland had thrown up from pain alone.
“When will I die?” Beloc eventually asked.
“From this?” Holland said. “I don’t think you will.”
“From this,” Beloc said, shrugging. “From anything. Will he kill me?”
“He might.”
Beloc looked at him with such a sense of determination that Holland couldn’t help but feel pity for him.
“How?” he asked, still staring intently at Holland. “How can I make him kill me?”
Holland shook his head. “You can’t make him kill you.”
“There must be something. Something that would make him angry enough that—”
“You don’t want him to be angry,” Holland told him. “He never kills out of anger. He will only hurt you.”
“He already hurts me,” Beloc said. “So what?”
“There are always new ways he can hurt you,” Holland said, and Beloc looked down at the floor, frowning.
“What does it matter?” he asked, after a slight pause. “Pain is pain.”
“I imagine that by now, you must know that isn’t strictly true,” Holland said.
“So if he doesn’t kill out of anger, why does he kill?”
“Threat to his power,” Holland answered. “Though you pose no such threat and now could not, even if you wanted to. And boredom, I suppose.”
“Boredom,” Beloc repeated. He looked up again, his eyes glinting. “If I make him bored of me, he might kill me?”
“Yes,” Holland said.
He was forbidden from killing Beloc himself, of course. If he wasn’t, he would do it right now, as a mercy. Holland had never enjoyed killing and that hadn’t changed over the years; he had grown no less accepting of it, and each death weighed on him just as much as the very first ones. But he recognised the need for mercy, and in some situations – such as this one – it would undoubtedly be kinder to kill a person than have them live in such suffering. It would have been easier if Beloc had been mindwiped like the rest of Athos’s guards; if he had just been blank-eyed and empty-minded. But Athos had seen something in Beloc that he liked, and that had sealed his fate. Beloc was fun, he was entertaining, and Athos had always coveted that in his playthings more than anything else.
No, Holland wasn’t allowed to kill Beloc, but when it came to death Athos had said nothing about pointing him in the right direction.
“How would I do that?” Beloc asked, unable to keep the eagerness out of his voice, the hint of desperation. “Do I become like you? If I just don’t react, he’ll kill me?” He paused, and frowned again. “But he kept you alive. But that’s because you’re Antari, right? If you were like me, he would have killed you.”
If I were like you, Holland thought, I would have kept my head down.
“I imagine so,” he said instead. “He has a low tolerance for boredom. I imagine once I stopped reacting entirely he may have grown bored, but I’m not sure. He is very perceptive. He knows what to look for.”
“How do you mean?” Beloc asked.
Holland thought for a moment. How could he explain it? It was something he didn’t like to think about often himself, but it was a fact of being so close to somebody like Athos. Holland was kept by his side more often than not, and Athos had hurt him in every conceivable way over the course of seven years. Just like Holland had grown to anticipate Athos’s moods, to be able to tell what kind of violence might be coming and when, to read every single look or movement or expression, Athos had learned to read Holland in turn. There had been a time where Holland hadn’t been stoic, where he hadn’t swallowed his screams down and forced the pain back; where there had been nowhere in his mind to retreat to. Learning to become the way he was now had been a process, and while Holland possessed impeccable self-control and the process had been a quick one, it had still been a process: tangible, observable. Athos had watched it all, from beginning to end, and he was nothing if not perceptive.
“Athos will learn your new language,” Holland eventually said. “He will learn the new things that signal pain and distress. No matter how much you swallow down, there are always reactions you cannot prevent. He will learn to read each and every one, and he will take just as much satisfaction from those as he would from your screaming.” He paused again, wondering if he should complete the thought, but eventually decided it would be best to. He couldn’t give this boy false hope. There was no crueller thing. “Besides, he could simply order you to scream, if he so pleased.”
Beloc’s face darkened, the anger so briefly complete and uncontrolled that Holland was again reminded that the boy was only sixteen years old. It was odd to see such sincere rage on a face so young, to see the same hatred that had overtaken Holland’s thoughts reflected on Beloc. What had he lost? Holland wondered the same of all the guards, but even more so when it came to the ones who had been allowed to keep their minds, rare though they were. Everyone had lost something when Athos had brought them here, something that was so much more than their present. What had been in Beloc’s future that he now had to reconcile the loss of? Holland vaguely remembered a time where he had wanted to save his world; where he had thought he might just manage it. That was a distant memory now. What was Beloc leaving in the past, forever unfinished?
Holland didn’t ask. He wondered, but he never asked. There was no point. His own loss was too great to bear; he had no interest in shouldering anybody else’s.
“There’s no way to win against him, is there?” Beloc asked, his voice dull.
“No,” Holland said simply. “There isn’t. All you can do is take what you can get.”
“And what’s that?” Beloc snapped. “What’s taking what you can get, for you?”
“This,” Holland said. “When the castle is quiet. When I have no need to anticipate any summons. It is not much, but it is mine.”
“How do you know?” Beloc asked. “How do you know he won’t need you?”
“It is always a risk,” Holland admitted, “but the Danes keep surprisingly normal hours. Even monsters sleep.”
Beloc snorted, looking down at the floor again. For a long moment they were silent, the castle heavy and still around them. Beloc shifted from foot to foot again and then glanced up, looking around the small hallway – his makeshift prison for however long Athos decided to leave him there.
“I’ll find a way,” Beloc said, the determination in his voice surprising after its previous dejectedness. “I don’t care how, but I’ll find a way to escape him. If there’s a way to get myself killed, I’ll find it.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Holland said.
Beloc searched his face for a moment, before evidently deciding to believe he was sincere. Holland was, of course. He would never underestimate a person’s determination to get away from Athos, and certainly not when he considered the lengths he would theoretically go to. The fact that it was an impossibility didn’t matter. The intent was the same.
The silence fell again, and this time Holland turned, heading back down the hallway and towards the stairs. Just before he reached them he looked back, and just as he passed out of view he spotted Beloc watching him go. The boy was standing right at the end of the hallway, his hands half-raised at waist height, his fingers pressed against some invisible barrier only he could feel.