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When Royce finally found Hadrian, his first thought was that his friend was dead.
The occupants of the last two cells had been. There were half a dozen of the tiny rooms leading off the low, dark corridor. The first three were empty, though they stank of decay. The fourth held an older man who'd been dead nearly a week; the fifth a younger one who'd been the same way for perhaps three or four days. Royce lingered a moment there, trying not to breathe, to look first at the man's face, then his clothes, and then his hands. The man had, he judged, been here for a little while before he died.
It had been two days since the same captors had taken Hadrian. Two seconds was enough to kill a man; two days was more than sufficient to make sure he suffered first.
Royce knew that better than most. That was part of the problem. It was all too easy to imagine.
And for most of the first night, Royce hadn't even known anything was wrong. Hadrian might already have been dead by the time Royce even found out he was in danger, and so much more time had passed since then. He had felt every passing minute like a failure, each one of them too silent, something always missing.
He'd been so forcibly confronted with the fact that he might never see Hadrian alive again that it seemed only reasonable to think that the world would live up to his worst expectations. Since teaming up with Hadrian, somehow those expectations had been repeatedly subverted, but perhaps not even Hadrian's luck was eternal.
Royce picked the lock on the final cell. They were hardly the most complicated locks he'd ever seen, but still solid and complex enough to stop anyone who lacked the right tools and experience. Old though the little fortress might be, someone had known what they were doing when they built it.
He wished the task was both faster and far slower. He could afford no more delays if Hadrian needed help; but if it was Hadrian's body that was inside that cell, he would rather wait a lifetime to find out.
The lock clicked easily and obediently under his hands. With a light shove, the door swung open.
Hadrian.
He was slumped in the back corner of the cell. He looked strangely crumpled, like he'd not sat down but rather been dropped in that position. One of his legs was splayed out in front of him, the other bent at the knee and lying at an angle. His head hung limply down over his chest such that his hair obscured his face. His hands, chained to each other and to the wall, dangled in his lap.
He was very still. He didn't look up or move at all when the old hinges creaked and the door thudded into the wall.
The cell was cold, Royce noticed distantly. The whole corridor was cold. It was built from thick stone and set below ground level. The only illumination came from lanterns hanging on the corridor walls, barely enough to cast light into the cells and certainly not enough to warm them.
Royce took one of the lanterns before entering the cell. He could see well enough but Hadrian... Hadrian wouldn't be able to see much at all without it.
The cold would have been worse for Hadrian regardless, but it was more than that. He was wearing only his shirt and trousers, his usual jerkin and cloak both missing. And they'd even taken his boots.
It was on this strange cruelty that Royce's mind latched. Maybe it was truly striking; maybe he just didn't want to linger on the blood on Hadrian's shirt or the painful angle of his neck. His free hand, he found, had instinctively landed on Alverstone's hilt.
Why take his shoes? There was no point to it, no advantage to be gained. Nothing but a chance to eke out a little more suffering.
Royce had killed only three men so far. Stealth had been essential to his plan for as long as he could maintain it, certainly until he got to Hadrian. He had killed only those he couldn't sneak past, and lost more precious time hiding the bodies.
It wasn't enough.
There would be a reckoning for this. Like Colnora, like Medford. All that remained to be seen was whether the reckoning would end here, or whether blood would wash across the world.
He can't be dead. He can't be. Not after everything. They wouldn't dare. He wouldn't dare. He wouldn't die - not when I wasn't even there -
Royce's body crossed the room of its own accord. He found himself crouching down, setting the lamp down on the floor. One hand reached out, so devoid of a conscious decision to do so that Royce almost felt it must belong to someone else.
"Hadrian," he said, and at the same time pressed the tips of his fingers to Hadrian's chest.
Royce waited, still as stone.
Hadrian's chest moved.
He was breathing.
Expand, contract. Rise, fall. Royce should have been able to see this from across the room. It was an unfathomable oversight. Had he just panicked? Was that why he felt curiously light-headed? Hadrian breathed and breathed and Royce's own breaths felt like they were shaking him apart. He felt like he'd just fought his way out of a pool of water, and yet also like he was still drowning at the same time.
"Hadrian," he said again, more sharply, and shook him a little. "Wake up, damn you."
Maybe it was the tone. The urgency of it. For all that Royce felt he could provide an itemised list of Hadrian's faults at a moment's notice, he did usually listen to Royce in the heat of the moment. It went both ways. They respected each other's instincts when it was their field of expertise; being able to do so was half the point of having a partner. It was kind of vindicating that this apparently worked even when Hadrian was unconscious.
Hadrian shifted. The pattern of his breaths changed, growing faster and more shallow. His head rose a little, and a noise that might have started life as a sound of enquiry became a groan by the time it reached his throat.
"Hadrian."
Hadrian's head finally rolled all the way up. His eyes opened without focusing, and immediately closed again. This repeated several times, like the slow blinking of an affectionate cat, but there was nothing so reassuring about this. Hadrian always woke swiftly. To Royce, who had slept with the wariness of both predator and prey since he was a child, Hadrian could sleep disturbingly deeply - but he did have the ability to wake both quickly and absolutely that all soldiers shared. All the ones who survived their first night ambush, anyway. This fatigue and the vacancy in his eyes was disturbing.
Concussion or drugs?
When Hadrian's eyes finally settled on Royce, his face was blank. This gave Royce a moment to study the wide, dark pupils and settle on drugs as the most likely conclusion, but he also drew back his hand in the same moment. What was he going to do if Hadrian was too out of it to recognise him? There was no way he could have dragged an insensate Hadrian out of here, and much less so an awake but unwilling one - and yet they were unlikely to have time to wait for him to sober up. He would have to -
"Royce," Hadrian said.
His voice was slurred, and rasped so much that it made Royce's own throat ache to hear it. He wished suddenly that he had brought water, but he never carried anything like that when he had to move silently. There was no evidence of food or water in the cell, and he wondered how long Hadrian had been without either. Whether he'd been given anything at all.
Two days.
But Hadrian was smiling. It was a lopsided, drunk sort of smile, except that when Hadrian drank his smiles tended to take on a bitter edge. This was entirely different; he was looking at Royce like Royce was a puppy or the first warm day of summer, or - or a damn unicorn, probably.
It was ridiculous. An idiotic expression. Clearly the result of whatever he'd been dosed with.
So why was there a lump in Royce's throat that he couldn't seem to speak past?
"You're here," Hadrian said happily, as though there was anything in his present circumstances to be happy about.
Perhaps he had been given something to drink within the last day, otherwise whatever they'd dosed him with the first time must have been extremely potent. Even for Hadrian, this was too cheerful to be natural.
"And you're alive," Royce said, "if we're playing state the obvious."
His own voice sounded strange, and he had far less excuse. And even he had to admit it was unfair to mock Hadrian at the moment. But he wouldn't have said it if Hadrian was more aware, and he more in control of his own tongue. He hadn't meant to admit to any concern that Hadrian might be anything other than alive.
Hadrian seemed more to respond to the tone than the words, and his face fell a little. "I think we might be in trouble."
"Really?" Royce said. He wanted to give himself a moment to sit down, maybe put his head in his hands and just breathe for a bit, but he reached for his lock picks again instead. "What gave you that idea?"
Hadrian watched Royce work on the manacles with vague interest, while apparently also giving the question some consideration. "The bit where they hit me a bunch, I think," he said seriously. "And all the, the yelling. And," he said, as though suddenly remembering something, "you know this is the third time now? I was thinking about it. The third time."
"The third time what?"
Hadrian shook his head. "Pubs used to be sacred," he said mournfully.
Royce wondered what it said about the amount of time he'd spent with Hadrian that it only took him a few seconds to follow that incomprehensible line of thought. It was, in fact, the third time that someone had drugged Hadrian in a pub, or at least in the rooms above one. And, come to think of it, also the third time he'd ended up locked in a small space afterwards. And each of those three times had been avoidable.
That was an appalling track record. Royce was going to have to stage an intervention soon.
He released the locks on the cuffs one by one. They slipped off Hadrian's wrists easily, and he set them aside. He wanted to throw them as far away as he could, but couldn't risk the sound the iron would make on the stone. It was a peculiar impulse, though, given that he never usually had trouble channelling his anger into a weapon to wield at the right moment, patient as a blacksmith forging a blade.
"They were only able to drug you because you let them," he pointed out, tugging Hadrian's shirt up to study the damage.
It was extensive. They must have beaten him after they'd already drugged him, because Royce had never known anyone able to land this many hits on Hadrian when he was in a state to defend himself. The bruises looked painful but not dangerous; all had progressed to a deep purple, not the near-black of internal bleeding.
The worst was a wound on his upper abdomen, several inches wide. Someone had tried to stab him. Hadrian must have turned with the blow, making it into a glancing hit that hadn't penetrated his ribs; this much Royce could tell from the angle, the old clotted blood, and the evidence provided by Hadrian not already being dead.
That injury, he supposed, might predate the drugs. The innkeeper had said Hadrian had killed at least one man when they first attacked him. Perhaps this wound was a sign that he'd been caught off guard when they arrived - injured before he'd known there was a need to draw a sword.
The gash had a pink, swollen look that Royce didn't like, and the skin immediately around it was warmer than the rest. He studied Hadrian's face again. There wasn't much hope of telling whether he had a fever, not between the drugs and dehydration.
"'m sorry," Hadrian mumbled.
Royce, who had certainly not been expecting an apology, stared. "What?"
"Screwed up. An' you were already angry."
A cold feeling settled in his gut, heavy and unwelcome. "That doesn't matter."
"They had..." Hadrian hardly seemed to hear him. He was frowning, but it was clearly a struggle to concentrate; his eyes rolled a little each time he blinked like it was a struggle to reopen them. "I couldn't let them... There was a child. Two children?"
"One."
"Yeah."
"Yes, her father told me."
The innkeeper had been very forthcoming. One look at Royce's face had been enough; he hadn't even had to draw his dagger. Armed men, we couldn't stop them, sounds of a fight, the big man, your friend, he killed at least one of them but they took my daughter as a hostage, held a dagger to her throat, please don't kill me, please, we weren't involved, he saved my child...
"Oh, Royce, you didn't. It wasn't their fault."
Drugged to the eyeballs and still worried Royce had killed 'innocent' people. Even aside from Royce's tried and tested theory on the lie of innocence, that family was half the reason Hadrian was in this state.
Still... "No, I didn't," he said, neglecting to mention that he had explained with great precision exactly what he was going to come back and do to the man if Hadrian was dead. "But you could've escaped if you'd let them kill the girl."
The look that earned him was woeful enough that Hadrian might as well have been a puppy Royce had just thrown a stone at. He sighed.
"Yes, I know," he said in answer to the unspoken rebuke. They'd had this conversation enough times that he could play both sides out in his head. Hadrian couldn't have done it. He wouldn't be Hadrian if he had, and then where would they be?
"Not sorry about that," Hadrian said. "But I'm still sorry."
Again, it made no sense and yet perfect sense at the same time. Royce closed his eyes for a second.
"I said it doesn't matter." He let Hadrian's shirt fall back down. There was nothing to be done for that wound until they were somewhere safer and better supplied. "Are there any more surprises I need to know about?"
"Huh?"
"Are you hurt anywhere else?"
"Oh." Hadrian seemed to notice for the first time that his hands were free. He stared at them with every sign of fascination, then rubbed his bruised wrists. He rolled his shoulders, flexed his bare toes, then frowned. "Royce?"
"What?"
"I'm cold."
Royce's jaw clenched. He touched the back of his fingers to Hadrian's hand, where the knuckles were scraped and red. His skin was much colder than it should have been.
"Can you stand?"
Hadrian looked affronted. "I'm not that hopeless."
"I didn't mean-"
"I've been able to stand since I was this high." Hadrian indicated a height that was somewhat smaller than he could possibly have been when he was born, let alone when he gained upright manoeuvrability.
Royce didn't believe in any gods, but he was starting to think the best argument for their existence was that he'd clearly pissed one off.
"Great," he said, more to himself than Hadrian. "How is it that this is actually worse than when you're drunk? Get up."
It was a pointless effort. Between Royce, the nearest wall and Hadrian's well-meaning efforts, they managed to get him standing, but he was uncoordinated, weak, and clearly unable to walk without help.
Seeing him with so little strength was unsettling, like stepping onto what you were sure was solid ground and finding yourself sinking into a bog. Royce wanted to blame the drugs alone because that problem ought to work its way out of Hadrian's system before long, but he suspected fever and a lack of nourishment had blame in this too. Hadrian could survive on little food and rarely complained of hunger (neither of them did; if one was hungry, they both were), but he ate a lot when the opportunity arose and always seemed happier afterwards. Two days on lean or no food would have sorely depleted his energy, and the lack of water was a true danger.
Royce propped Hadrian against the wall and thought quickly. His preferred plan was out. He'd hoped to find Hadrian well enough to escape by stealth (or Hadrian's best attempt at it, anyway), without anyone realising what had happened until they were safely away. Ideally, Hadrian would have been in fighting shape too, in case they ran into trouble with that plan.
But it was clear that if Hadrian tried to get down the wall Royce had climbed to enter the fort, he'd end up with a broken neck. He'd need Royce's support just to walk, and that wasn't an option while the fortress was full of enemies. They'd make too much noise, it would be far harder to hide when necessary, and Royce would have to drop him before he could fight if they were discovered. Then he'd have to sacrifice half his focus to defending Hadrian while he was immobile or, possibly worse, while he tried to help despite being incapacitated.
Well, alright then. Even if they had escaped unseen, Royce had intended to return to repay their host anyway. Might as well get the whole thing finished now.
"Right, you're going to need to wait here," he said.
If Hadrian had been more in control of his faculties, there was no way he'd have agreed to that. As it was, he blinked, nodded, said, "Okay," and slumped back down to the floor faster than Royce could catch him.
He landed hard, but with enough coherence or luck to keep his head from cracking against the wall. Which was just as well, because a concussion on top of everything else would hardly have been helpful.
Royce redirected his hand to his own face, wondering if it was too late to try and swap for another partner. Arcadius seemed to have unexpected connections under every overturned stone; maybe he knew another ridiculously skilled swordsman raised in questionable ways who'd gone through experiences that had done unquantified damage to his psyche and still come out of it exuding kindness in a world that was nothing but cruel.
Hmm. On balance, the odds of that might not be terribly high, even for Arcadius. I guess I'm stuck with this one.
"Ow," Hadrian said plaintively. But the shock also seemed to give him some measure of clarity. "What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to clear us a path."
It was necessary, but also more than that. He wanted to. Royce was careful to avoid being driven by impulse and compulsion, but he was feeling this like a need. Like he was parched with thirst and staring at a river. Royce knew that his and Hadrian's definitions of justice differed, and probably always would, but it was his form of it that they needed today. It was the only way they could make it out of here.
Well. Royce could get back out the way he came in. He was confident of that. Alone, he could leave now and be back in the forest within ten minutes, fifteen at most if he ran into any trouble.
When had it become so automatic to think of us not me? It wasn't as simple as saying it was when he first partnered with Hadrian, or when they'd made it official a year later as Riyria. Sure, it had started during their escape from the Crown Tower, but really it had crept up on him over time until it was a given that he'd be going after Hadrian even when the idiot got himself captured on a job they never should have taken in the first place. And it was also a given - a simple fact of life - that having found him and established that he was unable to aid in his own rescue, Royce wasn't going to leave him behind.
Only a few years ago he would have done so without thinking. Hadrian was nothing but a liability right now. Everything Royce did from this point on was endangering his own life for no other reason than...
No other reason than that there was not a single other choice he could make.
Unfortunately, there was also a rather large hole in his plan, and it was presently looking at Royce with an expression of befuddled thought that he suspected Gwen would call endearing.
"You're going after Ballard," Hadrian said.
"Something like that."
"I think it's too late."
"What?"
"The ring, the one the baron described, Ballard's wearing it. I think Oliver's dead."
Royce thought about the body in the cell next door - the dark hair, the fine clothes, the faded scar on the chin. Just as their client had described.
"Yeah, I think so too."
Hadrian heard something in his tone. "You found him?"
"Reckon so."
Distress crept into the lines around Hadrian's eyes. "Was he - did he - could we have..."
Royce had estimated the young man to be dead three or four days. He wasn't sure which. If it was three, Oliver Walden had still been alive when they'd first arrived in the town. Which meant that if they'd known where to look, there had been a chance to find him alive.
Royce had expected the man's death as a likely outcome from the start, which was why he'd ensured the client agreed they would get paid for returning either with a living Oliver or his ring as proof of death. It didn't bother him either way. But Hadrian...
"I don't know," Royce said. It was honest. He truly didn't know. But that wasn't why he said it.
"You were right," Hadrian muttered. "We shouldn't have taken the job."
Guilt and regret clawed at Royce's skin. It was true, he had been right, and yet...
"Least you can get the ring back," Hadrian said. "Still get paid, right?"
Royce looked down at him and felt a sensation like pressure building inside his chest. He knew why Hadrian was talking like that; in any other circumstance, on any other day, that would be Royce's primary concern. They had a job to do, money to make and a reputation to uphold. Hadrian had made some poor choices but the contract was still salvageable, and a poor wage was better than none.
But right then, staring at his friend, Royce really couldn't have cared less about the job.
Hadrian looked like he was expecting Royce to be angry. And he was. He'd thought he was angry before, angry at Hadrian for dragging them into this mess. But then he'd got back to the inn intending to meet him and found the blood instead, and found that his previous anger was nothing to what had burned under his skin ever since. This was fury like fire, like lightning that sparked through his veins where his blood ought to be.
And it wasn't directed at Hadrian.
"If he's wearing it, I'll take it," Royce said, mostly because he wanted Hadrian to stop saying things that made it hard to breathe. "Otherwise we'll figure something else out."
"Be careful." Hadrian seemed to be really trying to get his eyes to focus properly; his right hand clenched a few times like he wanted a sword in it. "He knows about you too. Kept asking who'd sent us and who you were."
"What did you tell him?"
It was impressive, really, how disgusted a look Hadrian could muster while half out of his mind. "I told him your life story. What do you think? I told him I'd come on my own but he didn't believe me, so I said he could shove his questions somewhere painful. I don't think he liked that."
Royce found the corners of his mouth twitching up quite without his consent. The sight seemed to bolster Hadrian, who smiled back. There was something terrible about how open his face was like this. Never old to begin with, he now looked painfully young. Worst was the trust in his eyes that never wavered. It used to be another thing about Hadrian that made him angry, how easily the man trusted people. These days Hadrian was a little more cautious, but the way he trusted Royce was plain right now. It no longer made Royce angry; instead, he found it made him feel something a little like fear.
The problem with his plan was that it meant leaving Hadrian here alone. Despite still having the propensity for getting tricked by anyone capable of pulling a sad enough face, Hadrian was never usually vulnerable to violence. There had only ever been two enemies Royce had seen Hadrian lose an actual fight to, and neither of those had apparently been either human or technically alive.
But right now, he wasn't sure what would happen if Hadrian was attacked, and he didn't like that doubt at all.
He crouched down in front of Hadrian.
"Give me your hand."
Hadrian extended his palm without question. Royce took his hand and pressed Alverstone's hilt into it.
When Hadrian didn't move, Royce curled his unresisting fingers around the hilt of the dagger. He held them there, keeping Hadrian's hand in place. Hadrian's eyes had gone very wide.
"What-"
"If anyone but me comes through that door, you kill them. I mean it, Hadrian. This isn't the time for mercy. If you hesitate, they will kill you."
"This is your dagger."
By Mar, could he really leave Hadrian alone in this state? But what else could he do?
"Yes, I'm aware of that."
"No." Hadrian tried to push Alverstone back to him, but Royce withdrew his hands. "You're going to need it."
"I can manage."
"But you never..." Hadrian looked lost. It struck Royce in the same moment that the odd pallor in his skin wasn't just an effect of the low light. His face had a grey tinge and his lips were pale. "You always keep hold of your dagger. S'important to you. Really important."
"Yeah." Royce scowled at him, because he refused to find out what his face might do if he didn't. His thinking was impaired; there could be no other explanation for what he said next. "But it's not the only thing that is."
This only seemed to confuse Hadrian more. His present state seemed only suited to quite short, linear thoughts, and for the first time this was an acute relief. Royce couldn't believe that sentence had even occurred inside his brain, let alone made it out of his mouth. To have Hadrian actually comprehend it would have made him want to take the dagger back to slit both their throats.
There was so much to do. He stood up swiftly. "Remember, anyone who's not me-"
"Stab," Hadrian agreed, prodding the blade into the air before him.
It was a disturbingly weak imitation of his normal strength, and yet it made that awful feeling swell up inside Royce's chest again, pressing against his ribs until it hurt. If that feeling had a name, Royce didn't want to know it.
"Yeah. Stab. I'll be back soon."
Royce closed the door behind him and didn't look back. As he went, he coiled danger around himself like a second cloak. He focused on his anger until it drowned out everything else.
They would have killed Hadrian. That much was clear. Whether by further harm or by abandoning him in that cell; whether he was being held for information or entertainment or as bait for Royce - these details he didn't know, but they changed nothing about that fundamental truth. The men in this fortress would have killed one of the only two people in the world that Royce truly cared about. Truly needed.
They had hurt him.
They would not do so again.
Royce had once told Hadrian that he would kill anyone who took him prisoner.
He lied to a lot of people, and he was extremely good at it. But he was not in the habit of lying to Hadrian.
Another fourteen men lay dead by the time he had a dagger at Ballard's throat.
The viscount lay on his back, trembling. There was a knife embedded in his thigh, and his hands kept twitching for it; perhaps out of desperation to have a weapon, perhaps shock overriding the knowledge that to pull it free would only worsen the blood loss. Either way, the trickle of blood at his neck every time he moved kept him still.
"Please," Ballard said hoarsely. It was quite a change from the tone he'd taken when his men were still alive. "We can make a deal. I have money."
"I already have a contract."
"Who sent you? Why are you doing this?"
"Those are two different answers. I was sent by Baron Walden."
Ballard looked blank. "Who?"
"His youngest son went missing near here. We were contracted to find him, or at least learn his fate."
"I don't-"
"Not that he's paying us well. The baron's not a rich man, apparently. Much like you - another minor noble who can still own the family estate and yet call himself poor. It was barely enough to cover the travel, let alone the work involved. But my friend suffers from an excess of kindness. A terrible affliction. He felt bad for the guy and insisted we take the job."
Ballard's chest heaved under the hand and knee Royce had pressed there to keep him still. He was a strong man, built more like Hadrian than Royce, and he kept tensing like he wanted to buck Royce off. But the dagger Royce had stolen from the first mercenary whose neck he'd broken after leaving the cells was held in an unyielding grip, and clearly acted as sufficient warning; or perhaps it was the bodies Royce had carved his way through to get here that did it.
"I was angry at him," Royce said softly. "When we got here, we learned others had gone missing, and people were frightened. Your name came up more than once. And I didn't want to deal with Hadrian, so we split up - I went to look into your house, and he stayed in town to talk to people. He's better at that than me.
"I didn't want his company. That's what caused this. I've been living with that ever since. Because when I got back to the inn, having found nothing in your estate, there was blood in our room."
The body under Royce's hands went very, very still. Ballard's eyes flickered.
"Ah." Royce felt the first curl of satisfaction in his chest. "You're beginning to understand. What drew him to your attention - he asked the wrong question to the wrong person? So you sent your men after him. There was blood on the floor, on his bed, and he was gone. Do you have any idea how that felt?"
"We didn't kill him," Ballard croaked. "He's here, I can take you to him."
"Oh, I know he's alive. You're very lucky in that regard. If he was dead, I'd have a lot more time for this."
"Whatever Walden's paying you, I can double it. More. I'll make you rich. Just let me go."
"Oliver Walden is dead. I'd ask for details, but I don't think you ever knew his name - I think you rob and torment anyone who travels alone round here. That's where your money comes from. You seem to bring them back here for some sadistic entertainment when you're in the mood, or maybe when they fight back. You've set up camp in this shithole because it's miles from your estate and very hard to find. I should know - it took me far too long to find you. And I don't care about any of it."
"Look, you're only telling me this because you're willing to negotiate, I get it, that means we can-"
"No. I'm telling you all this because I want you to understand. To really understand. I once told a man that I have very few friends, and that anything rare is precious. It's still true, but I'd add to that now. Too many things fit that definition. My friends are not merely rare, they're unique. Irreplaceable. It turns out that if you aren't careful, you can end up needing certain people in your life to feel like you're really alive. It's an awful weakness, but there we are."
Royce leaned in, lowering his voice as though sharing a secret, even though they were the only two left alive in the room.
"I just want you to know that you aren't dying because of the contract, or the people you've killed here, or the gold you took. You're dying because you hurt him, and he is my friend."
"You can't do this." For all his bluster, Ballard finally sounded like what he was: prey that had just realised, on some primal level, that he was the last survivor of his pack, and the beast was still hungry. "I'm a viscount. You'll hang."
"I'll take my chances."
He must have been able to read the truth of it in Royce's eyes. Ballard finally made his move; he lifted one arm towards Royce's, meaning to force the dagger away from his throat, while raising his leg to seize the knife from it with his other hand. A desperate effort, an attempt against all the odds to survive. And a futile one.
Royce sank the dagger into his throat before Ballard's blow ever reached him. It was instinct to draw the blade across the skin in a way that kept his hand clear of the arterial spray; for a moment, Ballard shoved at him, weak, gurgling on blood, and then it was over. The cut had been deep, the death fast. His arms fell; his eyes went still. The panic and pain slipped away from his face.
There was no sound but the faint, unusually rough noise of Royce's own breaths. He leaned back from the body and felt jagged parts of himself knit back together. It was done. He'd cleared the way and settled a debt both at once. He took no pleasure in killing, and yet there was satisfaction in this. Ballard could not have been allowed to live.
He considered the man's hands, and saw the ring Hadrian had referred to. A gold signet ring set with a W, apparently an heirloom of the Walden family. Quite possibly worth more than the sum they were being paid for the job, but he knew Hadrian would want to return it anyway, to give the father closure in lieu of a living son. It wouldn't do their reputation any good to keep the thing at any rate - that was what he'd say to Hadrian when he conceded. Not a lie; not the full truth.
The ring secured, Royce retrieved Hadrian's swords. The two smaller ones had been cast aside, but the spadone given pride of place on a table; Ballard seemed to have some understanding of worth, though not nearly enough. As an afterthought, he also took Ballard's boots, which looked about the right size, and then retraced his steps through the trail of bodies laid out through the fort.
Ballard's crimes, if substantiated, would probably be enough to absolve Royce, and the baron would be likely to be on his side, but he had no intention of being found culpable for the murders - or indeed of anyone being able to say for sure that there had been any murders. He'd get Hadrian out to safety and then come back to start a fire. The walls of the fort were stone, but enough of the infrastructure was wood; old, dry wood. It would burn easily and consume all evidence of how these men had died. No one would even know a viscount was among the dead, and he didn't think anyone would be inclined to investigate too closely. Once questions started being asked, the stories that poured out of the local township would be damning in themselves.
These pleasant thoughts occupied Royce back through the silent fort down to the cells. The building was empty; there had been no servants, just the mercenaries who formed Ballard's gang of thieves and murderers. Not so hard to manage, not when this was the battlefield. A dark building full of narrow corridors and shadows was Royce's perfect hunting ground.
Working without Alverstone had been the strangest thing. He didn't think he relied on it too much, but there was certainly a reassurance in working with a weapon he knew that well, and in knowing its capabilities so well - and that those capabilities so exceeded every other blade he'd ever seen. He preferred to have it with him, he supposed, that was all.
Well - perhaps the strangest thing had been going into a fight without Hadrian at his side. It had been exactly what Royce knew how to do, but it had been years since he'd truly acted as an assassin. His skills were still sharp, but it was odd, that was all. Not his line of work any more. Not what he wanted to be doing. He didn't miss it.
He felt better the closer he got back to Hadrian, but he knew the moment he stepped into the corridor that something was wrong.
The door to the last cell was open.
Royce had closed it when he left. Not locked it, because that would have foolishly endangered Hadrian, but he knew he'd closed it.
Hadrian could have left, perhaps confused and disoriented enough to forget the plan, but Royce hadn't passed him and the fortress doors had still been closed.
He'd thought he'd found all the mercenaries.
He'd thought they were all dead.
I missed one.
If he breathed as he ran - if he thought anything at all - Royce wasn't aware of it. He was hollow, nothing but a vessel for a single silent scream, the scream he would draw from the mouth of the man who had opened that door, a mere echo of the price he would make him pay if - if -
There was blood on the floor of the cell. A body lay in it, unmoving.
For a moment, Royce could grasp no other details but that the corpse was the right size to be Hadrian.
Lifetimes passed, stretching seconds to eternity. Royce, for the first time in his life, felt sick at the sight of blood.
But the body has dark hair.
It wasn't just a trick of the light. Royce's eyes were too good for that. He processed the realisation just as someone started to stagger towards him, lantern light glinting off a white blade.
Royce leapt backwards - but he needn't have. His would-be attacker stopped short, pulling the dagger back before it came anywhere near him.
"Royce," Hadrian said. His eyes were bright and his hand was gleaming with blood where it held Alverstone. "You're back."
You're alive, Royce thought for the second time that night, but this time he couldn't say it. He wasn't sure how his voice would sound. He wasn't sure he could talk at all.
The adrenaline that had sustained Hadrian through this unexpected attack abandoned him, apparently in direct response to seeing Royce. He staggered back into the wall, but this time Royce moved fast enough to help lower him to the floor.
Hadrian didn't seem to notice. "Royce, this dagger is amazing. It really does cut through anything."
Royce looked at the body. The man had been wearing a steel breastplate through which a neat little hole had been punched right over the heart. There was a short sword lying beside him. He'd come to kill a man without armour or weapons, a man who was injured, underfed and impaired by drugs, and still it was Hadrian who'd won. Who'd survived.
Royce had failed him, but Hadrian had defended himself anyway.
"I stabbed him," Hadrian said. He sounded faintly surprised. "I think I got blood on your dagger."
"It's seen worse," Royce said, finally unsticking his throat. Indeed, barring the three men he'd killed that night in Medford, he couldn't think of a single life he was so glad the blade had taken.
Better that than Hadrian being the one lying there unmoving, staring at Royce with sightless eyes.
Hadrian still seemed troubled. He began to wipe Alverstone clean on his trousers, smearing sticky red stains on the cloth and running the risk of slicing his own leg open. Royce grabbed his hand.
"Let me."
Hadrian relinquished the dagger easily. Royce cleaned it on the dead man's cloak before tucking it away with a feeling of gratitude and fondness. He retrieved the boots he'd dropped in the doorway. He'd dumped Hadrian's swords beside them, and now resigned himself to the fact that he was going to have to be the one carrying them out of there.
"Put these on," he said, crouching down beside Hadrian again. "I don't know what happened to your cloak, but I've got the rest of our stuff in the woods near here, with the horses."
"These aren't my boots."
"I know. Call it a souvenir."
Hadrian looked at the shoes. There was an odd expression on his face. When he finally moved, it took him a long time to get them on. He fumbled the laces half a dozen times before Royce pushed his hands out of the way to tie them for him, and even then Hadrian just stared at the boots without speaking.
"I've got the ring," Royce offered, finding that he hated the silence. He didn't like it when Hadrian went quiet. He'd found this numerous times in the last few years and always got frustrated by it, given how annoying he found the man's conversation sometimes. But the last day and a half had been silent enough, and he'd been so sure that this might be it, that the conversation might be gone forever. He couldn't bear Hadrian's silence now. "We can still finish the contract. Once you're, you know. Better."
For some reason, that only made Hadrian's face crumple more.
"I really am sorry, Royce." His voice was still a raw, painful croak. "You were right. I shouldn't have pushed you into this. Wasn't enough money. We didn't help. And I got us into trouble."
It was, at last, too much. Royce found himself gripping Hadrian's shoulder, and as if given permission he'd never expected, Hadrian's hand shot up and wrapped around Royce's wrist. His grip was tight, desperate, real. Smeared with blood, but not his.
Royce's head bowed forward until his forehead pressed against Hadrian's. The skin there was still cooler than it should have been, but they could fix that. Royce could make that right. They needed to get out of here, set up camp, light a fire and see what could be done for Hadrian's injuries; make for a town, probably, to seek proper care, but they'd have to travel a little first rather than be seen in this area again if they could help it.
There was so much to do, but he gave himself a moment just to breathe, eyes screwed closed, and feel the proof that he had not lost his friend. To know that this half of the world was still breathing.
"I'll pick the next one," he said after a minute, "and we can call it square, alright? I'm not angry with you. The problem's dealt with. They won't be hurting anyone else now. Let's just get out of here."
"They're dead?"
"Yes. They're dead."
He pulled back to look at Hadrian's face, wondering if he had a future of reproachful lectures ahead of him. Or, worse, the silence of a guilty Hadrian stewing on having been the cause of lost lives.
But Hadrian just looked irritated, and he wasn't even directing the expression at Royce. "I tried to tell them you were gonna kill them," he said, shaking his head. "They just wouldn't listen."
Royce swallowed down the instinctive reaction to point out that perhaps Hadrian shouldn't have warned his captors that someone was coming to rescue him. Even Hadrian had probably only been daft enough to say that because of the drugs, and it clearly hadn't impressed Ballard given how easily Royce had broken in.
And besides, there was perhaps a very small part of Royce, tucked away somewhere deep, that was... pleased, maybe, that Hadrian had been so sure Royce was coming. Sure enough to try - not for the first time - to save the lives of his enemies by urging them to save themselves before Royce got there.
It was strange enough that Royce trusted Hadrian, even though he'd done so for years. On the one hand, it was much less remarkable that Hadrian had so much unwavering trust in Royce; it was Hadrian, after all, always inclined to see the best in people. But on the other hand, it was more remarkable, because Royce was a far harder man to trust than Hadrian. He was reasonably sure no one else in the world would unequivocally trust him except Gwen, and they'd be right not to. Not that he would willingly betray Albert or any of their other allies, but he also wouldn't put their interests above his own. Not like he would Gwen's. Not like he would Hadrian's.
And Gwen, thank fuck, did not often have to put her life in Royce's hands. Hadrian did so all the time, evidently so easily and confidently that the trust remained even when almost everything else was stripped away from him.
When he was feeling maudlin, or perhaps on the rare occasions he drank a little more than was wise, Royce had occasionally reflected that the greatest theft of his life wouldn't be one measured in gold or jewels but in the place he'd stolen for himself in their lives. It felt like a bill that would come due some day.
But not, at least, today.
"Right," he said, standing up and offering Hadrian his hand. "You're still cold, and I'm about to start a really big fire."
It took a moment, but comprehension dawned like a slow sunrise. "Old buildings are such a death trap."
Royce grinned. It was, for once, an entirely real smile. He'd spent the last thirty six hours feeling like he was dying by degrees, and now he was reborn. The guilt and grief and rage were still there, and would linger, but for now - fuck it. Riyria had made it through, and he was happy.
"Exactly," he said, and when Hadrian took his hand, Royce hauled him to his feet. "Come on. We're going home."
"Thanks, Royce," Hadrian said as he leaned into Royce's side. He was still implausibly heavy, and Royce hadn't even picked up the swords yet. This was going to be a long night. "For coming after me."
"It's taken five years to get you to this point," Royce said, aiming for flippant and knowing he missed the mark by some distance. "I'm too lazy to start over with a new partner."
Hadrian laughed. It sounded rusty after two days, but it was still a bright sound in the bleak cell. "I wouldn't want to put you to any trouble. Guess I'll have to stay with you, then."
"There are worse fates, I suppose."
But few better, Royce decided, as Hadrian laughed again, and he allowed himself another smile as he led his friend to the door.