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The ties were supposed to be decorative, but Icanthus had struggled against them, and the menservants who had been in charge of binding him had quickly worn out their last nerves. The resulting mess was lopsided and ugly. He could feel it in the way the ropes dug into his skin, making his arms and legs go strangely numb, even if he couldn't see it. The ties had forced his head low between his knees, and he'd been blindfolded before that.
He could tell he was in a palanquin now by the familiar shift and sway as he was carried — even worse, an open one; he could clearly smell smoke on the air, the burning houses in the lower fortress, the sickly-sweet scent of unburied bodies. If he hadn’t been so afraid, and so angry, and in so much pain, he might have had room left to feel a little humiliation at being paraded in an open palanquin through his own damn fortress in nothing but his skin and some too-tight cord and the hair ornaments that now felt only like an insult without the rest of the formal dress meant to go with them. Mostly, though, he was just desperate to get the whole wretched business over with.
The wrapping over his ribs was too tight. Each breath felt like it was being cut off prematurely. As the numbness spread and tingling began to set in, breathing became more and more difficult. The rattling of the gate chain matched the stuttering pace of his heart.
The air outside the fortress walls still had the acrid scent of burning to it, but it was fresher. Bellikaur's besieging army hadn't suffered the same losses as the city had—and they'd been free to bury their dead in the surrounding countryside, Icanthus supposed with an entirely unwanted spike of hilarity.
The handoff… went. The idiot regent's man, who had clearly been picked for his slight fluency in the invaders’ tongue and not for his eloquence, spoke a bit haltingly about the symbolic surrender of their first prince, and then Bellikaur made a noise and the palanquin lurched abruptly, tipping Icanthus out the side to land on the packed ground. He cracked his head hard enough that his vision went white, and he had the distinct, frustrated thought that apparently, everything could get worse. He even failed to swoon or black out. What a stupid day.
At least the blindfold slipped a little as he tried to turn his face out of the dirt, letting him peer up at the central figure looming over his body. Icanthus's initial glimpse of the man being used as a tool to steal his throne was blurry and interrupted by bright spots of pain, so the sole impression he got was of someone wide and stout as a water barrel, and scowling.
"Yes, I also hate this," Icanthus said. Or tried to say. His words slurred awkwardly, and came out in a jumbled connection of sounds.
Bellikaur turned back towards the regent's man and his translator and said something, gesturing down at Icanthus. Probably why are you giving me an angry grown man in a tangle of rope instead of the money I specifically asked for,which was fair enough.
"Whatever you please," the regent's man said hurriedly, not even waiting for the translator to render the question in a language Icanthus could understand — which, he supposed, was as good a reminder as any of how very little agency he had in the proceedings. "He is proof of our submission — you may show him off to others, or kill him, or use him to warm your bed. You are an avenging god, and he is your sacrifice."
Icanthus grimaced as the translator worked to get that lovely message across. It apparently involved some back and forth, and at the end, he must have accepted, because the regent's man began praising his generosity, and the entire party started backing away, leaving Icanthus lying trussed on the ground, stripped and snared and gasping, a beached fish being abandoned by the tide.
It had been a very long two days, and that was the excuse Icanthus was sticking to to explain his flinch as Bellikaur reached for him. The flinch wasn't that useful, even; he couldn't move in the ropes, so he just sort of jerked all over like a horse trying to shake a fly free, and then laid there hot-faced with a throbbing head. Bellikaur touched him again, a dry, callused hand rubbing down the line of his bare-except-for-the-rope leg, and making soothing noises like Icanthus really was a horse.
Icanthus's breaths were coming out short and sharp. Bellikaur's thick fingers dug into the bruised flesh under one of the ropes, where several strands had bunched together to cinch painfully tight around the upper part of his leg, and he hissed out through his teeth. There was a dull increase in pressure, though he was too numb to tell more clearly what was happening, and then the rope snapped open, releasing his thigh from one of the many close-set loops they'd lined it with, and the release was somehow worse than the pressure had been in the first place. He must have screamed. Bellikaur swore — unmistakable in any language — and picked Icanthus up, turning him over on his other side and working a businesslike hand under the thickest twist of cord around the seam of his thigh, where the ropes dug harshly into the tender place between his ass and his thigh before meeting in a painfully hard tangle between his legs. The back of Bellikaur’s knuckles brushed over Icanthus's folds in passing, and Icanthus flinched hard and sucked in a sharp, short breath, but at least Bellikaur didn't try to shove his fingers in. One up on the damn regent. Though if he was waiting for Icanthus to get wet, then he'd get impatient quite quickly — and seemingly he did, because after a moment, and a few more muttered curses and aborted tugs to the cords, Bellikaur shouted something, and feet started running all over the place. Eventually, someone else came over to pluck at his ropes, speaking in low tones, and under the edge of the slipping blindfold, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a lean, lanky woman come around to squat near Icanthus's head.
“Idiots that brought you kept you tied too tight for too long,” he heard her say, and her accent was very strong but still, mercifully, intelligible. “I am Vesta, that idiot is Bellikaur, and the doctor is Lodan. He says it will hurt very much to cut you free, and if you move — move too fast, I mean — they will cut you and not the rope. He also says if you are tied for much longer, your arms and legs will die. Can you be still?”
What a bleak fucking prospect. On principle, Icanthus disliked being asked to consent to his own humiliation, which had been the main point of disagreement with the regent that had gotten him stripped and bound and dragged out as a sacrificial lamb in an open palanquin in the first place, but in this particular instance he had to admit he needed to be free of the ropes.
“I’ll be still,” he rasped, struggling for air. It was a little easier now that he was sprawled on his side instead of kneeling with all the blood rushing to his head, but he still felt dizzy and sick and short-of-breath, and at least in that moment, he’d rather lie still of his own accord than be forced with heavy hands on his bare skin. “I’ll be still,” he repeated. “Please. My ribs — I can’t — can’t breathe —”
Foolish, maybe, to think that they might care, but Vesta sat back on her heels and said something to the other two in their own tongue, and a moment later he felt the tightest of the loops of rope around his chest dig in a little more sharply and then go slack all at once. Two more followed in close succession, and the harness slowly unraveled until there was only a loose net of sloppy knots dangling from the too-tight noose at his throat. Then he heard the rasp of a serrated knife sawing at the knots forcing him to bend double over his knees, and the pressure eased slowly, first on one side and then the other. Icanthus had resolved to hold still even when the bindings were loosened, partly because he had the vague sense trying to move his cramped muscles would only hurt even worse and partly because at least when he was curled over himself like a turtle no one could see his bare chest very well, but almost at once someone had plucked the loose blindfold from his head, and then firm hands were at his shoulders, forcing him to sit back —
Cruel, to make him be still while they groped at him, with the threat of the knife or the lingering pain of the bindings to force him into obedience, but it was what he’d been surrendered to bear —
It did hurt to be moved, but that was all. To his surprise, and reluctant gratitude, Bellikaur had drawn his own cloak from his shoulders and draped it over Icanthus’s, bunched around the neck to hang down over his chest while leaving his back bare enough for that sharp little knife to work carefully at the web of ropes dragging his arms back painfully tight behind him. The needle-like prickle of blood rushing back into the deadened limbs made him groan through his teeth, but the bastard sadist of a doctor only grinned at him and mimed opening and closing his hands. Icanthus did his best, on the argument that disobedience would definitely leave him worse off, but it was nearly enough to make him scream, and his fingers simply wouldn’t answer him.
The doctor didn’t seem pleased at that; he exchanged a few sharp words with the other two, and then Vesta was kneeling beside him again, a frown settling between her eyebrows. “Lodan says you may have, uh, hurt. Long hurt, that he cannot fix. He thinks not, but he wants you to stay here, tonight and tomorrow, so he can know and not, uh, not just think. Yes?”
“Yes,” Icanthus rasped, because there was no other answer. It sounded almost like Vesta thought they would have wanted to let him go sooner if they’d had a choice, but her grasp of his language was clearly not as strong as he’d thought, and it was possible there was a misunderstanding there. Either way, he was already resigned to the idea, and so far, Bellikaur had been at least a minor improvement over the regent, so he would take what he had and be grateful.
“They will cut the ropes on your legs now, and then you rest,” Vesta informed him matter-of-factly, and Icanthus gritted his teeth and forced himself to nod. As little as he might like to have Bellikaur and his doctor digging around between his legs, it wasn’t as though he had the grip or coordination to cut any of the bonds himself, so there was nothing to do but take it. To his relief, Bellikaur at least seemed disinterested in toying with Icanthus while he was too floppy and dead-limbed to either cooperate or struggle entertainingly, and there was a brisk efficiency to his movements as he sawed at the cords folding Icanthus’s legs under him. The pain rose slowly, a horrible needling prickle that went on and on and made him shudder with the desperate desire to crawl out of his own skin to get away from it, but Icanthus told himself that if he could feel pain it likely meant the limb would recover in time — if he was allowed.
The last of the ropes came free, finally, and Bellikaur grumbled something that at least sounded pleased, and drew the end of the cloak farther over Icanthus’s body. In a moment Vesta was back at his head again, peering down at him with a vaguely sympathetic expression. “You can rest now,” she informed him, and Icanthus barely had time to think what, here in the fucking dirt?before she added, “Bellikaur’s tent is good, yes?”
Well, really, what did he expect? “Yes,” Icanthus agreed, quietly, and did not flinch as, at a nod from Vesta, Bellikaur crouched to scoop him up like a yearling goat and began striding off toward their camp. They did draw eyes as they went — how could they not — but at least from what Icanthus could tell, there were no leering comments directed at them. Bellikaur must care enough about his own dignity to take a heavy hand with his cohort, and they seemed to know enough not to try to tease him, and Icanthus by extension. It might even mean that, since it seemed that Bellikaur wasn’t immediately interested in torturing him by any means available, he might also keep Icanthus for himself without passing him around his entire camp for their pleasure, which was a small relief but a relief all the same.
Bellikaur’s tent was mostly distinguishable from the others by being large enough to accommodate a writing desk as well as a heap of furs and a travel chest, and, of course, by the guard stationed outside, who raised her eyebrows at Icanthus huddled in Bellikaur’s arms but made no comment. Bellikaur shouldered in under the tent flap and deposited Icanthus on the bedrolls, and then, as Icanthus was just starting to brace himself for the harsh hands spreading his thighs or knotting in his hair, he drew the cloak fully over Icanthus and patted his shoulder almost companionably. Then he was gone, leaving only the flap of the tent swaying behind him and the faint sounds of movement in the camp beyond.
Everything hurt — Icanthus’s body, of course, but his pride, and his spirit, and all the hopes he’d had when he’d reached his first coming-of-age and begun to involve himself more in the governance of the fortress. He’d still been eight months from his full majority when the first reports of the invaders reached them, and then he’d had only six scant weeks struggling to fend off the regent’s scheming on one hand and the besieging army on the other, and in the end — well, the bastard regent had finally gotten the better of him. He’d made enough deals with Icanthus’s nobles to gain support for the idea of handing over Icanthus as part of the surrender, and when Icanthus had stood his ground and refused to let himself be tamely carted off to leave the line of succession empty again, the regent had used the threat of the invading army on their doorstep and a healthy dose of bribery to convince his entire nobility to look the other way when he had Icanthus confined to his rooms. He’d had his sport with Icanthus as the arrangements were made, and of course no one had come to Icanthus’s defense in that either — the servants knew which way the wind lay, and Icanthus didn’t bother begging for their help after the first miserable day.
So far, Bellikaur had been kinder than the regent, but Icanthus knew better than to trust that. The regent had been kind too, before Icanthus had chosen a man’s name and a man’s dress for himself, before his older brother had been lost at sea returning from a visit to their neighboring islands — but all that had changed when Icanthus had become the crown prince, and showed no signs of returning to the quiet, biddable young princess he had been as a child. Bellikaur might be pleased with Icanthus’s exhausted obedience for the moment, but when his patience and his pity ran out, it would be a heavy burden to bear.
It was dark, and most of the feeling had returned to Icanthus’s limbs, when he finally heard heavy footsteps approaching the tent and the flap rolled back to reveal Bellikaur looming in the entryway, with the blue-violet splash of dusk silhouetting his huge frame as an unreadable figure of shadow. Icanthus drew his legs in on himself reflexively, acutely conscious of how little the cloak did to shield him, but Bellikaur only stood aside to let his translator come in on his heels with a lantern, and then both of them squatted down across from him. Bellikaur was carrying something large and round, curved like a shield on both sides, and then to Icanthus’s surprise he took the top off to reveal a large earthenware dish full of some indistinct food that sent up a sudden burst of rich, aromatic steam.
“Eat,” Vesta said without preamble, gesturing at the dish, as Bellikaur grunted a vague agreement and tore off a chunk of bread covered with some sort of sauce and indistinct chunks. “It is, uh. Bread. Meat. Egg. Spice. You can eat that?”
“Yes,” Icanthus agreed, a little hoarse. “Thank you.” It felt a little surreal to be sharing a pleasant meal with his captors as though they were friends, but he was hungry enough that he wasn’t going to complain. The bread was thin and firm, charred a little on the bottom, but the top was soaked through with a rich, tangy sauce that tasted vaguely of duck, and a heavy dusting of chili powder and foraged leeks. The duck and the leeks were probably stolen from one of the outlying farms that had been abandoned when the invaders came, and maybe it made Icanthus a bad prince, but he couldn’t find it in himself to care much. Then again, the regent had taken his title and his responsibilities from him anyway, so maybe it didn’t matter if Icanthus felt guilty about eating the fruits of their pillaging or not.
They ate in awkward silence for some time, until the bread was finished and Icanthus was looking a little longingly at the scraps of sauce left at the bottom of the dish. Bellikaur let out another of the grunts that passed for speech with him, and, to Icanthus’s surprise, offered him a spoon and nudged the dish to him.
“So,” Vesta said, as Icanthus scraped the last of the leeks out of the bottom of the bowl with a click of bone against earthenware, “you are better? All hands — both hands good? Both feet?”
“Good,” Icanthus said, a little warily, but it was true — he was stiff and sore and he knew he’d have some truly fantastic bruises and scrapes in the morning, even setting aside whatever they sport they wanted to make of him next, but he didn’t think there’d be any lasting hurt. Vesta made a pleased sound, and beside her Bellikaur nodded as well.
“Good,” she agreed. “Bellikaur wants to talk to you about what comes next, for you and for us. You can do that?”
“Yes.” There wasn’t another answer, and talking wasn’t… it wasn’t worse things.
There was a short back-and-forth between Vesta and Bellikaur, in their own tongue, during which Icanthus set the dish aside and regretted that it was probably beneath even what little dignity he had left to lick out the last traces of the sauce. He’d been so hungry, though; he hadn’t gone so long without a square meal since the ritual fast for his first coming-of-age, and he’d been half-catatonic with exhaustion at the end of that. After a minute or so, they seemed to come to some sort of consensus, and Vesta turned to him with a suddenly serious look on her face.
“He, uh, wants me to tell you, and tell your people, that he accepts your surrender,” she said, which was a promising start for the fortress, but less promising for Icanthus himself. There seemed to be more, though, and after a moment’s thought Vesta continued, slower, “We are not saying no, to the ritual. You understand? We agree on that. But the bargain was for gold, not a man’s life, and he still needs the gold. If he cannot pay his warriors, they will be unhappy, and the peace will —” she mimed a snapping motion — “and you do not want that, and we do not want that, but it will come, unless he has gold to pay them their, uh, to pay them what they ought to have. You see?”
So not only was Icanthus personally going to be condemned to the worst sort of cruelty imaginable, but he wasn’t even going to be buying any sort of peace with his pain. It would simply be a very short lifetime of senseless, useless agony, and then Bellikaur and his raiders would go straight back to pillaging and murdering, and it would all have been for nothing. Anger and fear warred in Icanthus’s chest, and eventually the fear won out.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and kept his voice as low and soft as he could, where really all he wanted to do was shout, and hit something, and maybe drive a knife through the heart of his bastard regent. “I want to help. I want to give you the coin you asked for. But I can’t — like this, what can I do for you? I have nothing to give, now.” It hurt his pride a little to admit to it, but maybe, if he could convince them their quarrel was with the regent, he could at least convince them it wasn’t the fault of the common people?
There was a quick murmur of translation going back the other direction. He wasn’t sure whether or not it was a relief when Bellikaur snorted and waved a hand at him, obviously dismissive even before Vesta turned back to him and said, in tones that were clearly meant to be reassuring, “Of course we do not think you can pay us, no need to fear.”
Icanthus considered bristling at that, but — well, after he’d been handed over trussed and naked and clearly meant as nothing better than a toy for the warlord’s bed, it would have been ridiculous to try to stand on his dignity. They all knew what he was good for, now; no sense wasting breath or goodwill in arguing about it. He nodded and ducked his head instead.
Bellikaur was saying something else in a low rumble, glancing between Vesta and Icanthus in a rather nerve-wracking way. It was shorter this time, or the message was simpler, because Vesta sounded more confident when she continued, “We will feed you again tomorrow, and give you, uh, clothing, and then maybe tomorrow night we help you go back to the city when it is dark? And you can tell the prince what we say, and this whole —” she said a word in their tongue that, judging by her grimace and tone, might have been farce or foolishness or filth — “can stop. It has already gone on much longer than anyone wants, yes?”
Icanthus stared at them, baffled. “But — I am the prince,” he said after a long moment, and was not reassured when Bellikaur made an impatient little motion and said something else, this time not looking away from Icanthus once. There was something half-impatient, half-earnest in his voice, accompanied by a gesture between them, and almost at once Vesta was nodding and taking up the thread of the conversation again.
“He says he knows; we agree on the ritual, yes? We know what it means; what is the word —? What it represents. We agree, and outside the tent we pretend for the peace. But he says in here, man to man —” she made the same gesture as Bellikaur, a quick flick of her wrist with the hand held flat like a knife-edge between Icanthus and Bellikaur, “we can talk honestly, yes? You are the, uh, how do you say? You stand for him, your prince. His pair — no, wrong word. His double?”
Icanthus couldn’t help the miserable little laugh that bubbled out of him. “I wish they had sent a double,” he said thoughtlessly, and then regretted it when the companionable warmth slid off Vesta’s face even before she turned to translate to Bellikaur in a few short words. Just as swiftly, the good humor drained out of his expression too. He said something short and sharp to Vesta, this time with much stronger gesticulation, and the look he shot toward Icanthus carried a frown with it this time.
“He says, he asks if you are telling the truth,” Vesta said, “because he did not think the lord of the city could be — eh — what is the word? Born like me, made like you?”
Anger rippled through Icanthus like a shockwave at that, tight and hot and entirely imprudent, but it had been a very long two days and exhaustion made him reckless. “You think I’m too unnatural to rule, then?” he snapped, “Or that a good prince should know his own mind, and I must not, if I want to change such a thing? Let me tell you, it wasn’t a lack of decisiveness that got me into this position —”
“Peace,” Vesta said very quickly, wide-eyed, waving her hands, “peace, peace, no, not like that, I am sorry.” She paused, as Bellikaur added something with a wry sort of laughter that made Icanthus’s hackles rise. He’d already been looked down on enough by his own nobles for it; he’d had to fight off all the accusations of fickleness and double-mindedness and duplicity for years even before his first coming-of-age, and in the end it had been the regent’s greatest tool in persuading the nobles of his court to send him off to the slaughter. To have this great hulking bastard who had clearly never had to deal with a moment’s discomfort in his own skin laughing at him for it made Icanthus angry enough to spit.
It was a brief exchange, and then Vesta turned back to him, hands spread peaceably. “We are sorry,” she said. “Only, Bellikaur says that he had heard that the lord of the city was much older than you, and he had heard enough about the coin the lord spent on horses and drink and women for his bed, and heard how he carried on with them there, and he says he had thought he should have heard different rumors if the prince was — you know, like —” she flicked her hand again in the little knife-blade gesture between Bellikaur and Icanthus, but the clear apology in her voice did very little to settle Icanthus’s feathers now that they were up.
“That’s my bastard regent, not me,” Icanthus snapped, “and even if it hadn’t been, I don’t go around announcing what I am to every itinerant gossip-monger! I should have been happier for the entire world to forget, until my fucking regent had me stripped naked and paraded through the whole fucking city —” and then his mind caught up with him and he stopped short, squinting at Bellikaur. “Wait. Like what?”
It was Bellikaur who spoke this time, not waiting for Vesta, and he was grinning broadly this time as he raised his hand again and made that same flat-handed gesture again, flicking his wrist between them. “You,” he said, heavy but clear, “and me. Same. Yes?”
”How?” Icanthus demanded, baffled and with the wind very thoroughly taken out of his anger all at once. He couldn’t be — Bellikaur’s voice was a little rough, maybe, but it was deeper than Icanthus’s would ever be, no matter how much he practiced, and there was a clear shadow of dark stubble on his chin —
“Lodan is a very good doctor,” Vesta explained, as Icanthus boggled at her. Until then his idea of being a good doctor had been restricted to not killing half your patients of sepsis, but clearly wherever Bellikaur was from, they had different categories for these things. “We really are very sorry. We didn’t know, about your regent, and about you.”
The fight had mostly drained out of Icanthus by now, leaving only the exhaustion. He couldn’t say it’s all right, because it wasn’t, and I accept your apology was stiff enough to be ridiculous when he was still sitting there naked except for Bellikaur’s cloak, with an empty serving dish between them that he still very, very badly wanted to lick. “Then, what will you do with me now?” he asked, hoping it came out less petulant and weary than he felt.
There was some quiet back-and-forth between Bellikaur and Vesta, once she had relayed the question to him, and it went on long enough that Icanthus was beginning to be a little nervous. It was a few minutes before Vesta finally turned back to him, sitting a little straighter and folding her hands in her lap more formally than she had before.
“Bellikaur says of course we can keep holding your city under siege,” she said, and before Icanthus could protest that he wanted no such thing to happen and hadn’t they just said they wanted a peace, she added, “and he says then you can be lord of a pile of ash, if you like. But he also says, if you like, we can leave and bring you with us, and he will tell the war-band we need a better plan before he can pay them. Then we will come back in a season or two, after you have gotten as much of Lodan’s doctoring as you like, and it will be easier to kill your horrible regent, and you will pay us and we will go away again and everyone will be happy. Except your horrible regent,” she added, enough of an afterthought that Icanthus choked on a little laugh.
There was something appealing in it — not least at the idea of getting a little of his own back from the regent, after those two horrible days of reaching hands and casual cruelty — but something held him back. “I would feel like I was abandoning my people,” he admitted, feeling in equal parts foolish for showing that much sentiment at all, and guilty for not showing more.
Vesta’s face scrunched a little on itself, and Bellikaur’s followed suit when she translated quickly for him. There was still a frown between his eyebrows when he began to speak, but he seemed strangely unwilling to meet Icanthus’s eyes, as though he was uncomfortable with whatever he was saying — and after a few short exchanges, Vesta turned back to him and said, just as awkwardly, “He says… ah. He says it is not his choice, and you may do as you like and he will not tell you how to live. But he also says that no one among your people told them to stop when you… were being brought through your fortress to him. That no one tried to help you or to say it was badly done.” Icanthus’s cheeks flushed at the memory, shame and anger welling up together — but Vesta was still going on, “He says he admires the care you have for them. But they will be happier to have you again if you leave them with your regent for a turn of the seasons, yes?”
As Icanthus, a little startled, was considering that point, Bellikaur added something quickly in his own tongue, and this time he didn’t look away from Icanthus as he spoke. There was a warmth in his dark eyes that went beyond the light of the lantern between them, and a sort of gentleness that was closer to brotherhood than condescension this time.
“He says also… it is not a fault, or a failing, to take the time to do what you must, to feel that your skin is your own again. And if you can do that better with us than among your own people, you will be welcome for as long as you choose. Lodan is a very good doctor,” Vesta added, as if the proof wasn’t sitting there before Icanthus’s very eyes.
They made it seem so easy; as though all Icanthus had to do was to tell them what he’d been dreaming of for so many years, and they’d see it happen. “And… when he’s done, when he’s made me like you, will I… will I be what a prince ought to be? Enough for them?” He was aware he sounded like a child, begging for reassurance that it would all be all right in the morning, but what they were suggesting was so impossible —
Instead of translating, though, Vesta only hooked a shoulder at him, and it was Bellikaur who said, slow but clear, “Not will. We are now.” He lifted his hand again — palm flat, fingers straight, thumb tucked in line with them in a gesture Icanthus was rapidly becoming familiar with. But instead of the quick flick between them, Bellikaur paused, and held his hand there making encouraging grunts until Icanthus realized what he was waiting for and brought his own hand up to mirror the gesture. “Same,” Bellikaur told him gently, warmly, and pressed their palms together to move their hands as one. “Yes?”
“If you say so,” Icanthus said, laughing a little because otherwise he was afraid he’d cry, but when Bellikaur only cocked a head at him uncomprehending, he swallowed hard and added, “Yes. You and me, the same.”
“Good,” Bellikaur said firmly, and finally Icanthus began to believe him.