The healer dropped the jar.
It hit the stone with a dull crack instead of shattering, salve smearing across the floor like something wounded. He stared at his own empty hands, fingers still curved around an object that wasn't there anymore.
Imann watched him. In all the visits, all the treatments, the man's hands had never once failed him. Now they shook — barely, a tremor like a leaf catching wind too faint to feel.
"Pick it up," Imann said.
The healer didn't move.
"What happened?"
The torch outside the bars popped and settled back into its rhythm. The healer's breath came fast, shallow, held together by will alone.
"They took Selvic," he whispered.
---
The name hit Imann in the chest before his mind caught up — a tightness spreading from his sternum, down through his shoulders, into the numb fingers of his left hand.
"When?"
"Last night. Before the horns. Before the city woke."
The healer bent at last to retrieve the jar. His fingers closed around it, gripped too hard, then relaxed. He wouldn't look at Imann.
"I was in the barracks, treating a guard's cut hand. Six of them came in. King's personal guard — not soldiers, not knights, men who answer only to the crown. They went straight to Selvic's quarters. I heard the door break. I heard—" He stopped. His throat worked. "Then nothing. Just chains. Then silence."
Imann's hands tightened around his own chains, the iron biting into grooves already worn there. He welcomed the pain. It anchored him.
"Why?"
The healer set the jar down without opening it and sat back on his heels, looking at Imann with the eyes of a man who'd seen something he couldn't unsee.
"Leris," he said. "They found him this morning. In the tent where he was healing. Where he was supposed to live."
"He was already dying."
"He wasn't." The healer's voice sharpened. "He was speaking. Asking questions. I treated him myself two days before the march — the skull fracture was severe, the bleeding inside his head I couldn't fully stop, but he was stable. Conscious. He asked me for water. He asked about the boy."
Imann's breath caught.
"He asked about me?"
"If you'd eaten. If you'd slept. If the guards were treating you like a person." The healer laughed once, a broken sound. "I told him you were alive. That was all I knew. He closed his eyes and smiled. I thought he was sleeping."
The torchlight flickered across his face, and for a moment he looked older than the stone around them.
"This morning they found him cold. The head wound had reopened — blood on the pillow, on his chest. The healers who examined him called it natural. Expected. The King signed the report himself."
"But?"
He reached into his satchel and drew out something small — a strip of linen, stained dark.
"I went back after they moved the body, to collect my instruments. Found this under the cot, caught on a splinter."
Imann took it. Rough, military-grade cloth, the kind used for bandages. The stain wasn't blood — something older, mixed with the smell of oiled leather. But it was the seam that caught his eye. Frayed. Reinforced stitching, the kind used on a commander's gauntlet cuff.
Selvic's kind.
Something was caught in the fibers. Small. Hard. He pulled it free.
A tooth fragment — the tip of a molar, cracked at the root, stained with dried blood.
"Leris's?" Imann asked.
The healer didn't answer. He didn't have to.
---
The fragment weighed nothing in Imann's palm, and yet it carried the weight of everything — forty-three bodies, a stone falling from his hand, a man's winter-river eyes asking to be finished.
Selvic had finished him. Not with a blade's mercy. With his hands, in the dark, while Leris lay healing and smiling and asking whether the boy who'd spared him had eaten.
Imann's stomach turned. He bent forward, chains rattling, and dry-heaved into the space between his knees. Nothing came up — there was nothing left in him but bile and a rage gone cold enough to burn.
The healer didn't touch him. He just watched the convulsions wrack Imann's ribs and throat, a sound closer to something breaking than something human.
When it passed, Imann wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, the tooth still curled in his fist.
"Why?" His voice came out ruined.
"I don't know."
"The King knows."
"The King signed a report calling it natural. Expected." The healer met his eyes. "But he also took Selvic in chains before dawn — before the report was even inked. So he knows something the paper doesn't say."
"Or he ordered it."
The healer's jaw tightened. "Or that."
---
They sat in silence while the torch outside guttered lower. Whatever ritual had existed between them — the healer working, Imann enduring — the tooth in his palm had shattered it.
"They're moving you," the healer finally said.
"When?"
"Tonight. After I leave."
"Where?"
"No one knows. The King doesn't share his maps with healers." He paused. "But I heard the guards in the corridor. 'Old prison.' 'Below the old walls.' 'Where the stones remember.'"
Imann looked from the tooth to the healer's face. "Why tell me this?"
The healer stood slowly, his knees cracking, straightening like a man who'd spent too many years bent over wounds that wouldn't heal.
"Because Leris asked about you," he said. "A man who asks if his enemy has eaten doesn't deserve to die with a gauntlet shoved in his mouth. And because—" He stopped. His throat worked again. "He saved my son once. At Thornridge. A horse went down on top of him, and Leris pulled him free with his own hands. I owed him a debt I could never repay. Until now."
He gathered his satchel and paused at the door without turning around.
"I've treated kings and commanders and boys who had no business on a battlefield," he said. "I've watched mercy die in this kingdom more times than I can count. I'm tired of watching."
"Keep the tooth," he added. "Bury it. Swallow it and let it cut you from the inside — I don't care. But remember what it means. The man who spared you was killed by the man who walked beside you. And the King took one of them in chains while the other rots in a tent under a lie."
The door closed. The key turned. His footsteps faded down the corridor.
---
Imann sat in the dark — not the cell's dark, the torch still crawled thin fingers of light through the bars, but the dark that had lived inside him since his father's head fell into the mud. Since the stone dropped from his hand. Since the healer whispered *they took Selvic* and something in him finally understood the war had never ended. It had only changed shape.
He opened his palm. The tooth sat there, small and white and stained — a piece of a man who'd smiled at the news his enemy had been fed. He closed his fingers around it and didn't weep. That had already happened, in front of the healer, in the breakdown that left him hollow.
Now there was only cold. Clarity. The understanding that mercy, in this kingdom, wasn't a luxury for the living. It was a sentence.
His father had shown mercy. Dead. Leris had shown mercy. Dead. Imann had shown mercy. Chained. The pattern wasn't subtle. It was carved into bone.
---
The guards came without warning — three of them, faces hidden, hands efficient. They unlocked his chain from the floor ring and hauled him up before his legs remembered how to hold him.
He stumbled. No one caught him. They let him find the wall, then shoved him forward.
"Walk."
He walked past cells holding shapes too still to be living and too warm to be dead, past stone scarred with generations of names carved by men trying to leave something behind. He didn't read them. He already knew what they said.
*I was here. I existed. Remember me.*
---
The courtyard he was dragged into held open sky. Stars — the first he'd seen since the battlefield, since the world had narrowed to mud and the sound of his father's head striking the earth. They stared back at him, indifferent, unchanged.
They chained his wrists to a ring in the cart's floorboard. Rough wood against his legs, cold air biting through his tunic. A horse snorted. Harness jingled. The cart lurched into motion.
They passed through streets still celebrating — wine spilling from windows, laughter off the stone, a woman somewhere singing a song he didn't know, her voice unbearably alive. He pressed the tooth harder into his palm.
The celebration fell away. Cobblestones gave way to dirt, dirt to gravel, gravel to something that crunched underfoot like bone. An iron gate opened, heavy and final, and they descended — not stairs, a ramp, spiraling into a dark that swallowed the torchlight before it could reach the walls.
The air thickened, grew colder, pressed against his chest like a hand.
The cart stopped. They pulled him out onto ground so cold it rang like metal underfoot. A door of ancient black wood, banded in steel gone the color of dried blood, opened with a sound like a sigh.
The cell beyond was smaller than the last. Colder. Frozen earth instead of stone, dusted with frost that caught the torchlight like broken glass.
They shoved him in, stripped the wrist chains, and replaced them with a single cuff around his ankle, bolted to a ring set shoulder-height in the wall — high enough that the chain allowed only a crouch, or standing bent like something less than a man. No position in that cell didn't punish him.
The door shut. The slot slid closed.
Darkness. Complete.
---
Imann sat in earth so cold it felt like metal against his palms. He couldn't see his hands, the walls, the chain — only feel them, by touch and cold and the weight of iron.
He opened his fist. The tooth was still there. Small. Hard. A piece of a man who'd smiled at news his enemy had been fed.
He brought it to his lips — not a kiss, not a prayer, just held it there and breathed air that tasted of iron and old water and something deeper, earth that hadn't seen sunlight in centuries.
Somewhere, water dripped. Somewhere, a man coughed. Not close. Not far. Just there, in the stone, in the cold.
Imann turned toward the sound. "Who's there?"
Silence.
Then: "No one."
The voice was old. Tired. Familiar enough to catch his breath.
"Selvic?"
A long pause — long enough to count heartbeats.
"The boy who spared the blade," the voice said. Not a question. A recognition. "I wondered when they'd bring you down here."
Imann's fist closed around the tooth until it cut into his palm. "Why did you kill him?"
Another pause. Then, through the dark: "Because he asked about you. Because he smiled. Because mercy in this kingdom spreads like disease, and I couldn't let it reach me."
Imann pressed his hand to the thin, crumbling wall between them. Cold seeped through it like breath.
"They put us together," he said. "They know we can talk."
Selvic laughed — dry, broken. "They don't know anything. These walls were laid before silence was invented, before anyone learned words could cut. They think stone is deaf. They've forgotten prisoners have nothing but time — and time teaches you to listen."
The water dripped on. And Imann, for the first time since the cell door closed, understood exactly what war he was still fighting.