Fantasy short. The fae king of Crystal City takes his most recent assassin hostage, and works to change his loyalties.
King Capulet has always had a dangerous affection for assassins, and this one is more fascinating than any other he’s ever been able to enjoy.
Rated M. M/M. 13k. Dark fantasy, manipulation, and interrogative techniques — note content warnings for blood and violence, sexual assault and manipulation, and complex power dynamics and layered interactions. Featuring Valorous King. Adapted from a TweetFic.
Crystal was a city-state once, not too long ago — less than a decade ago, she still had her king and her tall spires, hadn’t been absorbed into the neighbouring kingdom of Sith, her peoples scattered to the winds.
Before that, she’d stood for centuries, and prospered for over eighty.
King Capulet’s reign had been the most prosperous Crystal had ever had — one of the most prosperous any kingdom on the island had ever had, although most were reluctant to admit it. Capulet had been a firm ally of the Queen, and she was one of the few who’d sing his praises, and naturally, no one disagreed with her — not out loud — but that didn’t mean they liked it.
Assassinating Capulet was often said, and almost as often attempted.
Naturally, as with anybody, it was only achieved once, but before that, every single assassin that entered the city of Crystal would simply disappear.
No word of them would ever be sent back to whoever had hired or dispatched them: they would be gone, disappeared in their entirety, almost as though they had never existed at all.
Good assassins, too. Good enough to get into the King’s Palace, good enough to get close enough, surely, to be a threat, to make their attempt, but… after that?
Disappeared from this face of the earth, and all her others.
It was doubtless that they must be dead, but there was never even a sign of their bodies or the jewellery or weaponry that should serve to identify them, nary even a word in terms of intel or gossip.
People knew King Capulet was dangerous.
He was powerful, and he was unorthodox — anyone leading a fae kingdom was odd, but Capulet, he was odd even by fae standards.
Most fae didn’t much believe in democracy — they didn’t really believe in society, for that matter, and from kingdom to kingdom, there was a huge difference in the way one idea or another might be treated, one way or another that the ruler treated their people.
The king collected information and traded in it, and for a long time, the people of Crystal were known for being secretive and equally careful with the information they sold and traded in; if not information, they traded in rare mushrooms and plants, and difficult to grow alchemical ingredients.
Following on from this, naturally, they sold and traded in rare poisons, explosives, and medicines. The city of Crystal was worlds-renowned as a hub of knowledge, forbidden and forgotten, arcane and unusual.
King Capulet loved to share, but never what people wanted him to share.
It was said that if you asked him for information on matter, he’d give it to you, advise you as dearly and as wisely as though you were his very own child — and at the same time, he would advise your greatest enemy, just to see what would become of the match. He was a dangerous man to trade with, one that couldn’t be trusted as an enemy or an ally, because he would help or hinder outsiders simply to amuse himself.
Even — especially — his friends didn’t trust him.
He was honest and spoke plainly about his strategy: if other kingdoms were busy warring with one another, they couldn’t bother his people or faff about on his borders, and for the most part, he was right.
So long as he was alive, so long as he couldn’t be infiltrated, all would be well for Crystal, but people had to try, Crystal be damned.
It was too lucrative a temptation not to indulge it.
It was either a cold summer or a cool spring on the day the king first went down into the jail cells buried in the very core of the city’s crystal spires, for which it was named, depending on who you asked. The assassin was cuffed up against the wall with his wrists pinned above his head, breathing heavily, still soaked from the reservoir tank.
“Have a nice swim?” asked Capulet pleasantly.
The assassin, lips a thin line, stared at him, but he flinched when the king stepped closer.
“I hope you’ve been enjoying our hospitality,” said the king silkily, delicately adjusting his sleeves before he moved forward and loosened the chain keeping the assassin in place.
He hadn’t been fed since being captured — he slumped to his knees in exhaustion, given the slack. Falling to the floor, his arms no longer above his head but his wrists still bound together, he sat on his arse on the cold, damp floor. It was normally quite dry and of average temperature, but Capulet had ordered the air kept damp to keep him from drying out.
The assassin was shivering from the wet and the cold.
“Do you know who I am, young man?” asked the king.
“There’s been a misunderstanding,” said the assassin hoarsely — one of the guards had punched him in the throat.
“Hmm? Those poisons in your pocket weren’t for me?”
“No.”
“That knife on your hip?”
“For cutting apples.”
“The trap you laid over the door to my bedchamber?”
“A jape.”
“A familiar jape indeed, to play upon a king you’ve never met,” Capulet remarked. “Hungry?”
The assassin said nothing.
“Won’t you give me your name?” the king asked softly.
The assassin’s eyes narrowed, but his lip didn’t curl, and no personal offence showed in his face — a clue, as well as having a human appearance, he was like as not from a human background as well, not born to fae cultures.
“Do you know who I am?” asked Capulet again.
“King Capulet,” answered his assassin.
“That’s right.”
The assassin’s teeth were beginning to chatter, and once more he flinched when the king came closer, until the king’s hand slid against the assassin’s neck. The young man moaned at the contact, turning his head into the king’s palm even as his face crumpled: his skin was very cold to the touch, so much so that the king’s own was no doubt a burning relief.
“You’ll tell me sooner or later, young man,” said Capulet. “Who you are, who sent you… You’ll tell me everything I ask, by the end of your time here.”
“No one sent me,” said the assassin through chattering teeth. “It was just a jape, as I told you.”
He made a sound of aching loss when the king drew away.
The king made a gesture over his shoulder to the guard behind him, and the change in temperature in the room was like a sudden gust of cool air that lingered. The assassin gasped, shivering harder, and looked up at the king with horror writ on his features.
“I’ll be back in a little while,” said the king cheerfully, and the assassin set his jaw, but his teeth continued to rattle against one another as he tremored in his place. “Let you enjoy your peace and quiet.”
Two hours later, the assassin had a fine layer of frost on his skin.
He was shivering hard now, and when the king returned to the room, the assassin jumped, fell further against the wall — he couldn’t curl in on himself as he’d apparently like, and the sudden movement made many soft cracks as ice broke and little shards of it fell to the ground around his feet like so much snow.
“Are you willing to be a little more cooperative now?” asked the king pleasantly, reaching out and puling hard at the lacing of his shirt. It stung his fingers, so cold as it was, and the lacing sent more ice to the ground in little shards.
“My — My name is…” He shivered hard, handsome young thing that he was, jaw constantly shifting. “Jakob.”
“And you’re an assassin?”
“… It seems my employment has abruptly come to an end,” he said stuntedly, and the king laughed.
“Jakob,” repeated Capulet, amused, and then clapped his hands together.
Jakob jumped as two guards entered, his eyes wide and full of suspicion.
The thing did not watch closely as they unshackled the young man from the wall or pulled off his clothes. They weren’t gentle about it, and the young man cried out in pain as one of them rubbed his hand hard over his jaw, dragging away the ice in little fragments and sheet pieces, but he was helpless to struggle.
He could barely stand, trembling as hard as he was, and as the room warmed up in increments, each guest of warm air sliding over the assassin’s skin and wearing off the cold, the king shrugged off the coat he’d put on, anticipating a longer struggle.
The guards towelled him dry as the ice melted away from him, and then they wrapped him in blankets. Another servant brought in a mug of cocoa and some hot food on a tray.
When they were finally sat down, the young man on a steel cot, the king on a chair, the young man looked down at the tray suspiciously.
“Not hungry?” asked the king.
The young man was clumsy about picking up a piece of meat, his fingers still trembling for the cold, but he ate it quite ravenously, tearing into it no matter that he still couldn’t control his teeth, and hissed at the burn on his tongue.
The king said nothing as the young man ate, just sat back and watched him. He had black hair, which was down to his ears and had been handsomely wavy before it was sodden wet; his eyes were a crystalline blue; he looked old for his age.
He couldn’t be older than twenty, but there were thick bags under his eyes and marks from frowning on his forehead and around his mouth. Scars showed here and there — a heavy cut on his thigh, some sort of bite, a tear on the side of his neck. On his left arm was a lightning pattern that the king knew could come from two sources — either being struck by lightning itself or, more likely, spell damage, and the king had his money on the latter. The web of scarring ran all the way up his arm and spread across his shoulder and chest, stopping where it reached his heart.
Plenty of children, finding themselves with more power than they could control, ended up marked with injuries like that — nature’s way, he supposed, of keeping those born with a great deal of magic to channel humble, or at least out of action for a time.
“Were you trying to kill me?” he asked again, when the food was eaten and the young man was nursing his cocoa, his palms wrapped around the mug to warm them as much as possible. His skin was beginning to warm to colour again now, and he’d stopped shivering.
“Yes,” said Jakob. “I suppose.”
“Why?”
“Why else? It was my half of the contract — that’s how assassination works, you know. They pay, I kill.”
The king chuckled at that, unable not to. “I believe you know that’s not quite what I meant.”
“Does it matter?”
“Certainly it does — I’m curious. And you will tell me.”
The blue eyes met his — for one so young, they were so very dead inside. “Will I?”
“Where are you from?”
“Loegr.”
“Loegr,” repeated the king, chuckling again. “I know so little of humans, as far as you see it, that you can’t be more specific than that?”
Jakob considered the point, and then said, “Dwyrain Loegr.”
King Capulet laughed again. “Won’t you tell me how you made your way here?” he asked softly. “How you bartered your way into my city, my palace?”
“Information is good trade here,” said the young man.
“What information? Which?”
The young man shrugged, and sipped from his cocoa. The king looked at him with interest.
His clothes, when he’d had them on, had been of fae make, and from what the king had gathered, the young man had blended in quite well feigning to be from another fae kingdom. He had good Cymraeg for all he was Saes, and his Gaelic wasn’t bad either, spoken with a natural accent even when his vocabulary was halting. His education was not complete by any means, but he had certainly received one, and fae were not fooled by his haggardness or his scars. They knew a young man when they saw one, no matter what he’d been through, and young men were to be forgiven some halts in their education, and treated with more indulgence.
His education was not what many of the human assassins had, having knowledge but not the experience — he must have spent at least some time around fae or living amidst them, because he knew what real life was like, and he didn’t stutter or stumble on his way.
“Do you know what happens to those assassins who fail in their attempts to kill me?” asked the king quietly, and the young man looked down looked down at the floor between them, his jaw set. His fear was distant, but undeniably present. “You don’t know,” said the king softly. “None of you do — even within my kingdom’s bounds, the fate of those who would do me harm is something of a mystery. My mother is long dead, and I have no siblings, no heirs. I have no upcoming intention to die.”
“Does anyone?” asked the dead-eyed young man.
“Perhaps not, but I don’t, particularly. Many kings prioritise their blood, think of to whom their throne will pass — me, I have no throne, and no crown, either. I never put much stock in things like that, such pomp and ornament. I don’t have anyone to pass anything to, because I have no intentions of passing anything on for some time.”
Jakob watched him from within his blankets, silent and wary. “Are you going to tell me?” he asked.
“Tell you what?”
“What you do to assassins?”
“Oh,” said Capulet pleasantly. “Oh, no, I won’t. But you’ll find out soon enough.”
Jakob swallowed, and drank from his mug.
“You’ve been an assassin a long time?” asked the king.
Jakob stared into his cocoa, seeming to carefully consider his answer. “What’s the difference if I say yes or no?”
“If you say yes, I am not surprised, but intrigued. You look aged, tired.”
“Who says I’m not just old?”
The king chuckled. “You’re human — you people show your age in your faces, even faces as tired as yours.”
“And if I say this is my first time attempting an assassination?”
“I wouldn’t believe that — you’re too good. I might believe you an ingenue as yet early in your career, but not a first-timer.”
Jakob shifted, wrapping his blankets more around him and huddling in them as though to make a nest of them, dipping his shoulders back against the wall, his feet curled up beneath him. “How old are you?” he asked.
“You didn’t do your research before you came to kill me?”
“Oh, right,” said Jakob. “Because faeries are big on dates of birth.”
“If you don’t like fae time, you shouldn’t come to fae lands.”
“Fae time is an oxymoron.”
King Capulet chuckled, leaning back and examining the other man. “I’m middle-aged,” he said.
“That’s not an age.”
“It is,” said Capulet. “Age is in the name and everything.”
Jakob rolled his eyes, and the king smiled, his elbows resting in the arms of the chair, his hands folding neatly over his belly. “How old are you?” he asked.
“Nineteen,” said Jakob. “Not that means anything to you.”
“You’ve reached your age of majority.”
“I was an adult long before I reached my age of majority,” said Jakob. There was a bitterness in his voice, which the king liked to hear — bitterness, even when it came through lies, was so easy an emotion to exploit, when came the right time.
“Ah,” said Capulet. “Perhaps you’re fae after all.”
Jakob huffed out a soft laugh. He didn’t answer the question, even given a few moments of quiet, and so Capulet asked again: “Have you been an assassin a long time?”
“Are you going to kill me?”
“Are you going to force me to kill you?”
Jakob finished the last of his cocoa, and he set his mug aside. “Two years,” he said. “Or, a little less.”
“And before that, what were you? A soldier?”
Jakob went to some effort to hide the emotion on his face, but the king still saw the flicker of response in his eyes.
“Hm,” hummed Capulet. “Are there many children in your army?”
“Are there many children in yours?”
“I don’t have an army.”
“Right, right,” muttered Jakob. “Fae don’t have armies, and they don’t go to war.”
“It’s a broad generalisation, I admit,” said the king evenly, with a small shrug of his shoulders. “But it is more true than it is false, no matter what you might think.”
“Well,” said Jakob, “if fae have no armies to fight against, how could I have been a soldier? Who could I have been fighting?”
“Wars aren’t always against armies.”
Jakob pressed his lips together. “No,” he admitted.
“You understand I’m not going to let you go,” said the king. “You might as well be truthful with me.”
“Perhaps I’ll escape.”
“You’re a very powerful young man, aren’t you? You’re not accustomed to powerlessness like this. Perhaps you’ve never experienced it before: that must be quite frightening.”
Once more, Jakob’s face remained studiously blank, but he glanced up to meet the king’s gaze, showed enough strength of character that he didn’t look away.
“That spell damage,” he said, gesturing to the hand of Jakob’s poking out of the blankets, the one with criss-crossing white scars decorating its back. “Receive it when you were a child?”
“Not a young child,” said Jakob. “I was twelve or thirteen. The memory blurs a bit.” He flexed his fingers, not shivering any longer, and with the movement of his fingers, the Lichtenberg marks moved and flowed.
The king didn’t mean to frown, but he did. “You were that old,” he asked, “and didn’t know your own strength?”
“I knew what I could do, what I could handle. I knew what was too much,” said Jakob, and he shifted his shoulders. “But, uh… I needed more. Needed to channel more.”
“Was it worth the scars?”
“Did I win by battle, you mean?”
“I suppose.”
“Yes,” said Jakob, steely-eyed. “I always do.”
The king took all of this in, fascinated with the picture the pieces were beginning to come together to depict: a young man, somewhat battle-scarred already, and yet so strong-willed. It wasn’t right to call it mere defiance. It was evident that the young man had experience in this area, that his attitude was informed by previous victory.
“This is, I suppose, the calm before the storm,” said Jakob softly. “Are you going to torture me tomorrow?”
“If I’m made to, I suppose I’ll have to,” said the king. “Are you going to force my hand?”
“You’re a king. Who can make you do anything?”
“Before I’m a king, I’m a reasonable man,” replied Capulet as he stood to his feet. Taking the mug, he set it down on the tray for the servant to remove, and when he clapped his hands, she entered the room and passed him folded clothes for their prisoner before she took it and departed.
“These aren’t mine,” said Jakob, fingering the woven blue fabric of the shirt.
“They aren’t,” agreed the king. “I won’t be giving you your knife or your poisons back, either.”
The assassin watched not the king, but the retreating servant. His eyes were cold and keen as she examined her, watched her gait, the way she opened and closed the door with a soft glow of the room’s wards behind her.
For the time being, the assassin was left unbound. The cell warding dampened magic sufficiently that he couldn’t even use that — it was no surprise, nonetheless, when a guard knocked on the door to King Capulet’s office no less than two days later.
“Has he made his guard?” he asked casually, not looking up from the bundle of letters that had recently been sent onto the Queen, and that had then been passed onto him.
“No, sire,” said the guard — Ondeimon. “He found some old pin or nail, and picked the lock, but we caught him before he left the cell block.”
“You don’t like to let them have their fun, do you?”
For this, he received a frosty look.
“Shackle him,” said Capulet. “Nice and tight, wrists to ankles, and pin the chain to the wall. If he keeps making a nuisance of himself, put him in one of the spreader bars.”
“I don’t like the look of this one, sire.”
“You don’t like the look of any of them.”
“This one’s powerful.”
“You think we can’t contain him? You think I can’t break him, as I’ve broken all the rest?”
The guard set his jaw, his eyes fierce, though he retained a perfect guard’s posture. “Is broken the word you want to use, sire?” he asked pointedly, and the king smiled.
“You were broken for some while, Ond,” he murmured. “It just wasn’t me who broke you.”
Ond said, shifting on his feet, “I was different. All of us were different, compared to him — I do not warn you of him because he hurts my ego, but because I fear he’s taking advantage of yours. I’m telling you, sire, he’s dangerous.”
“I hear you,” said the king. “I’ll take my time with him, I promise. No need to worry your handsome head about it.”
Ond didn’t seem satisfied, but he did leave.
When the king went down to the cells the next morning, he found Jakob with a bar holding his wrists outstretched, a bar running between their shackles and a collar about his neck. Apart from the spreader bar, he was pinned against the wall, sitting on the floor and quite powerless to move.
It was overkill — Ondeimon was an overzealous sort — but it did look very nice.
“Have you been misbehaving, Jakob?” asked the king.
He was met with stony silence.
The king had a plate brought in, and Jakob looked suspiciously at the servant who entered. He’d not yet had the same servant twice, and the king had every intention of keeping it that way. Jakob’s suspicion only continued when Capulet picked up the mug from the tray and brought it up to the young man’s lips, not allowing him to grasp for it himself.
He drank, albeit reluctantly.
When the king picked up a slice of deer meat and held it to his mouth, the young man stared at his fingers a few moments, not moving, saying nothing. The humiliation must have rather stung.
“You’d rather starve?” asked the king pleasantly.
Jakob carefully took the meet between his teeth before he drew it onto his tongue and chewed.
Having eaten what was given to him, his plate empty, he asked, “Is it your habit to bind men in this way?”
“If it’s deserved,” said Capulet. “I’m told you caused quite the ruckus, trying to escape, fiddling with your cuffs, making all this noise and bother. My guards like to read on their watch, you know — you were breaking their concentration.”
“Am I expected to accept my captivity with grace, poise, and silence?”
“I’ll break you into the habit one way or another. An effective method, I’ve found, is to mount a young man like yourself on some vibrating pole and leave him be until his mind snaps for the pleasure.”
The assassin stared at him, his jaw abruptly slack.
“We use one of these bars as well, of course,” said Capulet, gesturing. “No sense letting you adjust yourself once we’ve found the perfect angle for you.”
Jakob didn’t say anything. He didn’t seem to be virginal. It wasn’t sex itself that shocked him, it seemed, but merely the extreme nature of the threat, and perhaps his own interest in it.
The king did not believe he imagined the slight dilation of his pupils, or the darkening colour in his lips and cheeks.
“Won’t you give me your name?” asked the king.
“Your memory is that short?”
“You expect me to take as given the first name you tell me?”
“Take it if you want. I’m not giving you another.”
“Why not give me someone else’s name?”
“Whose?”
“Your employer’s.”
Jakob shifted his mouth around, amused, and then rested his head back against the stone. He bent and moved his elbows, adjusting them, and flexed his hands in the cuffs, the tendons showing as his wrists shifted under the manacles they were bound in. “Who says you need to know that?”
“I do,” said the king. “The aforementioned vibrating pole might have something to say about it as well.”
“I’m no expert in interrogation,” said Jakob, “but if you make me come my brains out, obedient as I might be, it may just be I no longer remember everything you’d like me to.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Capulet. “A broken mind recalls more than you might think.”
Jakob flexed his hands again, his face twitching. He was very uncomfortable, bound like this, although he was trying his best to hide it. Capulet wondered how many times before he’d found himself bound so entirely, with so little ability for motion, even to fidget.
“Is that what you do with assassins?” he asked. “Fuck them so stupid they can’t try to kill you again?”
“I like to provide options, that’s all,” said the king. “Most people who become assassins, the way I see it — at least, those assassins who aspire to being king slayers — do so because they have some manner of expertise or passion for the craft. Do you?”
“You’re asking me if I’m good?”
“I know you’re good,” said the king. “You infiltrated Crystal City’s defences, came into my palace, laid traps, had back-up plans. The expertise is present — ours just outweighs it. Were you trained for this? Do you enjoy it? Enjoy the power of bringing others to their knees by your hand?”
“Sounds like that’s what you’d enjoy,” said the assassin, and the king chuckled.
“The difference being that when I do it, it’s out of ecstasy rather than out of a desire to cause death.”
“Death is an ecstasy all of its own,” said the assassin. There was a private joke hidden in his smile before he shrugged his shoulders and added, as an afterthought, “So I’m told.”
“What intelligence have you on me, gathered in your reconnaissance?”
“You’re King Capulet,” said Jakob. “That’s not your real name, of course — you started to call yourself Capulet when you feuding with a human sorcerer named Montague, and kept it even after you’d killed him. You’re fae. Middle-aged. You like poisons, explosives — you’re a consummate and well-studied alchemist, mycologist, enchanter. Your innovation lends invaluable worth to your people.”
“Invaluable?” repeated the king, surprised. “Do you think?”
“You sell poisons for which only you might brew the antidote, create medicines and analgesics that have no equal from here to Euskadi. You sell drugs and highs — very potent ones. What other can provide as you do?”
“Is that the city you find within these borders?” asked Capulet, arching one eyebrow. “A city of doctors and medicines, highs and hallucinogens, poisons and antidotes? Every nose in a bottle or scattered with powder, every skin shining with ointment?”
“You think that I see a nation of chemists and think it a nation of addicts?”
“I ask if you think that alchemy is the only core of my people’s focus.”
“Of course it isn’t — it’s yours. Your people I see well-fed, well-rested, and ever at ease. And they gossip.”
“They do.”
“A comfortable people… gossips.”
“Yes.”
“About trade, about interpersonal conflict, about who is sleeping with whom, about politics, about games, about everything.”
“Yes,” agreed Capulet. “Fed and rested, they have time to talk. With time to talk, information becomes… a tapestry. Many threads to be woven together.”
Jakob watched the king, resting his head back against the stone of the wall, his lips pressed loosely together. One would think he’d look less tired, with all the time he’d had to rest.
“You like gossip,” he said, in a tone of accusation.
“I do,” said the king. “I like words.”
“Why?”
“For the same reason I like mycology and alchemy. So many paths lead to the same destination — and of those paths, so many offshoots exist as to be incalculable. To understand mushrooms is to understand the universe — to understand alchemy is to understand its turns.”
“Who gives a fuck what way the universe turns?” asked Jakob, and the king laughed. It was a show of genuine irritation and a genuine loss of patience, which was always so revealing a falter — and while he was no expert, English not being a favourite language of his, he thought he heard the young man’s accent falter too.
“The young man doesn’t like words,” he said amusedly. “He likes action.”
“Better than I like mushrooms or politics. You fuck over everyone who so much as bids you greeting, one way or the other, prompt war if you can and strife if you can’t — or tournaments, or riots, or parades. It doesn’t matter to you: it’s all distraction.”
“Quite so.”
“You don’t think it’s a sign of weakness in your mushroom kingdom, built of magical crystal and fungus? That you survive only because no one looks in your direction for any length of time?”
“Is survival a sign of weakness, now? I had no idea this was so.”
“Is that all you want for? Survival and nothing else?”
“Are those your words, or your master’s?” asked the king. “You have seen for yourself how my people thrive with my ingenuity to pay their way. I live, and work, and play, all for them — not only do we survive, but we thrive, in fact. Do you?”
Jakob was silent, his lip curling.
“Where you come from,” asked the king, unable not to smile, “are all your streets paved, and all your children fed? Are all your people clothed, all your sick cared for? All your workers rested, and your aged housed? Somehow, I doubt it.”
The young man was cold as he retorted, “Do you?”
“Cities like mine rarely make assassins like you. In a city like mine, a boy would never be put to war — against whatever it was you were warring. In a city like mine, a boy would never be so hardened as to be useful there. My people, thriving as they do, have time to be soft before they must ever grow hard. There’s no child in my city’s bounds that has experienced whatever gave you this hero’s foolish spirit, so self-sacrificing, and for what?”
Jakob’s eyes flared.
“Who fills your head with these ideas of our danger to you? A monarch of a fae kingdom to whom you owe a debt? A company, perhaps — a druggist, a rival alchemist? Your king regent, perhaps?”
At that last, he saw the young man’s mask falter in the most infinitesimal ways, but he would have known regardless — there was no young man in Cymru-Loegr, with such power as this one commanded, that would escape Myrddin Wyllt’s personal attention, in one way or another.
“You think I will answer?” he asked, the image of handsome defiance.
“You will. They all do, in the end.”
“And if I don’t?”
The king reached forward, played his thumb and palm affectionately over the assassin’s knee, and resisted the urge to laugh when he jumped. Very deliberately, he said, “We’ll find some other purpose for you, I’m sure.”
Jakob suddenly surged in his bonds although he could not move, could not even stand. The king watched with polite interest as he snarled, and then collected himself, sitting stonily down once again. His nostrils flared as he took in a heavy breath, and filled his lungs.
“Was that fit of temper really at me, or at yourself, for losing control?”
Jakob said nothing.
“Let me make you a deal,” said Capulet. “For every part of your bondage I undo for you, you answer a question for me.”
“Truthfully?”
“The truth would be my preference,” said the king, “but so long as you put effort into your answer, I might make do with a lie.”
Jakob, after a long stare, gave what tiny nod he could, bound as he was in his place.
“What age did you first kill a man?”
Jakob looked up at him, a frown twisting his lined, chapped lips. “The questions are about me?”
“Of course.”
“Not my employer? Not the job?”
The king waved an uncaring hand. “We’ll get to all that,” he said dismissively.
Jakob frowned, brow furrowing, but then he said, “I was nine.”
“Nine?” repeated the king. “Very young indeed. Were you paid for that?”
“No, I killed the man who killed my father — shot him.”
“With a gun?”
Jakob’s expression showed a mild surprise that the king knew what a gun was, that he used the word with such confidence, but he nodded his head. “Yes. He’d put it down to go through my father’s pockets, and I picked it up, and shot him in the back of the head. He never knew I was there.” He flexed his hand, exhaled. “Sprained my wrist, damaged my ear,” he tipped his head to one side by the scarce half-inch he could manage in his bonds, “but he was dead.”
“Hm,” said the king, and loosened the belt over the young man’s throat. His blood pulsed visibly under the skin.
“Yes,” said Jakob. “But that was only recent. She died of an illness a few years ago — we were estranged. I didn’t talk to her.”
“Why were you estranged?” asked the king as he loosened the strap on his left wrist.
“She didn’t know my father was a criminal when she took up with him. That he killed people, that he sold drugs, that he smuggled. She realised after I was born, when I was two or so, and they made closer contact with my cousins — they were planning their wedding at the time. She left when she found out.”
“You never spoke to her?”
“She didn’t want to,” said Jakob, shrugging his unbound shoulder. “She thought me tainted, ruined.”
“Were you?”
“Yes, said Jakob. “But not until later.”
The king undid the strap on his left wrist fully, and fully undid the one on his right, but didn’t yet pull free the binding at his neck. He couldn’t drop forward entirely, but he was able to relax slightly.
“And who was it, dare I ask again, against whom your war was fought, young soldier?”
“A beast,” said Jakob. “A creature — from some netherworld, it came. Predestined.”
“And you its predestined slayer?”
“Mm.”
“Did you know that when you were put face to face with the thing?”
His words found their mark: Jakob gritted his teeth, and a muscle in his cheek twitched, his cold eyes becoming colder and more tumultuous than before.
The king chuckled. “I see,” he said, and unbuckled the strap across his throat.
The assassin tipped forward and then fell down onto his cot, lying on his side. He massaged his wrists, not touching the reddened mark that curved about his throat.
“How many questions must I answer to be let free?” asked the assassin lowly.
“You knew when you came for me that assassins making attempts on my life do not go free again,” said the king. “You knew you might be killed, or otherwise eliminated.”
“Perhaps I’m the exception,” said Jakob. “Perhaps no one else has asked enough questions.”
The king reached out, and the assassin didn’t flinch this time: he closed his eyes when the king’s fingers curled through the waves of his hair, feeling its smoothness, the thickness of it. There was enough of it to pull on, to manipulate him by — there was an appeal in that.
“You’re going to fuck me,” said Jakob. It wasn’t a question.
“Have you been fucked before?”
“Yes.”
“By a king?”
Jakob looked up at his face.
“By a king regent, perhaps?”
The young man rolled his eyes and set his head down on his pillow. His tired irritation seemed quite genuine.
“I’ll not fuck you for now,” said the king. “I want to see what I make of you yet.”
“Is that my new destiny? To be chained in your bedchamber?”
“I have means of rendering a young man too exhausted to escape without needing him chained.”
Jakob swallowed, shifted on the bed. He didn’t blush, but once more the king saw the slight dilation of his pupils.
“You like men?”
“No.”
“Women?”
“No.”
“You like to fuck?”
“No.”
“To be fucked?”
Jakob opened his mouth, but held his answer a moment. His lips shifted up almost into a smile. “Like is not the word.”
“Complicated, isn’t it, to fuck those you can’t trust?” asked the king softly. “To allow any kind of intimacy with those who would harm you and call it for your own good?”
Jakob’s face was calculatedly blank.
“Did you attend a boarding school?” asked the king.
“For a time, I did.”
“Because you were a de facto orphan?”
“Yes.”
“You had no other family? Or — No, you mentioned cousins. The family you had didn’t want to?”
Jakob’s lips were smirking now. “I was unwieldy.”
“Too powerful.”
“Yes.”
The king watched Jakob’s face before he asked, “Did you think you might have to seduce me, hm? Did you prepare yourself for that eventuality?”
“Is that what gets you off? The thought that your assassins might get off on killing you?”
“There is more entertainment to be found in the knowledge that they are desperate, by the end of it, to do anything but kill me. That they crave most of all to please me, and earn my approval.”
Jakob scoffed. “Not me.”
“Not yet,” agreed the king. “But that will change.”
In the coming weeks, the king visited the assassin every day, at one time or another. It was a habit he had, and might be called a hobby — there was pleasure to be found in sparring with those people sent to him, regardless of who they might be.
He was a people person, at his core.
Many was the man who craved to touch and piece apart a machine, that he might comprehend its workings, that he might destroy it from within, and rebuilt it to better suit himself.
King Capulet felt much the same way about people.
Some days, the assassin would not talk at all, and so long as they were not strung together all in a row, the king allowed him these plays at power. If not, on the third day, he would have him whipped, and the young man would talk after that.
He responded defiantly to the whip — he did not scream or beg, and he stifled his cries, but he was quick to ask that it stop, once the pain had gone beyond his masochism.
The king wondered what might be done to bring him to tears.
Every day, he touched the young man, somewhere. He would stroke his hair, his cheek, touch his chest, squeeze his knee, hold his hands, pet his feet, his ankles. When he stopped flinching, the king considered this a small victory, although it wasn’t quite the one he wanted.
When he reached out to pull a fleck of lint from the assassin’s hair and, quite automatically, he leaned his head into the king’s palm… Mmm, that was closer to the victory he wanted.
He had learned both a little and a lot about Jakob, these past weeks, asking as he was about assorted esoterica — the assassin’s favourite foods, animals, if he had ever been sick or injured, what clothes he liked, what sort of buildings.
It left him uncertain and unsteady to be asked of such ephemera and not of what he thought mattered, but the king had all the time in the world to decipher him.
What the assassin struggled to realise, to truly digest and understand, was that his liberty was gone on the wind, that he was already owned.
That was well: he didn’t need to realise it yet.
“When did you first fuck another person?” asked the king.
The young man was quiet a moment. “When I was eighteen,” he said, then.
“That seems late.”
“Does it?”
“You weren’t a popular teenager?”
Jakob’s body language was tight, although he was forcing a careful neutrality into his features, doing his best not to show any obvious reaction. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Scared of parties?”
“I didn’t go to them much.”
He was confused by this line of questioning, it seemed, as much as it made him uncomfortable. Discomfort and confusion were a useful pair of emotions in a casual interrogation, and Capulet was pleased to see him move his positioning, sitting up to lean against the wall, his hands in his lap.
Many of his prisoners, over the years, would move about whilst he was with them — they’d pace the room or lean against different walls and surfaces, sit in the chair, or at least stand to face Capulet. Jakob, curiously, rarely moved about his cell while Capulet was with him: he would ordinarily stay seated in his place, cross-legged or with his legs curled underneath him, or reclining on the cot.
It was not that he was entirely inactive or somehow torpid — Ondeimon made little reports of his activities, and apart from occasionally stirring and stumbling from his bed in his sleep, not irregularly woken or suddenly started from his bed by nightmares, the young man would sometimes pace his room, do push-ups or squats or other such callisthenics. Once or twice a week, according to Ond, he would perform gymnastics, stretching, tumbling, somersaulting, or twisting himself into knots.
Capulet had arranged for them to give him an exercise mat, to keep him from bruising himself on the hard stone floor, and it rested against the far wall.
“What age did you?” asked Jakob.
He did this sometimes, turned the questions around. He knew not their purpose, but thought if they were asked, there must be some reason, or some value to them.
“I was a young man, younger than you,” said the king. “My mother still ruled, and this palace was tiny in comparison — the kingdom was all fields of tilled mushrooms, and sprawled further outward than upward. The crystals I command are avernal in their nature and originate in Avernus: I tend them just as I do the mushrooms. At that time, the crystals scarcely sprouted here, but a few outcrops shooting up from the stone.” Capulet softly sighed, recalling pleasant memory. “When the girl I loved and I fucked in the soil, mushroom spores shot up about us, and the crystals, too.”
“That sounds dramatic,” said the assassin.
“You prefer sex with men or women?”
“I don’t care.”
“So long as someone has dominion over you, is testing you — is liable to hurt you, do you damage. So long as their body commands yours, what matters their gender, or their body’s particulars?”
Jakob frowned at him. “I like control,” he said. “In moderation, I like it. I just prefer to see it from the other side rather than to wield it myself.”
“When were you first rejected?”
“Rejected?”
“When was the first time you went to someone and offered yourself, and were told you were not wanted?”
The assassin’s throat bobbed.
“Was it your mentor that told you no?” asked the king silkily. “The one who sent you here?”
The handsome throat bobbed again, the electric scarring at the base of his throat tugged by the movement, and the assassin’s hands fisted in the sheet upon the bed, his lips curling.
“How long have you known Myrddin Wyllt?” asked the king.
“What does it matter?”
“It matters. He hurts so many people,” whispered the king, “and calls it needed.”
There was a beautiful stumbling in the assassin’s expression. It was a falter that in one person after another, the king had come to crave, a teetering on the brink of that first and most crucial, most wonderful betrayal.
“How would you know?” demanded Jakob.
“Surely you can’t think you are the first man your king regent has made ruin of?” asked the king.
“You seem very certain that my mentor was Myrddin Wyllt.”
“You have yet to create the impression it might have been anyone else.”
The young man’s eyes flitted down, breaking the lock of their gazes.
“There is no shame in it,” he said in quiet, gentle tones — he was a dangerous man, and he rejoiced in being so, but he was not uncompassionate. “To be charmed by a much such as he. In his thousand years of certain life, and his thousands more uncertain, that man has made himself the ghost of many a man’s past.”
King Capulet had met his majesty more than once. Wyllt was a strange man of powerful aura, and yet he was one who burned himself to the core of one’s memory, as soon as he was met.
Like Capulet, he traded in chaos, but they were by no means birds of a feather.
He had always traded in chaos to better protect his kingdom, to create a sheen of smoke and shadow to protect it and the people therein; Myrddin liked smoke because he liked to be surprised by what emerged from within it… And of course, he was of that smoke, and that smoke of him.
Myrddin Wyllt, like Capulet, was born of chaos, and marked well his siblings.
“They say he’s crazy,” said Jakob, in the softest voice that Capulet had yet heard from him, vulnerability laden in the words. They tasted sweet, but Capulet knew better than to count them as a victory just yet. “Myrddin. That’s what people told me, before I met him, and after I met him. That he’s crazy.”
“Wyllt,” said the king. “You’re Saes, you don’t know the word, don’t feel its heart, its core. It means… wild, furious — not furious as angry or full of rage, but as the Furies. Uncontained, uncontainable, unpredictably hungry for violence, and frantic.”
“That’s what I mean,” said Jakob. “He’s not.”
The king quietly laughed, leaning back in his seat, and Jakob looked up at him, his lips twisting. He realised he’d said something that perhaps he shouldn’t have — and at the same time, he was realising that if had said that, he might as well say more. This was one of his favourite notes of rhythm in these slow interrogations.
“He is,” said the king.
“He isn’t,” Jakob retorted. “You don’t know, you’ve — I’ve spent hours with him, days. I’ve spent longer with him than almost anyone, except…”
King Capulet almost lost control of himself, he was so hungry for more of what that particular trailing off of speech implied, for more of what Jakob could tell him. Jakob’s mouth twisted in discomforted recollection, his gaze far from the cell they were in. How many men alive had seen the great King Arthur reposing in his sickened sleep, in that wretched coma from which nothing could wake him? What did he look like, Capulet ached to demand, the king? Some centuries he had so reposed, unmoving and unstirred by sound or word or magic — was he pale? Was he emaciated, jaundiced, was he discoloured or apparently unhealthy as a result of his unnatural sleep, or did he seem as he did in the beautiful art that depicted his slumber, as brightly beautiful now as he always was, his dreamless sleep appearing quite natural?
Did Myrddin sleep in that bed, beside the would-be corpse of the would-be king, as scattered rumours sometimes said he did? How long had Jakob spent in Arthur’s sickroom — how much had he seen of him?
Had Myrddin Wyllt attempted to use this young man’s power, hoping to wake Arthur Pen Draig with a Saes’ hands, if his own would not suffice?
“I’ve never seen him like that,” said Jakob. “Frantic. He’s calm, collected, always, he’s… It’s spooky, is what it is. You can punch him in the face and he don’t even flinch. It’s like someone made him out of steel and dressed him in robes.”
There were two things here that caught the king’s interest.
In the first instance, it was the way the assassin’s accent slipped again, revealing more than it had before. The king wasn’t well studied on Saes accents, but he knew enough to hear that the inflection was north eastern, and not south eastern.
As for the second… The king asked, “Have you?”
“Have I what?” asked Jakob. His accent was back: neat, crisp, faintly Welsh over its clipped neutrality. It wasn’t anything like Wyllt’s own dangerously musical lilt, and the king wondered who he had copied it from — perhaps another person in the king’s court, a servant of Camelot or the King’s Service?
“Punched him?”
Jakob looked down at his hands, and not at the king. Oh, what wonderful, handsome shame was writ in his features — the best sort of shame. The shame that was tinged not with real regret, but a lingering sense of righteousness, and satisfaction.
“The king regent of Cymru-Loegr,” said Capulet, unable to keep the pleasure out of his voice, and not by any means wanting to try. “Personal and most trusted advisor to his majesty, King Arthur. The wild witch himself, his majesty, Myrddin Wyllt? You punched him in the face?”
“I think more people would try, if they were given the chance,” said Jakob.
The king laughed, nodding his head, and watched Jakob in his seat. He was relaxed but on his guard, his lops loosely pursed.
“When did you first meet him?”
“When I was nine,” said Jakob. “When I went to the boarding school. He… visited.”
“He knew,” said the king. “Even then, he knew you. He knew you as soon as he looked at you, knew the things that made you vulnerable, and the things that made you strong. He knew what you loved and what you feared, and you knew this, because of the way his gaze bored through you, even before he said a word. You felt his stare inside your soul.”
Jakob was quiet a moment, and then he said, “Yeah. He looks at everyone like that.”
“What then?”
“It was a fit of temper sent me to boarding school. It was the second outburst that dispatched me to the royal palace.”
“Temper?”
“Power. I stopped a landfall.”
“A landfall?”
“Yes.”
“In Camelot?”
Jakob opened his mouth, closed it. Said, almost convincingly, “Yeah.”
“Camelot is on a hill, but it’s all built up. It’s not near any hills. Not near any mountains, either.”
“Stones for a new park, a garden. The truck’s gate broke, and the stones fell down the hill. I was out with other kids from school, me and fifteen others. I stopped it.”
“It hurt?”
Jakob laughed. “Like fuck, yeah,” he said. “It was like… being on a crack. Feeling an earthquake right up through my spine — felt it in my teeth.” He flexed his scarred hand, wiggled his lightning-kissed fingers. “Had to be done, of course. I couldn’t have done anything else.”
“What did the other children say?”
“Thank you,” said Jakob. “I stopped them from being crushed to death. I don’t know that there’s another way one can reply.”
“This was when you twelve?”
“Thereabouts.”
“And when did you first try to fuck him?”
Jakob said nothing.
“When you were sixteen, seventeen? Fifteen? Fourteen? After you defeated your great beast, or before?”
“After,”, said Jakob. “I was covered in blood, dragon blood.”
“A dragon?”
“A gryphon, technically, but their blood has the same alchemical properties, and is used for the same ritual purposes — if they’re not the same exactly, they’re similar enough that one naturally serves as substitute for the other.” He froze after saying that, his eyes widening slightly, his gaze still downturned.
The king’s lips curved into a smile. “Yes,” he said. “I did know that. I guessed that you would yourself.”
“Because of Myrddin.”
“He’s an alchemist too,” said the king.
“Yes,” said Jakob. “He likes his hostages as well. Keeps them prisoner, keeps them captive. But for a few exceptions, once he takes a captive, they don’t find themselves free again. Have you ever been in his garden, your majesty?”
“I haven’t,” said the king softly, unable to suppress his shiver of horror and glee. “Have you?”
The coldness and the distance in Jakob’s eyes answered the question.
“Is that why you tried to mount your seduction?” asked the king. “Because you feared to be planted? Or was it simply that no one else had ever shown you such keen attention?”
“You’ve got me pegged, haven’t you?”
“Not just yet,” the king answered. “Did it hurt, when he told you no? Did he laugh at you, and call you a young fool, that that was not your purpose with him? Was that the moment when you realised he had always known your purpose, even as he sent you into the lion’s den?”
Jakob was holding his breath, as though he scarcely dared to breathe.
“That’s enough for today, I think,” said the king contentedly, and stood to his feet to go.
That night, Ond whimpered underneath him, gasped although he was too exerted to catch his breath. He was trembling for overstimulation, his thighs quivering from too many orgasms and too hard a fuck, and the king stood to wash his face as he allowed Ond to collect himself.
It took him a little while to remind his jellified limbs they were attached to his body, and longer still to recollect his scrambled mind, which he did while stripping the clothes from the king’s bed.
It had been, oh, some time, years. Enough that Ondeimon’s hair was beginning to grey, and that lines were showing in his handsome face where once it had been youthful.
“You still aren’t heeding my warning,” said Ond as the king brushed out his hair, having removed it from his braids for the evening.
He preferred to sleep with his hair loose, that it not pull so on his scalp. “Aren’t I?” asked the king.
“He’s dangerous.”
“He is,” agreed the king. “Anyone else, I’d have had them out of that cell by now, as well you know, or at least I’d have permitted more than a rubber mat for him to amuse himself with. Instead, he remains locked in that stone room with his magic dampened so much he couldn’t even charge an enchanted candle.”
“That’s not enough.”
“What would be enough for your peace of mind, Ondeimon? If I killed him now?”
“Killing him would be a good start,” said Ond forebodingly. He had a foreboding way about him which Capulet had always appreciated. “You like him too much.”
“I like assassins — you know this about me. Taming you is more fun than taming horses.”
“A horse would only kick your brains out,” said Ond. “What I imagine he would do — ”
“Imagined is right,” said Capulet mildly. “You think he’s too close, hm? Did you listen to all he told me, earlier today?”
“I did,” said Ond. “And I saw the way you walked, afterwards, confident and contented — you’re counting your victories before they’re won.”
“I’m far from victorious yet,” said the king.
Ond narrowed his eyes.
“Talk is cheap,” said the king. “I know that better than anyone. I’ll work him until I have his name in hand, Ond — and with his name, I’ll leash him nicely, bind him as tight as you tell me to, tighter than I’ve ever bound anyone. Until then, he stays in that room.”
Ond was a little unsteady on his feet, although his breaths were coming easily, and his legs were no longer trembling. He had grown so sensitive, so attached, and had such love and loyalty for his once-captor.
Well. Capulet still was his captor — it wasn’t as if Ond could go if he wanted to. It was simply that he didn’t want to, could no longer conceive of wanting to. Perhaps Jakob might replace him, when Ondeimon finally succumbed to his aging years.
“You promise?” he asked, his voice quiet, but it had a certain terseness to it, which of course, it would.
“I promise you, darling,” said the king softly. “He doesn’t leave that room until I have his name in my pocket.”
Ond nodded. There were still tears drying on his cheeks.
“Wait,” he said, catching Capulet’s wrist when his hand went for the bell to call for someone to take the dirtied sheets away and bring fresh ones, and the king turned to look at him. “Once more?”
Capulet arched one eyebrow, tossing his hair over his shoulder as he turned his head. “You can take it?”
“Not really,” he said, his cheeks red. “But I want to.”
“In the bath,” said the king, nodding to the washroom door, and rang for service.
Jakob, in the next few weeks, was reticent to speak, to answer questions. He was aware that a levee had broken, the king suspected, that he had revealed too much, and he was unwilling to go further just yet.
He was frightened, anxious — he teetered on the brink.
“Have you ever killed a man?” he asked the king one morning.
“A few times,” said the king. “I try to avoid it.”
“Beasts?”
“Beasts? You ask if I’ve slain beasts?”
“Yes.”
“I haven’t. I don’t even hunt, except for mushrooms.”
Jakob was silent again, staring down at his hands. In his captivity, these many weeks, he had not made one complaint as to his isolation, when the king was not present — he had not asked for company or entertainment, nor asked for the use of his magic. Even the rubber mat he had been quite pleasantly surprised by, and he had been very polite in offering thanks for it.
He had requested nothing except his liberty, and even that, he didn’t ask for often.
“How many beasts are dead at your hand?” asked the king, tilting his head.
“A few,” said Jakob. “I’ve killed more beasts than men.”
“Quests over contracts. You’re more knight than assassin.”
Jakob pressed his lips together, and the king watched them go thin.
“Has he tired of you, these past years?” asked the king softly. “Do you no longer please him, now he has little else to teach you, and when you are not interesting enough for him to fuck you?”
“That isn’t why,” spat Jakob.
“He doesn’t fuck you because you’re ugly, then?”
“He has greater responsibilities,” said Jakob defensively. “And he — it would be wrong of him, would feel wrong. My being younger than him, when he’s known me… since I was a child.”
The king could help himself, but he didn’t bother to try: he laughed very hard, even as Jakob looked at him with an expression that was pained and twisted in distaste.
“Do you believe that?” asked the king. “That he doesn’t fuck you because he’s noble, or to maintain his fatherly feeling?”
“Why else wouldn’t he?”
“Because you’re a joke, boy,” said the king. “Because you are enough to be human to him, but not enough to be an equal — not enough that it won’t bore him to fuck you. Why should he deign, when you are but a hero, and not yet a legend?”
Jakob’s shoulders are hunched and his body was bent forward, so that he seemed small and sad. This hurt him — good.
“Do you think he would have fucked you, if you’d managed to kill me?” asked Capulet.
“Maybe,” whispered Jakob.
“I’ll fuck you hard enough to make up for it,” Capulet promised.
The assassin misbehaved, later that week — he went to strike at Ond when he brought in Jakob’s evening meal, tried to grab for the keys on his belt, and he fought Ond toe to toe. The king did not witness it, but he heard from another servant.
Ond was angry, afterwards, angry and defensive and very cold, and when the king moved to touch him, he harshly twisted his hand free.
“He is dangerous,” he said by way of grating. It had become the phrase he said most, these past months.
“Yes,” agreed the king.
Ond had bruises on his neck. Jakob and he had been evenly matched, or so it had seemed at first, but as much as Ond had been a good assassin and was a very good guardsman, Jakob was young, and well-skilled in his trade.
Ond was angry because he had to use magic to cast him off.
“If that room dampened all magic,” he told the king, almost snarling, “if it had weakened me as much as it weakens him, I would be dead by his hand. Would that convince you of his liability, sire?”
“But it wasn’t,” said the king, kissing Ondeimon’s hand and dodging the slap it earned him. “And you aren’t,” he went on, and Ond began to strip off his armour, dropping leather to the floor.
“Had he taken the keys and overpowered me, got into the city proper, what then?”
“He didn’t,” said King Capulet, “but we captured him once — we could again.”
Ond turned away from him when King Capulet tried to touch him again, and the king sighed, leaving him be.
He could have had one of the others, of course, any of the others, but One was…
A favourite.
Jakob was still bound in the rack when the king went into his cell, his wrists tied tightly to the corners of the wooden frame, stripped down to his waist. The king reached out, brushing very light fingers over the welts on his back. Jakob didn’t flinch, but he did shiver.
“Why do that, hm?” he asked.
“I need to be gone from here,” said Jakob, his voice hoarse from shouting. “To go back.”
“Do you want to?” asked the king softly, and where his fingers had touched, he followed after with his mouth, pressed kisses over one long, raised welt from the whip and listened to Jakob’s shuddering sigh.
“Please,” said Jakob jaggedly.
The king liked the way the word sounded in his mouth, powerless and afraid and full to the brim with want.
“Do you think our king regent will welcome you home, hm? His hero returned not a legend, but a failure?”
Jakob’s head bowed lower.
“Do you think he’ll touch you now?”
“I need to go,” said Jakob, his voice hitching.
“You aren’t going,” said the king gently, and slid his hands around the assassin’s middle, splayed his fingers over the muscled flesh and felt the way he shuddered. “You’re staying here with me, my darling — forever. Do you understand that?”
“I…”
“He wouldn’t want you back,” murmured King Capulet, kissing from the base of Jakob’s spine now, tracing upwards with his lips and his tongue, feeling the young man arch and gasp and shudder in his bondage, hearing the soft whine that eked from his throat. “Do you think he wants failures? If you returned, he’d only send you out again.”
“No — ”
“But here, here, sweet and treasured creature, you might be something,” went on the king, and he nipped at a welt, hearing the shuddered, gasping moan and the tell-tale sob that followed it; he felt the way the assassin stiffened and then relaxed, giving in. “You might be treated with real desire and true affection. Taught for the sake of teaching.”
“I don’t want to be your pet,” said Jakob.
“What do you want to be?” asked the king. “Do you even know? Did you even expect to live this long?”
The assassin was silent until the king cupped his arse, and then he moaned from low in his throat.
“You didn’t,” said the king.
“So what if I didn’t? The fuck does it matter?”
“Your mentor raised you to think you would die,” was the king’s reply. “Set you against one beast and the next, you thinking it was to prove yourself, him knowing you would come to expect your own doom. He has trained you for sacrifice, my dear, such that you have forgotten how to do anything else — and he has done this all to see the chaos that came of it. He doesn’t care for you.”
“He does,” said Jakob sharply.
“Does he?” asked the king. “Has he ever asked you what you want in life? What you want to be? Has he ever promised you peace, a future, a family? Has he even promised you the kiss you crave from him, let alone the touch, the love? Or has he only ever given you duty, and pain, and blamed you for your petty failings, and everything out of your control?”
The young man’s sob was a ragged sound, and the king saw his tears hit the floor.
“He wouldn’t want you now, if you returned to him,” whispered the king, tracing his welts again. “You have lost your lustre — he wouldn’t even bother to plant you in his garden, and let his vines set their fruit in you. He would simply refuse to see you, and be bored in your presence. You know this.”
The next sob was louder, coming from lower in Jakob’s throat, and the king first unbuckled his ankles from the frame before he reached for his wrists.
“Here, you needn’t serve a purpose, needn’t be his working hand, needn’t kill or slay or flay open your skin to earn your keep. You might just… be.”
“Be yours,” said the assassin bitterly.
“Why not be mine?” replied the king. “Would you know how to be your own man, if you owned yourself? Do you know how to be anything but a king’s man?”
The assassin stumbled coming down from the rack. His tears streaked his cheeks and he sniffled, and he was trembling again.
“You could learn to be your own,” murmured the king, and cupped his cheeks, curling his hands in his hair. “But do you want to learn that now, hm? To be your own person, after all these years, when for so long you have served only others? As a soldier, a knight, a king’s man? Wouldn’t it be easier to let yourself pass from his hands into mine?”
Jakob’s eyes were wet and far away.
“You’re safe here,” said the king gently. “There are no expectations of you — you are captured, and your fate is sealed. Nothing more comes after this but more of your existence.”
Jakob cried hard and loud, and fell against his chest.
The king, smiling, curled his hands in his hair, and held him as he was racked with sobs. “There there,” he said softly. “I have you. I’ll always have you, now.”
He held Jakob up until the young man sobbed himself to sleep, so exhausted he could no longer hold himself up any longer, and then he left him be a time, nestled in his blankets on his cot.
Once properly broken in, he’d be tremendously useful. He could be bound, with his name, and then the real breaking could start.
It was harder when they had children and families, when they had a great variety of connections to twist or shatter — when they were like this, reliant wholly on the love of one person, especially one so capricious and cool as a man like Myrddin Wyllt, it was easier, in a way.
When a man was so shattered and made so brittle as to build his orbit around one other person, it was almost easy to change your orbit to yourself instead, as the king had done so many times before. It would take months, but then… Then.
There was nothing quite like the satisfaction of adding a new jewel to the collection, and this young man’s power, his skill, would serve a greater purpose here than it ever might have in Camelot or anywhere else in Cymru-Loegr — and his body was a fine one, responsive, handsome.
The defiance and the same, all that depth of feeling, that was an enticement in itself.
When the king next went into Jakob’s cell, he was on his feet, stretching. It made his scars and the healing welts on his back move and ripple like reflections of light on the surface of tide-tugged water.
“Why do you keep us?” asked Jakob hollowly. “Why not just kill us?”
“I like power,” said the king. “I like nice, new pets — I like the knowledge that I have turned weapons intended to kill me to my own service instead. I like assassins’ twisted minds and their strong, flexible bodies.”
“You like broken men.”
“Broken people,” said the king softly. “I like to repair them and fill in the cracks, so that you can always see the golden glue.”
“Is that what you are? A repairer of broken things?”
“Oh, yes. And you, a man of shattered pieces.”
“You haven’t shattered me.”
“You were already shattered when you came here,” said the king. “He has played a part in that shattering — to amuse himself, and to ensure you served your purpose, he has shattered and remade you to please himself, and never bothered to wholly complete his repairs. He has created a weapon from what you once were — a boy, an orphan. And now you have failed your purpose, and proven yourself unworthy even of that.”
Jakob stared down at the floor.
“He accepts failure,” he whispers. “He always has.”
“Does he?” asked the king. “When you have failed, has he comforted you? Told you it was not your fault? Or has he simply made you try again, until you serve out your mission? Refused to speak to you, even, on days you have displeased him?”
Jakob clenched his fists at his sides, and his gaze remained focused upon the floor.
“Mmm,” said the king softly. “Have you ever dreamed of being your own man?”
He was tremendously still.
“You have, haven’t you? What does that look like? What peace do you dream of?”
The king stepped forward slowly, cupping the assassin’s cheek and tipping his head up. He watched the way Jakob’s eyes closed, felt the way he leaned into the touch, and he smiled.
“Green fields and a peaceful garden? Animals, hm? Paperwork and a desk — someone to… take care of you? Someone who wants to take care of you?” Jakob’s eyes closed tighter. “Yes, I see. You recall you asked how many questions you must answer to be let free, hm?”
“Yes.” His voice came in a low whisper, but the cheek remained pressed into the king’s palm, and when the king retracted it slightly, he followed after it.
“There is only one.”
“One?”
“Give me your name,” the king murmured, “and that’s all.”
Jakob stiffened. “I gave you a name,” he said.
“You did, but I don’t want just any name, I want yours,” the king replied. “Give me your name, young man, and it will ll be over. You can have as much liberty as can allotted you — you can start a life of your own.”
“Under you.”
“Under me. It is the price you paid, in trying to take my life — you’ve already handed yourself over. This simply allows you the barest choice in what comes next, and freedom from these four walls.”
The king leaned in, ghosted his mouth over the side of the assassin’s jaw, breathed on his skin and felt him shiver.
“Don’t you crave the sun on your face? Company beside you? Don’t you ache to feel the magic thrum under your skin once more? Don’t you feel its loss?”
Jakob didn’t answer: he tilted his head, crushing their mouths together, and the king kissed him back, heard him whimper and relent, ceding the whole of the kiss to King Capulet’s command. There was a sort of desperate power to be had in a kiss like this, and the king indulged himself. He shoved Jakob back, swallowed his gasps and soft cries until he had him back against the wall, his wrists above his head.
Jakob’s keens were soft and eager and tinged with fear.
The king felt warm and satisfied, as though he’d sunk into a hot bath as he bit Jakob’s lip and felt him whimper sharply, but he didn’t break the kiss, didn’t draw away — he wouldn’t dare.
When the king leaned back, Jakob’s blue eyes were heavily lidded and misty with want.
The king smirked at him, watched the way Jakob swayed, and he reached up, touching his fingers to his own lips and feeling the way they were tingling.
He felt —
Young.
It was a pleasant feeling, one he felt less and less these days, but a victory compelled youth like nothing else.
“It’s been a long time since a kiss brought me so much satisfaction,” he said.
Jakob frowned, suspicious. “Are you lying?”
“Why would I lie?”
“To flatter me.”
“Your worth is bought and paid for,” said the king. “Again, why would I deceive you?”
Jakob smiled. It was a warm, soft smile, but there was an unexpected savagery in his eyes.
The king’s lips had stopped tingling now: they felt numb, and slightly cold, and his eyes widened as comprehension abruptly dawned.
“All you needed was my name,” said Jakob softly. He’d dropped his false Cymro’s accent — he spoke in his own voice, now, and the words came with ease and deliberation. “All I needed was your kiss.”
He caught King Capulet around the middle before he could hit the floor, and supported him back onto the bed. The king was trying to breathe, but the sense of cold was sinking down his throat, and Jakob smiled down at him as he slumped against the wall.
“Thank you for all the talk,” he said pleasantly — he spoke very politely, with all due respect and gratitude. “It really has been helpful. Better than therapy, not that you’d know.”
There was a new youth to his features now. It wasn’t a literal sap of power, he didn’t think, but there was a sort of spring in Jakob’s step as power crackled between his fingers, and he pulled open the cell door.
Ondeimon was facing the other way, deterring eavesdroppers, and Jakob casually took the knife from his belt with the perfect, silent ease of a master pickpocket. Ondeimon never even knew he was there.
“My name is Valorous King, by the way,” said the assassin over his shoulder, and Capulet stared as Ond turned. “My father was Vainglorious.”
The king couldn’t even raise his hands, couldn’t even voice a protest or a cry as Ond turned, and Valorous struck.
There were rivers of blood pouring down Ond’s shirt even as he went for the sword at his belt — his fingers went loose, unable to grip, before they could enclose its hip. As he dropped, Valorous looked down at him, interested, as Ondeimon wheezed and choked on the pooling blood, drowned in it.
“My cousin carries a rapier,” he said, looking from Ondeimon’s sword to the dagger in his hand. “Never was my thing — I like things like this, daggers and stuff, for close quarters, but I normally carry a claymore. I’ve worn other armour, used other weapons — sabres, cutlasses, broadswords — but I like claymores. People say they’re clumsy, but they’re only clumsy if you can’t handle their weight, and you don’t know how to keep your rhythm with them.”
Where Ondeimon was drowning, Capulet choked on air.
“It’s a good poison, isn’t it?” asked Valorous King, stepping over Ondeimon as he went still on the floor, daintily avoiding the pooling blood. He peeled back his lower lip, and the king saw the glow of symbols writ there, tattooed in the flesh. “My magic was dampened, and I couldn’t activate it — but you could.”
The king felt colder than he could ever remember feeling — as cold, no doubt, as the assassin had felt those months ago, when first he’d come here and Capulet had decided to give him the ice. There was a symmetry in it he had to appreciate.
Valorous — King — leaned forward, stroked his fingers over the king’s chest, tilted his head. Those dead eyes were full to the brim with life now.
“Do you think he’ll love me now?” he asked, faux vulnerable with his eyes wide, and laughed — it was a terrible, beautiful laugh, and lightning crackled once more from his fingers. “I’m sorry,” he said, not sounding like he meant it, as he put the knife through his belt and took up the keys from Ond’s, sticky as they were with blood. It wasn’t squeamishness that made him step away from Ondeimon’s pool of lifeblood — he didn’t want to leave red footprints. “I’m not a king’s man, Capulet. I’m the regent’s man. Such… chaos will come of this.” His eyes were glittering, and Capulet almost believed the fervour of his religiosity was real, but he didn’t quite.
His was a beautiful smile.
The king would very much liked to have kept it.
Valorous leaned in, and once more kissed him: his lips were fiercely warm against the king’s, so much so that they burned.
The king was dying, dying…
Dead.
Valorous King smiled down at him, touching his cheek again, and ridded him of his jewellery — his monarchical signet ring, particularly — and stepped out from the cell, Capulet’s kiss on his lips, his own name in his pocket.
He left a trail of blood and chaos as he made his way home.
Leave a Reply