this one, he’s got a mouth on him. Said the crudest things. Not the things we wanted him to say, of course. Courtiers have filthy minds, the lot of them. And this morning—well, I’d just had enough.” He wore a look of mixed distaste and affront. The man he’d been torturing had offended him, Nate realized, and in his new icy state almost wanted to laugh. “It’s not as if I didn’t warn him. I told him a dozen times, he’d better watch that tongue if he didn’t want to lose it. He wouldn’t listen, so out it came.”
Forgetting that without a tongue or a hand that worked, the smashed heap of human being on the floor would find it difficult to share any information at all. “I can’t sew his tongue back in, you know.”
The interrogator chuckled. “Not after I threw it on the fire, you can’t.” Then, more anxiously: “I was thinking about his hands, maybe.”
Nate bent back down. He didn’t recognize the courtier, but he wasn’t sure he would have, anyway. Most of the bones in the man’s face had been broken, including his jaw—probably when he lost his tongue. He put a hand on the courtier’s shoulder. The man cringed and shuddered.
“Which hand do you write with?” Nate asked him.
After a moment the right elbow twitched. Nate examined that hand. Evidently, the Interrogator had started by pulling out the fingernails and then worked his way up, smashing each bone individually.
“He’s got jewels hidden in his manor,” the Interrogator said over Nate’s shoulder. “He was famous for them, wasn’t he? But those jewels belong to the city, now, and this selfish pig won’t tell us where they are.” His voice grew strident. “The managers could trade those jewels to the provinces for food to feed the city this winter. But that ain’t good enough reason for him. He’s holding out. Don’t know why. After we’re done with him, it’ll take more than jewels to make him pretty.”
For money. They had done this for money, and on the strength of hearsay. Nate laid the man’s hand down gently. “This man is in shock. He might be dead by morning no matter what I do. But I can fix his hand well enough for him to write, eventually, if you’ll leave it alone to heal.”
The Interrogator nodded eagerly. Nate opened his satchel. He preferred to lay out what he needed before he began to work, but he didn’t want any of his supplies to touch the mucky floor of the cell, so he worked directly out of the bag. He had a salve that would help the man’s bloody lips, which were as dry as paper (and of course he couldn’t lick them). But before Nate did anything else, the man needed opium syrup. Nate took out the bottle; then stopped and considered.
The courtier was perched on the very edge of death, his bloodshot eyeballs staring right into the depths of the black river—but he might survive. It wasn’t likely, but it was possible. The injuries to the man’s face would not heal cleanly, though. Even with the best of care, any life Nate could help him back to would be misshapen and colored with agony. Nate’s thumb traced the edge of the cork in the syrup bottle. It would be a simple thing to empty it between the man’s cracked lips. He would be unconscious in minutes and dead in hours. Caterina would have considered it a kindness. But Caterina would also have checked the man’s lineage, to make sure his line would survive him, and conferred with the rest of the caravan. She might even have reached inside the man’s mind to ask his own opinion. Nate could do none of those things; he had nobody to confer with, and he wasn’t talented enough to read the man’s thoughts. But he could end his pain.
Behind him, the Interrogator laughed at something the guard said. Nate glanced toward them, to make sure they weren’t watching—and as he did, he heard again the words of the guard: Seneschal said you could be trusted.
With his new hardness, Nate knew he needed that trust. He had no choice but to leave the courtier here to suffer and—with any luck—die on his own. This hideous room with its hideous smells must be part of his life, now. He would set bones so they could be smashed again, stitch wounds so they could be opened anew. He would pump water from the lungs