hey whats UP about to drop the first chapter of a new TRC fic, I already posted the concept art for scenery a while ago because I was excited about it, here’s a couple cool monsters from it
dead dove do not eat scene but spn. cas comes back from a hunt looking worn out and he plops his bag on the table and dean and sam say what’s in there. cas goes “my other arm” and they’re like yeah haha very funny and open it and. it’s literally his arm.
CWs for intrusive thoughts, insects, and for page 6 only: active (insect-aided) decomposition, morbid intrusive thoughts, insect infestation of human and monster bodies
Sangfielle Season One Epilogue: Duvall, part 2 (one more part after this, it’s big so it’s on its own)
Sangfielle Season One Epilogue: Duvall, part 3: Weald and Woe (modified)
Following the passing of a legendary cleaver, sometimes the Course crashes into the Heartland to claim their body as a prize, flooding the landmark with visions of endless possibility. to activate this ability, die.
My comic about a guy with a monster mouth on his stomach updated this week with a brand new chapter! It’s called Scarred for Life and I think you should read it.
Reviews: My mom says it’s great and my dad doesn’t like it.
Scarred for Life is a comic about two FBI agents and their intern. One of the agents has a monster mouth on his stomach, but that doesn’t effect his life as much as you might think. (CW: body horror)
These are the first three pages of the newest chapter, but the whole thing is available to read right now!
And I actually just went and put the whole thing up at once, so you can read it ALL RIGHT NOW!!
Scarred for Life is a comic about two FBI agents and their intern. One of the agents has a monster mouth on his stomach, but that doesn’t effect his life as much as you might think.
Transformed by a Leitner, Jon finds himself trapped in the body of a cat. Unable to communicate, he faces the unenviable prospect of watching the world continue on without him.
It seemed a strange thing for a Leitner to do, even against Jon’s ever-shifting definition of strangeness. More akin to something from a children’s fantasy story than the series of horrors he’d come to expect. Which of the dread powers could possibly be fed by turning people into animals?
The Flesh felt likely. His initial transformation had been horrific enough – the unnatural sensation of his bones shifting, the pain of muscles tearing and re-knitting, the agonizing pressure as his skin shrank just slightlyfaster than everything inside it. If not for his encounter with Hopworth he’d have nothing to compare it to, and as was he’d been made violently aware of a dozen new ways his body could break.
He wondered if his missing ribs had grown back in the process. Cats had thirteen pairs, if he recalled, so he’d at least have broken even.
* * *
Jon found the book in document storage, half-hidden behind a cabinet. A slim volume, shiny with use around the corners. The cover was red, decorated with the silhouettes of birds, beasts and reptiles, and the title - Animal Poems.
He thought it might have been Martin’s, dropped and forgotten during his stay there after Prentiss. The wear on the cover made it seem well-loved, and he wondered if it had been a favorite of his – something read and reread many times over. Jon knew Martin reread books he liked. He’d mentioned it over lunch once, commenting on a novel he came back to a few times a year. Jon had balked at the idea. Though he was more flexible than he’d been as a child, he only ever reread things for research, and then only to skim and check for anything he’d missed. Reading the same story over and over for fun sounded absolutely maddening to him, and Martin had laughed when he’d told him as much.
It’s like comfort food, he’d said, and gestured to the soup and sandwich in front of him. Jon had ordered the same meal every time they’d shared lunch at the cafe, it had been a little embarrassing to realize that Martin had noticed.
He pictured Martin during a long night in document storage – curled on the tiny cot, book in his lap, taking comfort in the familiar words. It stirred something in Jon that he was absurdly tempted to call nostalgia. As if those had been the ‘good old days,’ back when Martin was sleeping with a corkscrew under his pillow, terrified the swarm would come for him. When Jon went home every night pretending not to feel the eyes on the back of his neck.
Then again, Sasha had been alive. Tim had been alive too, had still been talkingto him. And Martin, well … Martin had been talking to him too.
Good lord. Maybe those werethe good old days. That was a depressing thought.
He sat on the cot and flipped idly through the pages, indulging in thoughts of Martin doing the same, wondering which poems were his favorites. They were all short verse, named after animals, each with a sketchy ink drawing on the opposite page.
One illustration he found particularly captivating was of a pitiful-looking kitten huddling behind a stack of rubbish bins. The adjacent poem was called The Alley Cat. It described a small, hungry cat making its way through a city, scrounging for its meager meals and trying futilely to stave off the chill of the night air. The poor thing found itself ruthlessly chased from every doorway it approached, before finally giving up and accepting that there was no safe harbor for it. That it would never escape the cold.
It was surprisingly affecting. The actual words slipped from his memory almost as soon as he read them, but he was left with a profound feeling of sympathy for the poor creature.
He’d barely finished the final line before the pins and needles began at his fingertips. The sensation traveled to his larger muscles, quickly rising to the level of pain, and he was forced to his hands and knees. He barely had the chance to cry out before his scream was twisted into an animalistic yowl.
* * *
He may have gone unconscious for a while. When he could properly focus again he was lying on the floor, aching, eyes unfocused. It was only when he tried to push himself to his feet that it became chillingly clear how much his body had changed.
His limbs were strange, the angles they wanted to move at were all wrong, and his hands felt clumsy and inarticulate. The first attempt to rise was a failure, body folding underneath him and dragging him back to the floor. He twisted around, trying to get a better look at himself, but moving his head bombarded him with feelings of vertigo. Tentatively, he stretched what ought to have been his left arm out in front of him.
It took a moment to register what he was seeing as real. His vision was blurry and the colors seemed dull, but there was no mistaking the fact that he was staring at a scruffy, tortoiseshell cat’s paw.
Panic rose in him and he thrashed. The wild motion only dizzied him further so he stopped moving, forced himself to close his eyes and breathe. He tried to get a handle on his senses. The darkness helped – he was able to focus on sound, smell, and the sense of the room around him until his breathing slowed down and he could orient himself.
After another stumbling attempt he made it to his feet and managed a few uncertain steps on all fours. The sensation of vertigo – that Jon belatedly realized might be his own mind adjusting to taking in sense data through whiskers – began to fade. His hands (paws, he was walking on paws, there was no getting away from that reality) still felt clumsy, but manageable. As he moved, he saw the twitch of a tail (histail, god, his fucking tail) out of the corner of his eye.
All right. All right. He was apparentlya cat.
He might have laughed at the absurdity of his predicament, but laughter didn’t seem to be a natural response for his body anymore. He walked a few slow circles around the room, getting used to moving, and contemplated.
Not Martin’s book, then. Another sort of book. How had a Leitnergotten into document storage? He couldn’t imagine Gertrude leaving one there. Had a third party snuck it in? It could have been some sort of belated attack by the Stranger, revenge for stopping the Unknowing – the overwriting of identity, coupled with the uncanny wrongness of his new form seemed fitting enough for I Do Not Know You.Then again, avatars that came after Jon tended to take a more directapproach than planting a book behind a cabinet and hoping he’d stumble across it.
Perhaps it was a mistake to think it needed to be broughtthere. Given how these things worked it seemed entirely possible that the book had simply grown among the camouflage of stacks and papers. A natural lure, a pitcher plant, ready to trap a curious Archivist.
First things first, he should alert the others to his situation. Human speech might be beyond him now, but there were other ways to communicate and fortunately he’d left the laptop on in his office. Typing would be a challenge with paws, but he wasn’t going to be graded on his spelling. He’d get a simple message down, find Basira and direct her to it.
Navigation outside of document storage was difficult, his vision was poor and the new angle disorienting. He’d read somewhere that cats have a reflective layer behind their retinas which improves their night vision at the cost of visual acuity, hence their dependence on hearing and on scent. It didn’t matter. By this point, he could have walked the archive blind.
The door to his office was cracked open and he nosed his way in. Getting onto his desk was another matter – just working up the nerve to try and jump to the chair was a process, and he nearly fell in an attempt to climb from there to the desk itself. Finally, stable in front of his laptop, he stared down at the keyboard.
It took him a moment to realize he had no idea what he was looking at.
It wasn’t just his muddled vision. Up close the letters were clear enough, but they were meaningless squiggles and for the life of him he couldn’t remember how to put them into order to form words. The notes and papers scattered around his desk were likewise incomprehensible to him now.
All right. Cats couldn’t read, and apparently that meant he couldn’t anymore either. Fine. That was fine. Maybe it had something to do with language centers in the cat brain, but probably it was just one more part of whatever torment the book put its victims through. It didn’t matter, the laptop would have been easiest but he’d work something out. Some pantomime, or a “one meow for yes, two for no” sort of thing. He just had to get the others’ attention.
Melanie was in the breakroom, stirring unenthusiastically at a cup noodle. She didn’t seem to notice him walking in, and for a moment he stood in the doorframe and stared at her. The first idiotic thought to enter his head was that she was so tall.
(She wasn’t, objectively she wasn’t. She was the shortest member of the archive staff, and in fact was the only reason Jon himself was spared that title. He suspected she’d never quite forgiven him for the few inches he had on her.)
He’d already noticed his own change in size, of course. But it was one thing to see a desk or filing cabinet tower over him, another thing entirely to see a person he knew and realize he suddenly didn’t reach their knee. Particularly when the person in question had a recent history of throwing sharp objects at him.
She didn’t look at him, and he feared pawing at her ankle would get him kicked, so he stood back a bit and meowed. Melanie flinched at the sudden noise, eyes wide. Then she spotted him and let out a breath, shaking her head.
“Jumpscared by a cat,” she grumbled. “My life really isa horror movie.”
He meowed again. It wasn’t as if he had many conversational options.
“Where the hell’d you come from?” she asked, in the rhetorical way one asks questions of cats. “I know this place doesn’t have actual archival standards, but stray animals running around is a new low.”
This was the part where he should do something, he knew. Make a sound or gesture to indicate that he understood her, hint at who he was. Yet his mind seemed to have gone oddly blank all of a sudden, and the harder he thought about it, the slower and fuzzier things felt. He lowered his head and sniffed at a spot on the floor.
“Should probably get you outside. Not that I’d be opposed to seeing you take a piss on some ancient tome or something, but you reallydon’t want to be here. Hell, I don’t want to be here, but I haven’t got a choice –”
She stood from her chair and bent down, making as if to grab him and he jumped back clumsily, skittering towards the wall. He didn’t run, but kept a few feet of distance between them. If Melanie put him outsidethe archive, he didn’t know how he was going to get back in. A closed door was an impassable barrier to him now.
There was something he had to do, some reason he had sought her out. Why couldn’t he remember it?
“Come on. I’m not planning to hurt you,” she said gently, crouching down to his level. “I just don’t want to see you hurt. If you stick around you’re likely to get eaten by something from Artifact Storage.”
She reached for him again and a sharp, cornered-animal instinct made him snap, baring his teeth. A flash of anger passed over Melanie’s face as she jerked her hand back, and they both froze – she had instincts of her own she was fighting. He knew that. But the anger faded quickly, becoming something tired and bitter, and she stood.
“Fine, then,” she muttered, turning to go. “If you haven’t got the sense to leave, s'none of my business what happens.”
He followed after her, still trying to put his thoughts together, aware of how easily she could shut him out by closing a door behind her. She glanced back with annoyance as he trailed her through the archive.
“Aren’t animals supposed to know when a place is cursed, or something?” she grumbled. “Honestly … .”
“Who are you talking to?”
Basira’s voice came from the hallway, and Jon felt a measure of relief. Hopefully she’dbe a bit more patient than Melanie. He stepped into the middle of the room to give himself a better sightline, and Melanie gestured towards him.
“Cat got in here, now it’s following me around. I think it smells Georgie’s cat on me.”
Jon’s mind was beginning to clear, and ideas for communicating were coming back to him. He could move his head to approximate agreement or disagreement with things they said. He could meow loudly if they said his name, or other relevant words. He could tap his paw on the floor in an S.O.S. pattern, which he knew Basira would recognize. There were countless ways he could make them understand that hewas the cat in front of them.
Basira looked in his direction and all of it fled his mind, leaving him only with the sense that he’d forgotten something important.
“You think someone upstairs brought it in?” she asked.
“Looks more like a stray to me. Figure it wandered in through the tunnels.”
“Mmm.” Basira looked him over, her gaze sharp and suspicious. Jon’s head was heavy, his thoughts growing more muddled the harder he tried to concentrate, he looked helplessly back as the others talked over him. “Don’t like its eyes. Do cat’s eyes even get that color?”
“It does seem like something’s off about it … .”
“Don’t suppose you’ve got a pet carrier with you?” Basira asked, though she was already emptying a file box.
“It’s pretty skittish,” Melanie said as Basira turned the box in her hands, readying it as a trap. “Dunno if you’re going to have much luck with that.”
“We’ll see.”
There was nothing Jon could do but bolt, ducking away as she swung the box down over where he’d just been standing. From behind him there came a frustrated grunt behind him, followed by a told you so from Melanie. He ran towards the stacks, hoping he could slip between the shelves where his smallness would be enough to hide him. Footsteps followed, hurried at first and then hesitant, considering. They were looking for him.
Catching a whiff of something rotten in the air, he noticed a partly-chewed hole in the back wall, one that hadn’t been filled after the Prentiss attack. It was probably just large enough to fit him.
He glanced back with dismay as the only people who might have helped him discussed the best way to trap him in a box, then he shimmied through the hole and slipped into the tunnels.
* * *
Trial and error confirmed what he suspected. He could understand other people, could even planways to make himself understood, but the moment he tried putting them into practice his mind became hazy and disoriented. Besides trapping him in this form, the book’s effects were actively keeping him from seeking help.
Animal Poems was beginning to feel more and more like a creation of the Spiral. Muddling his thinking, keeping the others in the dark, spreading mutual confusion. He half-expected to run into Helen’s door as he stalked through the tunnels, but if she was aware of what was happening to him she kept the game to herself. Meanwhile, all his attempts to reach Melanie and Basira only cemented him in their eyes as a nuisance and probable threat.
He wasn’t entirely sure what they intended to do if they caught him – the absurd image of Basira shining an interrogation lamp at a cat, demanding he tell her what he knew flashed through his mind. It seemed more likely he’d be put outside, or worse, taken to a shelter where he’d be locked in a cage that he couldn’t escape from. At the absolute worst, who could say? If they thought he was an intruder, a monster in disguise … he wasn’t sure if either of them had the stomach or the cruelty for a sack and a river, but he also wasn’t ready to find out.
Daisy had been his last real hope. He’d thought her weakened connection to the Hunt might help her catch an inkling of his true nature. Hell, maybe part of him had expected her to sniff him out like a bloodhound, catch a familiar scent in the air and suddenly know who he was. It didn’t matter in the end, because he’d barely been able to poke his head into the room with her. The second she’d glanced in his direction he’d been filled with a rush of fear - animal and all-consuming, overriding thought, drowning reason, narrowing everything into the pureness of predator danger runrunrun. By the time he’d put some distance between them and caught his breath, he knew he wouldn’t be trying that again. He kept to shadows and corners after that, doing his best to stay unnoticed.
As day turned to evening, he felt the toll that all the running and leaping was taking on his body. The pain of hunger became demanding enough that he gave into the urge to follow an increasingly appealing smell deep into the tunnels. It wasn’t long before something small and furry darted past him and his body moved automatically, already knowing how to chase and kill. He sprang, pinning the struggling thing beneath his claws and bringing his head down to bite.
He ate, swallowing it all even as his still-human brain recoiled and fretted about diseases carried by wild rodents. His body was the body of a carnivore, but he had the mind of someone whose only experiences with meat involved grocery stores and delis. He’d never torn into a living thing as it tried to get away, never pulled out warm, stringy gore with his teeth. It was revolting, but once he’d started he couldn’t stop. Not for the first time, he let hunger and instinct take hold of him.
The pain in his stomach faded as he licked the blood from his face, leaving behind only a quiet nausea and a shame he couldn’t quite identify. A feeling that reminded him of leaving Jess Tyrell quietly weeping in the coffee shop.
As he slunk back towards the archive, he reflected on the Hunt. On ways that the fear of becoming prey could be turned back onto the predator, become the horror of needing to stalk and kill to survive. He wondered if Animal Poems had been touched by that particular sort of blood, if his guilt and disgust over his own ignoble feeding habits had called it to him, tempting it to subject him to a more visceral form of predation.
* * *
Maybe it didn’t matter which fear the book was connected to. But how was he going to find a way out of this if he didn’t understandit?
Crouched atop a filing cabinet, just out of sight, he watched as as others wound down for the evening. Basira and Daisy retired to cots near the tunnels, while Melanie left before dark. Jon had noticed she hadn’t slept in the archives since the night she woke up with a scalpel in her leg. He couldn’t exactly blame her. He hopedit meant she had someplace safe to go, more welcoming than this place, but she’d never told him and he’d never asked. He’d badly wanted to, but pressing someone who was already wary around him to reveal where she slept at night seemed like the exact sort of thing he shouldn’t be doing.
Sitting quietly, eyes tracking the others as they retreated, he wondered if he ought to look closer to home. Since he’d been left unable to communicate, all he could do was watchas the others went about their business. The Leitner had turned him into one more hidden observer in this place, another silent, staring eye. Perhaps it had been part of the Beholding all along.
If the others had even noticed Jon’s disappearance, they hadn’t commented on it. He grimly thought that an afternoon without him around may well have come as a relief to them, one less monster to worry about. How long had it been, he wondered, since the people he worked with had known him as anything other than a problem to be managed?
One by one, the lights were turned off and the building shut down. The archives grew dark and quiet and Jon finally emerged, free to wander without being seen.
As he walked through the empty, silent rooms, he felt strangely bereft. One might almost think he’d have grown usedto this sort of thing by now. In many ways his new form was just the latest in a series of bizarre and disorienting predicaments he found himself in. Not even the worst of them, really. He’d been trapped and on his own before, several times, and this wasn’t nearly as dangerous as being held by the Circus or threatened by the likes of Julia and Trevor.
But it feltdifferent. It felt worse. Having others so near to him but being unable to communicate, to even approach them without being chased away. Hiding in the shadows and watching as people he knew went on without him, it was worse than just being alone. The archive hadn’t exactly been welcoming before, Lord knows that conversations with his coworkers had been strained at best, but at least it had been something.Even in these past few terrifying years, he didn’t think he’d ever felt so profoundly isolatedas–
… Oh.
Well. There it was. Should have been obvious from the start, really.
Jon curled beneath the cot in document storage, shivering with a cold far deeper than the climate-controlled temperature of the archive. He lowered his head to the floor and let the Lonely bleed into him.
Summary: brief moment before we finally write The Letter. The Henry lookalike kid won’t give Therrin any information.
CW: ***whump of a minor*** (the Henry lookalike boy has suffered a horrific punishment from someone, making Therrin and Rudy even more suspicious of the claims about his heritage. The main characters do not/will not not harm him) mouth whump/body modification/mutilation that has already happened. Medieval/fantasy setting
“You need not fear me,” King Therrin said to the Usurper’s alleged son.
Something like longing stirred in Matteo’s chest. Though the words were not for him, it seemed they still applied. To his dismay he saw the red haired Knight, Rudy, watching him. He glanced away from the King as quickly as he could, his face heating in embarrassment.
The boy had not spoken a word since Matteo and Therrin had entered the room. He’d stopped eating the plate of black bread and goat’s cheese that he’d been picking at before, quiet and somber.
Matteo saw the resemblance immediately. It was in the set of the eyes, the shape of those nose, the jaw. It was striking, though impossible to pin down to one definite feature. He remembered Prince Henry as he’d first met him— in a tunic of Truly white, riding into his father’s camp on horseback, muddy from a scout and smiling.
“I have some questions, as I’m sure you’ve guessed,” Therrin said, in the same tone as if he were speaking to one of them. His blue eyes searched the boy’s face, flicking back and forth. “There are no wrong answers. I ask only that the answers you give me are honest. If you don’t know an answer, that’s okay too. Just tell me you don’t know, and we’ll move on.”
The boy’s nostrils flared slightly and his jaw jumped. He pulled his hands into his lap, staring at the remaining bread on the plate. His chest rose and fell faster. Up close, Matteo could see the shadow of a bruise on the boy’s cheek.
“Will you not answer your King?” Rudy nudged. The Knight looked huge next to a boy of twelve, like two men stacked together and wearing partial armor, a broadsword at his hip. His reddish beard had begun to grow back in, partially obscuring a scar on his chin that shaving had revealed.
The boy looked at Rudy apologetically, his eyes big and pleading. He began to appear visibly distressed, looking at each of them in turn. Matteo wondered briefly what Henry might have done in Therrin’s place, but pushed it away quickly. Once, he would’ve laughed at the idea that Therrin was a better King than Henry. But no one knew Henry. Not really. Not even he knew the real Henry, until it was too late.
At last he turned to the Knight and opened his mouth, though no sound came out. Rudy leaned closer, taking the boy by the chin to tilt his face up an inch and peer past his teeth into his mouth. His face fell in a moment of pure disbelief before it grew hard and unreadable again.
“Fucking Hell,” the Knight muttered. Gently, with two fingers, he closed the boy’s mouth by pressing up on his chin. The boy pulled his legs up on his chair and hid his face in his arms, resting his forehead on his knees.
“He’s not being difficult,” Rudy said gruffly. “Someone’s cut half his tongue out. And fairly recently.”
Matteo rubbed the spot where the knuckle of his pinkie used to be. If this boy was indeed Henry’s, it was like a piece of him was still walking the earth. He wasn’t sure if it was that or the cruelty that had been done to the boy making him so uneasy.
“Who did this?” Therrin nearly whispered, to keep the anger out of his voice. “That nobleman? Burns? He dares?”
Rudy looked at the child with weathered, resigned sympathy. He put a hand on his back, and rubbed a gentle circle with his big hand. “Can you write, little one? Do you know your letters?”
The boy only burrowed his head deeper into his forearms. Rudy kept rubbing circles, did not push any further.
“I forbade loss of life or limb as punishment without my express permission,” Therrin said. “I do not want to hear they’ve started cutting out tongues because it does not constitute as a limb. And a boy of twelve summers? Did they do this so he could not confirm or deny their allegations about Henry?”
“He can still shake his head yes or no,” Matteo pointed out. “Even if he does not read or write, and cannot speak.”
“Not if he’s been threatened sufficiently,” Rudy said darkly. “If you ask me, the poor thing’s terrified to communicate with us at all.”
“Then this will not help,” Therrin said, drawing his finger in a circle at the three of them there, speaking of him as if he wasn’t present. “Find out what you can, Rudy. I want him to understand he’s not going to be hurt.” He spoke in the boy’s direction. He was likely listening, even if he could not speak. “Not here. Not with us.”
“Of course, Your Grace.”
“Matteo?”
Matteo pulled his gaze from the boy’s coppery bowed head, thinking morbidly of what it would feel like to have his jaw forced open and his tongue cut from his head.
“Come with me. We’ve a letter to write.”
He followed Therrin from the room, his feet like blocks of stone.
The Letter. This minor complication was not a distraction from the real issue— a potential rebellion or resistance in the south.
Therrin waited for Matteo to fall in step beside him in the hall. They walked alongside one another instead of Therrin leading.
“What did you think?” he asked.
“He’s… he looks like him,” Matteo admitted. “Like Henry.”
Therrin sighed. “I still think it’s weak evidence for murder. I bet you could find a child passable for a Truly in every village in the Muirlands. We start killing everyone in the north who resembles a dead King and we’re going to have a lot of blood on our hands.”
We, Matteo noticed. Our. 
“What are you going to do, Your Grace?”
Therrin stopped. Matteo did too. Therrin looked up the hallway to make sure they were alone before cupping Matteo’s face in both hands.
“I’m going to convince you to call me Therrin again, first,” the King said, looking straight into Matteo’s eyes. “And write to your big brother in the hopes we are still friends, and keep my head and my crown both.”
“You’re not going to mention Martin Spearly?” Matteo asked. It was easier to be direct like this, with his face in Therrin’s hands. He was braver than if the King was across a room. “About the rebellion?”
Therrin let him go. They began to walk again. “If I have my way, we’ll never speak of it again.”
Summary: brief moment before we finally write The Letter. The Henry lookalike kid won’t give Therrin any information.
CW: ***whump of a minor*** (the Henry lookalike boy has suffered a horrific punishment from someone, making Therrin and Rudy even more suspicious of the claims about his heritage. The main characters do not/will not not harm him) mouth whump/body modification/mutilation that has already happened. Medieval/fantasy setting
“You need not fear me,” King Therrin said to the Usurper’s alleged son.
Something like longing stirred in Matteo’s chest. Though the words were not for him, it seemed they still applied. To his dismay he saw the red haired Knight, Rudy, watching him. He glanced away from the King as quickly as he could, his face heating in embarrassment.
The boy had not spoken a word since Matteo and Therrin had entered the room. He’d stopped eating the plate of black bread and goat’s cheese that he’d been picking at before, quiet and somber.
Matteo saw the resemblance immediately. It was in the set of the eyes, the shape of those nose, the jaw. It was striking, though impossible to pin down to one definite feature. He remembered Prince Henry as he’d first met him— in a tunic of Truly white, riding into his father’s camp on horseback, muddy from a scout and smiling.
“I have some questions, as I’m sure you’ve guessed,” Therrin said, in the same tone as if he were speaking to one of them. His blue eyes searched the boy’s face, flicking back and forth. “There are no wrong answers. I ask only that the answers you give me are honest. If you don’t know an answer, that’s okay too. Just tell me you don’t know, and we’ll move on.”
The boy’s nostrils flared slightly and his jaw jumped. He pulled his hands into his lap, staring at the remaining bread on the plate. His chest rose and fell faster. Up close, Matteo could see the shadow of a bruise on the boy’s cheek.
“Will you not answer your King?” Rudy nudged. The Knight looked huge next to a boy of twelve, like two men stacked together and wearing partial armor, a broadsword at his hip. His reddish beard had begun to grow back in, partially obscuring a scar on his chin that shaving had revealed.
The boy looked at Rudy apologetically, his eyes big and pleading. He began to appear visibly distressed, looking at each of them in turn. Matteo wondered briefly what Henry might have done in Therrin’s place, but pushed it away quickly. Once, he would’ve laughed at the idea that Therrin was a better King than Henry. But no one knew Henry. Not really. Not even he knew the real Henry, until it was too late.
At last he turned to the Knight and opened his mouth, though no sound came out. Rudy leaned closer, taking the boy by the chin to tilt his face up an inch and peer past his teeth into his mouth. His face fell in a moment of pure disbelief before it grew hard and unreadable again.
“Fucking Hell,” the Knight muttered. Gently, with two fingers, he closed the boy’s mouth by pressing up on his chin. The boy pulled his legs up on his chair and hid his face in his arms, resting his forehead on his knees.
“He’s not being difficult,” Rudy said gruffly. “Someone’s cut half his tongue out. And fairly recently.”
Matteo rubbed the spot where the knuckle of his pinkie used to be. If this boy was indeed Henry’s, it was like a piece of him was still walking the earth. He wasn’t sure if it was that or the cruelty that had been done to the boy making him so uneasy.
“Who did this?” Therrin nearly whispered, to keep the anger out of his voice. “That nobleman? Burns? He dares?”
Rudy looked at the child with weathered, resigned sympathy. He put a hand on his back, and rubbed a gentle circle with his big hand. “Can you write, little one? Do you know your letters?”
The boy only burrowed his head deeper into his forearms. Rudy kept rubbing circles, did not push any further.
“I forbade loss of life or limb as punishment without my express permission,” Therrin said. “I do not want to hear they’ve started cutting out tongues because it does not constitute as a limb. And a boy of twelve summers? Did they do this so he could not confirm or deny their allegations about Henry?”
“He can still shake his head yes or no,” Matteo pointed out. “Even if he does not read or write, and cannot speak.”
“Not if he’s been threatened sufficiently,” Rudy said darkly. “If you ask me, the poor thing’s terrified to communicate with us at all.”
“Then this will not help,” Therrin said, drawing his finger in a circle at the three of them there, speaking of him as if he wasn’t present. “Find out what you can, Rudy. I want him to understand he’s not going to be hurt.” He spoke in the boy’s direction. He was likely listening, even if he could not speak. “Not here. Not with us.”
“Of course, Your Grace.”
“Matteo?”
Matteo pulled his gaze from the boy’s coppery bowed head, thinking morbidly of what it would feel like to have his jaw forced open and his tongue cut from his head.
“Come with me. We’ve a letter to write.”
He followed Therrin from the room, his feet like blocks of stone.
The Letter. This minor complication was not a distraction from the real issue— a potential rebellion or resistance in the south.
Therrin waited for Matteo to fall in step beside him in the hall. They walked alongside one another instead of Therrin leading.
“What did you think?” he asked.
“He’s… he looks like him,” Matteo admitted. “Like Henry.”
Therrin sighed. “I still think it’s weak evidence for murder. I bet you could find a child passable for a Truly in every village in the Muirlands. We start killing everyone in the north who resembles a dead King and we’re going to have a lot of blood on our hands.”
We, Matteo noticed. Our. 
“What are you going to do, Your Grace?”
Therrin stopped. Matteo did too. Therrin looked up the hallway to make sure they were alone before cupping Matteo’s face in both hands.
“I’m going to convince you to call me Therrin again, first,” the King said, looking straight into Matteo’s eyes. “And write to your big brother in the hopes we are still friends, and keep my head and my crown both.”
“You’re not going to mention Martin Spearly?” Matteo asked. It was easier to be direct like this, with his face in Therrin’s hands. He was braver than if the King was across a room. “About the rebellion?”
Therrin let him go. They began to walk again. “If I have my way, we’ll never speak of it again.”
