But then what? They probably wouldn’t even bother with a prisoner of no importance; they might even kill him out of hand. And he did not want to die; although now, cold, wretched and in pain, he thought it might be rather nice to be dead.
He turned over, painfully, and looked about his prison.
A grim, pale light was sneaking its way through windows curtained roughly with threadbare tapestry, and shuttered with nailed boards. The room was spacious, with worm-eaten paneling, the hangings musty with age. The bed on which he lay was large and elaborate, but there were neither bedcoverings nor sheets; only an old horsehair mattress and a couple of fur rugs. The other furniture in the chamber was rickety and depressing, but he supposed he was lucky that he wasn’t in a dirty dungeon somewhere; his brief glimpse of the outside of the fort looked as if there were dungeons aplenty beneath the grim stone walls.
He had not, so far, been harmed. He had, such as it was, the freedom of this room. He could feed himself after a fashion with his right hand, but he had never realized how helpless anyone was with only one arm; he could not even balance properly when he walked. Morning and night they brought him food; a sort of coarse bread stuffed with nuts, a rough porridge of some unknown cereal, strips of rather good meat, some anonymous soapy-tasting stuff that he supposed was a form of cheese.
Now he sat up, hearing steps in the hall. It might have been someone with his breakfast, but he recognized the heavy, uneven tread of Cyrillon des Trailles. Cyrillon had visited him only once before, to inspect, briefly, the contents of his pockets.
“No weapons,” the man Kyro had told him, holding up the things Larry had carried. Cyrillion turned them over. At the Terran medical kit he frowned curiously, then tossed it into a corner; Larry’s mechanical pencil he tested with a fingertip, thrust into his own pocket. The other items he looked at briefly and dumped beside the Terran boy; a few small coins, a crumpled handkerchief, a small notebook. Larry’s folded pocketknife he looked at curiously, asked, “What’s this?”
Larry opened it, then mentally kicked himself; he might have been able to use the knife somehow, even though the main blade was broken off—he used it mostly for cutting string or building models. It had a corkscrew, a magnetized smaller blade and a hook for opening food cartons, too.
Kyro said, “A knife? You won’t want to leave him that!”
Cyrillon shrugged contemptuously. “With a blade not as long as my little finger? Much good may it do him!” He dropped it with the other oddments. “I only wanted to know if he had any of the Comyn weapons.” He had laughed loudly, and walked out of the room, and Larry had not seen him again until, this morning, he heard his heavy tread.
He felt a childish impulse to crawl under the bed and hide; but he mastered it, and got shakily to his feet. Three men entered, followed in a moment by Cyrillon, still masked.
Larry had realized, by now, that for all his contempt, Cyrillon treated him with a respect that verged on wariness. Larry couldn’t quite figure out why. Cyrillon stood back from the bed, now, as he ordered, “Get up and come with us, Alton.”
Larry rose meekly and obeyed. He had sense enough to know that any gesture of defiance wouldn’t help anything—except his pride—and might bring more abusive treatment. He might as well save his strength until he could do something really effective.
They conducted him to a room where there was a fire, and Larry’s shivering became so intense that Cyrillon, with a gesture of contempt, motioned him to the fireplace. “These Comyn brats are all soft . . . warm yourself, then.”
When he was warmed through, Cyrillon gestured him to sit on a bench. From a leather pouch Cyrillon drew something wrapped in a cloth. He glanced at Larry, curling his lip.
“I hardly dare to hope you will make this easy for me—or for yourself, young Alton.”