There’s simply no way to get comfortable. The path is barely a path, riddled with bumps and holes and stones. The wagon Fray rides in seems to find every single one, and informs him by jostling and the bristle of splinter after splinter into his bound arms. The motion keeps trying to knock his teeth together. It only fails thanks to the gag stuffed into his mouth, tied tight in place. A cuff has been locked around his ankle and secured to the wagon, ensuring he will not be leaving of his own volition. Everything hurts, inside and out. All of his gear has been confiscated. It’s kind of funny, Fray thinks dully, how even though he had been stripped of his armor and left only in underclothes, he didn’t feel like he had been truly violated until they took his sword from him.
He’s lost track of the sword. This worries him. Most things he can replace. He cannot replace the Blade of Saints, the weapon that embodies his vows, and if he loses it for good he—
He does not know what will happen.
It’s the least of his worries, though. He’s got others, bigger ones. The first rides in the lead wagon, further ahead, huge and hunched up front. Cesk, he’s heard the others call her. Her wide-brimmed hat and heavy cloak obscures most of her, and she has paid scarcely any attention to Fray since issuing her ultimatum. Probably sleeping off the brain, he thinks bitterly.
His other problem keeps well away from him. May Green takes hurrying paces to catch up to the beasts that pull the wagon whenever he gets too close to the back of it. Too close to where Fray rides. As he well should. Even with the indignities heaped now upon him, with the very real threat of death by the illithid’s tentacles close at hand, Fray does not know if he would be able to keep his head level if confronted with Green just now. But then, Green probably knows that. That’s probably why he had been so eager to volunteer all of Fray’s limitations, all the ones he had learned in their week of travel together. He can’t talk much, but he can still cast spells. It might be wise to gag him. He seems exceedingly well trained, best to take no chances with the knots. He’s fast, like you saw, a leash might not be amiss …
Yes, thinks Fray, if he were Green, he would be doing everything in his power to prevent Fray’s escape, too.
Fray does not enjoy killing people. Sometimes it must be done, and usually it’s visited on criminals who have become too violent to risk otherwise. He can count the humanoids he’s killed on one hand, and none of them gave him any sort of rush or pleasure. He doesn’t think he would enjoy killing Green. He does think he would enjoy everything leading up to the kill, everything he wants to do to the man.
Fray’s sword is still around here somewhere, though, because he can feel its disapproval at these black fantasies. All deserve a chance at redemption, it tells him, albeit more feelings than words. Even the mind flayer. Even Green.
Fray works his jaw around the cloth stuffed between his teeth. His face hurts from his mouth being held open. His shoulders ache from his arms being trapped behind his back. With every bump in the road, he can feel the furious throb of the half-healed wound in his back, the one that should have killed him. Each moment brings him deeper into the Underdark, further from the surface, and further from any chance of escape. The longer he waits, the worse his odds become. He’s leeched as much of his magic as he dares into healing himself, bit by bit when he’s sure no one is paying attention to him, but drip-feeding his wounds does nothing for the hole in his back. That needs concentrated attention. Fray has little doubt the mind flayer would much prefer to keep him hobbled by pain. The only attention that has been paid to that crippling injury has, in fact, been whatever spell Green had tried to pour into him.
At this thought, Fray’s eyes flit up just in time to see Green hurriedly stop looking over his shoulder at him.
The caravan has stopped. The people who need to eat do so. Fray, whose hands are still bound behind his back and whose mouth is still full of cloth, does not. He assumes this will be the norm and resigns himself to hunger for now. Starvation does not worry him overmuch. If they want to use him as bait for Right, he’s better bait alive. He’ll eat eventually. For now, he tries to study his captors. No one is paying attention to him. It’s the strangers that should be his focus, he knows, but he can’t help the way his gaze keeps returning to Green. Fray never catches his eye, and doesn’t know what he would do if he did. Glare? For all the good that would do him now, impotent as he’s been rendered? Right insists his “scary face” is enough to stop anyone cold, but …
Right. He forces back a cringe, making himself face the memory of their worried eyes. All that talk about seeing Right safely back to the surface, only to turn and indulge his curiosity despite better sense. Now Right is on their own somewhere, badly injured, and if Fray knows them at all, having a meltdown. A meltdown and an injury that could have been utterly avoided had he done his job. He is hard pressed to think of a time where he’s fucked up worse.
There is someone in front of him. The tiefling woman, Constance, grins at him where he’s pressed himself into the least splinter-laden side of the wagon. “Fat lot of good that swordplay got you, hm, Mr. Strong-and-Silent?”
Fray doesn’t bother looking at her.
“Oh, don’t be that way. I did warn you.” In what is clearly a delightful experience for her, Constance draws her sword and angles it against his cheek. The metal is viciously cold. The keen edge bites into his skin as she guides his head back toward her; he does his damnedest not to react as the blade makes a shallow cut on withdrawal. Blood beads and rolls down to his jaw, changing course midway as Constance tilts his head up with the sword point. “You know, I thought you said you couldn’t talk. You sure managed when you told that friend of yours to run.”
She’s here to mock him. Fine. Fray’s ego is not so delicate as to be bruised by the likes of her. He does his best to meld disdain, contempt, and aloofness into his expression as he meets her gaze. “Boss lady has a good sense for these things,” she goes on. “So I’m sure they’ll be back for you. Probably with reinforcements. And, well. You saw how well that went for those paladins. Surprised you weren’t with them, if I’m being honest.”
With a flick of her wrist that betrays her true skill, she slices his gag in two. He spits it out at once, working his jaw with painful motions. There’s a crack in his lip.
Constance looks at him expectantly. “What?” Fray says, or tries. He scarcely gets the right sounds out, and certainly not in the right order. He breaks into coughing before he can even consider repeating himself.
“Poor thing,” Constance says with utter amusement. “All dried out? Want me to kiss it better?”
He wants to spit in her face, but he can’t spare the saliva.
She’s about to go on when something cold bursts the silence in Fray’s frazzled head. He knows its source, still sat on the wagon up front. The mind flayer is not even looking at them. <Constance. I sent you to feed him, not toy with him.>
This at last makes the shit-eating grin fade from the tiefling’s lips. “Sorry, ma’am,” she says in a way that suggests she is not sorry at all. “Can’t help but razz these do-gooder types a bit, is all.”
<You are to feed him and let him rest.> The illithid turns just enough to cast one gleaming eye over the pair of them. It lingers on Fray, but settles on Constance. <He has a decision to make. I will not have you antagonizing him.>
“Understood,” Constance says, more soberly. She sighs and sheathes her sword. “Okay, pretty-boy. I can either feed you bite by bite, like you’re a little baby bird, or you can promise not to try anything funny and I’ll let you use your hands. What’ll it be?”
Fray will answer her, in a moment. She’ll have to repeat it, though. He’s distracted just now. Green is finally looking at him. Fray looks pathetic, he knows, bound and bloody. But hell with it. He turns on the scary face, letting his expression empty of anything but predatory focus and icy anger. He’s never thought much of it, until he found himself squaring off with an ogre in one of Right’s rougher haunts. There had been a disagreement on money. The ogre looked away first.
Green’s countenance twists into a strange shape upon being met with this look, a complicated, new kind of animal, crawling from feature to feature. Fray catches facets of bewilderment, exasperation, and something that he can’t pinpoint. It isn’t guilt; it isn’t not guilt. It is too complex a thing for a face to hold long. He only catches it for a moment before Green hastily turns his face away. Fray does not so much as get a chance to sneer at his back before he feels the Blade of Saints remind him:
Even Green.