Blackheart
Eighteenth Day of the Twelfth Month 293 AC
Minutes spent in dreaded silence turned into hours, hours into days. Still, Myles Toyne, known across half of the world as 'Blackheart' for the arms of his forefathers, sat stiff and defeated in apartments he had been blindfolded and frogmarched into most of the way through.
They were no noble's quarters as it was said Stannis Baratheon had been accounted during their ill-fated invasion of the Stepstones, but it could hardly be called a dungeon cell. Still, that said nothing of the intentions of Viserys Targaryen, a name thrice damned and twice cursed, which had hung over the company of soldiers and sometimes madmen he fought alongside for over a year like a dark cloud.
It took a long, long time of only being able to count the time passing by the emptied bowls piled into a tray near the door, with even that eventually taken away. All visitors he had were soldiers, or else men clad in grey cowls and the occasional raven mask, asking questions and rarely answering them, none permitted or even inclined to exchange gossip.
More honestly, Myles quickly recognized the gleam in the eyes of the 'Legionnaires' who had lead him into there to begin with, it reminded him of more than a few of the truly devout among King Aegon's army...
King, the word was a bitter jest upon the tongue, Myles was well used to the company of Kings, all of them fell, in their own way.
And who else could order veteran soldiers about for such menial tasks as cleaning out his prison while he was backed against the far wall and facing away, he suspected so he couldn't memorize faces or bodies. Gradually Legionaires and Inquisitors were replaced by Targaryen regulars, household troops by the looks of it...
no, he thought, too learned in the ways of war to recognize them for anything else.
They were as well-trained as any soldiers he'd serve alongside, perhaps just army regulars? They did not wear crimson uniform cloaks with their armor, just red enamel upon a single pauldron which had some kind of unit designation in High Valyrian:
1st Cohort, 31st Reserve Company.
Myles had slumped in confusion and frustration, unable to work out rhyme or reason to any number of things about that. Eventually he realized that when one could afford to pay men to garrison cities in great numbers, you could also keep your elite soldiers separate and dignified, surely not away from all banal tasks as digging trenches and latrines to make a camp, but enough to add further to its appeal.
Keeps the sedentary kind of man out of the way, Myles thought, he'd known more than his fair share of mercenaries who rather preferred the type of contract work where they sat around a great city, eating and drinking and fucking a nobleman's wealth away.
Myles dimly remembered the figments of shattered prophecy, when the Golden Company's mages were still learning their craft by sifting through ritual and figments, of Viserys Targaryen coming to him and his cadre of officers in one half-forgotten future, wining and dining them, begging bowl in hand.
Look how that hope turned out.
There wasn't much to do with himself as the days pressed on and the questions started to dwindle, so he asked for a cyvasse board on a mere whim, having learned the game while in Volantis.
To his surprise, one of his interrogators brought one to him promptly, making him wonder if he could have requested other things. Quite shrewdly he held off on that, and was rewarded with books and a copy of the
Imperial Times, the neat printed numeral in the corner denoting it as the
#2 issue. He thumbed through the broadsheets, learning much of what he'd already known from their own spies and diviners' reports, and much of what he didn't. How they sold tales to the masses, for one.
"So what now?" Myles asked the man in grey clothes, bearing the silvered badge of the book and sword, the former Captain-General lowering the copy of the
Times to peer across the cramped table dragged into the center of the room, noting the man slide, at ease, into the other chair bolted to the floor. Another oddity about this place... everything, all the furniture, the doors and fixtures, heavily reinforced and sturdy. There were no bars on the single small window of his prison which flooded light into his cell when the mage lantern was shuttered. He would break his hands first before he smashed through the hardened crystal, and he thought he saw the tell-tale flutter of raven wings outside, knowing they were no ordinary birds. Not that escape was ever really on his mind. He had run headlong into a world of literal shadows, and it hadn't helped him none.
"We finish writing our reports, and you wait for your deferred sentencing period to pass." The man glanced up, after a brief pause, a glimmer of sympathy passing through the impassive mask of his expression, not at all for what Myles was, he thought, his hopes and dreams and ambitions, but more the
not knowing, perhaps, and only if you could call it that. Myles could obviously just be seeing things, the confinement and lack of information getting to him. "From what I have been told, it should be decided upon soon where you will undergo identity refinement."
Such a cheery way to put it, Myles thought. Left unsaid were all the measures they would likely take to keep him in order, he shuddered, causing the man to shift his lips into a nigh-sickly smile.
"The tracking spells should be discrete and non-invasive. You will check in with a handler regularly, remain confined to one location and escorted for official matters, then live separate and meet less regularly," the man explained to Myles' surprise.
"That's it?" For a wonder, the former Captain-General believed the man when he nodded.
"That's it. King Viserys is fair and just to those who cooperate, teaching many in my institution of responsibility and lessons on dignity, even to the damned and condemned. Mercy after a fashion, besides that much, at least to those who we can afford to give it to." The smile never reached the man's eyes, not as he spoke words Myles would never forget in all his life: "Of course, not that many who do end up in your position ever will."
***
Myles still met regularly with Investigator Fodor, as a 'visitor', though only in the sense that it further demonstrated his quiet desperation, he was a man who craved companionship, near any form of it, who was suffering from a dearth of friends in this world, all of them ashes in the wind. "It actually amuses me, the more I think about it," Blackheart told his jailer, one of them anyway, a puppet operating on someone else's strings. "A former footman, not even an officer, running a whole army the size of the Golden Company."
"Lord Torchwood is an anointed Knight," the raven-friend replied with a tone of dry humor, "Bearing of the highest dignities."
"And my mother was a sailor," Myles replied with a laugh, "Can't tell you how many men I've served with who walked away from the life as an 'anointed Knight', who's never spent a single day in vigil or brushed either shoulder with sacred oils. Still, if you walk in the right shoes long enough, a lie becomes truth." That was how he felt when he began to lead the Golden Company all those years ago, at any rate.
"In his defense, I believe the Lord General can recite any passage you care to name from the Book of the Warrior," Fodor defended the absent high official, one who had apparently used to sell his sword along with a whole a cavalcade of dead men.
The errant thought killed any sort of cheer it had brought, sure as any sword to the heart. "Regardless, only the King knows for certain how he ended up in his position," Fodor went on, moving his elephant forward on the board. Myles held back his dragon, assessing the state of his side of the playing field now.
It implied enough about the appointment that it was deserved, Myles thought, a toadie would have at least a couple of rumors about general incompetence, that or they were able to delegate well enough to hide it. To hear the
Times tell of it, the man shit glory and breathed fire like any number of lauded heroes of the empire, and he was only clear on the fact that the general populace thought of the man as a war hero and a good commander from the nest of drivel. But it was a consistent narrative, tight and focused, so some of it had to be true.
Even the Dragon can afford to shower his far lessers in high honors, Myles thought, albeit less bitterly than before. There had been more than a few times where he thought for a moment to walk away from it all--that mostly cropped up during the darkest moments, seeing the life drain from the eyes of decent people, men and women who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
More than anything in this world, Myles hated especially those days playing the butcher.
It might have been a mercy for 'Blackheart' to die in the plains of Jogos Nhai.
***
"What happened to Fodor?" Myles asked in curiosity. The man no longer visited him, though it might not have mattered as he suspected he would not be kept here any longer, they were moving him soon, he knew, just the impression he got from the far more lax guards... they were less unsettling to be around than the first ones assigned to him. Just regular men, none of that 'higher' purpose fueling them.
"I beg your pardon?" The pinch-faced man was one of the seldom seen interrogators who still came by for one reason or another, he suspected because he was one of the few people who had the clearance to see him and he'd have gone insane otherwise, trapped in there with no one to talk to.
"Investigator Fodor--he used to visit." Myles thought perhaps he was being put on, it was possible they were playing dumb because 'Fodor' was an assumed name--Hells, likely was, now that he thought about it--but there were few men bearing that badge who had been seen interacting with him, by now he knew they recorded
everything on physical records.
The man blinked at him, lips pursing as he stood frozen mid-rise, just about to leave the cell, as if questioning someone far away, Myles had grown familiar with the look, a far away gaze like someone peering just over the horizon. Eventually he replied: "Investigator Argarys died eight days ago, during an altercation with fiendish saboteurs."
As the bottom of his stomach fell out beneath him, Blackheart sat back, unable to understand at first. Eventually he realized that of course men died to stranger things best left unsaid as much as they did to more common ailments, like an arrow to the guts or from wound rot after a battle. The world had changed and he had changed with it. He had lost many friends to the vagaries of fate before and after the return of magic, lost them to fiends too, but only now did he realize how shaky his sanity truly was as he had cursed the unfairness of it all--Hell wasn't an enemy one had to get ready to fight or see people die spitting in defiance against... that was just common sense at one time, only men and the darkness in their hearts. Only men.
Had he been lost in darkness this whole time, that he could only see there and then, after getting dragged back out kicking and screaming?