Luthais had not visited the ghost woman since he'd captured her in the nearby woods a few weeks before. Too many things had happened. Nairna had gone. Nairna had been returned. Searla and Roisin had gone. And they had been returned, too. His family had been in turmoil, and he had not spared the prisoner a second thought during those days. But now, things were beginning to go back to normal. Nairna was recovering, and Raith continued to heal. Searla and Roisin were well (even though the fact that he even thought of Roisin's health and wellness still left him confused). And the next battle was looming. Things were right in the world.
But Luthais was never one to leave well enough alone. The woman had always been in the back of his mind, plaguing him. He'd sequestered her to a smaller cell, alongside the Imperial Army prisoners but...separated, alone. Jacob did not do traditional cells, not like the royalist bastards. She was relegated little more than a broom closet, but it was fortified and a guard was stationed outside. It was to this guard that Luthais gave a curt nod now, and the guard leapt aside, leaving the door ajar for him. He walked into the semi-darkness of the makeshift cell, smelling immediately the damp and the cold and the waste.
And then...there she was, eyes like lanterns in the dark. Disturbing, how she managed to fit in even here. "Tha thu nad shealladh duilich." But he knew that she would not be able to understand him, and for this conversation, he needed her full attention. So, as much as he despised it, he switched to her tongue. "But it is what you deserve, wraith."
Thea lifted her head on a swan’s neck, turning it to look over her shoulder at the man who had entered without ceremony, the man who spoke harsh words in a tongue she knew not, the man who had thrown her into this forgotten closet and forgotten about her.
Though, it seems he hadn’t entirely forgotten. Here he was, looming over her as he had on that day. The girl looked up at him through milky lashes before slowly uncurling herself from her ball, lifting her body to sit, to turn and face him. Her joints seemed to creek, and her limbs were so heavy. She’d never felt less part of this world than she had being locked in this cell, her body feeling more and more foreign as it began to wither.
“But it is what you deserve, wraith.” he said, and her ash-tipped ears flicked, surprised that she could understand him. So he was speaking just for her now. How nice.
The words hung in the air between them, and her pale eyes flitted along the harsh curves of his face. It was funny that he called her wraith, when his own son was also called Raith. She thought of bringing that up, but there was another word that caught in her mind like a scrap of cloth in barbed wire: “Deserve,” she echoed, and then did something perhaps stupid — she smiled, and she let out a small little laugh — a short noise that was related to a scoff, but lacked all the derision.
It was just a funny concept — that someone deserved, or didn’t deserve, something.
“If I’ve gotten what I deserve…Have you gotten what you deserve?” she wondered. What did he think he deserved?
Was it praise for taking a royalist off the streets, locking her up and forgetting her existence? Was it punishment, for stealing a girl away from her home, her family, for merely existing?
What he deserved depended on who you asked. Thea herself had no opinion on the matter of what he did or didn’t deserve; she didn’t believe in the word, or the concept. He was just doing what he did, and she happened to be caught in it.
