The Kingless Crown

Chapter 2

2

WCNM999

“Food allotment for Prisoner W-C-N-M-9-9-9,” a deep voice called out. Cap made his way through the throngs of dusty prisoners, pushing against filth and despair. He hadn’t eaten in three days and hadn’t passed a wet cloth over his flesh in as many weeks. He could no longer pretend the sores on his feet and thighs were from the grueling labor schedule. This was a disease he’d never seen before in his past life, but he knew of it. It was common in the Southerlands, where they ate more fish than they did things grown from the ground. Cap had been to the Southerlands, in his youth, but he wasn’t from there.

“Thanks,” Cap said as he accepted the crumbling clay bowl, overflowing with gray matter. He wasn’t convinced what they served was even food, but it was warm and it staved off death. Five years he’d survived on it, if one could call this Wastelands existence surviving. Many didn’t make it that long.

He tried to find a place under the shade, but there were no trees in Camp Atonement, or anywhere in the Wastelands, only tattered tents and ramshackle lean-tos. Cap settled in at the edge of the makeshift screen that encircled the area where the men went to lay their waste. The smell didn’t bother him anymore, not really, not like it did. Like it should. He didn’t think about what life was like before. He’d stopped comparing the food of this world to the heady scents of boar and spice; stopped recalling what his flesh felt like against hers, clean and soft and inviting.

“Lucky day for you, Cap,” another prisoner, Hill, said, pointing with jealous hunger at the nondescript meal. Truth was, it smelled as good as it looked and tasted worse.

“How long’s it been?”

“Aye, a week?” Hill rubbed at the dirt on his face. Dark purple crescents dipped along the underside of his eyes, and he had the belly bloat that signaled the path had begun. Thin and frail in the limbs, but a gut that grew until the only thing to look forward to was the dead-given rites.

Wouldn’t be long, then.

“Ahh, Hill,” Cap said with a shake of his head. “Have some of mine.”

Hill smiled as he kicked at the red dust at their feet. “Nay, it wouldn’t do to take a meal from a man living, not for a man dying.”

Cap lowered his voice. For some reason, the gaolers didn’t like them talking about the camp for what it was. “It doesn’t have to be that way. Maybe I can finish some of your work instead. Bring up a few more barrows from the mines and say they’re yours. I can do more than I’m doing.” This last was a lie, and they both knew it. No one could do more than they were doing, or they would. Their food was measured in tandem with their efforts.

Hill clapped him on the back, but it lacked enthusiasm. His bony hand fell back to his side. “But then you’d starve, and we’d both die for the effort.”

There was no use complaining to the gaolers about any of this. They’d find more prisoners, probably from the Southerlands, where the king saw fit to steal men from the Warwicks in the crown’s ongoing efforts to punish them. Men, they could replace. Food was a finite resource. Food was a reward for labor, and once a prisoner grew too old, weak, or weary for labor, he wasn’t worth feeding. Hill was one of the first to come to the labor camp opened by King Khain before he died. His prisoner number was SHNT1—the very first thief to come here from Salthill, in the Northerlands. He’d outlasted nearly everyone, including many who’d come after. But you could only starve a man for so long.

“New batch came in a week or so ago.” Hill squinted against the unforgiving noonday sun. It brought the flies with the heat, which were already gathering everywhere; against their flesh, along the gummy surface of the gruel Cap had no choice but to eat if he wanted to survive.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Most from the Southerlands.”

“Seems the way of things.” Cap swallowed down another spoonful.

“Warwick’s a fool, but he’s not the one who starves when he squares up against the crown. At least here, his people can eat.” Hill scratched at his brow. “Well, sometimes.”

Cap didn’t like talking about the crown. “Any bets on the unluckies?” The unluckies were what they called their fellow prisoners in those first days when they realized every terrible thing they’d learned about Camp Atonement was wrong—it was all far worse than they could’ve ever imagined.

“A few squirrely ones, but they’ll knock that out of ’em quick.”

“I’d say so.”

“One from Sandycove has a real swing in his step. Young’un.”

“What did he do?”

“Thievery, according to the crown guard. But, like most here, prolly nothin’ other than the misfortune of being born under a Warwick reign in the Southern Reach.” Hill spat at the ground, but almost nothing materialized. If the lack of food didn’t kill him, the dehydration would rise to the task. “Goes by Andy.”

“Andy.” That wasn’t his name, of course, any more than Cap was really Cap and Hill was really Hill. They had names before this; some even came from the Greater Families. In here, those names meant nothing, and so they were quickly forgotten. They weren’t enough to shield them from the horrors of the Wastelands. Hill was called as such because of his Salthill roots. Cap, from Whitecap. Andy, a nod to Sandycove. The call back to where they hailed from was the only whisper of home allowed.

“There’s also the matter of The Right of Choosing.”

Cap winced. The king was a fool for going forward with the ceremony. Khain’s death should have freed Eoghan from imprudent choices, but instead he was pushing forward along the same course. “He really intends to go through with it, then.”

“Aye. I think he’d take all the lasses if he thought the houses would stand for it. Greedy bastard.” Hill spat again, and this time nothing left his mouth. “Hell, might be war anyway. Warwick’s only daughter is with the Guardians now, and no chance he’ll send his wife in her stead.”

“Mother’s blood.”

“Aye. The Dereham girl is still a lass, too. None of it feels right.”

Cap would miss Hill for a lot of reasons, but his ability to glean any and all news, from within and without the camp, was among the top.

Even the painful news. He’d stopped fighting so hard, but Cap couldn’t forget who he was.

Cap licked at the remnants of the bowl. When he considered how far he’d fallen in five years, it was never in the big moments, but in these, where his desperation for anything warm in his belly overrode any semblance of humanity left in him.

“That’ll be the bell,” Hill said, followed by a curse under his breath.

Cap was overcome with a powerful sense, and he’d come to trust these feelings. He’d never see Hill again. He knew it, just as he knew his own name. His real name. “Hill,” he said, as the old man turned away. “I’m not a murderer. I didn’t kill anyone, least of all my family.”

Hill blinked away the sweat from his eyelids. “Aye? Wha’ brought this on today?”

“We both know,” Cap said. “And, if no one else believes me, let me leave the words with a dying man, who can take them to the Guardians and write them on the sky.”

Hill snickered. He ran his hands over his head and came back with a tuft of white hair. “I know who ye are, Cap. I’ve always known. But it was never me ye had to convince. You’re a good man, but that means feck-all in a place like this. And unless you can see your way out of it, you’ll die a good man, and that’ll mean feck-all, too.”

“There is no way out of it.”

Hill shrugged his bony shoulders and slumped off to complete his final day of labor.

The early days had been hard.

Cap fought through his mornings and noondays, and nursed his wounds through his sleepless nights. The gaolers made a sport of his beatings, looking forward to them with increasing zeal. No other prisoner goaded them quite like Cap, as most learned their lesson after the first two or three sound thrashings. Most eventually figured out that the gaolers had no such rules against killing them. Men were replaceable, and the Wastelands was a lawless land.

For a year, he went to bed bruised, broken, and b****y. But he worked hard, and so he ate, and the energy emboldened him, and the emboldening led to more fighting, more whipping.

Eventually, the bloodlust in the eyes of the gaolers turned to pity. A man needing the spirit knocked out of him had come to the prison camp, but what remained was an empty shell of what once was, and there was no fun to be had in that.

They left him alone after that. Not only from the beatings, but in all things. When he walked past, they made a wide berth, as if afraid of the one man in the Wastelands who had nothing to lose and was no longer afraid of losing it. The soulless one.

But this wasn’t true. Cap still had a soul, and it was the only thing that still kept him lifting the pickaxe, day after day.

Cap paused for the first time in hours to catch his breath. He’d been pushing the carts up the mine all afternoon, owing to the brief rush of energy from the colorless gruel. Sweat covered every inch of his skin, running the dirt from his flesh into the floor of the cavern.

“Careful. I hear the gaolers are real cockmongers,” someone said.

Cap winced and turned toward the sound. A young man, standing fully erect with soft arrogance coursing through his virile limbs. Not yet broken by the yoke of labor under the crown’s worst. New, then. “You heard right enough.” He uncapped the waterskin and took a deep sip. “Some are worse than others. You’ll learn.”

“I don’t intend to learn feck-all here, but I may teach ’em a thing or two,” the young man with the sandy blond hair and ruddy cheeks said, before extending a hand. “Andy. Not really my name, but you know that. Feckers made me check it at the door, along with anything else of value.”

Cap frowned at the clean hand in front of him. They didn’t observe pleasantries here, but of course most of the unluckies didn’t know that coming in. They didn’t know anything at all, but they learned.

“Right.” Andy pulled his hand back and dug it into his pocket. “Well, I know who you are.”

“Yeah?”

Andy’s bright blue eyes twinkled. “The infamous murderer of Whitecap.”

“So they say.”

“What say you?”

Cap, in his delirium of hunger and desperation, often wondered if the crown sent in spies disguised as prisoners, and he couldn’t decide if Andy fit that delusion, or was simply too new to realize the futility in wasting words. If they didn’t get them food, rest, or water, they had no use. Merely energy misused.

“I say nothing matters but their truth. And you’ll do well to remember that if you want food in your belly.”

Andy grinned from one corner of his mouth. “You’re looking out for me. That’s sweet.”

Cap shrugged. “I don’t even know you. And now, we both better get back to work, because, as you say, the gaolers are real cockmongers.”

“We should be mates.”

Cap didn’t know what to make of this strange young man. Even in the real world, the outside world, no one talked the way he did, not that Cap could remember, anyway. In fairness, he’d forgotten more than he’d like. “Why?”

“You need one,” Andy said, and then said no more. He walked off, picked up an axe, and went about his first day of labor.