Unmaking Percy

Part II - IV, continued (The Hushing Manor)

"Please take a seat" Astred's voice reached him.

Percy did not even think to object that it was far too dark for him to see where he might sit. He merely stumbled forward, groped blindly for a chair, found one, and sat. He was bound tightly by nothing. That darkness, that scent, that urge to do as he was told.

From of the darkness, a lamp sighed a weary light. Astred sat facing him. They were alone: the darkness left untouched by the lamplight was quiet and still. There was nothing to see other than that man before him, and yet, it was impossible for Percy to focus on him. There were eyes, yes; and a mouth, and a nose, and hair. Dark brown hair, and a face that was pleasant, if unremarkable. Percy felt that he could not hold those features in his mind, could not commit them to memory: there was no closing in on them. They were as the waters of a river, carving its bed and leaving it behind as soon as they made their impression on it. Percy knew that, even if he was met with entirely different features when he was next summoned, still he would recognise that man: not for the traces of his face, but for the traces it did not leave.

"Did Sir Evans succeed in breaking the curse?"

A question that wasted no words and no preambles, a precise cut from knives already sharpened. That man would carve a straight road ahead of him wherever he determined to go; through bedrock or flesh, carve it all the same.

"Yes" Percy answered. He thought he had spoken normally, but his voice dropped in the darkness like a pebble thrown into a well.

"And how did he break it?"

He knew by now that there was little point in wasting his breath – and how scant, how precious it seemed to him now – by protesting that, surely, Astred had already heard it all from Evans himself. Percy started to weave his tale, recounting their arrival in the city, how he had been taken into the house and opened the door for the others, how Evans had spoken to Armand, summoned the enchantress...

"And then..." his voice faltered.

Anyone else would have picked up his words where he had left them. 'And then?', they would have repeated, perhaps with coaxing kindness, perhaps with growing impatience, but either way, handing him the thread of his tale so that he might keep spinning. But Astred merely watched on.

"And then" Percy continued at last, dragging himself painfully through that silence, "he kneeled before the sorceress, and he pleaded with her to see reason and to break her curse. And she did."

He could feel the straining of the truth he twisted now. It should not be so very hard; he had lied countless times before. But Astred's gaze flayed his mind, pierced his thoughts, threaded them as he wished with needle and twine.

"You pick your words carefully" the man said. "You say kneeled, when you could say prostrated. Pleaded, when you could say beg. Why flatter him?"

"I do not flatter him" Percy snorted. It was far too lowly a sound for such a venerable backdrop; and, in fact, it barely sounded at all.

"You do not chastise him, either."

"You wish I did?"

"You know what I wish you to do."

Percy felt a sudden despair at the blinding embrace of the shadows around him. He was often afraid of the dark. Not because he imagined monsters there lurking – he did, but he had been taught he would defeat them – but because he had a terror of losing his bearings. He had not managed to dust it off over the years; had not even tried, believing that as he grew older and wiser, the fear would leave him and seek other, younger, more foolish minds to haunt. As he had let it be, it had eventually settled into cobwebs that shrouded him in mute dread every time he met a dark room.