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The harsh slam of the workroom's oaken door sounded like thunder behind them, though Thomas had some small difficulty hearing it over the thud of his own body as the King's magic flung him unceremoniously across the anteroom. He fetched up against the outer door, dazed and shaken, and for a moment only lay there, waiting for the ringing in his ears to subside. The echoes, as well, the screams and whimpers and thuds of fists against flesh that had been cut off behind that viciously closed door. They were gone, he knew they were, yet somehow he heard them still. He had an idea that it would be a long time before he stopped.
William found his feet first. Either he was made of sterner stuff than Thomas, or his landing had simply been that little softer. Or, perhaps, his fury was just more powerful. Thomas watched him distantly as he flung himself back at the workroom door, scrabbling at the wrought iron ring to open it again. The door refused him for a long minute. An endless one. Thomas seemed to feel time stretch around them, some magic swarming out from beyond the door and holding William frozen like an insect in amber beneath it, and then it was gone again. Then the air came back, and the ringing stopped, and the door fell open beneath William's hand. It was not the workroom that it lead to any longer, however. William threw it wide to reveal only a bare, empty stretch of floor, an ancient room that had been gathering dust for centuries.
Of course. Of course the King had taken the room away with him, the better to finish his grisly work without them to disturb him by their horror and their anger. God alone knew where he might be now, the whimpering remains of that poor, wretched boy trapped alongside him. He would return to them when he was done. Not before.
William realised it too. He stood for a moment in the empty doorway, his hands knotted into shaking fists and his shoulders taut enough to repel steel, and then he pivoted sideways on one foot and slammed both fists into the oaken door with all his might. He let a roar out of him, a deep bellow of grief and rage, and Thomas closed his eyes against the sight of him. He laid his head back down against the floorboards, uncaring of all dignity, and listened as William's fists pounded over and over again against the wood as their King's fists had pounded over and over against dead, unresisting flesh. He brought his hands to his eyes, drove the heels of them down against his cheekbones, and pressed the back of his skull into the floor. He wished to be part of it, suddenly. He wished to be dead, uncaring wood, some inanimate object that had no knowledge of what they had just witnessed, that had no care for the horror and the fury of his friend. He wished to be part of the floor. He wished to be unconscious. He wished to be away from here. It was not granted. None of his wishes were.
"Damn him," William snarled, turning from his abuse of the door to stalk back into the anteroom. Thomas heard him come, and pried his hands from his face to look at him. William's face was whiter than gravefrost, his eyes dark and furious as a midnight thunderstorm. There were blood and splinters all over his hands. He paid them no mind whatsoever. "Damn him, damn him, damn him!"
It would have shocked many to hear him, Thomas thought. They would have found the sight of him now as horrifying and strange as the one they had left behind in the workroom. William was not much given to anger. He was known the length and breadth of England, and several of the Faerie realms as well, as a man of calm and compassion, and patience bordering on infinite. He was reason and restraint, the exact antithesis of his mercurial, tempestuous King. It would have stunned so many to see him now, with his rage and his grief so wildly and plainly to be seen.
Even a patient man has his limits, however. Even the calmest and most placid of men may be pushed too far. Thomas had watched it done to William inside that room. He had seen his friend horrified and pleading, and then anguished, furious and helpless. What had been done to Henry Barbatus, the gaunt, decayed figure of that noble young man flung about like a rag doll and punished beneath the King's hands, had horrified them both, but it had incensed William. It had driven him to try and stop it, to fling himself against his King and try to interfere, and then their King had driven them out instead. He had cast them away, blind and uncaring in his fury, and now here they were. Useless and helpless in their fury, pacing an empty room while somewhere, God knew where, their King made the last work of that wretched youth.
"Damn him," William said again, but it was softer now. It had passed through rage and into grief. He stopped in his pacing, his shoulders falling and his battered hands coming loose from their fists. He looked over at Thomas, a bleak anguish in his gaze. "Damn it all. God, Thomas."
Thomas stirred himself at that. Even as William dropped slowly to his knees, he sat up and pulled himself awkwardly up the wall, gathering his feet under him to move to his friend's side. William looked away from him. He looked down at his own hands, noticing the blood of them at last, and ignoring it all over again to clench them once more. He bowed his head, and it was only when his shoulders began to shake that Thomas knew he wept.
"William," he breathed, and knelt before his friend to pull him close and cradle him against his shoulder. Tears stained his tunic there, and blood possibly the cloth at his back, where William clenched his hands. Thomas felt very old, all of a sudden. He felt the weight of every year since he had been stolen into the brugh, more than a century previously, and met his King among the fairies there. It had been a long road, but until this moment he had never felt it so. It was only now, seeing William undone by an echo of fairy cruelty, that Thomas felt his age once more.
"Why?" William asked, in helpless anger against Thomas' neck. "In God's name, Thomas, why? How can it be necessary? How can he ..."
Thomas looked away, towards the window of the outer wall and the sunlight that filtered through it, in defiance of all horror. He curled his fingers tight in his friend's hair, and wordlessly shook his head.
"It is just, to his mind," he said finally, in voice made small and weary by grief. "He is as much fairy as man, William. You know that. Barbatus has betrayed him. To his mind, there is nothing wrong in what he has done to answer that betrayal."
William pulled away from him. Not harshly, though Thomas feared it for a moment. He feared that William, so unused to anger, might turn it against him in his grief. William did not. He only leaned away enough to see Thomas' face, to hold Thomas' arms in his hands and stare at him in horrified disbelief. That was nearly worse, Thomas thought. All the rage in the world, any blow cast against him, might have been better than the raw desolation and lurking fury in William of Lanchester's eyes.
"... Nothing wrong," William repeated, a hollow fury building slowly in his tone. "Nothing wrong? It was monstrous, Thomas! It was ... It was a mockery of all God's work! To debase a man so, to reduce a man to ... to that, and then to ..."
He cut off, clamped his jaw shut until his lips went colourless from the strain of it. Thomas reached out to him, tried to touch his hair or his cheek in comfort, but William withdrew from him. He stood up, that tautness back in his shoulders once more, and strode away. A few steps, no more. There was nowhere to go. William tried anyway. He paced about the room like a dragon in a cage, his fury visibly mounting with every step. Thomas, still kneeling in the middle of the floor, only watched him once again. He could not gainsay him. His heart was too full of grief to manage it. William was not wrong. What their King had done would not have horrified a fairy, but they were not fairies. They were men. Thomas had spent fourteen years a captive in a fairy brugh, and a hundred and thirty in service of a fairy-raised King, but he was still a man. He could find nothing but horror and disgust for what their King had done.
After a moment, William stopped pacing. He drew to a halt near the centre of the room, only a foot or two away from Thomas. His expression, when he raised his head to meet Thomas' eyes once more, was now stern and set and as immovable as stone. Thomas stood, slowly, at the sight of it. He felt a grip of fear seize his chest. This was not a helpless fury on his friend's face. It was a resolute one, the calm, determined anger of a man who meant to do something about it. Something, Thomas greatly feared, that would take a very great deal to undo afterwards.
William was not much given to anger. He never had been. William was always calm, and patient, and reasonable. And he was all those things still. They had passed through the roaring tempest of his fury, spent it uselessly against their King's power, and now they were in the eye of the storm. Here, his anger was cold. It was calm. It was patient. And it was, most of all, immovable. Thomas looked into the face of his friend, and saw a breaking there that he did not know if his King could overcome. He knew William loved the King still. He would not grieve or rage so strongly if he did not. But it was apparent now that beneath the surface of a patient man was a fury to match all the rage of the Raven King, and that the horror committed this day might be a horror beyond William's power to forgive. If their King said as much as one wrong word upon his return ...
And Thomas could not fault it. He couldn't. Men were not playthings, to be broken to less than an animal for a King's whim, to have even their God-given rest defiled for the sake of his anger. Thomas could not forget what had taken place in that room. He could not forget the sound of the King's fists striking dead flesh, nor the sight of a proud and noble youth cowering in terror on the floor, nor the horror of a voice begging in the tongues of Hell to know what wrong its owner had committed. How could any man forget that? How could he turn aside his honour and pretend he had not witnessed? He could not. No man of honour could.
"... I know," he said, before William could do more than open his mouth. He shook his head, looked right into William's eyes and met the anguish there with his own. He felt his face twist with his grief, but it was not grief alone that grew steadily in his breast. His anger was colder and quieter than William's, older and more hollow, but he felt it nonetheless. He could not ignore what he had seen. He could no more stand aside and pretend forgiveness than William could. "I know, William," he said. "I cannot bear it either. I'll stand by you. You have my word."
Tears sprang in William's eyes. He did not let them fall, not yet, but he came the last few steps and took Thomas' shoulders in his still-wounded hands. Thomas welcomed them. He reached up and gripped William's arms in his turn.
"... He may kill us," William said quietly. His mouth twisted, the grief for a moment over-ruling the anger, the tears slipping free to trail silently across his cheek. "He cast us out a moment ago. His mind is full of rage and betrayal. He may not tolerate further disagreement."
Thomas felt his lips curve, a smile as dark and bitter as wormwood. "Then let him kill us," he said, and his voice shook with his own anger, finally given rein. "Let him kill us and have his answers from our corpses as well. There are things I should like to say to him in the language of Hell. I think I should speak it better than that poor wretch of a boy."
William stared at him for the longest of moments, still calm in his anger and silently weeping, and then he leaned forward suddenly. He brought his hands from Thomas' shoulders to cup his face instead, and pressed a ragged, salt-stained kiss upon his lips. It tasted bitter. There was wormwood in William's mouth as well. Thomas gave a little cry of despair, nearly a laugh, and kissed him back in turn. He gripped at William's shoulders, taut and furious enough to repel steel, and broke the kiss to lay his head on one of them and weep at last in his turn.
"Damn him," he whispered, holding tight to William. "Damn him, why could he not listen to us? We have never led him wrongly. Why couldn't he just listen?"
William did not answer that. His fingers curled in Thomas' hair, his eyes locked on a now-battered oaken door as he perhaps heard once again the finality of it slamming shut behind them, and William did not answer. He did not have to. Anger born of betrayal was a terrible thing.
And this moment, it was not only their King who understood it.