Chương 90: Cherazza 3
286AC
She walked down through the hallways of the lower pyramid, a small basket held under one arm. The chambers here were simple rooms, they normally only held a plain bed and a vanity, so that the best slaves could make themselves presentable before joining the men or women who hired them. Anything else was generally considered a waste of money.
The room she was approaching, however, was slightly different. It was the same size as the others, but it also contained a dresser, as the Dragon-Boy was not expected to immediately serve in the nude. Rather her father wanted to parade him around in front of the other masters, and that required at least a modicum of decency, at least until he was loaned out for favors.
There were no doors in these halls, so she simply strolled into the room, "Hello Viserys." She said, placing her basket by the door. "I am here again."
The boy sat was as she always found him, sitting on the bed staring blankly at the wall, and dressed in the same red rags that he had been brought to her father wearing. Indeed, the only differences between now and then in his appearance were his hygiene and his tattoos. Gone were his dirty, cracked nails and ratty hair, replaced now by long but well kept silver hair, and trimmed nails painted a bloody red. His face and skin were also better kept, smoothed she understood by days of applied ointments and salves, to ease out the burns and scratches and usher in a new skin that was healthy and smooth.
On his upper arms, just below his shoulders, he bore an identical tattoo on each side. It was a carefully made depiction of the three-headed dragon of the Targaryen dynasty with collars wrought around its necks. Chains ran up from the collars and into the claws of the Golden harpy of Ghis. Her screaming features seeming to Leer down at the dragon in victory.
The boy, however, did not seem to care, just as he didn't seem to care about anything else. Whatever he had once thought of his dynasty, it seemed to have long since left him.
She sat down by the door in a chair she had asked Agazmon to place there for her after she had realized that she had no place to sit on the second day she had come to visit the boy.
Carefully, she placed the basket down in front of her on the floor. As far as she knew, he did not eat the food, and it was likely stolen by the other slaves, but she hoped that he recognized the offered basket for what it was, a gift that it was his choice to accept or not, he might eventually speak to her of the Red Witch's secrets.
This was the fifth day that she had brought the basket to him. She would sit a while and let him rest, though, from the way his eyes did not move from the wall, she did not think it likely he would accept today either.
She nodded, seeing that he did not intend to move, reaching down instead to take her flute from the basket. Agazmon believed her silly for trying such things, she could tell, but there had to be some stimulus, some emotion which could be drawn out of the boy by some means, and once she identified it she could move on from there, like pulling a thread through a needle. She knew that music was a potent tool by which to draw out an emotion in even the most cynical of men, and so each night after the first she brought one of her instruments down, to see if she could draw out feeling by that means.
Her velvet lips ever so carefully pressed against the side of the flute, and with a careful breath, she began to play. Songs she had been taught by her teacher, songs she had heard in the market, just as the night before, nothing seemed to work.
She scratched her head, trying to remember other tunes, the ones played for her father by foreign musicians and the like, often only once or twice. She began to practice around them, trying to match notes and sounds to them as she often did to practice new music.
After perhaps an hour of playing, she noticed a strange humming sound coming from the boy as she played a certain, swooping chord.
Experimentally she played it again, and the humming sound from the boy's throat repeated. She cheered in her head at her success, even as she turned her gaze to the boy. "Why are you doing that?"
Viserys Targaryen, a prince who ought to be a king, now a slave, turned his gaze from the wall for the first time, though only moving his neck. She felt his purple eyes meet her own, and for the first time since seeing him heard his voice.
"I don't remember."
At that moment, she felt herself drawn into those deep, deep purple eyes, despite their lack of visible feeling or emotion. Indeed, they seemed so deep that it took her a moment to recognize the context of the boy's face around them.
He was crying.
"I see," she said, as the boy turned back to the wall, his blank eyes leaving her to return to the yellow brick as if trying to pierce the mystery of his own existence.
Inside, Cherazza cheered, the boy before her had shown emotion. No longer was she left with just a needle.
She had found the end to her string, now she needed only pull it through.
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