4: No One Is Going To Hurt You
Summary: a short in-between where Therrin has to find a way to remove the shackle on Matteo’s ankle. Matteo, still feverish, misunderstands what is happening to him.
CW: feverish whumpee, restraints, manhandling, misunderstandings, royal whump, fantasy/medieval whump, infection, prisoner whump, fear of amputation, past torture
It was early still on a chill April morning, and Therrin had Matteo wrapped in a fur-lined cloak to ward off the damp. Even so, he shivered in their arms as he and Rudy carried him out of the castle and across the yard.
Snowmelt and foot traffic had turned the yard to intersecting trenches of mud, and long planks had been laid across the worst spots to keep them passable by cart. Rudy and Therrin made an awkward pair, shuffling sideways across the planks in the squelching muck, carrying a barely-conscious Matteo in their arms.
It was possibly the iron manacle on the prisoner’s ankle, the healers agreed, making him stay so sickly. It had chafed and never been allowed to heal, and the skin underneath was red and inflamed like a bad cut. It had to come off, they said, and only then they could hope to treat it.
Therrin would not be responsible for delivering the news to Saxon of his brother’s death a second time.
Matteo whimpered in his fever-sleep when they set him down in the smith’s shop, lying on an unsanded bench.
Therrin clapped Rudy’s shoulder in thanks. They had a shorthand, he and Rudy. Rudy had been with him in the long months spent on horseback and sleeping on frozen ground before the siege. Rudy was a man of few words and flaming red hair, with thick smatterings of freckles on his face and forearms. He was quick with a sword, and he knew all the same southern songs that Therrin did. “Too big to take offense”, Lord Barrman once said of Rudy while they were on the road, “and too noble to give it.”
“This it, Your Grace?” asked the smith, eyeing the shackle with doubt. He was a burly man, black of hair and with deep wrinkles in his forehead and at the sides of his mouth, suggesting ample experience in his graft. Good, Therrin thought.
“I need it gone,” Therrin replied. “It may be contributing to the fever.”
The smith wiped his calloused hands on his apron and examined the rusted shackle that was nearly fused with Matteo’s ankle.
“I’m guessing you wouldn’t be comin’ to me if taking the foot was an option, Sire?”
From the corner of his eye, Therrin saw Rudy’s glance.
“And if we run clean outta other ideas?” the smith asked.
“I’d ask a second opinion first,” Therrin said cooly. “Begging your pardon.”
“Not at all, Your Grace. Just seeing what we’re getting into. But I’ve got something that will do the trick, I think. The rust is stopping the key being any use, but it weakens the iron. Hold him down? I can’t have him rollin’ off the bench.”
Therrin and Rudy each knelt on the dirt floor and took one of Matteo’s shoulders loosely on either side.
The smith observed several angles before trying anything, standing at Matteo’s feet and then his hip, assessing where he would have the best leverage for his arm, the best grip with the tool.
“Hold him,” he muttered in warning before clamping the iron teeth into the shackle and giving it his first go. The sound was unpleasant, a grinding resistance of metal on metal.
Matteo moaned and his eyes fluttered as if to open. Therrin and Rudy tightened their grips.
“Stay asleep,” Therrin murmured. “Stay under.”
The next inch of work required a wrenching motion of the smiths arm, like he was putting all his weight into the torque of the tool to bite into the rusted shackle. Matteo’s eyes opened and he stiffened, taking in his alarming surroundings like he’d been dropped into an ice lake.
He screamed hoarsely, pulling his foot away from the smith and trying to roll off the bench. Therrin and Rudy held him fast, pressing his shoulder blades back down to the wood. He cried out, frantic, eyes glassy.
The smith cursed and grabbed him by the shin to straighten the leg beck out. He pulled a length of slim rope from his utility belt and wrapped it round the bench, securing Matteo’s leg at the knee. Matteo arched his back, bucking his hips like a wild thing.
“Nonono,” he sobbed. “Don’t do this. Henry…ask my father, he will pay you! Hell give you— whatever you want…anything you… please, what do you want?!” he sobbed. With the rest of his body immobilized, he banged his head back against the bench.
Therrin grabbed a fistful of his hair and held fast. “Shh. No one is going to hurt you, Mattie. Lie still.”
Still, he tried to writhe out of their grips. Rudy adjusted his knee on the ground so he could put his upper body into stabilizing Matteo, using not just his hands but his forearm and upper body to hold him still.
“God, please, stop,” Matteo sobbed, going limp with exhaustion, maybe finally realizing the futility of fighting three stronger men and a coil of rope. “I’ll do anything you ask,” he rasped. “Ask me and I’ll do it, I swear. Don’t do this— don’t do it…I can… I can be good, I— you can cut my hands again, I—I won’t scream…” Feverish eyes fixed on Therrin, bright with tears. “Y-your Grace… please, mercy.”
“No one is cutting anything off of you,” Therrin said gruffly. It was strange to imagine the boy he once knew was the same as the one on this bench, those same eyes, once fearless and proud to the point of snobbish. “We’re taking the shackle off of your foot, Matteo.”
“Don’t take it,” he begged, confused and frightened. “Nonono, I’ll pay you, my— I didn’t kill him… I didn’t…you don’t understand, I can—”
“The iron, Mattie,” he said, and risked letting to of Matteo’s dark hair to cup his cheek in his palm. He held him there, hoping to get through to him. “No one is hurting you. Do you understand? We’re not taking your foot.”
“Please,” Matteo whispered, his cheek hot to the touch. “Therrin.”
“That’s right. It’s just me. It’s alright,” Therrin said. “Lie still, Mattie. We’ve got you. Good boy. Lie still.”
His eyes were closing against his will, like he might drop into sleep again, after all that.
“No one’s going to hurt you,” Therrin promised him. “Close your eyes. You’re alright.”
Matteo’s brows knit in some troubled final thought before slipping back under the pull of his fever.
Rudy looked from Matteo’s face to Therrin. “He trusts you,” he said mildly. An observation.
“He doesn’t trust me as far as he can throw me when he’s lucid,” Therrin muttered. “Thinks I’m going to take him back down there and put him on the rack.”
“Perhaps it’s more telling that he trusts you in this state,” he mused. “If not in his lucid one.”
The smith gave a short snap of a powerful arm, and the last of the shackle fell open, revealing the infected skin beneath it.
They carried Matteo back to the castle, and Rudy helped lay him back in the King’s chambers among the furs.
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