Given the length of time Brantley had been down the hole, it was a wonder his single, lidless eye could still bear the light at all.
Yet he saw the shape of one of his jailers above him, black against the grey beginning of dawn.
He waited.
Would it be food today, or a bucket of icy water tipped laughingly over his head? Or would they lower nothing at all and leave him with the rats, the damp, and the slow drip from the stones?
After countless days in the old well, Brantley had learned not to hope. Hope was a bright thing, and bright things hurt his eye.
A wooden bucket scraped against the stones.
He pressed himself back against the wall of his prison, muscles tightening, but relief shivered through him when he saw it was being lowered, not tipped. He snatched at it as soon as it came within reach and clawed out its contents before the rope jerked upward again.
Bread.
A half-rotten apple.
He ate both quickly, crouched like an animal, then knelt and lapped water from the shallow pool in the floor. The spring beneath the well was weak now, no more than a whisper some days, but it had never failed him completely.
More than once, Brantley had thought of blocking the outlet and letting the water rise over him. Let the dark take him. Let the world forget the thing it had made of him.
But each time, his will to live had proved uglier and stronger than his despair.
Then voices came from above.
“Who wants him?” asked a gruff voice.
Brantley knew that voice. Falmuth, head jailer, whose breath smelled of onions, whose hands smelled of leather and blood.
“Orders from the king,” came the reply.
Brantley went still.
He knew that voice too, though he had not heard it in a long time.
A rope ladder dropped toward him, uncoiling like a pale snake.
“Move yourself, prisoner,” Falmuth called down. “If I have to come after you, it’ll be the worse for you.”
Brantley grasped the ladder and began to climb. His limbs were cramped and weak, and twice his foot slipped on the rope, but he kept going, up toward the dreadful light. As he neared the surface, Falmuth seized a handful of his filthy hair and hauled him out like something dragged from a drain.
Brantley fell to his knees in the prison yard.
With one trembling hand, he shaded his eye.
The courtyard was circular, its stones slick with morning frost. Prisoners stared from barred windows. Some crossed themselves. Some shrank back. Most had seen him before, but still they looked.
They always looked.
A child’s body, twisted by hunger and damp. A single staring eye. No eyelid. No lashes. A mouth too wide. Skin grey from the well.
A little Cyclops.