Stripped of his armor and every scrap of silk that marked him as the member of a Great House, Latio was made to walk. And walk. And walk still.

There were two hundred of them, each with a sturdy mount, yet he was kept on his own two feet. He had reached a point that he would have been willing to be sharing a saddle with any of them, stinking, savage, and lice-ridden as they were. Anything was better than this relentless, rhythmic trudge that lasted from the first grey light of dawn until the stars burned cold above.

By the second night, his feet were a cake of weeping boils. He had to burst them himself once they struck camp with a stick, the clear fluid mixing with the dirt of the road. On that first night, he had taken it as a personal insult when they denied him a rug or a tent, but a bitter glance around the clearing revealed the truth: these men lived like the beasts they emulated. None of them used tents. They slept on the bare earth, huddled in furs, indifferent to the frost.

The fire in his legs was a dull, throbbing roar that lived between his knees and his ankles. He couldn’t even massage the cramped muscles during their brief, agonizing breaks, for his hands were bound tight with hemp rope that bit into his wrists.

"Little Bull doesn’t need to know where the herd goes," the rider holding his lead rope would say whenever he asked where they were going. "He just needs to know that he is to go and walk." Then, for good measure, the man would lean down and deliver a heavy boot to the side of Latio’s head, sending him spiraling into the grit.

Laughters would rise after that.

And they also made sure to have plenty to laugh at.

He had always believed that the wounds of the soul, the shame of defeat, the loss of his men, would be the heaviest burden to bear. Four days of forced marching proved him a fool. The agony of the body was much louder; it screamed over his thoughts until the grief in his mind simply went numb, pushed aside by the sheer, grinding necessity of taking the next step.

Sleep brought no reprieve. His dreams were haunted by the ghosts of Ser Cleo and Noros. He saw their bloodied hands reaching up from the loam to drag him down into the dark with the worms. Sometimes they just watched him with milky, sightless eyes, refusing to answer his frantic questions.

When it wasn’t the dead, it was the memory of the Hounds’ laughter, the way they had mocked his last, pathetic attempt to strike back before they overran him. He was a bastard, and he thought he understood the sting of mockery, but these men made the slights of his youth feel like honey.

They hadn’t just outwitted him on the field; they felt the need to remind him of his insignificance with every league they covered. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

"Little Bull must be dearly missing his old friends," sneered the one Latio called, in his mind, Screw-Nose.Given how his nose looked more like a crooked twig than a feature of a man. Whenever Latio stumbled, Screw-Nose would yank the rope, senting him face-first into the dirt.

"Little Bull, Little Bull," another would chime in, dangling the silver-horned helmet his father’s blacksmith had painstakingly forged. It swayed mockingly from the side of a saddle, a hollow shell of the man Latio was supposed to be. "Where are your horns now?"

Once, he had dared to complain about the state of his feet as a favor they roped him to the underside of a horse belly.

It was a stallion.

’’The ride and the knight’’ Shrilled Red-eye, the single blood-shot iris on him.

’’Yes but which is the knight and which is the ride?’’ had laughed someone Latio could not see, when the stallion’s cock whoomped on his face.

Unbidden, old prayers began to bubble from his lips, hollow verses learned in a nursery and long forgotten. He didn’t blame himself for the defeat anymore; he didn’t have the energy for it. It didn’t feel like his fault. He was simply stunned by how easy it had been to trick him, to trick a veteran like Cleo. It felt like a trap set by the gods themselves, a destiny he had walked into with his eyes wide open.

But the absence of guilt brought no comfort. He was a prisoner of savages serving a peasant-prince, his army a memory. He recalled a week when the riders’ numbers had been halved, and the day they returned, boasting and drunk on some wine. He tried to tell himself his host was still out there, waiting, but deep down, yes...deep down he knew that was not the case.

Sometimes Latio wept, until he heard the bastards laughing. Then he would force his eyes to go dry and his heart to go dead, praying to any god who would listen that a plague would descend and rot them all in their saddles.

His throat had gone raw from the dust and the shouting. It was so inflamed that it hurt to swallow even a mouthful of water, and he could barely manage the hard tack they threw him. They made him drink whatever they offered; sometimes it was lukewarm water from a skin, other times a stinging vinegar. Once, he was even given a splash of sour wine.

Another time, they handed him a skin filled with a particularly bitter, warm liquid. He had swallowed two long mouthfuls, desperate for the moisture, before they bothered to tell him the truth.

"You’re drinking my piss, Little Bull," one of them cackled.

His stomach was too empty to even grant him the relief of puking it out. He just sat there, the taste of waste coating his tongue, while they howled at the look in his eyes.

One morning, the madness finally boiled over. Driven by a sudden spike of desperation or madness, he lunged for the shortsword Screw-nose kept loosely at his hip. He managed to saw through the rope and made a frantic, stumbling run for the treeline.

They treated his escape like a game of tag.

They brought their horses close enough for him to feel the beast’s breath, then veered away just as he swung the stolen blade. They threw stones and scraps of wood at his back when he turned to run, and when he tried to pick up speed, they rode alongside him, hitting him with the flat ends of their spears and sword and axes to keep him upright and moving.

At that point, he had truly wished for death. He no longer cared if his cousin inherited the throne and made Vinnacovi to be a brothel or a butcher-house, or whatever it was his cousin liked to do.

As long as this hell ended, it was enough.

Eventually, the farce reached its conclusion. He tripped over a root and fell hard, the sword slipping from his numb fingers. The hound-faced demon, the leader of this pack, appeared above him. He kicked the sword away just as Latio’s fingers brushed the hilt.

"That was certainly amusing, Little Bull," the man laughed, reaching down to hoist Latio up by his matted hair. "But try that again, and I’ll take a foot. You can crawl the rest of the way to the Prince."

He wept that night, a broken, hitching sound that he couldn’t stop. They laughed, as they always did, mocking the boy who cried like a babe.

"Crybaby," one shouted. "Mamma’s boy," another jeered.

But then someone called him craven. That was the word that finally found a spark in the ash of his spirit. He was a bastard, yes, and he was beaten, but he was not craven.

He had faced them, hadn’t he? He had reached for the steel.

He shouted his defiance into the dark, a hoarse, rattling scream of "I am no coward!"

In response, they beat him. They used their boots until his ribs felt like splintered glass. Then they bound him to the stallion’s belly again, leaving him there for hours, and beat him once more the following morning when they cut him down and forced him back onto the road.

That was the last time he gave them any trouble. For the rest of the journey, he remained a ghost. He didn’t open his mouth; he didn’t make a sound. He simply moved his feet.

Screw-nose took notice of the change. During one of the evening stops, the man tossed half a greasy sausage toward him. Latio didn’t hesitate; he lunged for it, gulping it down like a starving dog.

It was good...

"Look at the cur,eating like a dog" Red-eye called out, and the it stuck.

From then on, they made it a sport. When it was time to eat, they threw his rations into the dirt, forbidding him the use of his hands, and to make it a reward they would sometime throw muttone or jerky-meat. For one day, Latio tried to maintain a shred of dignity and refused to eat from the ground.

They simply watched him grow hungry.

By the next sunset, he had learned the lesson. He knelt in the grass, picking up scraps of meat and bread with only his lips and his teeth.

He was no longer a prince, no longer a bull. He had never been; he was the son of a tanner and a prince. But he was no prince; he would never be.

He was exactly what they wanted him to be.

He just wanted to go home to his father.