Both men stared hard at him, eyes narrowed slightly. When several minutes passed without anything happening, Gar said, “Truly incredible. You’re a marvel, lad! You should join a troupe of traveling entertainers to share your talents with the world! Peasants and nobles alike will laude you for your majesty and—”

The man’s mockery was cut short, just as Ludo knew it would be. Because partway through, he’d begun to feel the familiar tingles he’d experienced his entire life. Sometimes they roamed throughout his body, but only if needed, and in this instance, they were focused on a single spot—the tear in his lip.

A tear that, he could tell, was no longer there.

“What the void?” Gar said. “That’s…”

“Impossible,” Min finished. He seemed to be leaning backwards a bit, as though trying to put as much distance between himself and Ludo as possible. “Not without magic. Which is illegal. So illegal that King Vedran has been sticking heads on pikes across the entirety of the kingdom if one is caught.”

“It’s not magic,” Ludo said. In truth, even when the crown had deemed magic to be illegal, he hadn’t given it a second thought.

“I don’t know if the king would see it that way.”

“The king is the least of our concerns right now. And anyway, is breathing a sin? Is blinking? I have no control over this. It just happens. It’s always happened, since I was a child.”

“It doesn’t make a lick of sense,” Gar muttered. “It’s not natural.”

“For me, it is.”

“Do you feel pain?”

“Of course I do. But it fades quickly.”

“Lucky you.”

“I understand why you’d say that, but I’m not lucky. It’s been a curse more often than it’s been a blessing.”

“This is why you were willing to offer your tongue up to stop Dahlia from pouring that poison down my throat,” Min said.

Ludo shrugged. “Doesn’t seem so heroic now, does it?”

“I never said it was heroic. In fact, I think the term I used was ‘foolish’.”

“What about your eye?” Gar interrupted. “If you’re so confident your tongue would grow back if Dahlia cut it off, why didn’t your eye heal?”

This was a question Ludo had considered for many years, and yet wasn’t any closer to the answer. “I don’t know.”

Gar shook his head. “What are we supposed to do? Not hit you when we’re forced to fight? You won’t be able to hide this from Dahlia. Not for long, anyway.”

Ludo already knew that. According to their accounts, Dahlia punished them whenever they refused to hit each other. They’d learned to just fight hard and suffer the consequences later. What they could do to each other while shackled was never as bad as what Dahlia could do to them with her daggers. “I don’t plan to keep it from her. I plan to use it against her.”

As they listened, Ludo explained his plan.

When he was finished, Gar nodded and said, “You know, lad, that could actually work.”