The door opened and two Keep guards dragged Joseph to the seat opposite Apollo and forced him in it.

Then they left the room.

Tor fought a flinch at the sight of his arms ending at his wrists.

Tor had fought wars, lost battles, but thankfully won the wars, and he’d seen men with Joseph’s injuries, as with Alfie’s.

The true warriors, in his estimation, were the kind like Alfie.

It was clear Alfie had not simply put his injury behind him and moved along. He struggled. There were frequent moments of darkness that he was not able to hide.

But he was robust. Fit. It seemed daily, his upper body physically strengthened, and this was because he worked hard at it.

And he had found a calling. He had shifted the meaning that was always his life to the same meaning, just going about it a different way.

And he carried on.

This…

Joseph.

He had earned his injuries at the hands of his own, who had turned on him for the gods didn’t know what reason, but any brotherhood that would take the hands of a brother was no brotherhood at all.

All of them locked in an undertaking that was wrong from the start.

It turned Tor’s stomach.

“I will warn you,” Apollo said, his eyes jade daggers aimed to the prisoner who had rested his stumps on the table between them, “if you waste our time again, there will no longer be anyone to listen to your blathers. This will be our last visit.”

“I—” Joseph started.

Tor spoke from where he stood with his shoulders against the wall to the side of Apollo.

“Your Golden Thomas is dead.”

Joseph lifted his gaze to Tor and blinked at him repeatedly, all the while his face paled.

“He was found in a clearing in the Lesser Thicket Forest not far from a pile of dead women,” Tor went on. “His head had been crushed.”

“By the true gods,” Joseph whispered.

“Another one of your people,” Apollo took up the narrative, gaining Joseph’s attention when he did, “identified as G’Fenn, or Fennley Trehurst of Wodell, was with him. He’d been decapitated.”

Joseph’s mouth dropped open.

“Do you know what this clearing is used for?” Tor asked.

Joseph wasted most of both the men’s remaining store of patience, which admittedly was not much, in pulling himself together, straightening in his chair, at the same time obviously trying to work out how to twist this to his advantage, when Tor decided to end it.

“We know the Beast has ascended. We can put the dead women together with the fact some ritual was performed to make that happen, and we can deduce from the dead Rising priests in that location that they did not get what they bargained for when he arrived. Though, their bodies there offers irrefutable evidence your lost cause was behind it.”