Cyran keeps pace. "And if the oversight council moves the sentencing forward?"
"They won't get the chance." I say it with more certainty than I have right to, and I mean every word of it. "I will pull apart this entire region before she answers for feeding her family."
He's quiet for a moment. "That's a significant statement, my lord."
"Write it down." I push through the prison entrance. "I'll repeat it in council if I have to."
23
EDRIA
The first interrogation lasts three hours.
I know because I count the bells from the courthouse tower through the wall — one when they start, four when they finally leave me alone. The room is small and cold, a stone table bolted to the floor, two soldiers and a man I don't recognize who writes everything down in a ledger without looking up.
"Names of your rebel contacts."
"I didn't have rebel contacts. I had one buyer and he’s not a rebel."
"Who did your contact supply?"
"I don't know. I filled orders. I didn't ask questions."
"You filled orders and never asked where the weapons went."
"No." I keep my voice flat. "I asked once. He told me it wasn't my business. He was right."
The soldier to my left hits the table with his palm, loud enough to make me flinch without thinking. "You're lying."
"I'm telling you what I know." I stare at the man with the ledger. "Which is that I made blades for a smuggler because my family was starving. I don't know rebel commanders. I don't know attack coordinates. I don't know anything useful to you."
They don't believe me. The second soldier makes sure I understand that clearly before they take me back to my cell.
The second interrogation is the following morning and covers the same ground. The third is that afternoon. By the fourth session I've stopped flinching at the table slam, and the man with the ledger has stopped writing because I keep giving him the same answers.
They want names I don't have. Every session ends the same way — frustrated, empty-handed, me back in my cell with new bruises on my wrists from the restraint cuffs.
The cell blockholds seven people.
Three of them I've never seen before. Two are clearly Velis's men — I recognize one from the exchange points, though neither of us acknowledges it. The last is a woman who sleeps most of the day and doesn't speak to anyone.
Word about me moves through the block fast. By the second night, the whispers are loud enough that I don't have to strain to hear them.
"That's the one who was bedding the border lord."
"Heard she's been doing it for months. Right under the magistrate's nose."
"Smart, if you think about it. Keep the lord distracted, he stops looking at the smuggling routes."
I lie on my back on the stone shelf they call a bed and stare at the ceiling and say nothing. One of Velis's men catches my eye through the bars the next morning and shrugs — an apology, maybe, or just acknowledgment. I look away.
Sorella comes on the fourth day.
I hear her before I see her — her voice carrying down the block, bright and firm, the tone she uses on difficult customers. A coin purse changes hands somewhere near the entrance. Thenher face appears at my cell door, amber eyes doing a quick scan of me from head to toe.
"You look terrible," she says.
"I'm in prison."
