"You lookparticularlyterrible." She passes a wrapped cloth through the bars. "Eat this before the guards come back. It's actual food."
I unwrap it. Bread, soft cheese, two dried figs. My eyes sting unexpectedly, which I blame on the cold air in the block.
"How's Papa?" I ask.
"Released yesterday. Finn's been keeping him still, which is its own miracle." She leans against the bars, voice dropping. "He's furious and mostly fine. Two cracked ribs, nothing that won't heal."
I exhale and take a bite of the bread.
"I need to tell you what's moving through town," she says.
"Tell me."
She does, and she doesn't soften it, which I appreciate. The story spreading through Oxwood is that I seduced Nyrius deliberately — a long scheme to put a powerful man in my debt, use his protection as cover while I ran weapons to rebels. That I defiled him. That the whole village is implicated now by association.
"People are saying it at the market," she says quietly. "Not everyone. But enough."
I chew the bread and don't say anything.
"Aldric started it, I think. Or someone started it through him." She watches my face. "Edria. My family doesn't believe it. Not a word. And your father would break his other ribs fighting anyone who said it to his face."
My eyes shift to the wall. My throat is doing something inconvenient, which I refuse to indulge.
"There's more." She reaches through the bars and puts something small and heavy in my palm. A cloth purse, knotted tight. "The Pelleys started a collection. Some of the farmers, the ones you've done work for. It's not much, but it covers Finn's medicine for two months."
I close my hand around it.
The sting behind my eyes gets worse. I blink, hard, twice, and press my lips together. I am not going to cry in a prison cell over a collection from the Pelley farm, and yet my hands are shaking slightly and I cannot entirely account for it.
"I don't know why I'm—" I stop.
Sorella watches me. "When did you last sleep properly?"
"I'm fine."
"You're pale and you're shaking over a coin purse." She's not unkind about it. "When did you last eat before I got here?"
"Yesterday morning." I tuck the purse into my boot. "The rations are bad."
She doesn't look convinced. She stays another twenty minutes, talking about the village, about Finn's attempts to keep the forge running without me, about small ordinary things that feel very far away. When the guard comes back to move her along, she grips my hand through the bars for a moment.
"We're working on it," she says. "Don't give up in here."
She goes.
I'msick the next morning before the block bell rings.
I make it to the chamber pot in time, barely, and crouch there in the dark while my stomach empties itself of the bread and cheese that tasted so good the night before. When it's over I sit back against the cold stone wall and wipe my mouth with my sleeve.
Bad rations. Different food after days of barely eating. A stomach unsettled by stress and cold and irregular sleep.
I sit with that explanation for a moment.
Then I think about my reaction to Sorella's news — the shaking hands, the burning eyes, the disproportionate emotion over a purse of coins from neighbors. I think about how pale she said I looked. I think about the timeline, and I run the math, and I run it again, and I get the same answer twice.
I pull my knees to my chest and rest my forehead on them.
The cell is very quiet. Down the block, someone coughs. Outside the narrow window slit, the sky is just beginning to lighten.
