I write faster.
27
EDRIA
Ihear the crowd before the morning bell.
It starts low — voices in the lane outside the courthouse, too many of them moving together to be anything other than organized. By the time the block wakes up fully, it's loud enough to carry through the prison walls. I catch fragments through the high window slit above my shelf, words rising and falling with the crowd noise.
—put us all at risk?—
—dark elf retribution on the whole village?—
—taxes doubled, they'll take the farms?—
I sit on my shelf and listen to Oxwood deciding I'm not worth the trouble.
The prisoner two cells down — one of Velis's men — mutters something to the cell beside him. I don't catch all of it, but I hear my name. I hearthe lord's womanandbrought this on herself.I pull my knees up and look at the ceiling and count the stones in the arch above the window slit until the crowd noise moves away down the lane.
Thirty-seven. Same as yesterday.
The town is turning on me, which doesn’t help my case, or Finn and Papa.
Another secret guest shows up two hours after the protestors disperse and go back to their lives.
I know it's him before I see him because I hear him arguing with the block guard in the same rapid, reasonable tone he uses to get what he wants and is just working out the details. A coin changes hands. Then his footsteps, uneven with hurry, and his face at the bars — flushed from cold or nerves or both, auburn hair a disaster, soot on his chin that suggests he's been trying to keep the forge running.
"You bribed a guard," I say.
"He accepted, which means it was a fair transaction." He wraps both hands around the bars. "You look terrible."
"You're the third person to say that."
"We're all right." He scans my face, my wrists, the cell behind me. "Are you hurt?"
"I'm fine." I move close to the bars. "Finn. How much did that cost you?"
"Not your concern."
"It absolutely is?—"
"Edria." He says it the way I say it to him, flat and final. "You'd have done it for me. You have done it for me, a hundred times, and I will not stand outside a prison and watch you through the window because I was worried about a few coins."
I press my lips together. He stares back with our father's stubbornness wearing our mother's eyes.
"Fine," I say.
"Fine." He exhales. "Papa's okay. Ribs are healing. Sorella's been bringing food and he's letting her, which means he's worse than he's admitting but not bad enough to refuse company."
"Are you managing the forge?"
"Badly, but managing." A small grimace. "Henley came by. Said to tell you the gate fitting held through the last storm."
"The hinge alignment on the left post was always going to be the weak point. Tell him to check it again in spring—" I stop. "Tell him yourself. He'll listen."
Finn's expression does something careful. "I'll tell him."
We look at each other through the bars, and I feel the weight of what we're both not saying settling between us.
