Nobody speaks.
Thalen, sitting at the table’s opposite end, looks at his hands.
"I'll take the silence as an acknowledgment," I say, "that the room doesn't have a good counter-argument." I turn toward the door. "The investigation begins this week. Anyone who wishes to cooperate voluntarily will find that cooperation noted in the record."
I walk out before they find their voices.
35
EDRIA
They release me on a Tuesday.
No ceremony to it — a court clerk comes to the cell block with a single piece of paper, reads a formal suspension of proceedings pending investigation review, and tells me I'm free to return home under conditions of continued regional oversight. I sign where he points. He takes the paper and leaves.
Cyran is waiting in the corridor with the key to the chains.
The morning air outside the courthouse hits me like stepping into a different world — cold and sharp and smelling of frost and wood smoke and the earthiness of Oxwood's lane mud after rain. I stand on the front steps for a moment and breathe it in.
Then I walk home.
The forge is cold. Papa has kept it clean in my absence — tools hung back in their places, the coal pile covered, the floor swept. Everything exactly where it should be and none of it in use. He's been managing on the legal repair work, Finn told me, but barely. The money from Sorella's collection got them through the worst of it.
I don't light the fire the first day. I sit in the forge and let the quiet exist around me and try to remember what normal feels like.
It doesn't feel like much. Normal, it turns out, requires the village to behave normally toward you, and Oxwood is not quite there yet.
Some of them are fine. The Pelley brothers stop by the morning after my release, hats in hand, awkward but genuine. Old Perrin leaves a bundle of dried herbs on the doorstep without knocking. Sorella comes and goes freely, loudly, as if daring anyone to object.
Others are not fine. I hear it on the lane — low voices stopping when I pass, a woman pulling her child closer, the silence that means people were just talking about you. A man I've sharpened knives for twice a year calls my unborn child an abomination under his breath outside the grain merchant's. He doesn't know I hear him.
I do, and I keep walking, keeping my face a stone mask.
Sorella arrivesthree days after my release with bread still warm from her kitchen and an expression that says she’s not going to accept any answers she doesn't like.
She sits down on the workbench beside me without asking and tears the bread in half.
"You're blaming yourself," she says.
"I'm not?—"
"You are." She hands me half the bread. "I know what it looks like on you. You've been wearing it since you were a girl." She takes a bite, chews, continues. "Stop."
"A man called my child an abomination yesterday."
"One man." She meets my eyes. "One loud, frightened man who is also the same man who cheated the miller's daughter outof three silvers last market day and nobody thinks well of him regardless." She breaks off another piece. "Edria. The Pelleys are on your side. Aldric came to me two days ago asking how you were doing. Half this village has eaten bread they could afford because you kept their tools working." She pauses. "They're going to come around."
"And if they don't?" I look at my hands. "This child grows up in Oxwood. They'll know what people say."
"This child grows up in Oxwood with a father who is a dark elf border lord and a mother who dropped a horseshoe at a soldier's feet and didn't flinch." Sorella's voice is warm and firm. "They'll be fine. And they'll be one of us, regardless of what anyone thinks right now, because they'll have been born here and that's what counts."
I eat the bread and don't argue, because arguing would require energy I don't currently have and also because she isn't entirely wrong.
The fears don't go away. I sit with them instead, which is the best I can manage.
Nyrius comes when he can. Not long visits — his time is consumed by the investigation, by correspondence with the court, by the political fallout he warned me about. But he comes, arriving quietly at the forge in the late afternoon when the light is going grey and sitting with me while I finally, slowly, get the fire going again.
He asks after the baby. He asks after Papa's ribs. He asks after Finn with attentiveness ans care.
