The room erupts in exactly the ways I expect. Pravel's aide raises three separate objections in rapid succession. Theren says nothing, which is its own form of objection. Two of the escort soldiers exchange looks. Corrine watches me throughout all of it.
When the voices have subsided enough to be useful, I step within earshot so that only she can hear clearly. The scars on the left side of her collarbone are visible above her torn collar—fire, from the texture—and I file that away with the same detachment I give everything else.
"You're not going to a cell. You're going to my estate's west wing, under guard, with no exits. You will stay there until I've decided what you're worth to me alive." I let a beat pass. "If that number drops to zero, I'll revisit the lieutenant's suggestion."
Corrine meets my eyes. Whatever she expected from this moment, it wasn't this, and she's smart enough to know that the unknown is in most practical situations considerably worse than the threat she can measure. "You should have let them execute me."
"Probably." I step back. "That's a problem for later."
3
CORRINE
The room has twelve paces east to west and nine north to south. I know because I've walked it forty times since I was placed inside it, which tells me my shoulder hurts badly enough to be distracting. My expression is neutral because there's a guard at the exterior door and possibly another behind the false panel on the north wall. The panel sits flush except for a faint line of newer mortar at the lower left corner. I noted it on my third circuit and stopped looking at it on my fourth, because the last intelligence I want them to have is that I found it.
The ward on my wrists has been replaced with a single heavy manacle, connected by a chain to a wall ring that gives me eight feet of movement. Generous, for a cell. The room itself isn't a cell. It has a bed, a basin of water, a lamp burning low, and curtains over a window that opens onto a wall. I washed the blood from my face using two fingers and my sleeve. I wasn't going to use the rag they left because it's too coarse for the cut above my eyebrow and I need to keep the skin from pulling apart.
I sit on the bed and map the guards by sound. Two at the outer door, rotating conversation in the short, clipped cadenceof soldiers who've worked together long enough to run out of interesting things to say. A third presence somewhere down the corridor—less consistent, which means either patrol rotation or a ranking officer who doesn't want to look like he's standing watch. I'd wager the ranking officer.
This is what I do with fear. I make it useful. The lamp flickers twice from a draft I haven't located yet. I am building a picture of a room. Not an escape. Not yet. Escaping Leoric Kaine's holding would take resources, timing, and somewhere to run that is not worse than here. Right now, I have none. What I have is information, and that is the only currency that doesn't require me to be anywhere else to spend it.
The voices outside shift. The two guards have stopped their idle exchange and moved closer to the door, where their conversation drops below easy hearing. I go still, extending attention toward sound the way I learned to do on border crossings in pitch-dark forests, letting meaning fill in underneath words.
"—wasn't supposed to be a secret, Voren. Half the division knew the executions were happening before the fire. Officers running processing for the human detainees?—"
"—Prisoners disappeared, and servants," the other interrupts. "Nobody evacuated them."
"Nobody evacuated anyone."
A silence that sits differently than the comfortable gaps of their earlier conversation. Then: "Records say the orders came from somewhere above the outpost commander. That's all I know."
"That's all anyone knows. Nobody's asked in seven years, and nobody's going to start now."
Footsteps. The patrol rotation I suspected, rearranging positions, and then the conversation ends the way they do when people realize they've said more than they intended.
I sit with what I've just heard and let it settle, which is not gentle. I knew the outpost held human prisoners. The intelligence I was given—Gideon's intelligence, sourced through channels I trusted because I'd trusted him and he'd never given me a reason not to—described illegal executions being carried out on captives: civilians, rebels, anyone inconvenient. I believed it. I built the plan around it. I helped light the structure that would bring the whole rotten system inside it down.
But servants. Kitchen workers. Stable staff. People who were not the officers, not the architects of whatever crimes were occurring in the lower chambers. People who survived on proximity to power rather than possessing it—cleaners who removed evidence, cooks who fed soldiers, grooms who held horses for men whose orders they couldn't refuse. Fire does not care who deserved it. It takes everyone it can reach. And if there had been human prisoners below when the fire spread, then I had not only failed to save them. I may have helped seal them in.
I already knew there were dead I couldn't assign to deserving. I knew it before tonight, underneath the more comfortable belief that I'd done a terrible thing for a true reason. But overhearing confirmation aloud is different from carrying it quietly inside.
I press the heel of my palm against the cut above my eyebrow, just enough to feel something immediate and specific, and I stare at the lamp flame until my breathing evens out.
The door opens without warning. I stand before I've consciously decided to. Leoric enters alone. He closes the door himself, which I note because it means the guards outside are either incompetent or explicitly excluded. The light brings the burn scars along his jaw and neck into relief, dragging shadow into the puckered texture. I fix my gaze on his face, but inside, the room tilts back into smoke and heat. My knees lock to keep the memory from taking my body with it. He takes the chairwithout asking whether I prefer to sit and looks at me with the unhurried patience of someone who has run interrogations for longer than I've been alive.
"Sit down," he says. "You're favoring your left side."
"I'm standing."
"Yes." He doesn't press it. His pale blue eye finds my face, the clouded one aimed roughly in the same direction, giving him an unsettling focus, and I watch him catalog the cut, the favored shoulder, the chain length, the distance between me and the exit. He studies the room the same way I did, even in a space he already knows. "Why did you burn the outpost?"
"You already know why."
"I know what the reports claimed after. I know what your rebellion sang about after. I want what came before."
"Then ask the dead men who wrote those reports."
His expression does not change. "You were twenty-four. The intelligence came through the Thornwall cell. Gideon Valecrest's network."
