Chapter Fifty-One

Time moves differently in prison. It pools, then flows, rushes, then ebbs. It’s too slow and too fast.

When Stefan and the new guard came, I opened the portcullis for them, let them rush in and take me.

I suppose I could have sat in the galley, could have stayed safe behind the bars, could have taunted them until dehydration made me delirious, until I became dead-eyed and dead-faced.

Maybe I would have if it’d been just my life.

But it wasn’t.

Fifty-four prisoners in twenty-seven cells. Fifty-four prisoners with lives and families, who cheered for us as we raced down the hall. Fifty-four prisoners with hopes and dreams, and maybe some deserved to die, but maybe some didn’t.

I’m a physician, not a judge. A healer, not an executioner.

So, I opened the portcullis and Larland took me, pinned me against the wall. They stripped the knife from my stocking and searched my body with roving hands, the scent of their leather filling my nose, my mouth. I kept Signey’s bead pressed under my tongue, and I couldn’t breathe.

I wanted to scream.

I wanted to cry.

I wish I was brave.

I’m not brave.

They sent out a search party for the Volds, the thirty men meant to escort Erik. They tore Salborg Castle apart, then tore me apart, tried to make me turn, to tell. Where’d they go? How’d they leave? Maybe it would have been better to die in the galley, to die before I opened that door.

But fifty-four prisoners…

The sores are healing—cattail strips up and down my back, red and angry welts that blister and sting against the cotton shift I wear now.

Where the Volds went, I will not say.

But you should know they never found them.