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 hear the lord's woman and brought 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.
"This is not your fault," I tell him.
"Isn’t it?" He asks quietly. "You started the weapons work because of my medicine."
"I started the weapons work because I chose to." I raise my eyelids wider. "You were twelve when I took the first commission. You didn't ask me to. You didn't know. That decision was mine."
"If I hadn't been sick—"
"Then something else would have tipped the balance." I reach through the bar and grip his forearm. "We were already underwater. You know that." I shake him gently. "If I had to do all of it over again, I would. Every night in the forest, every delivery, every risk. You understand me?"
He swallows hard. Nods once, quickly, the way he does when he doesn't trust his voice.
I let go of his arm before either of us makes this worse.
"You said Nyrius sent word through you," I say. "Tell me."
Finn straightens, grateful for something concrete to do.
He pulls a folded paper from inside his coat — small, no seal, the handwriting inside clipped and precise.
"He said to tell you he has Velis's signed testimony.
Financial records connected to Malrec. Inconsistencies in your arrest." He looks up.
"He said the rebellion activity was manufactured, well, most of it.
Exaggerated or staged to keep the border territories destabilized. "
"So Malrec could profit from both ends," I say.
"And keep himself necessary." Finn refolds the paper. "Nyrius said the documentation is nearly complete. He's filing challenges before the sentencing."
Nearly. I hear that word and file it away where it won't undo the steadiness I'm holding onto.
"He's working fast," I say.
"He hasn't slept in two days, according to Cyran." Finn watches my face. "He's not going to let this go, Edria."
"I know." I do know. That's not what's sitting badly.
What's sitting badly is Malrec, and what Malrec knows about the pregnancy, and what a child represents to a man who trades in leverage.
A dark elf noble with an acknowledged half-human heir is a target.
The child itself becomes a pressure point — something to threaten, to politicize, to use in negotiations Nyrius would never accept on any other terms.
Malrec doesn't need to harm the child directly. He just needs to make the child useful.
I press my hand to my stomach briefly, the gesture too small for Finn to notice through the bars.
"Tell Nyrius I got his message," I say. "Tell him I understand the timeline."
Finn studies me. "Is there anything else I should tell him?"
"No." I manage something that functions as a smile. "Tell Papa to stay still and let his ribs heal. And tell him I said the left leg brace needs replacing before winter — there's a pattern in the back cabinet, blue wool, he knows which one."
Finn commits it with the serious nod of someone taking on a real errand. "I'll tell him."
The block guard appears and taps the bars. Time up.
Finn doesn't move immediately. He stands at the bars with his hands still wrapped around them and looks at me the way he looked at me when he was eight years old and woke up from a bad fever to find me sitting on the floor beside his bed.
"I'll see you on the other side of this," he says. It's not a question.
"Yes," I say. "You will."
He goes.
I sit back down on my shelf and listen to his footsteps fade down the corridor, and I refuse to let myself think about whether I just lied to my brother for the last time or simply told him the truth a little ahead of schedule.
Thirty-seven stones in the arch above the window slit. The crowd outside has moved on. The block is quiet.
I press my back against the cold wall and wait.