Edria
The square erupts all at once. It doesn't start with one voice — it starts with several, overlapping, pulling in opposite directions before the echo of the farmer's words has fully faded.
"He's been bleeding us dry for years—"
"She brought this on herself—"
"The taxes went up three times in two seasons—"
"Consorting with a dark elf lord, and now look—"
"Malrec's men took my grain stores last winter—"
"She had weapons hidden in her forge—"
I stand between my guards and let the noise wash over me. The chains on my wrists are cold. My feet are cold. The morning air smells of mud and torch smoke and too many bodies pressed together in a square that isn't large enough to hold all this fear at once.
Fear is what it is, underneath all of it.
I can hear it even in the voices shouting against me — not hatred, not conviction.
Fear that they chose the wrong side, fear that the dark elves will use this as cause to make all of them pay, fear that the fragile safety they've built by keeping their heads down is about to collapse because of something one blacksmith did in her forge at night.
I understand that fear. I've lived inside it for years.
Malrec raises his hands from the platform, calling for order, his voice cutting through the noise with practiced projection. "The court will have silence—"
"You're the one who should answer for the taxes," someone shouts back, and the square fractures again.
A clod of mud hits the platform steps. I don't see who threw it.
I drop my eyes to the ground in front of my boots.
The chains clink when I shift my weight.
I thought — I let myself believe, last night in the cell with Nyrius's arms around me, that the evidence would be enough to cut through this cleanly.
That documents and testimony would land like light through a window and everyone would simply see.
That was foolish.
People don't see clearly in crowds. They see what they're already afraid of, and they shout it loud enough to drown out anything that would require them to change their minds.
Half of Oxwood is shouting that I'm a traitor.
The other half is shouting that Malrec stole from them.
Neither group is thinking about the child I'm carrying, or Finn, or what actually happened in the years I spent keeping my family fed.
I press my palm briefly against my stomach beneath the chains. Once, quietly, so no one sees.
Stay calm. Stay still. Not for me — for you.
"Order." Malrec's voice again, sharper now, losing its pleasantness at the edges. "The court will have—"
"Where did the grain levy money go, Malrec?"
The shout comes from somewhere near the tavern side of the square. Sorella's side. I don't look up to confirm it, but I'd know that voice anywhere.
The crowd lurches in that direction. The soldiers flanking me tighten their grip on my arms.
I raise my head.
Nyrius is standing thirty feet away at the platform steps, and he's looking directly at me. He doesn't shout. He doesn't gesture. He just catches my eye and gives one small, deliberate nod.
He's not done.
I look past him, along the perimeter of the square. His guards are spaced at intervals around the crowd's edge — eight of them, I count, not drawn but positioned. Watchful. Ready.
He came prepared for this to go badly, and he came anyway.
The chaos in the square is still loud, still unresolved, the crowd pulling in too many directions at once.
Malrec is still on the platform trying to reclaim control, his pleasant composure fraying at the seams. A woman near the front is crying.
Two farmers are shouting at each other over something that stopped being about me three sentences ago.
I watch Nyrius move back toward the platform steps with the documents still in hand, steady and unhurried, and I feel the knot in my chest loosen by one careful degree.
He has a plan. He's working it.
But even as I breathe through the noise and the cold and the weight of the chains, a quieter worry settles underneath the relief.
I watch the people in the square — at the divided crowd, the frightened faces, the guards positioned at the edges, the nobility watching from the platform.
All of this because of what I did, and what Malrec did, and what Nyrius chose to do about it.
The entire region's political future is tangled in this square this morning.
Whatever happens in the next hour writes the next decade for Oxwood, for the border territories, for every human village that exists in the margins of dark elf governance.
Nyrius could lose everything he's built.
The reforms, the territory, the credibility that makes any of it possible.
Because of me. Because of a woman who forged blades at night in a failing forge to buy medicine for her brother.
I want to tell myself that isn't a fair accounting of it. That Malrec would have been exposed eventually regardless. That corruption this deep was always going to crack.
Standing in chains in the middle of a screaming crowd, I find it difficult to fully believe that.
Nyrius reaches the platform steps and stops. He turns back to the crowd and raises his voice, cutting through the noise with a command that lands like a hammer strike.
"Enough."
The square doesn't go entirely silent, but it flinches.
He uses the moment.