Chapter 41
FORTY-ONE
ZRYNOK
We find Tessa in cell thirty-one.
She’s younger than I expected—twenty-eight, maybe, though the hollows in her cheeks and the shadows under her eyes make her look older. Her stomach swells with pregnancy, the curve visible even through the shapeless robe she wears. She’s far enough along that the child must be due soon.
Arwen makes a sound beside me. Something between a gasp and a sob.
“Tessa.” She releases my hand. Moves into the cell. Drops to her knees beside the pregnant woman with a complete disregard for the filthy floor. “I didn’t know—I would have come sooner—”
“Arwen.” Tessa’s voice is hoarse from disuse, but there’s recognition in her eyes. Hope, fragile and terrified. “You’re real. You’re actually here.”
“I’m here. And we’re getting you out.”
Tessa tries to stand. Can’t manage it on her own—the pregnancy has progressed too far, her body too weakened by captivity. Arwen helps her up, supporting her with a tenderness that makes something twist in my chest.
The pregnant woman takes three steps into the corridor. Then her legs buckle.
I catch her before she falls. She’s lighter than she should be—too light, underfed, her body struggling to sustain both herself and the child she carries. She flinches when my arms wrap around her, then goes still, then collapses against me entirely.
The sobs come in waves. Violent, wracking, the kind that steal breath and leave nothing but raw need. She cries into my chest while I hold her, while Arwen stands beside us with tears streaming down her own face, while the reality of what we’ve found here—what we’re saving—settles into my bones.
I’ve killed more people than I can count. I’ve ended lives with efficiency and without remorse. I thought I understood death, understood suffering, understood the full scope of what humans can do to each other.
I was wrong.
We work through the wing for hours.
Some prisoners follow us out immediately, forming a ragged procession that grows with each opened door.
Others need coaxing, reassurance, the patient repetition that yes, this is real, yes, they can leave, yes, the nightmare is finally over.
A few refuse entirely—locked so deep inside their own minds that freedom has become more terrifying than captivity.
Arwen knows most of them. Names, histories, the circumstances of their capture. She crouches beside the ones who can’t move, speaks softly to the ones who can’t hear, holds the hands of those who need contact to believe they’re still human.
I watch her work. Watch her give pieces of herself to people who need them more than she does. Watch her be the lifeline she wished someone had been for her, during all those years she spent in cells just like these ones.
I don’t know how a person does what she’s doing. I only know I want to be the kind of man who deserves to stand beside her while she does it.
The courtyard fills with survivors.
Forty-one of them, in the end—six still refusing to leave their cells despite our assurances, their minds too broken to accept freedom as anything but another form of torment. Arwen promises to send people back for them. Healers, she says. People who understand what the cult does to its victims.
I don’t know where she’ll find such people. I don’t ask.
Oben stands at the courtyard’s edge, exactly where I expected to find him—at the border between monastery stone and Thornwood earth, staring at the trees. He hasn’t moved since he walked out of his cell. Just stands there, drinking in the sight of something he’d given up hope of seeing again.
Tessa sits on a low wall, Circe beside her, the two women holding onto each other like survivors of a shipwreck clinging to the same piece of debris.
Other survivors cluster in small groups—some talking in low voices, others silent, all of them struggling to process the sudden, overwhelming reality of being free.
Arwen finds me at the courtyard’s center. Her face is drawn, exhausted, something raw and barely contained moving behind her eyes. She has been steady through all of it—the cells, the freed prisoners, Tessa. Now the cost of that steadiness is showing.
“There are more.” Her voice is thick with feelings she’s barely controlling.
I don’t want there to be more. Don’t want to see anything worse than what we’ve already found.
“Where?”
“The lower levels. The basement.” She swallows. “The transformation cases. People the Abbot kept for study.”
“Can they be saved?”
“Some of them. Maybe.” She meets my gaze, and I see something in her expression that I haven’t seen before. Not fear—she’s faced fear and moved past it. This is something else. Dread, maybe. Or the anticipation of a horror she’s been preparing herself to face.
“Do you want to see what the Bloom does when it’s allowed to run its full course?”
No. Every instinct I have screams the word.
“Yes.” I take her hand. Press my lips to her knuckles—a gesture I’ve seen courtiers use in the warlord’s halls, elegant and out of place coming from an executioner’s scarred mouth. “You shouldn’t have to face it alone.”