Edria
The first interrogation lasts three hours.
I know because I count the bells from the courthouse tower through the wall — one when they start, four when they finally leave me alone.
The room is small and cold, a stone table bolted to the floor, two soldiers and a man I don't recognize who writes everything down in a ledger without looking up.
"Names of your rebel contacts."
"I didn't have rebel contacts. I had one buyer and he’s not a rebel."
"Who did your contact supply?"
"I don't know. I filled orders. I didn't ask questions."
"You filled orders and never asked where the weapons went."
"No." I keep my voice flat. "I asked once. He told me it wasn't my business. He was right."
The soldier to my left hits the table with his palm, loud enough to make me flinch without thinking. "You're lying."
"I'm telling you what I know." I stare at the man with the ledger. "Which is that I made blades for a smuggler because my family was starving. I don't know rebel commanders. I don't know attack coordinates. I don't know anything useful to you."
They don't believe me. The second soldier makes sure I understand that clearly before they take me back to my cell.
The second interrogation is the following morning and covers the same ground. The third is that afternoon. By the fourth session I've stopped flinching at the table slam, and the man with the ledger has stopped writing because I keep giving him the same answers.
They want names I don't have. Every session ends the same way — frustrated, empty-handed, me back in my cell with new bruises on my wrists from the restraint cuffs.
The cell block holds seven people.
Three of them I've never seen before. Two are clearly Velis's men — I recognize one from the exchange points, though neither of us acknowledges it. The last is a woman who sleeps most of the day and doesn't speak to anyone.
Word about me moves through the block fast. By the second night, the whispers are loud enough that I don't have to strain to hear them.
"That's the one who was bedding the border lord."
"Heard she's been doing it for months. Right under the magistrate's nose."
"Smart, if you think about it. Keep the lord distracted, he stops looking at the smuggling routes."
I lie on my back on the stone shelf they call a bed and stare at the ceiling and say nothing. One of Velis's men catches my eye through the bars the next morning and shrugs — an apology, maybe, or just acknowledgment. I look away.
Sorella comes on the fourth day.
I hear her before I see her — her voice carrying down the block, bright and firm, the tone she uses on difficult customers. A coin purse changes hands somewhere near the entrance. Then her face appears at my cell door, amber eyes doing a quick scan of me from head to toe.
"You look terrible," she says.
"I'm in prison."
"You look particularly terrible." She passes a wrapped cloth through the bars. "Eat this before the guards come back. It's actual food."
I unwrap it. Bread, soft cheese, two dried figs. My eyes sting unexpectedly, which I blame on the cold air in the block.
"How's Papa?" I ask.
"Released yesterday. Finn's been keeping him still, which is its own miracle." She leans against the bars, voice dropping. "He's furious and mostly fine. Two cracked ribs, nothing that won't heal."
I exhale and take a bite of the bread.
"I need to tell you what's moving through town," she says.
"Tell me."
She does, and she doesn't soften it, which I appreciate.
The story spreading through Oxwood is that I seduced Nyrius deliberately — a long scheme to put a powerful man in my debt, use his protection as cover while I ran weapons to rebels.
That I defiled him. That the whole village is implicated now by association.
"People are saying it at the market," she says quietly. "Not everyone. But enough."
I chew the bread and don't say anything.
"Aldric started it, I think. Or someone started it through him." She watches my face. "Edria. My family doesn't believe it. Not a word. And your father would break his other ribs fighting anyone who said it to his face."
My eyes shift to the wall. My throat is doing something inconvenient, which I refuse to indulge.
"There's more." She reaches through the bars and puts something small and heavy in my palm. A cloth purse, knotted tight. "The Pelleys started a collection. Some of the farmers, the ones you've done work for. It's not much, but it covers Finn's medicine for two months."
I close my hand around it.
The sting behind my eyes gets worse. I blink, hard, twice, and press my lips together. I am not going to cry in a prison cell over a collection from the Pelley farm, and yet my hands are shaking slightly and I cannot entirely account for it.
"I don't know why I'm—" I stop.
Sorella watches me. "When did you last sleep properly?"
"I'm fine."
"You're pale and you're shaking over a coin purse." She's not unkind about it. "When did you last eat before I got here?"
"Yesterday morning." I tuck the purse into my boot. "The rations are bad."
She doesn't look convinced. She stays another twenty minutes, talking about the village, about Finn's attempts to keep the forge running without me, about small ordinary things that feel very far away. When the guard comes back to move her along, she grips my hand through the bars for a moment.
"We're working on it," she says. "Don't give up in here."
She goes.
I'm sick the next morning before the block bell rings.
I make it to the chamber pot in time, barely, and crouch there in the dark while my stomach empties itself of the bread and cheese that tasted so good the night before. When it's over I sit back against the cold stone wall and wipe my mouth with my sleeve.
Bad rations. Different food after days of barely eating. A stomach unsettled by stress and cold and irregular sleep.
I sit with that explanation for a moment.
Then I think about my reaction to Sorella's news — the shaking hands, the burning eyes, the disproportionate emotion over a purse of coins from neighbors. I think about how pale she said I looked. I think about the timeline, and I run the math, and I run it again, and I get the same answer twice.
I pull my knees to my chest and rest my forehead on them.
The cell is very quiet. Down the block, someone coughs. Outside the narrow window slit, the sky is just beginning to lighten.
I press my hand flat against my stomach.
A child would give Malrec leverage over Nyrius that no amount of political maneuvering could match. A child would give Thalen ammunition. A child would make every enemy Nyrius has built through his reforms and his investigations into a threat aimed directly at something that can't defend itself.
I fold my legs under me on the cold floor of a prison cell and cry as quietly as I know how, which is very quietly, and I don't stop for a long time.