Chapter Twenty-Seven Frejara
The room held its breath around me. Linen creased beneath my shoulder where I’d curled onto one side, the coverlet drawn snug across my hips, warm where it held and cool where it had slipped.
The air was thick with sleep and the slow ember-glow of the banked hearth, and the dull ache behind my eyes told me I had slept longer than I meant to.
A sound stirred beyond the door – a footfall, muted but certain, followed by the soft click of a latch easing open.
I shifted only slightly, opening my eyes the barest slit.
The crooked beams above swam into view through the morning haze, and a chair came into focus—drawn close to the bed, and slouched in it, Mathias.
One arm draped against the frame, his chin tipped toward his chest in the loose abandon of someone who had fought sleep until it won.
His hair had dried in tangled waves, the lines of his face gone soft.
I watched the curve of his throat as he stirred, the flick of lashes before they stilled again.
The floor creaked outside – once, then again.
A careful tread, familiar with every board.
The door opened just wide enough to allow presence, not light.
A pause followed – and then a voice, hushed and low, threaded through the quiet.
“Come, boy,” I heard Maeve murmur, her tone worn smooth.
Mathias shifted beside me, and though I kept my face turned into the pillow, I felt him rise – first the lift of his arm, then the slow push of his boots against the floorboards.
He moved like someone unwilling to disturb the air too sharply, and I wondered for a moment if he believed I might still be sleeping.
But then his hand brushed lightly against the line of my shoulder, fingertips skimming the blanket as if in passing – and a moment later, the backs of those same fingers caught gently against my cheek, tucking a stray strand of hair back from my brow.
He leaned in close, and I felt the warmth of his breath at my ear with his words.
“Whenever you’re ready.”
He knew I was awake. Had known, perhaps, from the moment my breath shifted as he stood. But he let me linger for as long as I needed, as if holding still could make the hours wait their turn.
The latch clicked again, softer this time, followed by the dull thump of boots meeting timber and the sweep of a coat being drawn back over one shoulder.
I stayed as I was, eyes closed, the blankets still gathered at my collarbone, listening as their voices settled just beyond the door—muddled by wood and distance, but still clear enough to follow.
“I’ve spoken to the Elders,” I heard Maeve say, followed by a heavy huff and a ruffle of her skirts. “They’ll be at the square by midday, and half the town with them if the gossips keep their pace.”
A breath from Mathias – not sharp, but laced with vex. “Well. That should go smoothly.”
Maeve made a sharp, wry sound that landed somewhere between a sigh and a scoff. “You’re far too calm for someone walking into a den full of teeth.”
A rustle followed, the scrape of boots finding firmer footing. “Oh, I’m not calm,” Mathias said. “I’m resigned.”
She paused a moment. “That’s worse.”
“Probably.” His voice shifted, a little closer to the door now, as though he’d leaned back against it. “But they’ll bare their teeth either way. Might as well give them a reason.”
Outside the bed’s cocoon, I imagined her arms folded, the set of her jaw turned toward the window, counting shadows that hadn’t yet arrived.
“No, they’ll come alright,” Mathias said, and there was a steel in his voice I hadn’t heard before. “They’ll come with sharpened tongues and old grudges polished up like heirlooms, competing to prove theirs cost the most.”
“I’ve known them since they had knees scraped from running barefoot on dirt paths and cobblestone,” Maeve sighed. “And I can’t tell you which frightens them more – what she’s done, or what they now owe her to survive what’s coming.”
Their footsteps moved off down the hall, slow at first, then swallowed by the hum of wind curling at the corners of the old house.
I lay there a moment longer, feeling the warmth of the blankets fade inch by inch from where his hand had rested.
The room felt thinner without him in it – not emptier, just different, as though the air itself had changed its shape around his absence.
When I sat up, the movement came slow and deliberate – the kind you made when you weren’t yet sure how much of yourself had returned to you.
And something in me moved with it: sharp and rising, a heat I hadn’t summoned but awake now all the same – stretching like a muscle remembering its own strength.
The quilt slipped off me in a heavy fold.
Someone – Maeve, most likely – had left a bundle at the end of the bed: clean clothes, neatly folded.
I dressed piece by piece, the fabric still stiff with line-dry and sunlight, handling each with the same dutiful care I might have used for armour.
Today, the linen tunic, kyrtill, and woollen trousers would serve as my shield against an entire town who would rather see me hang than hear me talk.
At the window, I drew back the curtain with the tips of my fingers and squinted against the light. The sun had already cleared the rooftops, bright and unrelenting in its climb. Whatever time I thought I had, it was less than I’d hoped.
The square was already thick with bodies by the time we turned the final corner.
Word had travelled faster than even Maeve expected – passed from mouth to mouth like fire jumping rooftops, each retelling adding its own soot and smoke.
The Elders stood in a line atop the raised platform, their robes drawn close, their expressions carved in that particular way people used when they wanted to look measured and looked anything but.
They did not speak – they were waiting; for Maeve, for the crowd to settle, for whatever spectacle they thought this might become.
She walked ahead of us, her back straight, her stride unbroken, and without a single word the people parted to let her through.
She had lived too long among them, set too many bones, stitched too many wounds and banished too many fevers to be challenged outright.
But when Mathias and I followed in her wake, the air changed – it thickened and pulsed, like the breath of a hound just before it bites.
Gasps met us first, sharp and almost delighting in their cruelty.
Then the curses came – witch, liar, butcher, whore – “String her up,” someone barked.
“Burn the rot out of her,” shouted another.
A woman next to me spat at my feet. But no one stepped forward.
No one blocked our path. They only watched as we walked through them, flinching as if the sight alone might mark them.
I expected no different. Their venom was old, familiar, almost worn thin with use.
Let them curse. Let them drag my name through the muck and call it justice.
I hadn’t come for forgiveness, and they hadn’t come to offer it.
I had come to offer them a way to keep their souls intact – nothing more, nothing less.
They could hate me all they liked, as long as they stayed alive to do it.
We stepped onto the platform one by one – Maeve first, then Mathias, then me – and though no one touched me, I felt the recoil ripple through the Elders like a stone dropped in still water.
One of them stepped back outright, her mouth curling in distaste.
Another turned half away, as if even the act of looking in my direction might draw contamination.
Only the third – the oldest of the three, his beard streaked through with white and his eyes sunken into hollows too deep for age alone – held his ground. But even he would not meet my gaze.
Their attention shifted to Maeve then, sharp as flint. She held it without shrinking, hands resting at her sides, her chin lifted just enough to show she had walked into this willingly.
“Alright, Maeve. You brought her here,” one of them said, spitting the words like venom from his mouth. “Now speak your peace and be done with it… so we can be done with her.”
Weathered and unmoving, she kept her gaze on the crowd, not the Elders – as though her answer had been given long before she stepped onto the platform. The pause stretched, unflinching, until the space it left became mine to step into – carved not by welcome, but by fear.
I let the moment hold, just long enough for the weight of Maeve’s silence to settle across the square – and then I stepped forward, the boards beneath my feet groaning faintly as if even the wood resented my presence.
A sea of faces stared back, their expressions fractured and flinty: some closed like fists, others taut with suspicion, and a few already twisted in scorn.
They’d come for blood, or for spectacle, or simply because they feared being the last to see me hang – but they had come, and I could work with that.
“I have not come here to make peace.” I said then, every word louder than the one before. “And I have not come here to ask for your forgiveness.”
“You wouldn’t get it!” Someone shouted from the crowd. A bottle flew to the foot of the podium, shattering against the cobblestones.
“You’re a monster!” Someone else shouted.
“And a butcher.” I turned to look into the crowd, as if to find those who had raised their voices.
“And a devil. And a murderer. And who said it just now, a whore? Probably that too, just not a very well-paid one. I have burned my way through cities, and I have stolen crops from farms to feed my armies, and I have starved villages by taking all they had and more.”
The whole square had fallen so silent even those at the back could hear the creak of the wooden podium boards as I shifted my weight.