“I do not know why I should think you would treat me with dignity,” she said, yanking her arm from his grip and moving to the cell wall. “You and your liege have been barbaric and immoral from the start, so this is not a surprising action. Thank you for your time, my lord. You may leave me here to rot just as you have the others.”
With that, she plopped down onto the cold, moldering ground, huddling her knees up against the icy temperatures. Leaning against the wall, she turned her face away from the knight, effectively cutting off the conversation. But she realized as she sat there that tears were very close to the surface.
Tears of what had been lost on this day, tears for her poor father. Thoughts of Rupert de Thorington were heavy on her mind, but she wasn’t going to beg a de Wrenville knight to be kind with her father’s body and give it over to the priests of the nearby parish. He would probably spit on her if she asked, so she didn’t. But the thought of her father’s body ending up in Winterhold’s massive moat made her physically ill.
Bile rose in her throat.
As Emelisse closed her eyes to ward off the horror her life had become, the knight was still standing a few feet away. He hadn’t left her. She could hear his joints pop as he moved in her direction.
“Lady Emelisse,” he said quietly. “I am going to offer you some advice. Whether or not you take it is your choice, but I would suggest you consider it. You are now Baron Darliston’s prisoner and he can do with you as he wishes. A cooperative prisoner will be treated much better than a combative one. De Wrenville has not touched you, but he can. If you push him with your resistance and bad behavior, he very well might. Though you do not belong in the vault, it can become your permanenthome if you do not start showing a willingness to be obliging. Am I making myself clear?”
Emelisse didn’t answer him. She had nothing to say. She turned her face to the wall and squeezed her eyes tightly shut, letting the tears come. It had been a day of days and physically, mentally, she had been cracked.
Cracked, but not broken.
She had earned the right to spill a few tears.
The knight watched her lowered head in the darkness, waiting for an answer. When he realized she wasn’t going to reply, he turned to the two threadbare, filthy prisoners on the other side of the cell.
They were two men, two brothers who had cheated Marius de Wrenville of a fine horse. They’d promised him one and when it was delivered, it was far below standard. Rightfully, they had been imprisoned and here was where they would die. Soon, by the pitiful looks of them. But that didn’t stop the knight from standing over the pair, menacingly.
“Harass the lady and my justice shall be swift,” he said. “You will not go anywhere near her. Do you understand me?”
The pair, weak and frail, cowered from him until one of them nodded his head. That was enough for the knight, who headed out of the chamber, slamming the cell door with a resounding clang that echoed against the stone walls.
There was something final about that sound.
Something desolate.
But the knight wasn’t thinking about that. He was thinking about the lady trapped down there. She was correct; she shouldn’t be down there and they both knew it, but the knight didn’t have the authority to move her.
But he knew someone who might.
He went on the hunt.
*
“My lady,” aservant whispered. “Sir Hallam is here.”
Alice, Lady de Wrenville, looked up from the sewing loom. She was working on a scene with birds and clouds and cherubs, and she was quite talented. Though her heart had jumped at the sound of Hallam’s name, her hands were steady as she resumed her sewing.
“Show him in, Matilde.”
The well-dressed maid did. She opened up the chamber door, one of two great doors that guarded the entrance to Lady de Wrenville’s private solar. It was a solar she’d been unable to touch in any way because it had belonged to Covington’s first wife, Egraine, dead for ten years, and he kept it as shrine of sorts to the woman. Everything was as she had left it. He’d made it clear that Alice was just a visitor in it, and that’s exactly what she felt like– a visitor to a home she was supposed to be in charge of.
This had never been her home and never would.
As the maid opened up the door, Alice glanced up as a figure in mail entered the chamber.
“That will be all, Matilde,” Alice said calmly. “You may wait outside.”
The maid slipped out, shutting the door behind her as Sir Hallam Chadlington, commander of Winterhold’s army, approached the well-dressed woman at the sewing loom.
“My lady,” he greeted politely. “I hope you have had a pleasant day.”
Alice paused in her sewing, smiling timidly at him. “I have,” she said. “But from the looks of you, I would hazard to say that your day has been quite busy.”
Hallam nodded, a weary smile on his lips. “Another day at Hawkstone,” he said. “We finally managed to breach the gatehouse, but I lost several men doing it.”
