Seraphina woke up shivering. She was alive and in one piece, and she could tell that Rune hadn’t moved from his spot, so she couldn’t complain. She was stiff all over. She drank the cup of water she’d saved from last night, thinking of offering it to Rune first, but then changing her mind.
In regard to him, she noticed she was starting to feel guilty, and she couldn’t afford that. He was who he was, and he’d done what he’d done. She’d already given him two chances to tell her the truth, and he’d evaded both times.
The guards did their rounds, emptied buckets, brought a poor excuse for a breakfast, and laughed at Seraphina’s pleas to be returned to her cell. Koch and Fischer were on shift, so she hadn’t expected much. Then the prison was silent again, and Seraphina tried not to gag as she ate her clumpy porridge. At least the bowl had come with a spoon in it. It had no taste whatsoever, but she forced herself to swallow it down. She needed the little strength it would give her.
Rune didn’t say anything. He stayed curled up on his side of the cell, listening to her eat. She knew he was awake. She’d memorized the patterns of his breathing and could easily tell when he was relaxed, agitated, awake, or asleep. A wave of guilt washed over her again. Damn it. It was so strong she couldn’t ignore it.
Seraphina pushed the second bowl of porridge to the middle of the floor, and then slowly did the same with the cup of water. She tried not to spill it. She hung her head low, slightly tilted to the side, letting her long, blonde hair fall over her face.
“Eat,” she said.
“Thank you.”
She heard him scramble on the floor quickly. He must’ve been hungry. Fuck. Had she not given him his portion, he wouldn’t have asked. She pressed her knuckles to her mouth and bit hard, fighting with herself, going through the little information she had about Rune over and over.
The guards had said he was a whore killer, and he hadn’t denied it. She’d asked him twice, and first he’d said he wasn’t a violent man – whatever that meant, as she’d found men had a different definition of violence than women – and the second time, he’d told her about a woman he’d tried to save, definitely not kill. The details of the amputation were consistent with what only a barber-surgeon would know.
When he’d explained how the Quietus Net was made, those details had also been perfectly consistent with only what a lattice weaver would know. She herself wasn’t a weaver, but she’d worked alongside Matteo for years, as a shard technician. Her job was to cut and shape pieces of bone to his precise specifications, which was something that required patience and a steady hand, but not any sort of intuition or creativity. The weaver was the one who chose the relics to be broken and cut, who knew which relics went together, and designed the lattice pattern, then stitched it together. The shard technician was there to follow instructions and make the weaver’s job easier. That had been Seraphina. Still, she’d learned a thing or two while observing him, and he’d loved explaining things to her.
Seraphina couldn’t have become a weaver if she’d wanted to. An intuitive sense for relics and how they interacted was needed, similar to a perfect pitch in music – you either had it, or you didn’t. It manifested early, and the relic schools scouted far and wide for children who showed signs of that “sense”. It was rare. And when these children were taken under the wing of a relic school or academy, it was even rarer that they developed their intuition and skill enough to become master weavers.
A master weaver could invent new patterns for new lattices. Matteo’s greatest achievement had been the Ward of Rebound – a class A military grade lattice that acted as impact armor. It worked best worn under a jacket, gauntlets, or trousers, as when the lattice took a hard hit – from a musket ball or a club, for instance – it spread the force sideways, turning a sharp smash into a dull shove. Matteo had invented it when he was twenty, and it had made a tremendous difference for the Bavarian soldiers in both wars. They kept it secret for as long as they could, until they had to register it and share the pattern with the world, and then any experienced weaver could make it. But since there weren’t many, the academy sold completed Wards of Rebound and filled their coffers.
“I was thinking,” Rune said after he finished eating. His deep voice startled Seraphina from her thoughts. “Would you like to take the cot? It’s not much more comfortable than the floor, but at least it’s something. It’s against the left wall, so you can have the left side of the cell, and I’ll have the right.”
“Back-to-back?”
“Always,” he whispered.
“That’s agreeable.”
They shuffled around and settled in their new spots. Seraphina stretched on the wooden cot, wrapped tightly in Rune’s blanket. That was another thing that made her feel guilty. He’d given her his blanket, so he was left without, to freeze in the cell that was getting colder and colder with each passing day. It was October, and the weather was only going to get worse. In the cold seasons, imprisonment was often a death sentence. She was lucky they’d allowed her to keep her boots.
They spent the day in silence. Seraphina dozed on and off, feeling more at ease now that she’d survived a night sharing a cell with a man who was supposed to be a beast. A creature. He moved little, only to scratch his lyrics and drawings on thewalls, or to use the bucket as quietly as humanly possible, which Seraphina eventually had to do as well. It was so mortifying that after she used it, she wrapped her arms around her knees, made herself small, and clenched her jaw, staying stubbornly silent when Rune asked her if she was all right, or if she needed more straw.
“It looks like it might freeze tonight.”
She didn’t say anything, and he didn’t press. The guards came and went, she forced herself to eat the deplorable dinner, then fell into a fitful sleep. The man in the next cell asked her to sing again, but she didn’t have it in her. After half an hour of begging, he started humming to himself.
The next day was just as miserable. And the next. Three days passed, with her and Rune communicating the bare minimum, and she was at her wit’s end. She was in pain from not moving for so long. Every morning, she woke up with her toes freezing and her breath steaming in the frigid air. She couldn’t understand how Rune was so calm and never complained, when she felt like she was about to unravel.
The guards hadn’t given them a second blanket. She’d asked. Koch had laughed and said he was sure she and Rune had a lot of fun sharing the one blanket at night, and she was whining for nothing. Weber had expressed surprise at the fact that she was still alive, and the creature hadn’t eaten her. After all, food was scarce even outside of the prison walls, let alone inside.
Seraphina had stopped asking.
“I need to do something,” she said, jumping off the cot. “Don’t turn around. I need to stretch, exercise... Or I’ll freeze to death. Have to generate body heat somehow.”
“I exercised too. Before you came.”
“Oh?”
She lifted her arms above her head and stretched until her body popped in various places.
“To pass the time and stay strong,” he said.
“How are you not dying of cold?” She reached for the blanket, sniffed it – quite bad, but not horrible – and folded it. “You should have the blanket while I exercise for a bit.”
“I don’t need it,” he said. “The cold doesn’t bother me that much.”
