A lady clutches her child close, as if I might snatch the boy away.
"You can stay at my house if you'd prefer," Darstan offers as we walk. "My wife won't mind. You'd have a bed at least. Some comfort."
I shake my head. "Take me to the cliff prison."
He studies me from the corner of his eye. "You sure? The lower cells are likely flooded."
"Yes."
He doesn't argue.
Perhaps he understands that I need stone and bars around me right now, something solid between myself and the rest of the world. Or maybe he thinks it's fitting that I belong in a cage. Either way, he changes direction and leads me toward the upper streets.
Darstan has walked me to a prison before, back in Tavan. A different guilt and the same silence between us.
The prison rises above the city carved into the cliff face, its black stone slick with rain and salt spray. Seawater laps against the worn steps at the entrance, but it's still passable. Inside, the air turns colder. Torchlight flickers against wet stone, sending shadows writhing across the walls.
Darstan unlocks the prison and gestures for me to enter. Water covers the floor but it's dry enough above the water line. I step inside. He does not follow nor does he lock the door behind me. I hear him pause, key in hand, and then the small sound of him pocketing it again. There is no need. The knight knows this prison holds only one inmate and I have come to join him willingly.
The knight lingers at the threshold, the torchlight framing him in uneven gold.
"She'll be all right," he says before stepping back into the night.
The door swings shut.
Silence settles, thick and echoing. Water drips somewhere deeper in the corridor.
"Well now," a familiar voice drawls from the shadows. "Didn't expect to see you again."
I turn slowly toward the sound.
"I came to check on you," I say to Hrolf.
The dwarf sits on his cot with a half-finished horseshoe in his hand. He looks older in the torchlight. Maybe I just never looked closely before.
Hrolf snorts softly. "I'm still breathing. Trying to salvage what's left of the forge."
His words land quietly.
The prison here is nothing like the dungeons below the capital. Rhianelle had made sure of that. Hrolf was to await trial in Völundr, far from the court. Too many would have tried to kill him before judgment was passed. So she gave him stone walls overlooking the lower plaza, a small anvil secured to the floor, and tools permitted under guard. His confinement even has a window carved into the cliff face so he could see the street below and the sea beyond.
Comfortable, for a prisoner.
The memory of that quiet mercy tightens something in my chest. That was my wife. My kind and gentle Rhianelle.
Hrolf follows my gaze to the window.
"Saw the whole thing from up here," he says quietly. "The wave."
He steps closer to the opening, looking out into the dark as though the sight still lingers there.
"The sea pulled back first, then I saw it on the horizon. Wall of water taller than the towers." He exhales once before continuing. "A young elven guard was on duty. He threw the door open and told me to run."
Hrolf nudges the heavy iron ring still bolted to the floor. His chain clinks softly. "The guard couldn't get my chain free. The anchor bolt is sunk into the floor and he didn't have the key for it. He stood there trying to pull it loose with his bare hands while the water was already on the plaza."
His jaw tightens. "I told him to go. Took him three times before he listened."
"He make it?" I ask.Wait—since when do I care?
