They walked me through Bloomreach.
I was escorted through streets now empty, with a guard on each arm, one in front and one behind, and the feeling of being very visible in a place that had decided not to see me.
The garrison was on the north side of the town. A stone building, older than most of what surrounded it, with the architecture of a place built to hold rather than to house. The door was iron-bound. It opened from the inside when one of the guards knocked, which meant someone had been watching.
Inside, the air smelled of lamp oil and damp stone, and of a building that didn't often open its windows. The guard behind the desk looked at me with professional blankness and began writing without asking my name. Beyond him, a low-ceilinged corridor with doors on either side.
One of the doors was opened, and I was put inside.
The door was locked behind me.
The cell was small. Not cruel, just small. A stone bench along one wall, a blanket recently washed enough to be acceptable, and a narrow window set high in the wall that showed a rectangle of dark sky. A lamp in the corridor outside cast thin strips of light through the bars in the door across the floor.
I sat on the bench and looked at the strips of light and thought,I was alive. That was the first fact, and it was a good one.
I was in a Florlunia garrison cell on suspicion of… what, exactly? The dead men in a back street. They'd find Vorn in the fountain square before morning, which meant several dead men were linked to a woman whose description I matched. That was a significant problem.
I had no coin. No weapons. No pack. I had my cloak, which they'd searched but not taken from me.
I had my magic, which hummed in my chest with that small, patient warmth — quiet, present, and waiting.
I had the memory of a kiss, and I was absolutely not going to think about it in a garrison cell in Bloomreach, because thinking about it would require feeling things, and feeling things right now was a liability.
Especially for a man who let me get captured.
I pressed my palm flat against my sternum. Held it there for a moment. The gesture's familiarity soothed me.
The lamp in the corridor shifted as someone passed by the door. I watched the light change and settle, thinking about exits, the window's construction, and how long it would take someone to notice a missing prisoner versus how long it would take to cut through stone.
Too long. Both answers were too long.
I lay down on the bench, pulled the blanket over myself, and stared at the ceiling.
Somewhere in Bloomreach, or on the road south of it, three people knew roughly what had happened and were deciding what to do about it.
I thought about Baxley. He’d be confused and eager to get me back. I thought about Larana, hoping her blonde hair would help her get out of a killing she didn’t commit. I thought about warm brown eyes assessing the situation in the lamplight, then going carefully blank.
And leaving me.
The stone bench was hard and unremarkable, and cold. I'd slept on colder surfaces than this.
I closed my eyes.
I was going to need sleep for whatever came next, and whatever came next was coming whether I slept or not, so I might as well sleep.
I was sure it wouldn’t look so bleak in the morning.
Chapter 40
They questioned me before dawn.
Two of them, in a room that smelled of lamp oil and mold, asking the same questions in different orders, the way people did when they hoped the answers would change. Where had I come from? What was I doing in Bloomreach? Did I know the men in the street?
I told them I was a trailfinder and had been traveling south with companions. That I'd been separated from them amid the confusion of guards running in the street.
The rest I didn't tell them.
They wrote things down. They looked at each other. They went away, came back, asked the same questions again, and wrote down the same answers. I sat in the chair they'd given me, kept my hands in my lap, kept my face neutral, and thought about Crystallese, about the Watch in Eirhollow, about every official room I'd ever been in, and about the skill of being unremarkable in them.
