My stomach tightens at Gideon's name, but I keep my face still.
"You weren't the planner," Leoric continues. "You were the hand they put the flame into."
"Careful," I say.
"No." He stands, and the room becomes smaller when he does. "You do not get careful from me."
I become aware of every inch of chain. Of his hands at his sides. Of the fact that he still has not reached for me.
"What were you told?" he asks.
I hold his stare. "That prisoners were being taken beneath the outpost and not coming back."
"That is not an answer."
"That's all I'm going to say."
"Were you told names?"
I don't respond.
"Were you shown proof?"
"I was shown enough."
"Enough to burn two hundred and seventeen people alive." The number hits harder than I let it show.
"Fewer than sixty were officers with command authority," he bellows. "The rest were soldiers under assignment, servants, healers, cooks. People who did not decide what happened below that fortress."
"I know."
"Do you?" It is not a question. "There were men calling for help through the walls for three hours after the building caught. Men and women who had never set orders for prisoner processing. Soldiers who couldn't disobey assignment without execution. A healer attached to the garrison. Two cooks."
He stops moving.
"The healer was seventeen."
I have nothing to put between me and that. I refuse to look away anyway.
"I was told people were dying inside those walls," I say. My voice stays level because I force it there. "I acted on that."
"And when the fire spread?"
My hand curls once at my side before I stop it. "It was already too late."
"That's convenient."
"No." I breathe through the word. "Convenient would have been dying there and never having to remember it."
Silence cuts through the room. He watches me like he heard more than I meant to give him. I shut my mouth before anything else escapes. He is silent for a moment. He has every legal right to end my life and I'm aware of it standing here. His hands are at his sides. Still. Not reaching for me, not closed into a threat, just present and controlled as everything else about him. It shouldn'tmatter that he's not laid a hand on me, but it does. I hate that I notice. His fury feels banked, like a furnace kept alive too long and doesn't know what to do with it now that it's possible. I don't thank him for the restraint. Gratitude is a concession I don't have the right to offer, and he didn't come here for it.
"I believed the prisoners were dying," I say finally. "I still believe crimes were being committed inside those walls. If I was lied to about the scope—" I hold the rest, because completing that sentence requires finishing a thought I'm not equipped to finish cleanly, "—that doesn't put the fire out."
He studies me and then crosses to the door without another word. He knocks twice, and the guards open it from the other side with the practiced speed of men who have been listening to every silence.
Before he steps through, he doesn't turn back. "The healer's name was Senne. She'd been posted there eleven days."
The door closes. I stand alone with what he said, and the guilt sits heavy in my stomach.
