The Mace turned to Ewen and snapped his fingers. “Jailor!”
Ewen stepped forward, trying to stand as tall as he could. Da had chosen Ewen as his apprentice, even over Ewen’s smarter brothers, for exactly this reason: Ewen was big and strong. But he still only came up to the Mace’s nose. He wondered if the Mace knew he was slow.
“You watch this one closely, Jailor. No visitors. No little field trips outside the cell for exercise. Nothing.”
“Yes, sir,” Ewen replied, wide-eyed, and watched the group of guards exit the dungeon. No one called him any names this time, but it was only after they’d departed that Ewen realized he had forgotten to ask for the man’s name and crime for the book. Stupid! The Mace would surely notice such things.
The next day, Da had come to visit. Ewen was tending the new prisoner as best he could, though the man’s wounds were well beyond the power of anything but time or magic. But Da had taken one look at the man on his cot and spat, just like the Mace.
“Don’t bother trying to cure this bastard, Ew.”
“Who is he?”
“A carpenter.” Da’s bald head gleamed, even in the dim torchlight, and Ewen saw with some uneasiness that the skin of Da’s forehead was getting thin, like linen. Even Da would die eventually, Ewen knew that, deep in a dark place in his mind. “A builder.”
“What did he build, Da?”
“Cages,” Da replied shortly. “Be very careful, Ew.”
Ewen looked around, confused. The dungeon was full of cages. But Da didn’t seem to want to talk about it, and so Ewen stored the facts in his mind alongside the rest of the mysteries he didn’t understand. Once in a while, usually when Ewen wasn’t even trying, he would solve a mystery, and that was a great and extraordinary feeling, the way he imagined birds would feel as they swooped across the sky. But no matter how he stared at the man in the cell, no answers were forthcoming.
After that, Ewen thought he was prepared for anyone to enter his dungeon, but he was wrong. Two days before, two men in the black uniform of the Tear army had burst in, dragging a woman between them. But this was no fancy woman like the Regent’s redhead; she spat and kicked, shouting curses at the two men who dragged on her arms. Ewen had never seen anything like her. She seemed all white, from head to toe, as if her flesh had lost all of its color. Her hair was similarly faded, like hay that had sat too long in the sunlight. Even her dress was white, though Ewen thought it might once have been light blue. She looked like a ghost. The soldiers tried to force her through the open door of Cell Two, but she grabbed at the bars and hung on.
“Don’t make this any harder than it needs to be,” the taller soldier panted.
“Fuck you, you limp prawn!”
The soldier kept patient pressure on her hands, trying to peel back her locked fingers, while the other soldier worked on hauling her into the cage. Ewen hung back, not sure whether to get involved. The woman’s eyes fell on him, and he went cold inside. Her irises were circled pink, but deep in the center was a blue so light that it glittered like ice. Ewen saw something terrible there, animal and sick. The woman opened her mouth, and Ewen knew what was coming, even before she spoke.
“I know all about you, boy. You’re the halfwit.”
“Give us some help, for Christ’s sake!” one of the soldiers snarled.
Ewen jumped forward. He didn’t want to touch any part of the ghost-woman, so he took hold of her dress and began to tug her backward. With both soldiers free to work on her fingers, they finally succeeded in prying her loose from the bars and then flung her into the cage, where she ran into the cot and fell to the ground. Ewen was barely able to get the door closed before the woman hurled herself against the bars, spewing more curses at the three of them.
“Christ, what a job!” one of the soldiers muttered. He wiped his brow, where a mole grew like a small mushroom. “Locked in, though, she shouldn’t give you too much trouble. She’s blind as a mouse.”
“Only watch out when the owl comes hunting,” the other remarked, and they chuckled together.
“What’s her name and crime?”
“Brenna. Her crime …” The soldier with the mole looked at his friend. “Hard to say. Treason, probably.”
Ewen wrote the crime in the book, and the soldiers left the dungeon, cheerful now, their work done. The soldiers had said that the ghost-woman was blind, but Ewen quickly discovered that wasn’t so. When he moved, she turned her head and her blue-pink eyes followed him across the dungeon. When he looked up, he found her gaze pinned on him, a horrible smile stretching her mouth. Ewen usually brought his prisoners their food in their cells, for he was too big to be physically overpowered by an unarmed man. But now he was glad of the little door on the front of the cell that allowed him to slide the woman’s food trays through. He wanted the comfort of bars between them. Cell Two was the best cell for dangerous prisoners, since it faced directly into Ewen’s small living quarters; he was a light sleeper. But now, when it came time for bed, he found that he could not sleep with that awful gaze upon him, and he finally moved his cot into the corner so that the doorway blocked the view. Still, he could sense the woman, sleepless and malevolent, even in the dark, and for the past few days his sleep had been uneasy, frequently broken.
Tonight, after Ewen had finished his dinner and inspected the empty cells for rats or rot (there was neither; he cleaned his cellblock thoroughly every other day), he settled down with his pictures. He tried constantly to paint the things he saw, but he always failed. It seemed like an easy business, with the right paper and some good paints and brushes–Da had given him these for his last birthday–but the images always escaped somewhere between his thoughts and the paper. Ewen couldn’t see why it had to be that way, but it was. He was trying to paint Javel, the prisoner in Cell Three, when the door at the top of the steps crashed open.
For a few moments, Ewen had a bad fright, worried about a jailbreak. Da had warned him about jailbreaks, the worst shame that could befall a jailor. Two soldiers were stationed outside the door at the top of the steps, but Ewen was all alone down in the dungeon. He didn’t know what he would do if someone had forced his way in. He grabbed the knife that lay on his desk.
But the crash of the door was followed by many voices and footsteps, such unexpected sounds that Ewen could only sit at his desk and wait to see what would come down the hallway. After a few moments a woman entered the dungeon, a tall woman with short-cropped brown hair and a silver crown on her head. Two great blue jewels hung on fine, glittering silver chains around her neck, and she was surrounded by five Queen’s Guards. Ewen considered these things for a few seconds, then bolted to his feet: the Queen!
She went first to stare through the bars of Cell Three. “How have you been, Javel?”
The man on the cot looked up at her with empty eyes. “Fine, Majesty.”
“Nothing else to say?”
“No.”
The Queen put her hands on her hips and huffed, a sound of disappointment that Ewen recognized from Da, then moved over to Cell One to gaze at the wounded man who lay there.
“What a miserable-looking creature.”
The Mace laughed. “He’s endured rough handling, Lady. Rougher, maybe, than even I could have devised. The villagers took him in Devin’s Slope when he tried to barter carpentry for food. They bound him to a wagon for the trip to New London, and when he finally collapsed, they dragged him the rest of the way.”
“You paid these villagers?”
“All two hundred, Majesty. It’s a lucky break; we need the loyalty of those border villages, and the money will probably keep Devin’s Slope for a year. They don’t see a lot of coin out there.”