“Are you the only one alive in there?” I ask.
“No.” A young woman.
“I’m here, too.” An older man, weaker-voiced.
“Is Lively there?” I ask.
A gasp from the woman. “That’s me.”
“I just met your father. He’s very kind.” I close my eyes to fight nausea, to calm the ugly headache blooming behind my ears. “You others. What did you do to be jailed?”
“I stole,” the coarse-voiced man says. “Though it was only food to feed my parents. We had nothing and I was desperate and it was just sitting at the altar in the chapel. It’s not like Supreme is here to actually eat it, and I don’t think He’d want His faithful servants to starve. That’s what I thought. But I was wrong. I am to serve my sentence before He will forgive me.”
My headache grows and spreads past my eyes.
“My niece and I,” the old man says, “we drank wine.”
I wait to hear more. When the man doesn’t continue, I say, “And?”
“And,” the old man says, “we didn’t offer the first taste to Supreme. But we wanted to make sure that it tasted right, with the drought and all. We couldn’t offer Father Knete and Mayor Raffolk rancid wine.”
I frown. “They’redrinking the wine? Not Supreme?”
Silence.
“And are they eating the food you all leave?” Anger prickles over my skin like stings from Jamart’s bees.
More silence.
“So, that’s it?” I ask. “Food and wine will be the reasons you die here? And you, Lively, because you removed something from your own door?”
No response from the prisoners. The young woman starts to cry.
Sensing danger, my neck and ears tingle. “Who passed yesterday?” I ask, my eyes skirting the doors and windows of the cottages and shops behind me.
“My son,” the older man says, barely containing his sob. “He was a good man—”
“…before I chop your head and hands off!”
Narder!
I peek around the corner of the jail.
The jailer is shoving a red-faced man up the road, heading in this direction. Both men are drunk and stumbling over their own feet. But only one man has the key to the clink and the authority to do what he wants to whomever he wants.
“Help us,” the young man whispers. “We will never leave this place.”
“No one ever does,” the old man adds. “Not alive, at least.”
Not from this jail. Not from this town.
“I will.” My voice catches, and tears slip down my cheeks. One drops and splatters in the dirt. I don’t know these people, but my heart feels like I do. “I’ll figure it out. No one else will die in here. I promise.” I close my eyes and touch the wall.
But what sort of promise can I make? I’m also a captive in this town. How can I free others when I can’t even free myself? I don’t know. But I can’t leave them. Iwon’t. As I hurry away from the structure before Narder comes, I make a vow: Whatever I do, it will have to be more than just leaving a single teardrop.
8
Black smoke pours from the forge’s doors. Jadon, now wearing a long leather smock, is still working, and he grimaces as he bends a hot orange steel rod now clamped in a vise. The veins in his arms and hands push against his skin.