The cold came in through the floorboards.
Gerffron had not expected that. He had expected the wind from the boarded balcony, expected the draft that crept beneath the locked door, expected the frost that gathered on the inside of the single window like a second set of iron bars. But the cold that rose through the stone floor beneath the thin pallet — that was the cold that truly lived in the east tower. It seeped upward like a confession, patient and relentless, finding every bruise on his body with the intimacy of an old enemy.
He spent the first three days learning the room.
Not with his eyes. His eyes had catalogued it in the first hour — stripped walls, single pallet, iron bucket, the boarded balcony doors with three nails driven through the planks, the narrow window that faced north and offered only a gray slice of sky and the top of a dead elm tree. His eyes had nothing more to do.
He learned the room with time.
He learned that the guard at the bottom of the stairs changed at dawn, midday, and dusk. The dawn guard was young and heavy-footed, prone to dropping his sword hilt against the wall when he sat. The midday guard was older and silent and frightening in his stillness. The dusk guard hummed — not songs, just notes, an endless wandering melody that had no shape and no resolution, filling the stairwell like smoke.
He learned that the servant who brought his meals arrived exactly forty minutes after the guard change. Breakfast was black bread and cold water. Supper was grey porridge and the same cold water. There was no midday meal. The servant — a young woman with a scar along her left jaw and eyes that refused to meet his — set the tray on the floor inside the door without entering, then left. She never spoke. On the second day, Gerffron said good morning to her. On the third, he said thank you. On the fourth, she kicked the tray hard enough to splash water across the stone and pulled the door shut behind her so violently the lock screamed in its housing.
He learned the sound of Lady Elowen's footsteps.
She came every morning at precisely the same hour — not to his door, but to the bend in the corridor outside his tower, close enough that he could hear the tap of her cane on the stone. She stopped there each morning for exactly as long as it took to draw a slow breath. Then she moved on. She never knocked. She never entered. She only stopped and breathed, as if checking that the tower was still standing, that its prisoner was still contained, that the wound she had sewn shut had not reopened in the night.
Gerffron lay on the pallet those first nights with his hands pressed flat against his chest and counted his own heartbeats.
The bruising on his ribs faded from purple to green to yellow over the course of those first days. His lip healed clean. The raw skin on his wrists where the iron cuffs had been dried and scabbed and peeled away, leaving pink unmarked flesh beneath. His body was mending itself with a thoroughness he found almost insulting — as if it did not know, or did not care, that mending was the lesser victory.
On the seventh night, he took the two pebbles from his pocket.
He had not looked at them since arriving. He had been afraid to — afraid that the sight of them in this gray stripped room would unmake something essential in him, would hollow out the resolve he had been carefully building brick by brick from the rubble of the courtyard scene.
But on the seventh night he opened his hand.
They were so small. One smooth gray river stone, slightly flattened, that Styrmir had pressed into his palm through iron bars at the age of seven, not understanding what he was giving, only knowing that Gerffron had looked at it as if it were the finest jewel in the empire. One rougher, darker pebble with a white seam running through it like a vein — found years later in the courtyard garden when Gerffron had been newly arrived as consort and Styrmir had not yet been put in chains, when they were still only two strangers discovering the language of small offered things.
He held them until they warmed in his palm.
Then he put them back in his pocket and closed his eyes.
Seven days down.
He did not know how many remained.
He did not need to know.