Eyes closed, mind focused, my breathing began to normalize as I clutched Mitchell Turner’s candles now. “It’s all right, it’s all right.” I spoke to myself as much as everyone else. The familiar smell of animal fat had never been so comforting as its light glowed smooth and warm through the cell.

I passed a few candles from my pocket through the bars connecting our cell to the next, then held my candle out to light theirs. “Here, hold steady. Now pass some on. Let’s have some light in this place.”

As the few candles I had in my possession circulated down the hall, the nearest cries and moans turned to soft voices. Tense whispers. Our section of the tower was lit with a soft glow that increased as the handful of candles were lit all down the way.

I sighed. “It’s all right, we have some light.”

I turned to pass my candle to Bridget so I could move about freely, and she grasped the hand that held it out, smiling up into my face with a knowing look.

I returned her smile. “At least I’m not wasting it out in broad daylight.”

Her eyes shone and one eyebrow rose.

I moved toward Rose, who had huddled around the twist in the tower wall again, and sat before her. “Are you all right?”

She nodded, and I urged her out, coaxing her to sit beside me on the straw. When I tried to speak to her, she merely shook her head and re-drew the single bar with four notes, pointing at each one.

I shrugged and shook my head. “I wish I understood.”

Her face was pained. She jerked her finger at the first note, so I looked down. “That’s a D.” I put my hands up in a gesture of helplessness, but she brightened. Leaned forward. Then she pointed at the next note.

“F? No, E.”

She nodded hard and pointed at each note again.

I read them aloud. “D . . . E . . . A . . . F.” I frowned. “D-E-A—” I jerked upright. “Deaf. You’re deaf.”

She grasped my hand, her tender face looking up into mine with gratitude. Relief. She smiled. Music had become her language. How long had she been secreted away here, that her brain had been stripped of everything else?

I touched her ear, tucked tufts of hair behind it. “You cannot hear, can you?”

She merely looked at me, her eyes wide and staring in the dim cell. Just as she’d watched me when we played together, sat together in my childhood. We’d never spoken. Only played. And this was why.

Also why she’d been locked up, perhaps. But there had to be more to it than that. Had to be.

I leaned close so she could see my lips and spoke slowly. “How do you—”

Something banged. Metallic groaning and creaking, then a door slamming open. Men’s voices. Footsteps.

“What’s that?” Bridget whispered.