The odour here, he also admitted, was, by now, in good part his own smell, after a month, more or less (he’d lost count of the days). That awareness improved nothing. They had left him his boots. No change of clothing. Nothing to wash with. Of course not. There was one grimy, barred window, very high up. At ground level, he assumed. It admitted the merest hint of daylight, allowed him to know when it was day.

He stomped rats when he could. It was difficult in the night’s blackness, but he’d gotten quite good at tracking their movements by sound, treating it as a challenge. He had killed quite a few. Then the others ate the dead ones. He would hear the crunching of small bones in the blackness.

A lyric poem in that, Villar thought bitterly. He was ill by now, coughing.

His folly had taken place in the other castle, the first one, de Thunier’s.

Minor nobleman, fatuous, thought himself a poet. Had been very happy to receive Thierry after his flight from Orane. He’d carried a recommendation letter from Marina di Seressa, after all.

She had given him instructions before he’d left Orane, as to which he had missed the urgency. Or he’d not be here, coughing in darkness.

“De Thunier is vain,” she’d said, in a sitting room in the palace. She had discovered he was leaving, he wasn’t certain how. Probably the provost. “If you flatter him, he’ll let you stay as long as you like, give you a chamber in which to sleep and write. It is a good place to be, I think. I’ve not been, but he is said to have a superb cook, and his gardens will be lovely now. Keep your patience and your wits and you can wait there until it is safe to return.”

All she’d said had been true! But his patience had been…wanting. Also his wits, the wits he prided himself upon.

In the cold, damp blackness of his cell, Thierry coughed and shivered and blamed everything on how lost he felt outside of Orane, in the countryside. Uprooted. Adrift. Unbalanced. Ought to have been prepared for these things. It had happened before, when he was exiled while delicate matters associated with his stabbing of Rasse de Barille had been worked through.

His first stabbing of Rasse de Barille.

It still disturbed him that he’d killed a man. With cause, but even so. He’d…killed a man. And the provost and his serjeants had covered it up. Made him think about how often that sort of thing happened.