In high summer, the cell is warm and reeks of human sweat. Deirdre lies on the cold stone floor, trying desperately to allow her body’s warmth to leech out of her into the bones of the prison. It isn’t a clean floor, not by any measure, but it beats having to fight someone for space on one of the two rope-mattress cots the room holds.

She is desperately lonely, but never alone here. There are twelve other prisoners who share this cell. None of them are people Deirdre would consider deserving of this pestilent hole. All but three seek to be as physically far from each other as possible. Deirdre knows that there are two additional large cells such as this in the prison. And several more that hold only a single, doomed person, that lacks even the meager window that blesses this room. The heat and humidity are a penance unto themselves.

Most are men. If Deirdre opens her eyes, she can see the wiry muscled young man who is the only one of the thirteen to be standing. He stares down at her from where he leans against the prison’s wall.

He licks the sweat from his lips.

She keeps her eyes closed by choice.

If she were anywhere else, with anyone else, Deirdre would likely have pulled her tunic off by now and laid upon the floor in her underclothes. But that would invite an excess of danger here. So she keeps the many layers of cloth between herself and those who watch her every breath and instead suffer in silence.

Silence is her best defense against her fellow mankind.

The passing of time feels meaningless. There is no such thing as the past. There is no such thing as the future. There is only the eternal now, horrid and filled with suffering.

The light from the narrow window slit at the top of the room angles such that none of the sun’s rays penetrate directly through it when the guard approaches the barred gate. It’s noon, or nearly.

The guard bangs a lead-weighted baton against the iron bars. It rings them like a musical instrument, and the loud noise draws groans and curses from the sweltering prisoners within. Calls from down the hall echo the sentiment. Nobody is pleased.

“Burrows.” The guard’s voice echoes against the heavy stone, raised to be heard above the chorus of lamentations. “Is Burrows still alive in there?”

Deirdre peels herself off the floor before she even bothers to open her eyes. Her head swims when she stands, heat, damp air, and the stench of too many people in too small a place contributing to her near-fainting experience. She stumbles roughly to the bars, her fellow cell-mates jeering at her for having been selected out of all of them.

To what fate she treads, she does not know.

But she knows the guard.

Dobrin Sedlacek has seen Deirdre many times in many states of dress, undress, and distress. He has searched her person for contraband, and he has played the nursemaid to her injuries. Deirdre wishes Dobrin were anything but a guard in this vile dungeon. He is short, with pale skin from spending too much time indoors, and has muscular arms that he frequently uses to bodily lift prisoners to break up fights.

Deirdre would marry him if he asked her.

He shackles her hands and feet before leading her out of the cell. Heavy manacles dig into the skin of her wrists and ankles. Their weight makes walking cumbersome. It is not possible for Deirdre to run so burdened.

The scowl Dobrin wears fades slowly from his face as he leads Deirdre up the stairs to the offices above the dungeon. At the landing, halfway up the long stairs, he permits her to catch her breath. He offers one of those muscular arms to help her up the stairs, like a gentleman instead of a jailer.

Deirdre does not know to what fate she walks, but she walks with her arm supported by one she trusts enough to know he will not hurt her himself.

At the top of the stairs, she ceases relying upon his support and pulls away as though the two were magnets and his touch repulsed her. It is the falsehood to which they must ascribe in order to maintain their professional distance.

They have never had a conversation.

At the top of the stairs is a hallway that is roughly the same length as the hall full of cells below. Here, a large single room dominates one side of the hall, with doors permitting entry every few feet. Inside is a barracks for guards who do not have their own residences elsewhere, and an armory where they can store weapons of varying degrees of lethality. Opposite the large room is a series of smaller cells. Deirdre’s experience marks two as reserved for questioning the accused, and two are offices where the captain manages her paperwork and the bursar accepts and distributes payment for fines and salaries alike.

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When Dobrin ushers his charge into one of the questioner’s rooms, she knows that today is going to be filled with terrible pain.

Deirdre keeps her eyes downcast, watching as the shackles rub her wrists raw. She does not want to see who will interrogate her today.

Her jailer helps sit her down in a high-backed chair. He adjusts her shackles to lock to the chair instead of each other.

A window admits the wind through its own set of iron bars. In the winter, she knows the room to be horrible and cold. The interrogator usually lights a small brazier, which serves multiple purposes. In summer, the window is instead a blessing. The flow of air into the room from the breeze outside feels like a kiss from an angel on her sweltering skin.

The door to the hallway shuts, and Dobrin is gone.

Deirdre knows she can confess to any crime she wants, but she can never speak a word that implicates someone else. It is probably the only remnant of pride she holds onto in this place.

She would do just about anything to get out, but she would not put someone else in her place. And in the infinite now, where there is no past and no future, Deirdre can quietly enjoy the movement of air.

The sound of someone quietly placing an object on the wooden counter behind the chair disturbs her tiny moment of peace.

Deirdre’s eyes snap open and she looks around the room with greater attention.

“I know you aren’t working for just your own sake,” a familiar voice states from behind the chair. She cannot twist around to confirm, but that voice certainly belongs to the man who caught her and put her here yet again. But it is not the one who wields the interrogator’s tools. So she relaxes, only slightly.

“No, Deputy Clarkson, you have me all wrong.” Deirdre feels confident enough to lie to him instead of remaining in silence.

“Do I?” the deputy asks. Deirdre can hear his hard-soled boots on the wooden floor as he walks around the table of implements behind her. “I was sure that there must be someone paying you well. Why else would you consistently do the same things that land you here over and over again?”

“Maybe I like the company?” Deirdre gives him her very best attempt at a grin. It isn’t the most convincing. For a thief, she makes a poor liar. If it even is a lie.

“Is it your uncle?” Derek Clarkson comes into view as he paces around the back of her chair. Deirdre was absolutely correct in recognizing that voice. The deputy is short, with sandy colored hair and a thin, wiry build. A dark sunburn spreads across his normally pale face.

“Why would you ask that?” Deirdre deflects, knowing that to respond with a question is easier than the direct untruth.

“Why wouldn’t I?” Deputy Clarkson scratches at the edge of the sunburn that continues over the back of his neck. It looks painful, and sheets of flaking skin peel off where his fingers pass.

“Why my uncle?” Deirdre worries faintly that her tactic might fail if he doesn’t change questions.

“You’re being let go.” The deputy sounds deeply concerned, and Deirdre is so startled by the tone that she looks up to his face to confirm that she is not misreading the auditory cues. The creases on his brow describe intense worry, and those pale eyes speak volumes. His every breath is honesty and his slightly bowed posture declares his loyalty to the crown that writes the laws Deirdre breaks. He really must care about her.

“Can I decline?” Deirdre asks, trying to keep her voice even, but failing.

“Why would you ask that?” Deputy Clarkson’s deliberate word choice mirrors her earlier deflection. But there is sincerity in his demeanor. He actually wants an answer.

“Why am I being let go?” Deirdre asks the safer question.

“I wasn’t told.”

Deirdre thinks about that answer for a long moment. She burns through the various possibilities in her head. And comes up with a conclusion directly next to the one Deputy Clarkson has already chosen. Cousin Sigismund has flexed the fist of bureaucratic control and found an excuse to put her in his debt again.

“Please let me stay,” she nearly whispers, her voice shaking with dread. “Please let me stay,” she repeats when he doesn’t respond. “Please let me stay,” she begs, tears sliding quietly down her dirty cheeks.

“I can’t.” Deputy Clarkson turns his face away from the prisoner. She stares at his back as it shudders involuntarily.

“Please,” Deirdre whispers yet again. “I’ll only end up back again. Please don’t make me go. Please let me stay here.”

Deputy Clarkson responds by walking back around to the table of torture implements behind the chair. He picks something up and returns as Deirdre continues to plead.

“Please,” she begs one more time, just one.

The deputy unlocks the shackles from the prisoner’s ankles and wrists. Then he places her shoes and personal belongings in her lap.

“Tell me why.” The command is a kind of begging on its own, every bit as desperate as her repeated pleas.

But she can’t answer that. She knows, sure as the sun always rises, that Sigismund is going to demand another favor, and she is going to comply.

Without a response from her, the deputy opens the door to the cell.

“You are free to go, ma’am. Please do not give us cause for you to be returned.”

And that order is one she has no choice but to obey.