1278
Outside her cell, the bishop called feverishly for the Brothers.
Mouse sank to her knees as her father’s overpowering voice in her head was suddenly gone, and all her own thoughts and fears came swirling back in the undertow. There was so much at stake—Nicholas most of all. But her father would smell weakness and despair like any predator hunting for an easy victim.
If he violated her mind again, he needed to find her calm, a person confident in her choice to go with him. To keep all the other thoughts at bay, to suffocate her fear, she filled her mind with counting—steps, breaths, heartbeats, and then, finally, the chinks of metal on stone as the Brothers began to tear down the wall.
The grind of the stones as the Brothers worked them loose grated against her ears, as if they were pulling her apart, too, piece by piece, but as the light drove through the cracks like blades, Mouse fought against the joy that instinctively blossomed.
Yes, there would be sunshine and birdsong and fresh air. But there would also be fear and bitterness and running. Mouse could not let herself indulge in any of it—neither the dark nor the light. So she gathered up all the parts that made her Mouse—her feelings, her memories, her hopes—and she wound them up like yarn on a spindle, twisted tight. She hid them away in a walled-up cell deep inside herself.
When the hand broke through the opening in the wall, reaching in to exhume her, she did not take it. Mouse laid her own hand against the low lintel, steadying herself before stepping out into the hall, leaving the world of the dead for the land of the living. She did not feel like she belonged in either—a ghost trapped in the shell of herself.
There had been no redemption for Mouse and no resurrection either.