When the baron left, he took his guards with him, and I was alone in the frigid, stinking darkness for hours. Days, maybe. Armies of rats skittered ceaselessly along the stones, and sometimes I could hear what sounded like low, inconsolable moaning. Was I imagining it, or was someone dying in a cell not far from mine?
I didn’t know, and I realized with a dull sense of shock that I didn’t even care. I was freezing, starving, and so thirsty that I’d licked the damp, slimy walls just to get a few drops of moisture on my tongue. If the baron’s plan was to break my spirit, it was working. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Mary’s pale, bloody face and Otto’s livid, lifeless hands. I heard Otto’s last words to me and Mary’s final, agonized gasps.
All of this was my fault.
Dear God in Heaven, my name is Hannah Dory, and I am ready to die. I beg you to bring me home.
But either He didn’t hear me or He didn’t want me in his kingdom. My stubborn heart kept beating, and my chest still rose and fell. There were no words I could say to make it otherwise.
When the men finally came back and stopped outside my cell, I didn’t move. I had gone past hunger, past terror. I was a shell of the girl I’d been.
“Is she dead?” one of them whispered.
“Kick her and find out.”
The door swung open and a guard strode in. When his boot connected with my hip, I let out an involuntary cry of pain.
“She’s alive all right,” he said. He reached down and caught me by the ankle, then started to drag me across the floor. When he’d got me through the doorway, he gave me another kick. “On your feet.”
“Where are you taking me?” I rasped as I tried to stand. The light of their torches blurred and swam in front of my eyes.
“Back to the gallows.” He grinned at me with black teeth. “You’ll hang for a week or so, just to get good and ripe, and then we’ll cut you down and put your head on a pike.”
“Crows’ll eat your eyeballs,” said the other, a bald man with a long horse’s face.
So, I was to be hanged after all.
Even if you add in a little torture beforehand, the baron had said, it’s all over very quickly.
I was so weak that I could barely walk, so the guards dragged me through the subterranean hall and up a set of narrow, curving stairs. At the top, they opened another heavy carved door, and sunlight exploded all around me. Through my streaming eyes, I saw not the gallows, but long, empty garden rows and leafless fruit trees. We were in the inner bailey, near the castle’s tall keep.
“I think you’re lost,” I muttered. “The gallows are the other direction.”
My answer was a hard slap to the face, and my mouth filled with blood. When I stumbled, the black-toothed guard picked me up and threw me over his shoulder like a sack of grain. My head bobbed dizzily upside down as he ducked in through a door, trudged up more stairs, and then headed down another hallway.
Maybe they’re going to hang me inside, I thought dully. Or maybe it’s where the torture happens.
He turned and entered a room off of an upper passage. Still upside down, I saw a barrel-vaulted ceiling, a blur of tapestries on the walls, a fire blazing in the hearth. The heat on my face was sudden and wonderful. The guard pushed me off his shoulder, sending me crashing onto the floor and knocking the breath from my lungs.
I lay still, waiting, as pain flooded every inch of my body. When I could speak again, I asked where I was.
“Don’t you know what a bedroom is, milady?” said the bald one mockingly.
The guard who’d carried me took an exaggerated sniff and said, “No, and I don’t think she knows what a bath is, either.”
“You’re both very funny,” I whispered. “But I was kept in a dungeon for days. What’s your excuse for smelling like pig shit?”
The bald one raised his hand to strike me, but the black-toothed guard caught his wrist. “She’s not to be touched anymore,” he said. “Baron’s orders.”
The bald one spat angrily at me. “You’d best hold your tongue, or I’ll yank it out with my bare hands, orders or no.”
I just closed my eyes, listening to the fire as it popped and crackled. I could feel its heat beginning to seep into my bones. I was overcome by a fatigue so deep that I could not even move a finger.
If I lie very still like this, I thought, maybe they will leave me.
And soon enough, they did.