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She goes willingly to the dungeons. Allows them to shackle her hands and lead her down, down past the kitchens and the storerooms, down below the sea. It’s the wrong time of year for the dungeons to flood at high tide, though she doubts she’d protest if it wasn’t.
This was never anyone’s choice but her own. It was her choice, her actions, and she will accept whatever punishment falls upon her shoulders.
Edward unlocks her shackles, a sign of trust he likely only offers because it’s her, and examines her face in the dim, flickering candlelight, looking for answers. Her expression gives him none, but Lockland’s only six months gone - they were all fools to think she’d return to herself this quickly.
(Cora is upstairs, searching her room. On the desk, a letter from Georgiana, crumpled around the edges from a too-tight shaking grip. I fear I do not have good news. Cora grits her teeth and skims the rest. It is early yet, but I worry that their belief will favor him. She smoothes the paper’s wrinkles as best she can and sets the letter where she found it, and looks out the window over the calm ocean.)
He tells her that he will return when he’s made a decision, and then locks the iron bars and leaves her alone.
She sits on the warped wooden bench and leans her head against the cool, damp stone. She closes her eyes and listens to the waves crash against the tower.
Appropriate, she thinks, when Edward informs her that he’s given Cullen the power to decide what happens to her. She nods. Edward hesitates, and she knows the question that lingers on his tongue - why? - but he leaves without asking.
Her memory of her years in the Chantry orphanage has grown faint, muddled around the edges as she grows farther away from them, but she remembers hiding in the shadows, listening to the Revered Mother offering advice to layfolk and Sisters who had gone astray. Silence was the order given more often than most. Days, weeks, even a month of silence.
(“Do not speak. Do not interrupt the Maker’s world. Listen to His creations as they are without your words.”)
Time passes strangely, even with the regularity of meals. She decides not to count. Cullen’s decision will come when he has made it, and no sooner.
Her eyebrows furrow in interest as a crab scuttles along the floor, toward the torchlight. It pauses, as if asking her how to get out of this stone cage and back to the sea. She shrugs, having no answers for the crab.
Cullen looks quite less burnt than last she saw him. She’s had experience with her own burns, and is suddenly aware that she has been down here alone, not speaking, for over three weeks. The crab has either made its way home, or given up and died in the darkness beyond the stretch of the torches.
She wonders if he’s come to deliver the news himself. No decision would be too harsh, not for her crimes. She stretches her arms over her head and calmly waits in silence for him to speak. Death or Tranquility, the only fitting ends. She will not beg for her life.
Instead of handing out sentence, he sits and asks her the question Edward didn’t.
Her voice is hoarse, scratchy from disuse, but she coughs and clears her throat, and gives him half an answer. It’s true, the half she tells him, but not as important - not as sharply painful and honest - as the half she doesn’t. She has no intention of telling him the rest, and so if he is still waiting to make his choice, half an answer is all the information she provides.
He surprises her, when he stands and unlocks the door and lets her free.
Years will pass before she asks him why. They’ll have killed together and saved together and escaped together and survived together before she asks him why. He will look at her on the side of a snowy cliff, and give her half an answer.
Even more will pass before she tells him the rest. The dawn will have come and an old god will have died, they will both be married and their children will have children, and on a spring day in the mountains she’ll tell him the other half of her answer.
He’ll smile, and capture her knight, and tell her the other half of his.