Page 33

He gave a low, silky chuckle. “No, it is not. But I don’t make a habit of keeping people in underground cells, no matter howmutinous they are. As a punishment for wrongdoing, hanging is much more efficient. Even if you add in a little torture beforehand, it’s all over very quickly.”

I had the distinct feeling that the baron was mocking me. Once again, I wanted to do him grievous bodily harm. “Is that what you’ve done to my friends?”

“No,” he said. “I have freed them, as I said I would.”

Please God, let him be telling the truth.

“What about me, then? Will you free me, too?”

“No, I have something else in mind.” He turned and began to walk away, but he hadn’t taken ten steps before he was suddenly back. “Oh, look,” he said, the barest hint of a smile on his lips, “I found this in my pocket.” He dangled a narrow strip of dried meat through the bars. “Fallow deer, if I’m not mistaken.”

I didn’t want to take it from him—I was too proud. But my hand shot out and snatched it from his grip, and I’d shoved it into my mouth before I even knew what I was doing. The meat was tough and salty, and nearly impossible to chew. It didn’t matter. It was food.

“That was meant for my hound,” the baron said. He sounded amused. “Who, I might add, has better manners than you.”

My mouth was full, but I managed to speak around the gristly strands. “I’ll gladly show you my manners,” I said furiously. “All you have to do is let me out.”

The baron merely bowed, and then he walked away without turning back.

CHAPTER 33

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.

Allof 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. Myhead 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.