TAG | Chapter 3
The jail was only a single-story squat stone building on the outside. But underneath it housed one of the oldest and deepest dungeons in Corwell. It was many hundreds of years old and designed to make it very hard to get in and out of, even for the guards. Doubly so for anyone who escaped from a cell.
It was dark, the passageways were built to cramp and hinder movement, and every space was a door, or stairs, or the wall of a cell. The stairs you walked down formed an arch that held a door. Every wall you placed your hand on had a cell on the other side, the floor you stepped on was the roof of another cell. It seemed haphazard, with no discreet levels and no way of telling how far down you were. Heden didn’t know how deep it went and there were special cells with spells and prayers on them to keep powerful enemies locked up. It had once been Heden’s duty to come down and renew some of them.
He and Domnal had arrived outside a small door only two or three levels below the jail. Domnal unlocked the door and opened it. Heden thought he detected a little fear from Domnal, a man normally not afraid of man or beast. But madness, possession, loss of identity did scare him, Heden knew.
“Come get me when you’re done,” Domnal said, turning to leave. “I’ll send someone down to clear her out.” He stopped and looked with a mixture of gratitude and pity at his friend, about to discharge a terrible duty, and held out his hand. “Thanks again,” Dom said.
Heden took his hand, but couldn’t look Domnal in the eye. “Shouldn’t be a moment,” he said.
Dom nodded, turned, and began the long process of getting back up to the jail. Heden, torch in one hand, looked into the cell but out of the corner of his eye monitored the slow retreat of Domnal’s light. The light eventually winked out and Heden was alone.
He stepped into the cell. It was ten feet deep, but only four feet wide. The roof was low but low ceilings had never been a problem for Heden. The cell walls and floor were dark, ruddy clay. There was a cot about a foot off the floor. The door behind him had a small metal plate that could be opened and closed only from the outside, allowing the guards to feed the prisoner. There was a bowl of food on the floor, tipped over, and a bowl of water still intact.
In Heden’s estimation the girl was maybe fourteen. She was in the far corner of the cell, on the ground, looking as though she’d crawled there in an attempt to put as much of her body as far away from the door as possible.
She was gibbering. She’d soiled herself, and her mouth was bleeding. Her eyes were rolling around in her head. For a moment, Heden saw the mad eye of the Eseldic from upstairs.
Heden was relieved. She was in the middle of a fit, which meant she’d be easier to deal with than the last one.
Ensconcing his torch, he walked over to the cot. The girl had left a streak of vomit and blood on the ground. Heden sat on the cot, and unlaced the pouch he’d tied to his belt.
He extracted from the small leather pouch what looked like a ball of green pipe tobacco. It glistened in the guttering torchlight. He pulled a small leather strap out from his waist, and said a short prayer.
As he prepared, he spoke to the girl. Nothing in particular, in soothing tones. He knew she wouldn’t respond to him, but he thought maybe part of her could hear him. He bent down and began his experiment. He felt like a thief. Like he was stealing something from someone.
The girl was seizing up, flailing around in spasms. Her long, black hair was matted on her face and her thin, gangly arms and legs were bruised. She was wearing a short wool shift, courtesy of the jail. Her face was gaunt. Her dark eyes were wide.
Heden grabbed her arm. She didn’t resist. She didn’t stop her thrashing, but she didn’t actively fight him.
He pulled her toward him and, sitting on the floor next to her, tried to get her back toward him, so he could put her head in his arms and feed her the herbs he’d brought.
She was slick with blood, sweat, and urine and in one great spasm she rolled away from him, hitting him in the nose with her elbow. Heden grunted, and scrabbled after her. Talking to her, or himself, the entire time.
He eventually got her head in his lap, her arms and legs not close enough to the walls to get much leverage. He brought the leather strap out, folded it once, and forced it into her mouth. She tried to bite around it and seemed at one point as though she might gag on it, but Heden was careful. He wedged the leather in between her upper and lower teeth on the left side of her mouth, preventing her from closing. Her eyes still danced wildly, seeing everything and nothing. It looked like mortal terror.
He took out the ball of green herbs, moistened, preserved, and held together with honey, pinched it in half and pushed half of it between her upper right cheek and gum, then quickly did the same with the other half, and the lower right of her jaw.
He quickly removed the strap. Taking care to make sure she didn’t bite down on her tongue, he closed her mouth and tied the leather strap around her head, under her chin, keeping it closed. Her nostrils flared as she sucked air in through her nose.
Before she could choke, or swallow her tongue, Heden said a quick prayer and she was asleep. Her whole body relaxed, her eyes closed, and it felt to Heden as though her weight on his legs was suddenly lighter.
Heden looked around the room, at the mess, the aftermath of struggle, and thought; I should have said the prayer first.
Laboriously, taking care not to injure her, he got up and put the girl on the cot and fetched the bowl of water. Dipping his cloak in the water, he spent several minutes cleaning off her face, arms and legs. Working not to aggravate the cuts and scratches covering her body. He used his fingers to brush her matted hair out of her eyes, then shrugged and stopped. Good enough, he thought.
He closed his eyes and said another prayer over her. A more potent version of the one he said for Domnal. Her wounds closed, her bruises melted from blue-back to a wan kind of yellow and, for the second time in two hours, his eyes snapped open at what the prayer revealed to him. The disease, the precise flavor it left in his mind. A flavor he’d tasted less than a turn ago.
He narrowed his eyes and looked out the door, into the darkness where Domnal had retreated.
“That fucker,” he said, to no one in particular.
This is an important chapter, or rather the events therein are important, though their full import will not be felt until well into the next book. It’s enough to say that everything that’s happened up until now was leading up to this chapter, and there’s a reason out of the long story we’re coming into the middle of, that I chose to begin here.
I really hope you’re reading the gloss at least after having read the chapter, if not after having read everything posted up until now because otherwise I’m about to spoil things for you.
One thing I’ve noticed some readers get immediately, and others completely miss, is that Vanora has a sexually transmitted disease, that she gave it to Domnall, and she gave it to him while he was having sex with her while she was in the jail, possibly unconscious, possibly while having an epileptic fit. Yeah.
That’s never made explicit, however, because I feel doing so would completely undermine the tone of the work. Well, never made explicit, except here. But you’re special, you’re reading this on the web, so you get all the goodies. 
The struggle in and amongst the bodily fluids, like the profanity, is one of those things some readers feel like I’m doing to make a point, but if so, that point is lost on me. My significant other works in a real jail and tells me stories just like this one, often far more graphic, messy, and disturbing, and my only desire was to capture that. For that reader who is taken out of the book by reading about Heden and the girl flailing around in and amongst blood and shit and piss, authenticity and verisimilitude have become two different things, and the former has damaged the latter. In my defense I can only say; it’s my book and this is how I see it. 
If you want to know how I picture the dungeon described here, it’s the same one Ben Hur is taken to at the beginning of the movie with Charlton Heston.
