* Nine months later *
The supply yard has forty-seven flagstones. I counted them in April when counting was the only thing my hands could do, and I have recounted them in every quality of light this room permits.
Dawn gray. Noon white. The amber of late afternoon when the cart shadows stretch long enough to kiss the eastern wall. Forty-seven, confirmed twice in June, because thoroughness is all I have left.
Nico kicks hard against my ribs and the candle on the windowsill gutters sideways, flame bending toward him like it's taking instructions. He does that now—radiates something warm and strange that makes fire lean and metal hum.
I press my palm against the spot where his heel landed and push back gently. He pushes harder. We have been having this argument since July, and he is winning.
Nine months. The siege drums stopped the night Jericho rode through the gate, and the silence that followed was so total I thought I'd gone deaf. Then the weeks came—sealed door, guarded hallway, the same window.
The same forty-seven flagstones arranging themselves into the same pattern while the world outside my glass continued without consulting me. I watched Hilda's belly swell on her daily walks through the compound—always directly below my window, one hand curved beneath the bump.
A performance staged for an audience of one. I watched it every single day because the alternative was the wall, and the wall had nothing new to say by March. She never looked up at my window—she didn't need to.
The scars pulse tonight—a low rhythmic heat that started in the sixth month, something stirring in my blood that has no name and no outlet. I press my fingers against the silver lines and feel the hum travel down my arm. The candle leans harder.
The lock turns. My spine straightens before my brain catches up—nine months of the same sound has trained my body to distinguish between the guard's heavy tumblers and Lira's quick irritated way of working the mechanism, like the lock has personally wronged her and she intends to settle it.
"You look enormous." Lira closes the door behind her and does not sit down. She stands with her arms folded and her jaw set at the angle I associate with oncoming weather.
"Thank you for the update. I hadn't noticed from the inside." I shift against the window seat, which requires the full-body negotiation that nine months of pregnancy demands. "You look angry."
"I am angry. I've been angry for three months and I've been holding it in because you're stuck in here, but I can't hold it anymore." She doesn't soften a single edge. "So you're getting it today."
"The supply chain is gone, Agatha." She starts pacing, her boots hitting stone in sharp beats. "Not struggling. Not strained. Gone."
"The merchant contracts you negotiated—all four—lapsed because nobody knew the renewal terms." Her hands cut through the air on the word four. "Because they lived inside your head and Hilda's streamlining did not include asking you to write them down—or simply ask."
My nails press crescents into my dress. Four contracts, eighteen months of careful relationship-building—dissolved because someone locked the only person who understood them behind a guarded door. My hands itch to reach for a quill that isn't here.
"The healer rotation crashed six weeks ago." Her voice could snap iron in half. "Davin is still at the southern front because nobody processed his recall. Seela's transfer requests vanished into whatever Hilda replaced your system with."
"Which, as far as I can tell, is a drawer." She stops pacing and faces me square. "A literal drawer. I watched her put a requisition form in, close it, and walk away like she'd accomplished something."
My jaw locks around a sound that wants to be a laugh but arrives as something with more teeth. A drawer—nine months of captivity and my filing system's replacement is a piece of furniture.
"The intake shelter lost six families last month." Lira's voice drops, and the shift from fury to something rawer hits me harder than the anger did. "They walked into the woods, Agatha. With children. Because the food distribution collapsed and nobody came."
My fingers go still on my stomach and the room contracts to the size of that sentence. Six families with children, walking into winter woods because the system I built to feed them no longer existed.
"How long has distribution been down?" My voice comes out flat and scraped, and my nails leave marks in my palms I'll find later.
"Seven weeks." She pulls a folded paper from her coat—numbers tallied in her cramped handwriting. "Granary stores at forty percent. Refugee intake running at a third of your rate. Elder wing hasn't had a proper healer check in eleven days."
I take the paper. The numbers swim before they sharpen into a catalogue of failures I could have prevented from this window seat if anyone had thought to slide a form under my door.
"There's something else." Lira sits on the edge of my bed, the anger layered now with something underneath. "The pack is talking."
"The pack always talks." I fold the tally sheet along its crease, pressing the paper flat between my fingers like I can press the numbers into something less damning.
"Not like this." She leans forward, elbows on her knees. "In corridors, around fires, voices low enough that the wrong person won't hear. They remember who kept the shelves stocked and the carts arriving on schedule. And they're noticing who didn't."
Nico kicks again—hard, insistent—and the candle flame stretches toward my belly like it's reaching for him. My thumb traces the paper's edge.
"I can fix it." The words leave before strategy catches them. "Every contract, every rotation—I built them once, I can rebuild them in a week if someone opens this door." My voice steadies on the practical details the way it always does, like logistics is the only language my body trusts.
"I know." Lira's hands grip her knees hard enough to whiten. "That's why I'm angry. You can fix everything wrong with this pack, and instead you've been counting flagstones while a woman who files requisitions in furniture runs it into the ground."
My mouth opens around a response that never arrives, because the door swings wide without a knock.
Vesper stands in the frame. Torchlight from the corridor catches him from behind—tall, broad, wearing something on his face I haven't seen in three years of marriage. The fact that I can read hesitation after nine months of absence lands heavier than his shadow across my floor.
He looks at me—at the belly, the window seat, the room he locked me inside—and his throat works once around something that doesn't make it out. Lira is on her feet already, her body angled between us like a wall that materialized from sheer protective instinct.
Nine months. Not a visit, not a word, not one question about the child growing beneath scars he put there. The tally sheet crinkles in my grip, and whatever is cracking behind his eyes, I am not prepared to name it or forgive it.