The gate opened with a low groan.
"You may go — you are free, lady," the guard said, stepping aside.
Adele didn't thank him. She walked out without looking back, her footsteps steady on the dusty road. The sky was pale and indifferent above her, the kind of sky that didn't care what had happened inside those walls. The town hummed quietly around her — market stalls opening, children running, smoke rising from breakfast fires. Everything exactly as it had been. As if nothing had changed.
As if Mara had never existed.
She kept walking.
Mara's house looked smaller than she remembered. The door creaked when she pushed it open. She stepped inside and stopped.
The quiet hit her like a fist.
It wasn't just silence — it was the absence of something. The absence of footsteps running to meet her. Of Mara's voice calling from the kitchen, complaining about something ridiculous. Of laughter that could fill a room without trying.
Adele stood very still in the middle of it.
Then her knees gave.
She sank to the floor slowly, hugging her knees to her chest, her back against the wall. The tears came before she could stop them — not soft tears, but the kind that hurt, the kind that had been locked behind her ribs for months waiting for a door to open.
"Mara," she whispered. "Why you?"
The house didn't answer. It never would.
She didn't know how long she sat there. Long enough for the light to shift through the cracked window. Long enough for the worst of it to pass.
Eventually she wiped her face and stood.
Mara's room was untouched. Books still piled on the desk. A scarf still draped over the chair like she'd just set it down and stepped out for a moment. Adele ran her fingers along the spine of one book, then pulled her hand back.
In the corner sat an old wooden board.
She carried it to the table. Found scraps of paper. A pen. And she began to write — slowly at first, then faster. Names. Dates. Connections. Fragments of conversations she had replayed in her head a hundred times inside that cell.
She pinned each note to the board. Drew lines between them. Built the map piece by piece until every thread, every arrow, every name curved back to the same point.
Lord Morin.
She stepped back and looked at what she'd made.
The grief was still there. It would always be there. But something else had settled over it now — something quieter and much colder.
A slow smile tugged at her lips.
"It won't be so bad," she murmured, "to start the fire from the bottom."