Wren’s POV
They keep her in a root cellar under a house with no smoke.
Isen goes down the steps first with a lamp. Maren comes last, which puts me between them, and I have enough of my wits left to notice that neither of them planned it any other way.
The cellar is cold and dry and smells like earth and old apples. Someone has put a real bed down here, and a chair beside it, and a shelf with a cup on it, and all that care makes what’s on the bed worse instead of better.
She’s a woman about forty. Small. Grey at the roots and dark at the ends. Her hands are folded on top of a blanket that has been tucked in by someone who does it every day, and her eyes are open, and she is not in the room with us at all.
“Nell,” Isen says. “I’ve brought somebody.”
Nothing.
“Eleven years?” I ask.
“E
