Chapter 59

I smelled it before I was awake enough to know I was smelling anything.

Iron. A great deal of iron, cold, the way the Ashgrove butcher’s smelled on a winter morning before he opened the shutters. It was in my nose and my mouth and at the back of my throat.

I opened my eyes.

Grey light, very thin, coming in at a slant through a barred square of window that was in the wrong place: above me, where the roof should have been. Black boards close on either side. Wet straw. The smell of the river. I was lying on my side in the prisoners’ cart, on what had been its wall and was now its floor, with my knees drawn up and my chained hands held together against my chest.

There was something in them.

***

I did not move at once. I lay still and made myself look at it the way I would have looked at a page I had been told to copy and did not understand: all of it, edge to edge, before deciding anything.

It was my paper-knife.

Plain silver, the length o