Act 3: Recovery
Three weeks. That's how long it takes me to work up the courage.
Three weeks of inventory counts and supply meetings and group sessions where I sit in the back and say nothing. Three weeks of watching Hugh move through the castle like he owns it. Which, in a way, he does. Three weeks of sleeping through the night, most nights, and waking with the echo of Eleanor's voice in my head.
She saw you hand them over like cargo.Three weeks of knowing I need to ask and not being able to.
Until I can.
I find Hugh in his office after dinner. The door is open. It's always open. That's what he said, the first time I came here. The same door I stood outside with a knife in my hand.
The same room where I held a blade to his throat.
He looks up when I appear in the doorway. No surprise. He's been waiting for this. I can see it in the way he sets down his pen, the way he leans back in his chair. Not bracing. Just ready.
"Jamie."
"I need to ask you something."
He gestures to the chair across from him. I sit. The room is smaller than I remember. Or maybe I was bigger the last time I was here. Filled up with paranoia and cold certainty and the weight of a knife in my hand.
"Ask."
I've rehearsed this. Practised the words in my head during long shifts in the warehouse. They come out rougher than I planned.
"Eleanor. The woman in the cell. She told me you were handing people over to raiders. Catherine. Derek. She said she saw it happen. Saw them being walked across the courtyard at night, hands bound, heads covered."
Hugh doesn't flinch. Doesn't look away. He hears it the way you hear something you've been expecting for a long time.
"What else did she tell you?"
"That you had secret meetings. A locked door with armed guards. That people who asked questions disappeared."
He nods slowly. Like I've just confirmed something he already knew.
"And you believed her."
"I wanted to." The words come out before I can stop them. "I wanted to believe her because it fit. Because I was already looking for something wrong. Because I'd decided you were the threat before I ever set foot in this room."
The silence stretches. Hugh watches me. That same steady gaze he gave me when I had a knife at his throat. No anger. No fear. Just attention.
"What do you want to know, Jamie?"
"Everything. I want to know what actually happened."
Hugh stands. Moves to the window. Looks out at the courtyard for a long moment. When he speaks, his voice is flat. Administrator. Not counsellor. Not friend.
"Eleanor was a spy. MacLeod's people. We caught her passing information about our patrols, our supply schedules, our defences. The theft charge was what we told people. Easier to explain than 'we detained an enemy agent.'"
The room tilts. Just slightly. Just enough that I have to grip the armrest.
"A spy."
"A spy. She was good. Came in with a group of refugees, blended right in. We figured it out after the second raid hit a route that should have been secret. Marcus tracked it back to her."
A teacher. She told me she was a teacher. Eleanor Marsh. Taught children to read.The memory of her face in the cell. The quiet certainty in her voice. The way she said _"I was a teacher. Before all this."_
All of it. Lies. Every word calibrated to make me trust her.
"And Catherine. Derek."
Hugh turns from the window. "Not what you think. They were MacLeod's people too. Catherine had been here two months. Worked in the laundry, just like Eleanor said. Kept her head down. Asked questions about supply stores, guard rotations. Same pattern. Derek was younger. Worked in the kitchens. He confronted me at a community meeting because MacLeod told him to. Made noise. Drew attention. We figured out what he was after."
"So you handed them over."
"I returned them." Hugh's voice hardens. "There's a difference. I took them out to the forest, gave them back to MacLeod, and got Callum and some of our supplies in return. A prisoner exchange. Our infiltrators for our people."
The words land like stones.
"They were MacLeod's people. Sent here to spy. To report. To undermine. I could have imprisoned them indefinitely. I could have executed them." He says it without drama. Just fact. "Instead, I traded them back and got one of my own people home. And some of the supplies MacLeod had taken from us."
Eleanor said they were innocent. That Catherine was quiet and Derek was idealistic.I can still hear her voice. The way she described them. _"Catherine. Quiet. Kept to herself. Derek. Brave. Stupid."_
Brave and stupid. That's what she called the man who confronted me at a community meeting on his handler's orders.
"The official story," I say. "That they left voluntarily."
"Three hundred people living in a castle. If they knew MacLeod had infiltrators inside the walls, they'd turn on each other. Every new arrival would be suspect. Every argument would become an accusation." Hugh's jaw tightens. "I simplified the truth because the full truth would have torn this place apart. Every leader makes calls like that. You learn to carry it."
I sit with that for a moment. The weight of it. Three hundred people. A community held together by the careful management of truth.
Eleanor knew. She took the real thing and twisted it. Made it sound like Hugh was selling innocent people.That's what makes it worse. The manipulation wasn't fabricated. It was surgical. Eleanor took real events and stripped them of context. The midnight meeting. The bound prisoners. The people who disappeared. All of it happened. None of it meant what she said it meant.
"I need to see it," I say.
"See what?"
"The locked door. The council. Everything she told me was suspicious. I need to see it for what it is."
Hugh studies me for a long moment. Then he nods.
"Follow me."
The east wing. The corridor I mapped in my head during those sleepless nights. The reinforced door with the keypad that I broke through during the shift change. The guard who still sits outside, though he watches me with a different expression now.
Recognition. Wariness. Maybe respect.
Hugh punches in a code. The lock clicks.
"Medical supplies," he says, pushing the door open. "Antibiotics. Painkillers. The last of our insulin. Everything that's too valuable or too dangerous to keep in general storage."
I step inside. The room is clean, well-organised. Shelves lined with containers, each labelled and dated. A log book on a small table near the entrance, tracking every item that goes in or out.
I walk the perimeter. Open a few containers. Check the labels. Everything matches. Nothing hidden. No dark secrets behind the medicine.
This is it. This is what I broke into a guarded facility to find. This is what I held a knife to a man's throat over.Antibiotics and insulin.
I don't say anything. I don't need to. Hugh sees it on my face.
"The council meets in the room next to my office," he says, closing the door behind us. "Same time every week. Marcus. Sarah. A few others. Anyone who wants to observe can sit in. We discuss supply distribution, security, new arrivals. Nothing secret. Just decisions that need to be made by people with different perspectives."
"You could have told me this."
"When? Before you held a knife to my throat? After?" He doesn't sound angry. Just tired. "You didn't ask. You decided what I was and went looking for evidence to prove it. The truth was available. You weren't ready to hear it."
He's right. That's the part that sits heaviest.
Eleanor didn't make me paranoid. She found me already there. Already looking for a threat. Already convinced that the man with the warm smile and the open door was hiding something. All she did was hand me the pieces and let me put them together the way she wanted.
I held a knife to his throat over antibiotics and a medical supply log.The walk back to my room is long. The corridors haven't changed. The stone walls, the torchlight, the sound of people living their lives behind closed doors. But I'm seeing it differently now. Not as a fortress to be infiltrated. Just as a place. Imperfect. Complicated. Trying to survive.
I stop at the door to my room. Rest my forehead against the cold wood.
The guilt doesn't crash down. It's been there all along, waiting. It just has a shape now. A name.
I believed a spy. I nearly killed a good man. I freed an enemy agent into the wild with full knowledge of our layout, our patrols, our weaknesses.
Eleanor is out there. Somewhere. With MacLeod. With everything she learned while she sat in that cell, watching, waiting, calculating exactly who would be stupid enough to believe her.
She picked well.That might be the worst part.
I push the door open. The room is empty. Zoe's at the medical bay. The bed is made. The candle on the table has burned down to a stub.
I sit on the edge of the bed. I don't sleep. I don't read. I just sit there, feeling the weight of what I almost did and what I actually did.
The truth doesn't set you free. It just makes the cage visible.
But I'd rather see the bars than imagine them.