Hey guys, tonight we begin with a question that might make you shiver a little: where did prisoners sleep in medieval castles during freezing winters? You might imagine thick walls, protective stone, safety from the chill. And yet, as you pull your blanket tighter around your shoulders tonight, imagine instead that those very walls are dripping with cold water, seeping with frost, and you are not a guest of the castle, but its prisoner.
And just like that, it’s the year 1312, and you wake up on the stone floor of a castle dungeon. There is no fire waiting, no bed carved from wood with soft linens. Your body is pressed against damp straw, brittle and sharp against your skin. You flinch as a drop of icy water falls from the ceiling onto your cheek. Could you sleep like this?
The darkness around you isn’t complete—it moves. The torch in the far corridor flickers just enough to show you the outlines of your cell: thick walls of stone, cracked with veins of moisture, glistening as if they are breathing frost. Your breath itself hangs in the air, small clouds of white that vanish almost as soon as they appear. You listen, and all you can hear is the steady drip of water, slow and deliberate, like some ancient clock marking time that never moves forward.
Historically, many medieval dungeons were built underground or in the lowest levels of castles, where the thick masonry trapped damp air. Records show that in places like the Tower of London, prisoners often complained of cold, wet walls and floors that never dried, even in summer. Curiously, in some accounts from 14th-century France, it was noted that a jailer might occasionally toss in armfuls of straw, not out of kindness but to prevent prisoners from dying too quickly—straw was cheaper than bodies to dispose of.
You shift, feeling the straw beneath you crunch and scatter. It offers the pretense of a bed, but in truth it’s little more than a disguise. The floor beneath drinks the warmth from your body as fast as you can generate it. Your fingers instinctively curl to your chest, but they are stiff, clumsy, unwilling to obey. Each inhalation fills your nose with the mingled scents of mold, rotting straw, and the acrid sharpness of rusted iron. You wonder—how many slept here before you, and how many never woke?
The cell door is heavy oak, iron-banded, slick with frost. You watch as your breath curls against it, making the metal glisten faintly in the faint orange glow from outside. Beyond it, footsteps echo on stone stairs—your jailer making his rounds. He will not speak. He may not even look. And yet, the sound of his boots is both terrifying and strangely comforting, proof that the world beyond your cell still exists.
A lesser-known belief among prisoners, whispered in desperation, was that the dungeon itself could hear your thoughts. Some carved prayers into the stone, fingers bleeding as they scratched words into walls already hardened by centuries. You reach out and find such markings yourself—half-faded letters, names, maybe a plea to God. They are rough beneath your fingertips, colder than the stone itself, and you wonder if whoever etched them found any peace in doing so.
You curl back into yourself, shoulders hunched, knees drawn in, the way animals huddle against the wind. Could you find rest here, with your body shivering and your mind wandering into questions you’re not sure you want answered? Sleep comes in fragments. The torchlight flickers once, twice, then seems to vanish altogether. In the dark, the sound of dripping water grows louder, filling every corner of your mind until it is all you can hear.
Outside your barred window—a slit no wider than your hand—snowflakes drift, carried by a wind that sings through the iron like a low whistle. They land on the sill, melt, and drip down to join the chorus of water that has never stopped. You imagine for a moment that those flakes could fall onto your blanket, cool against your skin, if you had a blanket at all.
Like & subscribe only if you genuinely enjoy this kind of journey—this slipping into another time, another body, another night you might never want to endure in reality. And tell me, where are you listening from, and what’s the local time there? Somewhere warm, perhaps. Somewhere safer than this dungeon, where even now, you pull your blanket tighter around yourself as you drift into the story.
Because here in the year 1312, in the bowels of this castle, you are awake. Cold seeps into you as surely as chains bind your limbs. And tonight, you will learn how prisoners truly slept, if sleep ever came at all.
The first thing you feel, before you even register the cold or the damp, is the weight on your wrists. Iron. It bites not with teeth, but with its sheer indifference. The shackle is too tight to ignore, too loose to forget, and it rattles softly every time you move your arm. You tug once, half-heartedly, but the chain only answers with a dull scrape against stone. The sound echoes, filling the cell, a constant reminder that even your smallest movement is never silent.
Your back rests against the wall—bare, wet, merciless. The stones are uneven, cut by hands long dead, yet still sharp against the ridges of your spine. You shift, searching for some angle that might offer relief, but the wall is as unyielding as the chain. Your breath leaves a faint mist across its surface, but it disappears instantly, as though the wall itself swallows your warmth.
Historically, medieval prisoners were often chained directly to walls or floors, not just for security but to prevent escape during sleep. Archaeological excavations in castles such as Chillon in Switzerland reveal iron rings still set into stone, positioned at heights that suggest prisoners sat or lay tethered. Curiously, one chronicle from 14th-century Germany describes a prisoner who trained his body to sleep upright against the wall, so that he would not wake with his skin frozen to the damp ground. The chronicler called it “the art of surviving like a tree.”
You glance down. The chain at your ankle snakes across the floor, glistening with frost. When you lift your foot, the links scrape, producing a metallic shriek that feels louder than thunder in this silence. You wince. It is not just the noise that unsettles you, but the thought of alerting the rats, who scatter whenever you move but always return.
The wall behind you radiates chill into your bones. You close your eyes, imagining for a moment that it could be a hearth, a place where warmth gathers and lingers. But the illusion collapses as your body shivers violently, your teeth clicking together like pebbles in a stream. You open your eyes and stare at the stones again. Each one seems to pulse with its own breath, misted by moisture, alive with shadows.
Above your head, faint scratches. You reach upward, fingers tracing uneven grooves in the mortar. At first, you think they are cracks from the stone’s weight, but then you feel shapes—letters, rough, deliberate. Another prisoner’s words. They are impossible to read in the dim light, but you know they exist. And in knowing, you feel a strange connection, as if your suffering has been witnessed before, and will be witnessed again.
The shackles rub at your wrists until the skin feels raw. You wonder how long before blood would mix with rust, and whether rust itself might creep into you. The iron smells sharp, metallic, mingling with the sour scent of mold. The dungeon air tastes thick, like breathing through damp cloth. Every sense insists on reminding you where you are.
Could you sleep like this—sitting up, chained against the stone? You imagine slumping forward, but the chain yanks you back. You imagine curling sideways, but your wrists twist painfully. You wonder if, over nights and weeks, your body might finally learn to fold itself into the wall’s embrace, as if the stone could become your pillow.
Beyond the wall, muffled noises: a guard’s cough, the faint creak of wood somewhere above. The world of the free presses faintly against your prison, but it never enters. Instead, you are left with the constant chorus of your cell—the clink of iron, the drip of water, the shiver of your own breath.
And when your eyes finally close, the wall at your back feels less like an enemy and more like a witness. It accepts your weight, your trembling, your weakness. It does not care, but it endures. And you, too, endure, shackled and sleepless, bound to bare stone while winter itself seeps deeper into your bones.
You lower yourself once more onto what is supposed to be your bedding, and instantly the truth becomes clear. It isn’t a mattress, not in the way you imagine beds today. It is straw—scattered, flattened, half-rotted. A handful of stalks pressed beneath your weight, crunching like brittle bones. Some pieces jab through your rags and scrape your skin, sharp enough to leave little welts. Others crumble to dust, filling the air with a dry, earthy smell that clings to your throat.
At first, it almost feels like relief. Anything is softer than bare stone. You shift, curling onto your side, and the straw cushions you—just barely, just enough. For a moment you dare to believe you’ve found comfort. But within seconds, the illusion collapses. Cold rises from beneath, merciless, seeping through the straw as if it were nothing at all. The stalks trap more damp than warmth, carrying the moisture straight to your bones. You breathe in, and the air is thick with mildew, hay dust, and something faintly sour—urine from those who slept here before.
Historically, straw bedding was the cheapest and most common provision for prisoners. Records from English gaols in the 13th century show that jailers were instructed to provide “litter of straw” to captives twice a year, once in summer and once in winter. Curiously, ethnographers later noted that in some prisons of central Europe, prisoners sometimes lit their straw bedding on fire, not to escape but to banish vermin for a night, trading smoke and punishment for a fleeting sense of relief.
You shift again, trying to rearrange the stalks into something resembling a pillow. They crunch loudly, echoing in the chamber, startling a rat that darts across your arm with whiskers brushing your skin. You flinch and push it away, but it returns to the edges of the bedding, waiting for crumbs you do not have. Its tiny eyes glisten in the dark like twin sparks.
The straw itself has frozen at the edges. You reach for a bundle near the wall, only to find it crusted with ice, stiff and snapping under your touch. In the torchlight, you see delicate crystals clinging to each stalk, beautiful in their geometry, cruel in their bite. You wonder if you might fall asleep and wake to find yourself rimed with frost, a prisoner turned statue.
The illusion of the mattress becomes crueler the longer you lie there. It whispers the possibility of rest, then betrays you with damp and cold. You curl tighter, drawing your knees to your chest, feeling the stalks dig into your ribs. Your breath rattles, your teeth chatter. You try to imagine a hearth, a feather bed, a warm woolen blanket pulled to your chin. But every time the image begins to glow in your mind, the straw snaps beneath you, jolting you back to the dungeon.
Could you sleep like this? You close your eyes, and the sounds magnify: the drip, drip, drip of water from above; the scratching of rats in the corners; the shifting of straw each time your body trembles. The air tastes of dust, sharp and bitter, coating your tongue. You cough softly, and the sound seems to bounce from wall to wall, as if the dungeon itself is mocking you.
In the stillness, you realize the straw is not just bedding. It is a record. It remembers the bodies that pressed into it before yours, the sweat, the sickness, the despair. You can almost feel them—the ghosts of sleepers who curled in this same pose, shivering, praying for dawn. And tonight, you add your own shape to its memory.
The straw mattress illusion: a promise of comfort that dissolves as quickly as it appears. You close your eyes once more, not for sleep, but for a fragile trick of the mind—pretending that the crackling stalks beneath you might one day turn to softness, that frost could melt into warmth, that a bed is more than just the cruel lie of straw on stone.
The wall is not still. At first you think it’s only your imagination, a trick of the shadows. But the longer you lean against it, the more alive it feels. The stone exhales cold into your skin, each block of masonry a lung of frost. You press your palm flat against the wall and recoil—the chill bites deeper than ice. It’s not just surface cold. It seeps, it seeps relentlessly, until it feels as if the stone is pulling the heat straight from your bones.
You tilt your head back and listen. There’s a faint crackle, almost too soft to notice. At first, you think it might be rats in the straw again. But no—this sound comes from within the wall itself. Frost, expanding in the mortar, fracturing the old seams. Each tiny shift is a whisper, like ice sighing in the dark.
Historically, medieval castles were not insulated against winter. Records show that even nobles complained of frost forming on the inside of their chamber walls. Archaeologists studying preserved dungeons in Eastern Europe have found layers of mineral deposits and ice damage, proof that moisture seeped continually through stone. Curiously, a few accounts mention that jailers sometimes smeared animal fat across certain walls—not to warm the prisoners, but to stop ice from crumbling the masonry. Imagine the strange smell of rancid fat mingling with damp stone in the dead of winter.
Your breath fogs and clings to the surface, spreading a thin glaze of moisture. When you lean closer, you see it shimmer briefly before disappearing, swallowed whole. You try to draw warmth from the stone with your own body, but the attempt is laughable. The wall gives nothing back. It is like embracing a corpse.
The smell is sharp, mineral, almost metallic. It fills your nose with the taste of wet limestone, gritty and sour. Each inhale scrapes your throat as though you were breathing dust. Your tongue feels dry, cracked, despite the wet air. You imagine licking the wall and finding nothing but a bitter chill.
You curl tighter, knees to chest, as though making yourself smaller could protect you. But there is no escape from the wall. Whether you sit upright or lie on the straw, its presence surrounds you. It presses in with its cold breath, a constant reminder that the dungeon itself is alive, that its body is larger than yours, and you are trapped inside its lungs.
You close your eyes and try to imagine something else. Perhaps the wall is not stone at all but a sheet of glass, clear and fragile, separating you from another world. Perhaps on the other side there is firelight, laughter, the smell of bread baking. But you open your eyes again, and all you see is rough stone, sweating frost, indifferent and immovable.
Could you sleep while frost itself seemed to breathe against your back? You roll to your side, curling away, but even then the air is saturated with cold. It crawls into your ears, down your neck, across the tips of your fingers. You feel your own body betray you: shivers coming in waves, jaw locking, breath stuttering. The frost owns this place. The frost is older than you, older than every prisoner who ever lay here.
Somewhere above, a guard coughs, the sound faint and distant. A bootstep follows, hollow against the floorboards. Life exists above, where fire glows and cloaks hang near the hearth. Down here, you are left with frost that will not stop breathing. It fills the silence, wraps around you, whispers against your skin until you wonder if the dungeon itself is trying to freeze you into memory.
And so you lie still, eyes half-closed, body trembling, while the frost exhales, and exhales, and exhales.
The torch is your only companion. A stub of flame wedged into an iron sconce on the far wall, it spits and crackles softly, as if it resents the duty of surviving in this damp air. Its glow barely reaches your corner. Shadows crouch thick around you, pressing close, shifting every time the flame flickers. The dungeon breathes with those shadows—alive, patient, waiting.
The light is golden but weak, always at risk of drowning in its own smoke. You watch as the smoke curls upward, gray and sluggish, clinging to the ceiling where it mingles with mist. The smell is sharp, tarry, and heavy in your lungs, clashing with the stench of mold and straw. Every inhale carries soot, every exhale a cough you try to stifle. Could you sleep while the air itself tastes burnt?
You shift, and the iron chains rattle. Their glimmer catches the light for an instant, like a serpent uncoiling. Beyond that brief shimmer, everything else remains swallowed by dark. Your eyes ache, straining to hold onto the little fire, as though its dim radiance were the last thread tying you to the living world.
Historically, torches in medieval prisons were scarce. Records from English gaols note that some prisoners lived weeks without any light, enduring perpetual darkness. Ethnographers later remarked that when torches were lit, they served less as mercy and more as surveillance—guards could see the captives better, and captives, cruelly, could see the night drag endlessly forward. Curiously, one Italian account tells of prisoners who would deliberately breathe close to the flame, trying to snuff it with carbon dioxide—better complete darkness than the torture of seeing time crawl so slowly.
The torch trembles, bending under its own exhaustion. Shadows leap violently across the wall, grotesque shapes that seem to mock you: one moment a claw, the next a hunched figure, the next a skeletal hand reaching toward your face. You blink hard, but the illusions return with every flicker.
The night stretches without measure. You cannot tell whether hours pass or only moments. The torch neither dies nor thrives. It simply endures, like you, like the frost, like the chains. At times, the flame shrinks so small you think it’s gone, but then it flares back, a stubborn ember refusing to surrender. You envy it. Even smoke has a kind of freedom—you watch it spiral upward, slipping between cracks, seeking the stars.
The silence deepens. Then, faintly, a sound—water dripping into a puddle somewhere out of sight. The torchlight dances on that ripple, and suddenly you imagine you see the moon reflected there, far away, unreachable. You close your eyes, and the image lingers: a silver disc floating in the dark, promising a sky you cannot touch.
Could you drift to sleep beneath such light? The answer comes in your body’s betrayal: your eyelids droop, then snap open at each crackle. The shadows taunt you, refusing to let you rest. Even when you slump sideways, the straw crunching beneath you, you cannot escape the glow. It is too little to comfort, too much to ignore.
The torch burns on. The night does not end. And in this endless hour, you wonder if time itself has been locked in the cell with you.
You feel the itch before you name it. A thin, needling tickle at the edge of your scalp, a creeping at the nape of your neck, a sudden sting beneath the seam of your ragged shirt. You scratch, careful at first, then harder, until your fingernails rasp the skin and raise a heat that has nothing to do with fire. The itch returns as soon as your hand falls away, bold, insistent, as if it has been waiting for you to pause so it can begin again.
You bring the collar of your tunic to your nose. The cloth smells of damp straw and old sweat, of wool that has forgotten sunshine. You pinch the seam and rub it between your fingers. Something gritty catches and resists—the tiny, sand-grain clasp of a nit glued fast to a thread. You blow a slow breath along the fabric and watch a speck crawl; the breath fogs the air, a pale cloud in the torchlight, and the speck keeps moving, stubborn, unhurried, perfectly at home.
Historically, lice flourished wherever bodies were crowded and laundering rare; medieval accounts complain of “verminous affliction” in prisons, monasteries, and barracks alike. Records show that gaolers often provided straw but not soap, and clean water was spent on the living only so far as it kept them breathing. Curiously, in several late-medieval sources, lice are given almost domestic nicknames—“seam-keepers,” “shirt-folk”—a bitter joke acknowledging where they nest, in the hidden hems and warm folds that cling to the body like a second, unwelcome skin.
You feel another sting along your ribs. Your fingers hunt, then trap a small, hard bead between nail and thumb. The sound it makes when it bursts is soft but unmistakable, a tiny pop that would be satisfying if not for the fact that it must be repeated, again and again, like plucking pebbles from an endless shore. You wrinkle your nose at the faint iron tang on your fingertips and wipe them on the straw, where the smell of rot swallows everything.
You try to imagine yourself clean. Rainwater on a summer road, scented soap, a comb tugging through hair at a hearth while someone laughs about the day’s work. But here, winter air keeps your scalp prickling and your hair matted to your skull. When you scratch, flakes of dry skin drift down like pale ash. They land on your knees, on the chain, on the straw that crackles under you and now hosts not just you but a whole crawling parliament of little lives.
From the next cell, a soft scraping. At first you think it is a rat. Then you hear it again, rhythmic, deliberate: someone grooming by touch alone, the slow drag of fingers along a seam, the wet pinch of thumbnails meeting. You wonder how many nights that prisoner has mapped their own clothing like a cartographer, learning every hidden campsite where warmth and thread cross to make a shelter for vermin.
Ethnographers noted that even long after the Middle Ages, delousing rituals became a kind of grim companionship in rough quarters—soldiers “roasting the seams” by the fire, mothers teasing nits out with bone or wooden combs. Here, in a dungeon of winter, you have no comb. So you improvise. You pull a single straw, stiff with frost at the tip, and use it as a probe beneath the seam, easing until you feel the grainy grip of a nit and pry it free. The straw squeaks along the wool, a dry, papery sound that seems too loud in the hush.
The air tastes tainted, not just with smoke and damp stone but with the stale, sour note of bodies that cannot properly wash. When the torch flares, its heat is thin but the light is bright enough to show you what you’d rather not see: the swift skitter of a louse across your sleeve, a minute shadow that slips into the fold near your elbow and vanishes. You close your eyes. You try to breathe past it.
Could you sleep like this—itching, hunting, waking from half-dreams to scratch the same spot until your skin feels fevered under the cold? Your fingers grow tired. Your scalp grows tender. And still the lice work with winter’s patience, a quiet tide moving under cloth and along hair, finding whatever warmth your shivering creates.
Records show that some gaolers shaved prisoners’ heads, not out of mercy but management; bare scalps meant fewer outbreaks that spread to guards. A lesser-known detail appears in a few accounts from central Europe: prisoners sometimes begged kitchen scraps of rendered fat, then rubbed a thin film along collar and cuff to make a slick barrier where nits could not cling—grease and ash smeared together, a poor man’s armor against a persistent enemy. You consider the idea, then think of the smell, the way rancid fat would mingle with wet wool and straw. You do not know if you could bear it. But you mark the thought for later, a small, practical hope in a place that discourages them.
You pull your rags tighter and tuck your hands into your sleeves, a makeshift nest. The fabric is rough against your chin. It scratches, but its scratch is human; it is the rasp of woven fiber and not the needle-work of mouths you cannot see. You rock once, twice, the chain murmuring against the ring in the wall, a cold lullaby. The torch hisses, a tiny storm caged in tar and wick. Smoke drifts over you with a bitter sweetness, and for a heartbeat you imagine it drives the lice back—smoke like a shepherd, you like a sheep—though you know they will return the moment the air clears.
A faint whimper rises from farther down the corridor, then fades. Perhaps someone dreams of snow and wakes to find the dream already here. Perhaps someone else stares at the same problem you do: sleep means stillness, and stillness means the lice feast, undisturbed. You think, absurdly, of making a pact with them—if you keep moving, will they keep their teeth? The thought almost makes you smile, and the smile feels like warmth.
Above, the guard’s dog barks once, the sound carrying down the stairwell like a thrown bone. You picture its fur, its easy curl before a brazier, its paws tucked snug beneath its chest. Then you look at your own hands and see the raw crescents your nails have made there. You exhale slowly, fogging the air. Your breath thins and disappears into the cold, into the stone, into the darkness that will take everything and give nothing back but echo.
You shift your weight and discover a new geography of pain and itch, as if your own body were a continent mapped by small conquerors. A soft irony blooms: the dungeon belongs to your captors, but your skin belongs to the lice. And still, you are here in the middle, tenant to both.
“Could you sleep like this?” you whisper, not sure if you are speaking to yourself or to the stray spirit you sometimes feel watching through the bars. The whisper tastes of smoke. It leaves your mouth and seems to hover before it vanishes, like everything warm does in this place.
So you set small rules. Scratch only when you must. Hunt when the torch flares and look away when it gutters. Breathe through the itch until your shiver becomes a rhythm, like waves tapping stone. Lice as constant companions: unwelcome, inevitable, proof that you are still alive enough to host them. And in the unkind logic of winter, “alive enough” is victory.
You fold your arms, rest your head against your sleeve, and let the soundscape thicken—chain against ring, straw against cloth, the hush of your pulse in your ears, the torch’s soft hiss. Somewhere a flake of frost loosens and falls. You close your gritty eyes. Beneath the seam at your wrist something stirs, then goes still, as if it, too, is settling for the night.
Sleep comes not as a gift but as a truce nobody keeps.
The sound comes first: the scrape of boots on stone, the jingle of keys that always makes your stomach tighten. You brace yourself, not knowing whether it will be neglect or cruelty this time. Then the door groans inward, hinges complaining in the cold. The jailer stands in the frame, his silhouette blotting the weak torchlight from the corridor. He carries something in one hand, a sagging bundle that smells before you even see it.
He tosses it toward you with no ceremony. The weight lands on the straw with a dull thud. A blanket—or at least, the memory of one. You unfold it slowly, and the smell blossoms: mold, smoke, and something sharp, like wet leather left too long in a ditch. You wrinkle your nose, but your hands do not let go. In this place, even filth is a kind of gift.
Historically, records from 13th-century gaols show that blankets were rarely provided, and when they were, it was often out of pragmatism rather than pity. Prisoners dying of cold meant paperwork, disposal, unrest. A blanket cost less than a corpse. Curiously, in some French accounts, blankets were passed down from one prisoner to the next, never washed, until they resembled stiff slabs of felt—more relic than comfort, yet treasured nonetheless.
You shake this one out. Dust rises, glinting in the thin light, making you cough. The fabric is rough wool, stiff in places where mildew has eaten and hardened. You drape it over your shoulders anyway, and it scratches your skin like nettles. Still, the weight is real. It presses against you, clumsy, heavy, but undeniably present. For the first time tonight, your shivers slow.
The smell clings. You bury your nose deeper, trying to ignore it, but every breath carries the damp sweetness of rot, the sour tang of centuries of use. Could you sleep beneath something that stinks so badly? The answer comes in your body’s quiet relief: warmth outweighs disgust. Your hands clutch the edges, pulling the blanket tighter, ignoring the way its corners are stiff with grime.
The jailer lingers for only a moment. His face is half in shadow, unreadable. Perhaps he is thinking of the fire upstairs, the bowl of broth waiting, the bed with furs piled high. Or perhaps he thinks nothing at all—just a man doing a job, tossing scraps of comfort like feed to cattle. He turns without a word, and the door slams shut. The key grates in the lock, and you are alone again.
The blanket grows heavier as you settle beneath it. It holds the dungeon’s damp like a sponge, but even wet warmth is better than none. You curl into yourself, rags pressed close, blanket layered over straw. The smell surrounds you, inescapable, but after a while your nose grows numb to it, the way your skin grows numb to cold. What remains is the weight, the illusion of being covered, shielded.
You trace the seams with your fingers. Threads loosen, fibers fray, patches thin. You imagine the blanket’s history—how many prisoners clung to it before you, how many whispered prayers into its wool. You wonder if their dreams linger, woven into the fabric like hidden ghosts. Does this blanket remember them? Does it now remember you?
A small laugh escapes your lips, dry and strange in the dark. You hadn’t meant to make a sound. But the thought is absurd enough to spark something like humor. You clutch the blanket tighter. Could you tell someone in another life that you once felt gratitude for this rag? Would they believe you?
The torch sputters in its sconce, shadows ripple, and you feel your eyelids grow heavy. The blanket may stink, it may scratch, but it is also anchor, shield, cocoon. And as you curl into its grudging embrace, you realize: even gifts given without kindness can still keep you alive.
The blanket is no match for what comes from beneath. The floor beneath you is alive in its own way—an endless reservoir of cold that drinks your warmth with silent greed. You feel it through the straw, through your rags, through the mold-stiff blanket. The stone floor does not care that you shiver. It simply hungers, pulling heat from your body as though it were a feast laid out for winter itself.
You shift, curling tighter, pressing your knees into your chest. The straw crunches, rearranging into new angles that stab your ribs. The blanket slips, exposing your ankle where the iron shackle bites. Immediately the cold climbs into that space, licking up your leg like an invisible frost-fire. You yank the blanket back down, but the chill has already rooted itself inside you.
Historically, medieval prisoners often complained of “cold rising from the earth.” In castles built near rivers or marshes, moisture seeped upward, creating floors that never dried. Archaeologists at Château de Loches in France found that dungeon floors were often nothing but rough flagstones laid directly over damp earth. Curiously, a 15th-century account from Scotland describes prisoners spreading ashes across the floor to dull its bite, creating a fragile buffer that needed constant renewing.
You stretch one hand flat against the flagstones. The surface is slick, slicker than ice. Your palm burns from contact, as if the stone is not cold but hot in reverse—stealing, consuming. You snatch your hand back, but the ache lingers in your skin, a dull throb that refuses to fade.
The air itself seems drawn downward. Each exhale pools close to the ground, fog curling against the stone before dissolving. You imagine the floor is inhaling it, swallowing even your breath. A faint drip echoes, and you realize water seeps from cracks, spreading into thin rivulets that glisten faintly in the dying torchlight. Your straw bedding soaks it up greedily, turning to mush beneath your hip.
Could you sleep on such a floor? You try lying flat, but your spine feels every seam in the flagstones. You roll onto your side, but the moisture clings to your rags, seeping upward as if to remind you who truly rules here. Your body is only a visitor; the floor is eternal.
The smell rises with it—earthy, mineral, sharp with mold. It tastes like old caves, like forgotten wells. You swallow hard, and the flavor lingers on your tongue. You wonder how many bodies rotted on this very ground, their heat surrendered to the same stones. Do the walls remember their faces? Does the floor still feed on them, year after year?
You curl tighter. Your breath hitches, shallow and fast, as if conserving what little heat remains. You pull the blanket over your head, trapping stale air around you. It is sour with your own sweat, thick with the smell of mold, but it is yours. For a moment, the floor seems farther away, the hunger dulled.
Then a rat scurries past, tiny claws clicking on the stone. It pauses near your foot, nose twitching, then vanishes into the straw. You realize it too shares this place, drawn to the warmth you leak, feeding not on your flesh but on your crumbs, your presence, the faint life you resist surrendering. You wonder if, to the rat, you are nothing more than another flicker of heat in a place that consumes heat without mercy.
The torch gutters. The shadows thicken. You feel the stone waiting beneath you, patient as the grave. Your eyelids droop, but you know what happens when you drift too far—your body slackens, and the floor presses closer, ready to drink the last of your warmth. You pull the blanket tighter, clutching it like a shield. It is no more than a moldy rag, yet tonight it is all that stands between you and the hunger of stone.
And so you lie awake, balanced on the edge between sleep and vigilance, listening to the floor’s silence, its patience, its endless appetite.
It greets you before you open your eyes. A smell thick and clinging, so strong it seems to crawl inside your mouth. Damp hay, once golden and sweet in summer fields, now blackened by rot and mingled with the sour breath of stone. You inhale, and it scratches your throat with a taste of mildew, earth, and something faintly animal—as if the ghosts of oxen and horses still linger inside each stalk.
You turn your head, and the straw shifts under your cheek. It is no longer crisp but soggy, compressed into clumps that cling to your skin. The damp soaks into your rags until you can no longer tell where cloth ends and hay begins. Your nose wrinkles, but there is no escaping the smell. It saturates the air itself, weaving into every breath you take, stronger than smoke, heavier than frost.
Historically, straw was rarely replaced in prisons. Records from 14th-century England mention fresh straw delivered only twice a year, and sometimes not at all. Over months, it became layered with sweat, urine, and mold, a festering carpet that spread sickness faster than chains could hold it. Curiously, ethnographers found that some prisoners developed the habit of chewing stalks to ease hunger, despite the filth. Their teeth left grooves in the frozen fibers—marks still visible centuries later in preserved bedding pulled from castle cellars.
You pick up a stalk and roll it between your fingers. It bends limply, heavy with moisture, before snapping with a sound more like wet cloth tearing than straw breaking. The smell bursts sharper as it cracks, filling your nostrils with a pungent, earthy sting. You drop it quickly, wiping your fingers on the blanket, but the scent clings to your skin, stubborn and greasy.
The hay beneath you gives off heat of its own—not warmth, but the fevered heat of decay. Each shift of your body releases a puff of sour steam, the product of countless bodies pressed here before yours. The thought unsettles you. Could you sleep while lying in the residue of those who came before, their sweat mingled with yours in a bed that remembers everyone?
You close your eyes, but the smell grows stronger in darkness. Your mind tricks you with images: barns in summer, children stacking hay, laughter carried by the wind. You almost smile, almost taste fresh bread and honey carried to the field. But the fantasy collapses as soon as you inhale again. This is not summer hay. This is hay drowned in shadow, hay forgotten, hay that has learned to rot in silence.
A rat scuttles through it, sending up another wave of odor. The sound of rustling stalks is loud in the dungeon stillness, like paper being shredded. You watch the movement, quick and determined, until it vanishes into a hole near the wall. You wonder how many nests it has built with the same damp fibers, how many generations of rats have slept more soundly than you do here.
Could you get used to this? You think of how the body adapts, how the nose dulls to familiar stench after long enough. Already the sharpest edges of the smell seem softer, not because the hay has changed, but because you are changing. Your senses surrender, one by one, trading disgust for survival.
The torch flares once, smoke curling across the cell, and for a moment the burning pitch competes with the hay, masking it. You breathe deep, savoring the reprieve, until the smoke thins again and the damp reclaims its throne. You sigh, curling deeper into the blanket, pulling it over your nose as a shield. But the hay’s scent seeps through wool and through skin, a perfume of imprisonment you cannot escape.
And as you lie there, listening to the soft drip of water and the occasional squeak of unseen life, you understand: this smell is not just the hay. It is the scent of time itself, trapped in straw that has witnessed countless winters, countless prisoners, countless nights like yours.
You feel them before you see them. A whisker brushes your ankle, light as a strand of hair. Then the faintest pressure—tiny claws tiptoeing across the straw, bold in the dark. You freeze, holding your breath. The rat pauses too, as if listening to your heartbeat. Then it scurries forward, vanishing into the folds of straw near your hip.
The sounds multiply. A rustle behind you, a squeak from the far corner, the dry snap of a stalk under weight too small for human eyes to follow. Your skin prickles. They are everywhere, moving confidently, as though this dungeon belongs to them more than to jailers or prisoners. Perhaps it does.
Historically, rats thrived in medieval prisons, feeding on scraps, corpses, and straw bedding. Chroniclers describe gaols where vermin grew so numerous that food had to be guarded, not just from fellow captives but from the swarming creatures of the night. Curiously, in some accounts, prisoners grew to welcome rats. One 15th-century letter mentions a captive who let them crawl over his body for warmth, calling them “God’s little blankets” in a place where wool never reached.
You hear one now, chewing. The sound is sharp, insistent, teeth scraping against something hard—perhaps a bone long forgotten in the straw. The smell of musk fills the air, rank and earthy. You wrinkle your nose but do not move. Movement would invite them closer. Stillness makes you part of the landscape, unworthy of attention.
One rat is braver than the rest. It climbs across your shin, its weight surprisingly heavy for such a small body. You clench your jaw, resisting the urge to kick. The rat pauses, nose twitching furiously, whiskers brushing your skin. You feel its warmth—startling in its intimacy, an uninvited comfort. Then it leaps off, vanishing into shadow with a rustle and a squeak.
Could you share your bed with such companions? The thought unsettles you, but the truth is harder: you already do. Their eyes gleam in the half-light, pinpricks of reflection in the darkness. They are watchers, roommates, sometimes thieves. But in a place where human touch comes only with chains, their presence is undeniable, almost reassuring in its constancy.
You shift, and the straw crackles. Instantly, half a dozen shapes scatter, tails slapping against stone. The silence that follows is brief. Within moments, the rustling begins again, cautious at first, then bolder. You realize they were only waiting for you to settle—waiting for your stillness so they can reclaim their night.
The torch flickers, shadows jumping, and for an instant you see them clearly: small bodies darting, noses glinting wet, fur slick with dungeon damp. One carries a crumb of something in its teeth, dragging it triumphantly across the floor. Another pauses to scratch furiously at its side, mirroring your own restless itching. You almost laugh. Vermin and prisoner, scratching together, both victims of this place.
The air tastes of their presence—musky, sour, faintly sweet. It mixes with the smell of hay and mold, creating a pungent perfume of captivity. You swallow hard, trying to breathe past it. Your tongue feels coated, as if the dungeon itself insists on leaving its flavor behind.
From the far corridor, a guard’s footsteps echo. The rats scatter instantly, silent as smoke. The cell feels emptier without them. You blink, surprised at your own reaction. For a heartbeat, you miss them—the proof of life, the sound of movement, the reminder that not all things in this dungeon are made of stone.
When the footsteps fade and silence returns, they creep back. One dares to climb onto the blanket draped across your chest. Its claws tickle your ribs as it scampers over. You stiffen, then exhale slowly, letting it pass. The rat pauses, sniffing at your neck, before leaping away again. You close your eyes, half repulsed, half comforted.
Because in this place, in this winter, warmth is warmth, even when it comes with whiskers and a tail.
Your fingers wander across the stone, restless in the dark. At first you think you feel cracks, natural veins in the rock. But the lines are too deliberate, too jagged, too human. You press closer, tracing grooves one after another until words emerge beneath your fingertips—letters cut by hands desperate to leave something behind.
The torchlight is faint, but enough. On one block you see a cross, etched with crude determination. On another, a name, half-worn away by centuries of damp. Below it, a date, though the final digits are lost in erosion. You pause, staring. The prisoner who scratched it here must have believed that by writing into stone, they could outlast the frost, the hunger, the chains. Perhaps they were right—you are proof their prayer remains.
Historically, archaeologists have documented prisoner graffiti across Europe: scratched initials in the Tower of London, crosses in Chillon Castle, prayers in the Bastille. Records show these carvings were more than idle marks; they were survival, memory made visible when voices were silenced. Curiously, at Lancaster Castle in England, one cell revealed an entire wall covered with the Lord’s Prayer, repeated line after line, as though the prisoner had written it over and over until their hand gave out.
You lean close and whisper the letters aloud. Your voice sounds strange here, too soft for these hard walls. The words echo back, distorted, as though another voice answers faintly from within the stone. You shiver, not from cold this time, but from the weight of presence—lives that linger in scratches.
The grooves cut your fingertips as you follow them. Some lines are deep, carved with iron nails or bits of broken chain. Others are shallow, scratched hurriedly by hands that knew they didn’t have long. You imagine a prisoner in this same corner, hunched in the flicker of torchlight, whispering words as they carved them, each stroke a prayer, each letter a shield against despair.
Could you sleep in such a place, surrounded by voices you cannot see? You close your eyes and the wall seems to hum. You imagine the air thick with old prayers—Hail Marys, psalms, desperate bargains with God or fate. Perhaps each breath you take is full of them, dissolved into the damp and carried forward into your lungs.
Your hand brushes a carving shaped like a star. Not a Christian cross, not a word, but a star with six uneven points. You wonder who etched it, and why. Was it a symbol of hope, of magic, of something beyond the Church’s reach? A lesser-known detail from prison studies reveals that some captives turned to folk symbols—circles, runes, suns—believing the wall itself could hold power if marked correctly.
You rest your forehead against the stone, closing your eyes. The chill bites, but you do not pull away. For a moment you let yourself believe the wall listens. That each groove you trace answers back, that each carved word still carries heat from the hand that made it.
The straw rustles under you, the chain murmurs, and above, the torch sighs. Yet here, with your palm pressed to prayer-cut stone, you feel less alone. The wall may not save you. It may not even care. But it remembers. And in a dungeon where everything else seeks to erase you, memory is the closest thing to mercy.
You shift your weight, only slightly, but the sound is enough to fill the dungeon. Iron against iron, a hollow rattle that echoes along the stone corridor like a voice that will not stop speaking. You freeze, as though silence might swallow the sound, but the echo lingers long after the movement has ended, mocking you in fading metallic whispers.
It happens every time you stir. A small twitch of the ankle, a shrug of the shoulder, even the tilt of your head—all answered by the same song of iron. At first it startles you, each rattle sharp as thunder. But as the hours bleed together, it becomes something stranger: a rhythm, a presence, a reminder that the chain is not just a tool but a companion.
Historically, shackles were kept deliberately heavy, not only to prevent escape but to exhaust the prisoner into submission. Records from the 14th century describe iron collars and manacles weighing several pounds each, designed so that even sleep was restless and loud. Curiously, one chronicle from Milan tells of prisoners who claimed the sound of chains became a kind of lullaby, the metallic clinking reassuring them that they were not alone in their suffering.
You lie back and listen. The chain moves with your breath—inhale, exhale, faint rattle, faint drag. It is almost like wind chimes in some cruel parody of comfort. You close your eyes, pretending you are outside, listening to bells carried by the breeze. But the illusion falters each time the iron cuts into your skin, each time the sound reverberates too harshly to be gentle.
The dungeon amplifies it. The walls are curved just enough to carry the rattle farther, sending it into neighboring cells. You hear other chains answer: a clink from the left, a drag from the right. Each sound is faint, hesitant, but together they create a symphony of confinement. You picture the prisoners beside you shifting in their sleep, turning against walls, stirring against stone, and every movement announcing itself to the darkness.
Could you sleep with such music? You try to roll onto your side, but the shackle jerks your ankle back, the rattle sharp and angry. You try lying flat, but the collar at your wrist scrapes louder than before. Finally you surrender, curling into the smallest ball you can, arms and legs tight together, chains lying slack, their voices hushed. For a moment, silence returns.
Then—clang. From somewhere farther down the hall, a sudden violent rattle, as though someone yanked against their restraints with all their strength. The sound shudders through the corridor, raising gooseflesh on your arms. You wait, breath caught, half expecting a scream to follow. None comes. Only the echo, rolling back and forth until it fades into quiet.
The air tastes metallic, as though the sound itself has settled on your tongue. You lick your lips and taste rust, even though you know it is only in your mind. The iron is everywhere—on your wrists, on your ankles, in the very flavor of the night.
A lesser-known detail: some prisoners rubbed straw ash into the hinges of their chains to quiet them, hoping the guards would not hear each movement. The trick worked briefly, but soon the ash was gone, and the rattle returned, louder than ever. You imagine trying it now, smearing soot into the links, praying for silence. But would silence be worse? Would it mean you are truly alone?
The torch flickers, and the chain beside you shimmers faintly. You reach out, running your fingers along its links. Cold, unyielding, yet oddly familiar. You know every notch, every rough patch where rust has eaten the metal. You have touched it so often it feels like part of you. And as you close your eyes, the rattle begins again—not harsh this time, but soft, timed with your breathing, like a strange lullaby only prisoners ever learn.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
The sound is so steady that it becomes time itself. You cannot see the source—only hear it, echoing from some unseen crack above. Each drop falls with cruel precision, a rhythm that mocks the absence of bells or sunlight. In the dungeon, there are no hours, no dawn, no dusk. There is only the water, marking its own endless calendar against the stone.
You shift your head, trying to trace the sound. It seems close, then far, then everywhere at once. The dungeon turns it into a chorus, each drip multiplied by echo until it feels as if rain is falling in slow motion, one bead at a time. The straw at your side grows damp, and you know the drops will find you soon enough. Moisture always does.
Historically, chroniclers noted that prisoners often lost their sense of time in darkness, measuring their days by unnatural rhythms. Records from Parisian gaols describe captives speaking of “the dripping clock,” the way a leaking ceiling became their only way of knowing the world still moved forward. Curiously, in one monastery-turned-prison, archaeologists discovered stone worn smooth in a single spot where drops had fallen for centuries, carving a hollow like the face of a water clock no one could ever read.
You listen harder. The sound becomes unbearable in its constancy, yet irresistible. Each drip lands with a plink that resonates in your chest, as though your ribs were tuned to the same pitch. Your heart starts to follow it—beat, pause, beat. You wonder if, given enough nights, your very body would surrender to the water’s tempo until you lived and breathed in harmony with the dungeon’s clock.
The air carries its flavor: metallic, mossy, sharp with limestone. You lick your lips and taste it before it touches you. Dampness crawls across your cheek, and you realize condensation beads along the wall, sliding down in slow rivulets to join the drops below. You wipe it away, but your fingers come back wet again almost instantly.
Could you sleep with this? The sound is steady enough to lull, yet sharp enough to keep you awake. Like a drum that never ends, it denies you silence, denies you surprise. Your eyelids grow heavy, and for a moment you surrender. But even in half-dreams, the dripping follows you. In your mind you hear it falling into bowls, onto skin, into endless wells. You dream of being hollowed out like the stone, each drop carving you away until nothing remains but an echo.
Somewhere down the corridor, another prisoner coughs. The sound interrupts the rhythm for an instant. Then the drip resumes, steady and merciless, drowning even human voices beneath its measure. You sigh, curling tighter beneath your blanket, pulling the wool over your head. The damp smell of mildew fills your nose, but the drip pierces through fabric, through flesh, through thought.
A lesser-known tale speaks of a prisoner who claimed to measure his sentence in drops. He counted to ten thousand, then to twenty, then to fifty, until numbers lost meaning and only the sound remained. They said when he was released, he could not sleep anywhere but near a leaking roof, for silence felt unnatural. You wonder if the same fate waits for you.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
The dungeon’s only clock ticks on, indifferent to your shivering. You close your eyes and let the rhythm take you, because there is no choice but to breathe in time with water that will outlast every prisoner who ever lay here.
You find it tucked beneath the straw, half-buried in damp fibers: a lump of wax, misshapen, no taller than your thumb. A candle stub. You hold it in your palm as if it were treasure, its surface slick with mold, its wick a black thread curled inward like a secret. How long has it hidden here, waiting to be found?
The torchlight on the wall sputters in the distance, its smoke heavy, its glow uncertain. The candle feels different. Personal. Small enough to belong to you alone, if only for a few breaths. Your hands tremble as you shield it, glancing toward the door. If the jailer caught you with this… you imagine the punishment. Darkness as penalty, rations withheld, perhaps worse. A forbidden fire carries more danger than warmth.
Historically, prisoners often smuggled light into their cells—candle stubs traded like coin, hoarded for moments of desperation. Records from the Tower of London mention “secret candles” hidden inside bread loaves or tucked in boots. Curiously, one 15th-century account describes a captive who wept not when his sentence was read, but when his last candle was confiscated. He called it “the only star I could hold.”
You strike the wick with a spark from a bit of flint—how it came into your hands, even you’re not sure. The wick coughs once, then catches. A thin flame blossoms, trembling, defiant. Its light is gentler than the torch’s, closer, more forgiving. The shadows shift, softer now, no longer monstrous but intimate. For the first time, the dungeon feels less like a cavern and more like a room, yours alone.
You cup your hand around the flame. It warms your fingers, faintly but undeniably. You lift it closer, and the walls reveal more of their scars: carvings, cracks, droplets frozen mid-drip. Each line glimmers in miniature, as if the stone were stitched with veins of gold. You breathe slower, soothed, hypnotized.
The smell is subtle: wax melting, faint and sweet, cutting through the mildew. You inhale deeply, greedily, tasting the difference. Could you sleep with such a fragile star beside you? Perhaps. Perhaps the knowledge of its light, even unseen through closed lids, is enough to quiet your thoughts.
But danger hums louder than comfort. Every snap of the torch outside makes you flinch. Every creak of the jailer’s boots above makes you press the flame closer to your chest. You think of blowing it out, hiding it again. Yet you cannot. Not yet. You let it burn lower, wick shrinking, wax pooling onto your fingers, hot enough to sting. You don’t let go. Pain is worth the flame.
A lesser-known practice among prisoners: melting wax onto cloth to stiffen it, then twisting it into makeshift torches for a few minutes of stolen reading or carving. You consider it briefly, but the stub is too small. It is only what it is: a heartbeat of fire in an endless winter.
The flame wavers, guttering as the last of the wick disappears. You hold your breath as though your stillness could keep it alive. But it dies anyway, collapsing into smoke that curls into your nose, bitter and final. Darkness surges back, swift and heavy.
Yet something lingers. The warmth on your fingertips, the memory of golden light, the sweet trace of wax in the air. You curl into yourself, clutching the stub’s remains, and smile faintly despite the cold. For one stolen moment, you had your own star.
You wake to a sting on the cheek, sudden and precise, as if a tiny needle has pricked you from the sky. Another follows, and another, quick and playful, colder than breath. You open your eyes to the slit of the window—a narrow mouth in the stone, bridled with iron. Snow rides the wind and sails through the bars as if the castle were a flute and winter its musician. Each flake survives the journey intact, a perfect star that lands on your skin and dies there, a whisper of water on your warmth.
You pull the blanket higher but leave a gap for your eyes. The world beyond the wall is a sheet of white. The yard, the parapet, the distant line of the outer curtain—everything is softened, smudged to silence. The only movement is the wind, which drags a pale streamer of powder straight through the window and into your cell. The flakes drift, turn, and finally settle onto the straw with a sound you cannot hear but somehow feel—like the faintest tapping on your nerves. Could you sleep while the sky keeps walking in?
Historically, castle prisons were often given only the meanest of openings—loopholes and slit windows set deep in splayed embrasures—to keep air moving and disease at bay. Records show that in cold months those same vents became conduits for winter: drafts strong enough to gutter flame, ice forming inside sills, snow drifting onto stone. At places like Chillon on Lake Geneva, archaeologists point to low, barred apertures that let in light by day and lake wind by night, proof that security and exposure were built into the same hole. Curiously, descriptions from several early-modern gaols mention prisoners stuffing cracks with anything they could work into the joints—moss, rags, chewed bread pressed like paste—temporary dams against the weather that the jailers knocked out on inspection day.
You inch closer to the window and study the bars. They’re not smooth but pitted, as if the iron has been gnawed by time. Frost has filmed them with a delicate glaze. Your breath makes the glaze bloom and vanish, bloom and vanish, the way a child might draw ghosts on glass. The embrasure is deeper than your arm is long. Its inner faces are cold planes where your fingertips leave no mark at all.
Outside, a dog barks—once, twice—then settles into a low growl that becomes the wind itself. You picture it turning circles near a brazier, stamping snow from its paws before curling into the heat. The memory of fur rises in your nose—a clean, warm animal smell—and then is gone. What remains is the scent of iron and wet stone, the sweetish rot of straw underneath you and the almost-clean smell of falling snow, as if the air were being laundered right where you sit.
A flake lands on your lip. Your tongue finds it before you do, and for the briefest instant you taste something like nothing at all—cold minus flavor—then limestone and soot rush back in. More flakes follow, collect in the corner by the wall, and begin to melt into a thin, shining sheet. The water creeps toward the straw, ambitious as any invader. You shift the bedding away, but the cell is small, and there’s no good place left to move.
You consider the bars as if they were a puzzle. Could you weave a curtain from your world? You take a handful of straw, plait it with clumsy, cold-numbed fingers, and wedge the braid into the angle where the embrasure meets iron. The braid holds. Another joins it, then another. Soon you’ve made a thatch fringe that trembles with each gust. The snow still comes, but less boldly now, as if forced to negotiate with your handiwork. You grin despite yourself, the way a child does when a toy finally works.
From the next cell, a voice—hoarse, a little amused: “Good trick.” You answer with your own whisper, and winter swallows both of you. It feels dangerous to speak and good to have spoken. You return to your task. The straw scrapes your palms. Your nails have gone blue at the half-moons. When you blow on your fingers, they burn with that cruel, returning heat that means you have not yet lost them.
Records show that jailers sometimes nailed oiled skins over such openings for prisoners of rank, a temporary membrane to cut the worst of the gale. For the ordinary captive, there were hacks and household magics: a strip of damp cloth frozen hard along a sill to seal the seam; a smear of tallow spread thin on stone to shed meltwater. A lesser-known detail from a northern chronicle notes men stuffing the embrasure throats with sheep’s wool combings stolen from a fulling shop; the guards ripped them out at dawn, and the prisoners began again at dusk, a nightly ritual of weaving and unweaving winter.
You try your own ritual now. The blanket goes up like a tent, one ragged corner tucked into a crack above the window, the fabric drooping to make a windbreak. Smoke from the corridor torch flows into that pocket and flattens, then slides down around you. The air under the blanket grows richer, thicker. It smells of wet wool and old bodies, but it is yours, and it is calmer than the gale.
Snow gathers along the blanket’s edge and slowly turns to beads, then to threads that fall and patter onto the stone with a sound almost like rain. You collect the water in your cupped palm and sip. It is cleaner than the bucket, less metallic than the drip from the ceiling. You feel absurdly grateful, as if the sky had leaned down and kissed you. Could you sleep under a blanket pitched like a pilgrim’s shelter, with winter combing its hair across your threshold? Perhaps. You have slept under stranger roofs.
The light outside strengthens and then dims, but the snow keeps coming. Your straw fringe bows and shakes. You reach up to straighten it and feel the bars bite through the blanket into your knuckles. The iron is colder than anything else in the world. You pull back and count slowly until your hands stop aching. Somewhere above, the guard’s dog gives a single soft huff, and the sound drifts down like the memory of warmth.
You think of other windows you have known: the round mouth of a smoke hole in a cottage roof, the glass eye of a merchant’s house catching a candle and turning it to honey, the billowing cloth of a ship’s port with salt drying in white kisses along its edge. This slit is none of those. It is a wound. And yet the wound admits stars on clear nights, and now it admits snow that becomes water that becomes breath. Even harsh gifts are gifts.
You adjust the blanket, adjust the fringe, and settle again. The wind has a music—a high whistle when it drives head-on, a low moan when it curls back along the outer wall and returns through the slit by stealth. When it lulls, you hear the delicate hiss of falling powder, and then the quiet thud of some far-off load sliding from a battlement in a silting avalanche. The whole castle seems to breathe with the weather, stone ribs lifting and lowering around you.
Your eyes blur. The flakes at the margin of your shelter look like white moths testing the dark. One alights on your sleeve and holds its shape long enough for you to count its branching arms. You almost say the word beautiful out loud. It melts before you finish thinking it. In the puddle it leaves behind, a bar’s reflection wobbles like a black reed in clear water.
Could you sleep like this? You test the answer by letting your head tip to the side, cheek on forearm, ear near the little river that your window makes when the gusts are strongest. Cold tickles your scalp where the blanket gaps. The straw-ropes tick gently against iron like soft chimes. For once, the cell’s sounds are not all made by you. The sky has joined in, and the sky does not hate you.
You draw one last braid and wedge it tight, then fold yourself smaller beneath the wool, a hermit under a weathered cowl. Your breath warms the cave you’ve made. The snow continues, tireless, but now it arrives chastened, reduced to a dust that glitters and dissolves at the threshold. Your eyes close. In the last slip of vision, you see the bars frosting over like old bones given lace. Beyond them, a pale world turns slowly, and the dog in the yard—guardian of both captors and captives—shakes himself and settles by the fire you cannot see.
Inside, you keep your own lesser fire: the small, stubborn heat of a body that refuses to surrender. Snow blows through the iron bars and fails to put it out. Not tonight.
By morning the straw is no longer straw. It has turned to something else—silvered, stiff, delicate as spun glass. You brush the surface with your knuckles and it crackles in reply, each stalk rimed with ice so fine you can see the tiny needles standing like fur along the length. When you shift, the frost powders up and drifts back down in a glittering sigh. Your breath touches it and the silver melts to dark, then refreezes in a thin blink, trapping your warmth and returning it to the stone.
You try to burrow, but there is no burrowing now. The upper layer has become a crust that breaks and cuts like brittle reeds. Beneath it, the lower straw is wet as pond weed, heavy and cold, pressed flat by your body’s night-long surrender. Your fingers dig and come away clammy, sweet with that peculiar smell of rotting hay—a smell that clings to your tongue and will not be washed off by breath alone. The blanket over your shoulders holds a bloom of frost at the seam where your exhale leaks; the wool glitters there like a field at dawn, beautiful and unkind.
Historically, winter turns bedding to ice where moisture meets cold and fire is scarce. Records show that prisons with ventilating slits—loopholes and narrow embrasures—kept air moving for health but also invited frost to settle on every fiber. Archaeologists working in the substructures of castles along the Loire and in Alpine keeps have documented mineral salts and freeze-fractures in floor layers where organic bedding once lay, a stratigraphy of damp that never quite dries. Curiously, a few early modern jail manuals mention “beating the palliasse” at daybreak—prisoners ordered into the yard to thrash stuffed sacks or straw mats so the frost would shake loose and vermin with it, only to bring the same freezing bedding back by evening.
You do your own beating here in the cell—lift a corner of straw and let it fall. The sound is papery, a crisp slap, a winter book closing. The falling crystals hiss like sand. The motion releases a little cloud that makes your nose sting and your eyes water. You sneeze, once, twice, and in the instant after, you taste iron—the flavor of blood wicked up by dry air through cracked skin. You touch your upper lip and find a thin line. The cold has made you delicate; everything splits.
You sit up and study your “mattress.” Overnight, the snow that slipped through the bars melted and crawled. It found the straw’s lower layers and married them, and the night’s breath officiated. Now there is a seam, a clear boundary: frost above, slush below, your body in between. When you press, the upper crust collapses with a soft cranch and the underlayer wicks through your rags, a slow invasion. You pull your knees closer. The chain at your ankle feels like it has grown a rind; you peel a white collar of ice from one link with your thumb and forefinger and it snaps like brittle sugar between your nails.
Could you sleep again on this? You try to imagine how. Perhaps by rearranging the bed into islands—dryest here, least-wet there—building a tiny archipelago of survivable surfaces. You set to work. You drag the wetter clumps toward the embrasure, where any faint breeze might persuade them to firm; you rake the frost-glitter straw to the center and pile it into a mound. Your fingers numb, then burn, then ache; you tuck them into your armpits and breathe until the pain climbs down. When you reach again, the straw’s cold feels fresher, the way cold sometimes resets its cruelty after a pause.
The cell smells like a barn that has forgotten summer: sweet rot, wool, mouse musk, smoke breathed thin through stone. Your own scent has changed with the weather—something clean and metallic rides under the mold, the smell of air so cold it scrubs everything and leaves only the mineral behind. If you could bottle that, would it be a tonic or a curse? You almost laugh. The sound would fog the air and freeze at the edge of your blanket, a tiny lace fringe of humor.
From the corridor comes the creak of a bucket and the mutter of a guard you cannot see. The dog barks once, the sound dented by the snow outside, then paws thud and settle. You picture its breath gilding the hairs around its muzzle, making them white with rime before it noses close to a brazier and melts the crystals into wet. You look at your own sleeves: the wool is sugared along the cuffs. You lick a thumb and draw a line; the frost vanishes under your touch, leaving dark, damp thread that immediately steams ghost-pale in the cold.
Ethnographers noted that people without fires learned tricks you can feel in your hands now: twisting straw into tight plaits to lift the body an inch above the worst of the wet; stuffing plaits into shoes as insoles, wrapping ankles in braided rings to fend off the ache that climbs from stone to bone. You try the same—your fingers clumsy, your nails blue crescents. The braid grows, squeaking softly as the stalks rub and freeze. You lay two plaits crosswise and lower your hips. The difference is small but real, a whisper of separation, enough to make your spine believe it is not lying in a flooded ditch.
A lesser-known practice flickers up from some remembered mention: prisoners saving the hot stones from a kitchen fire—stones used to warm a pot or a guard’s hands—then sliding them beneath straw to radiate a little sunrise into the bed. The warmth never lasted long, but the ritual did: the exchange of a heat that passed through one life to touch another. You have no stone, only the idea. It heats you anyway, the way a story does.
You test another defense. You spread a thin layer of ash—scraped from the torch’s foot with a sliver of splinter—across the slickest flagstone, a gray dusting that bites the damp and dulls its shine. The ash smells sour-sweet, like old resin and rain. When you set straw on it, the stalks grip instead of skating; your bed slides less; your body trusts more. The improvement is small but it changes everything. Could you sleep now? Perhaps not well, but less badly. In winter, that counts as victory.
Historically, even in noble houses where fires blazed, winter bedding gathered frost where curtains breathed and stone lurked just beyond the drapes. Records show nightcaps pulled low, wool socks doubled, dogs welcomed to the foot of the bed for the heat of their bellies. Here, your nightcap is your own breath, your socks are wrapped rag and braided straw, and your dog is only a sound above your head. Curiously, one 14th-century letter from a minor official imprisoned after a quarrel mentions plaiting “a sea of straw ropes” and sleeping upon it “as sailors do upon coils of line,” the first time he ever envied a rope. You understand that now with your whole back.
The frost climbs your hairline where it touches stone. You peel away, leaving a ghost-print in melt. The wall beads immediately again—stone inhales heat, exhales winter. You shift the mound so that your shoulder rests against a heap of straw instead of the blocks. The straw snaps, then settles, and though it pricks, the prick is living—plant against skin—not the mortuary cold of limestone. You whisper a thanks to last summer’s field, to scythes and sun and the hands that bound these stalks long before they found you. The gratitude feels absurd and exactly right.
You breathe shallow to keep your tiny cave warm. Each exhale leaves a white thread along the blanket seam; each inhale tastes faintly of old hay, ash, and the sour edge of rust. The chain beside your ankle has shed its ring of ice, and where the frost let go, it left the metal darker and rougher, like a scar. You rub it with the heel of your foot until the skin burns and a small heat returns there. You hoard that heat greedily, a coin you will not spend.
Somewhere, a drop begins again—drip—resetting the dungeon’s clock. Your own rhythm tries to comply. You will yourself slower. You name your layers like charms: ash below, plaits beneath, straw mound, rags, blanket, skin. Above you, breath. Outside, snow. Beyond that, the wide old world that remembers summer even when you cannot. Could you sleep inside this litany? You try.
Your eyes close and open and close again. In the dim, the frost along the blanket edge looks like constellations torn down and stitched to wool. You want to tell someone that. You almost do: “hey—” you whisper, a habit from a life where someone might have answered, “do you see—” But here, the answer comes from the small shift of a body in the next cell and the tiny, companionable rattle of their chain. It is enough.
You nestle deeper into the architecture you have made out of winter’s teeth. The straw catches frost; the frost catches light; the light catches your breath and gives it back as silver. Every trap here traps something else, including despair. The crust will form again tonight. You will break it again tomorrow. Between those two actions lies the narrow country called rest.
You tuck your hands between your knees and lower your cheek to your sleeve. The prickle is familiar now, mapped, almost chosen. Above the bars, the dog gives a quiet chuff in its sleep, and for a heartbeat you feel the heat of its fur as if it pressed its back to your feet through stone. You smile into the wool. The smile warms a thumbprint on the fabric, a softness that is yours and no one can confiscate.
Then you let go, not to dream of summer—that is too far—but to drift in a field of frost-straw that you have turned, for an hour, into a bed.
You wake to the feeling that someone is breathing beside you. Not warm—the breath is never warm here—but present, the way cold can press as surely as a hand. You lift your head, the blanket whispering along your cheek, and listen. Only the soft hiss of the corridor torch. Only the dog above, turning once on boards and settling. Only the drip that keeps its patient count. Yet the sense remains, as if the dungeon has moved closer, as if the stone itself has leaned in to hear you think.
You roll to ease the ache in your hips, and the straw crackles like paper read by a careful voice. Your eyes find the carvings again—crosses, names, the uneven star you traced with numb fingers in the last watch of the night. Their grooves hold shadow like ink. You do not need candlelight to read them now. You feel your way along the letters as if they are braille written for the living by the dead.
Historically, people in the Middle Ages accept the nearness of the dead the way you accept winter—inevitable, intimate, part of the household. Records show prayers said for souls in Purgatory, candles offered, alms given on All Souls’ Day so that the dead might be eased along their smoky road. In castles with chapels, the chaplain kept a roll of names and said masses for benefactors and for those who died within the walls, guard and prisoner alike. Curiously, masons and carpenters often left apotropaic marks—little daisy wheels, burn scars, and carved circles—on door frames and window throats to tangle the path of anything wandering and unquiet; some of those sun-wheels and scorch-signs turn up even in stairwells near prisons, too humble for ornament, too deliberate for chance.
You can believe it here. You close your eyes and count your own breath as if each were a bead on a rosary. The air tastes like wet chalk and smoke, a little animal, a little sweet where the snowmelt threads your straw dam. Your tongue finds a crack in your lip and stings. The pain is bright. It holds you in the present long enough that the feeling of a presence eases. Then it returns, not menacing, not kind, simply attentive, as though the dungeon keeps watch the way a dog does—head lifted, ears turned, silent, faithful only to the house.
“Do you feel it too?” you whisper, not sure whether you speak to your own breastbone or through the seam in the wall to the neighbor whose chain rattled like a lullaby last night. Your voice moves a thumb’s breadth and stops. The dark returns it in the softest echo, as if it does not want to wake anyone.
You think of the names cut shallow on the lowest stones, where fingers could reach while ankles were fixed. You picture the hands that made them—dirty, scabbed, ringless, but steady enough for letters. You press your palm flat and wait. The stone is cold as always. Yet under the cold is a texture you could swear changes when you touch it, as if the wall listens through its skin.
Could you sleep among so many witnesses? You pull the blanket higher, leaving a slit, and stare through it the way you stared through the barred window when snow came walking in. Dust moves in the beam from the corridor—tiny constellations rising and falling with the breathing of the torch. For a fragile instant, you feel attended, not by guards, not by rats, but by patience itself. The attention is light, the way starlight is light: too faint to read by, enough to keep terror from sharpening into a blade.
A sound—a sigh more than a voice—from the next cell. It could be your neighbor turning. It could be the corridor shifting with the day, timber complaining under its own age. Or it could be the way a room inhales when you remember it hard enough. You tell yourself the first answer is the true one, and the others are only icing on winter’s cake. Still, you speak, very low. “I’m here.” You do not know whether you are announcing or asking.
Your breath fogs the wool and stitches the edge with frost. You watch the tiny crystals bead and join, a lace that melts when you breathe harder and returns when you slow. The wool smells like years—a history written in lanolin and smoke and the touch of a thousand hands. You imagine those hands. Some rough. Some fine. Some trembling the way yours tremble when the cold gets to your core. You picture each owner lying where you lie now, listening to the same drip and the same dog and the same nothing, and you sense the crowd of them lining the room’s edges like a congregation that forgot its benches.
“Historically,” you remind yourself softly—because it steadies you to state something that can be known—“the living and the dead shared houses and work and worries.” You list them like rosary beads: wakes in kitchens; bones in charnel chapels; names in chantries; saints’ days and soul cakes; bells rung for passing. Your voice grows more certain with each item. The certainty is a small heat.
A lesser-known habit returns to you, snagged from a scrap of talk in some other town: prisoners knotting cords to count prayers, three knots for a psalm, five for a decade, a rope of mercy when beads cost what you do not have. You have no cord. But you have the chain. You count links with your fingers—one, two, three—and whisper a line with each: have mercy on us, keep us from the worst, remember us in the winter of your house. You stop before you say amen. It feels too final, as if you might be dismissed from a place you need to remain.
The dungeon answers, as it always does, in the language of elements: stone ticking as frost loosens and tightens; water keeping time; smoke writing its faint script along the ceiling and blurring it again. When you rub your ear, you hear the dry hush of callus against wool. When you swallow, the sound travels through your head like a pebble dropped into a well. The senses become drums, and the drums become a path you can tread without moving.
You test the path. You close your eyes and walk it in your mind: the door with its bands; the ring sunk in the floor where the chain is moored; the straw island you built with braids and ash; the slope to the barred slit where you taught the snow manners; the wall of names. You turn left and right, kneel and stand, lean and reach, until the room lays itself bare like a map, as known as your own body. On that map, where do the ghosts stand? They do not stand; they lie. They lie as you do—on their sides, on their backs, curled. They do not face you. Neither do they turn away. They are not cold anymore. They are the cold. And somehow that thought is not a terror. It is almost an apology: sorry we had to leave you with the weather, we tried to teach it your name before we went.
You open your eyes to find your cheek damp, though you do not remember crying. The water is warm at first, then it cools and evaporates and leaves your skin tight. You smile at your own foolishness and you do not stop smiling. The expression makes a small heat that belongs entirely to you.
From above, a scraping—the guard adding coal to a brazier or shifting a pot to keep it from catching. The smell of warm iron and faint broth drifts down and hangs like a memory at the top of your cell before the cold tears it to shreds. The dog gives a soft, questioning sound, halfway between a whine and speech. You whisper back, “Hush,” and the room accepts your word and stores it with the others.
Could you ask the ghosts for anything? You consider it and decide against. The living are always asking, and the dead are always busy. Instead you make an offer: “Share,” you say. “Take a corner.” You pat the straw mound as if smoothing a quilt for a guest. For an instant the air beside your ribcage feels heavier, the way the air feels when someone sits down on a bed and does not quite touch you. You let that be true.
Records show prison chaplains reciting the Office among cells, psalms threading through iron like thin sunlight. Sometimes they came with bread and wine. Sometimes only with words. In some accounts, a chaplain wrote down the names the prisoners could not carve, then placed the list near an altar upstairs, above your ceiling of stone and smoke. Curiously, there are notes of guards who kept their own private rolls—superstitious men who believed that if the names were not kept, the walls would keep them louder. You imagine the jailer with his keys, muttering, counting, touching the ring as if it were rosary. You feel kinder to him than you did yesterday.
Your hand finds the star you traced, the one with uneven points. You cover it with your palm until your skin chills along the edges. You picture the unknown who made it, picture them drawing a shape that catches and turns whatever wanders; you imagine the star as a net for fear. “Hold,” you tell it. “Hold what tries to leave teeth in me.” The instruction makes you chuckle. You cannot help it—there is arrogance in giving orders to carved superstition. But the laugh warms your mouth. It fogs the wool and sprinkles it with new crystals that shine like a frost of fireflies.
Sleep comes—but it comes slant, the way snow did through the bars. You do not lie back and sink. You edge sideways into it, careful not to disturb the listening air. Your last sensations gather like a benediction: the faint musk of rat-fur from the corner; the thin sweetness of old wax still clinging to your fingertips from the candle stub; the iron taste you learned to call time; the distant, sifting hush of powder sliding from a battlement and landing in a soft thud; the dog above, breathing in an honest, open way you can almost follow.
“Could you sleep like this?” you ask one more time, and the answer you hear is not yours alone. It rises from stone and straw and names, from the chaplain’s list and the jailer’s keys, from every frost-rimed breath that ever left a mouth in this room and didn’t quite vanish. Yes, says the silence. If you pretend the company is chosen. Yes, says the cold. If you let the dead keep watch as the living never can.
You pull the blanket up to your eyes and let the dungeon hold its vigil. In that watch, ghosts become only what winter makes of everyone: a borrowing of breath, a shape in frost that records a life and then surrenders to the next exhale. You breathe. The shape returns. You breathe again. And again. Until the shapes and the breathing and the counting of links turn to what the living call rest.
At first you take it for the wind. A thread of sound slips along the stones, thinner than smoke, easy to dismiss. But the wind does not shape syllables, and this does. You hold your breath. There—again. A consonant rubbed thin by distance, a vowel worn like a coin that has passed too many hands. You shift closer to the seam where your wall meets the floor. The chain answers with a small complaint. You hush it with your palm and lower your mouth until the stone cools your lips.
“Are you awake?” The voice is less than a whisper—more a shaping of breath than speech—but the words find you like a match finds tinder.
“Yes,” you breathe. Your voice stays inside your mouth, then slides into the crack as if it knows the way. The stone tastes of lime and an old damp dust that coats your tongue. You feel the wall trembling faintly, not with sound but with winter, and you wonder how many words have shivered through these same joints, how many nights the mortar has served as messenger.
The reply comes with a tiny rhythm, not spoken at first but tapped: a light, patient pattern like fingernails on wood, except it is knuckle on stone, bone talking to stone and stone to bone. Three soft knocks. A pause. Two. One. You press your ear to the crack until frost kisses your cheek. The knocks repeat, then the whisper: “If you hear the taps, it is me. If the guard passes, I will only tap.”
Historically, neighbors in cells learned to speak through fabric and stone, shaping codes where sound could not pass openly. Records show prisoners in late medieval gaols sharing news and prayers by knocking in counted patterns, and when breath would carry, by “singing low” into seams, drain holes, and the throats of chimneys. In some castles, the privy shafts themselves became corridors of rumor. Curiously, a few accounts mention chewed bread pressed into tiny pellets and flicked through cracks as messengers—each pellet a token meaning “yes,” “no,” or “wait,” soft enough not to ring on stone if it fell short.
“Your straw trick,” the whisper says. “It slows the snow. I could hear you plait.” There is a smile in the words. You feel it the way you feel heat from another body when it moves close to yours in darkness.
“What is your name?” you ask.
The pause is a full breath. Then: “If you keep it safe—Michel.” The name arrives gentle, as if laid on your palm. You close your fingers around it without meaning to, an old habit from a life where small things could be kept.
You offer your own name and feel the cell change with the exchange, as if the dungeon has been forced to make room for something two people own together. Beyond the slit, the snow has slackened to a slow sift. The dog above gives a single soft sound and the torch in the corridor scratches a little song into the quiet. Between those larger noises the whisper returns, steady now that it has found its path.
“Do you need anything?” Michel asks. Not as a rescuer, not as a guard, but as a neighbor—another inhabitant of winter. You inventory what “anything” could mean and want to laugh. Fire. Bread. A world with roofs. Instead you say, “A way to sleep.”
There is a rustle, a chain’s polite rattle, the sound of straw shaped by careful hands. “Put your feet to the wall,” he breathes. “Not flat. Heels tucked, toes up. The stone steals less when it cannot kiss the vein.” You obey. The position looks foolish but feels wise. The ache in your calves deepens, then eases into a workable throb.
“Historically,” you murmur because it steadies you to speak a true thing even in whispers, “prisoners bought what the gaol would not give—light, blankets, a little heat—if they had coin or friends. Records show that alms passed through gratings and over thresholds, and that the poor starved when charity failed.”
“Records do not show the ways,” Michel answers, an exhale dressed as wit. “Here is a way: wedge straw into a braid and lay it like a ridge under your spine. It makes your blood believe you are not lying in a ditch.” His whisper carries a dry humor that warms the air an inch between you. You shift, add a new plait, and the difference is slight but real, the way a far star is small but not nothing.
A hush. Then the scrape of something soft along stone, a slow drag that stops at your crack and bumps it, once—tap—like a timid visitor. You extend two fingers. They find cloth. You pinch and draw it through—an edge of rag, cropped clean with a blade that was not meant for cloth. The bundle is no bigger than your palm and tied with a hair-thin twist of straw. You open it under the blanket like a child hiding a sweet. Inside: a lump the size of a thumb tip, pale and greasy, wrapped in brown paper that smells of smoke and broth. Tallow. You inhale and almost groan with gratitude.
“Only a smear,” Michel breathes. “Collar, cuffs, ankles. It keeps the wet from biting. Do not waste.”
Curiously, ethnographers noted that in cold quarters without fire, people smeared a breath’s thickness of fat at pulse points and along seams—a poor man’s oilskin on the body itself. They added ash to cut the shine and the smell. You follow that old counsel now, mixing a pinch of soot from the torch foot into the tallow, making a gray salve that looks humble and works. The fat stings on cracked skin, then softens it, then teaches the damp to slide. The smell is not kind, but it is purposeful, and that makes it bearable.
“Could you sleep?” Michel asks. His voice is a little closer now, or perhaps you are imagining the nearness because you want it.
“Better than I did.” You flex your hands inside your sleeves. The wool no longer drags against every cut like nettle leaves. The chain by your ankle warms a degree where the salve sits between skin and iron—not triumph, but truce.
You trade more ways. Michel shows you how to fold the blanket into a narrow roll under your knees to draw the ache out of your lower back. You tell him about ash spread under the slickest flagstone, how it grips water and gives straw a purchase. He taps approval, three quick notes. You hear him trying it, the faint drag of something gritty across stone. “Good,” he whispers. “The dungeon is a stubborn mule. You must ride it where it does not want to go.”
A soft laugh escapes you and warms the wool at your mouth. The laugh smells of tallow and ash and your own breath—an honest smell, lived-in and human. Outside, snow edges into rain, the sound changing from sift to faint sibilance on the sill. The dog thuds down and shakes. Someone above pours liquid; it hisses where a log meets a coal. For an instant the air tastes like onions and marrow. It is almost worse than nothing. You swallow and let the taste pass through you the way a bell note passes through wood.
“Listen,” Michel says, and taps again—three, two, one—then translates: “Guard’s step. The tall one. He limps on the right. If he stops, we stop. If he passes, we speak.” The code is not complicated, but it works because you both agree it will. Very quickly your body learns the ritual: voices when leather rubs fast along stone, silence when it pauses. In a place where you cannot choose much, the choosing of silence becomes dignity.
A pause, then a story delivered in threads. Michel tells you about last winter in another cell, two doors down, where the privy shaft opened like a mouth in the floor and men spoke to each other through stink as if they were talking through a hedge heavy with late flowers. “We said psalms down that pipe,” he whispers, “and the pipe returned them as if God had hollow bones.” The image steals a smile out of you that you are not expecting.
You offer one in return: the candle stub you found and burned, the way the flame felt like a star you could own. He answers with a memory of a candle traded for a heel of bread, and you both agree without saying so that light and hunger are currencies that can exchange in either direction.
Historically, the better sort sometimes paid the gaoler for comforts—“composition,” some called it: food, a brazier, the right to walk. Records from London and Paris alike note that poorer captives depended on alms collected at church doors and carried down into cells—“for the prisoners and the poor”—wrapped in cloth, tied at the corners, sometimes with a saint’s name scrawled on paper within. A lesser-known practice: when paper was dear, men pricked messages into thin leather with pins, then rubbed charcoal dust into the holes so that words darkened like constellations. The scrap could be rolled small and threaded through a crack as if it were just another piece of trash.
“Do you have a prayer?” Michel asks, not pious, only practical, as if prayer were a tool like straw and ash and fat.
You count links in the chain and speak one line for each, barely moving your lips. Not a long prayer. It wanders, touches gratitude for tallow and for straw and for a dog that exists somewhere above the roof of your world. You add, at the end, something you have not said aloud for a long time: “Keep the one who speaks to me.”
From the crack, a breath. “And you.” Then quiet.
You lie back and test the new lay of your bed. The frost has re-sugared the seam of the blanket where your breath escapes; your ankles feel less like glass about to shatter; the braid under your spine persuades your bones they are not bedding a river; the stone cannot reach your heel vein as easily with your toes cocked against it. The world remains winter. But the winter has, for this hour, been taught a name and asked to use it.
Could you sleep with another life braided into yours by a seam of mortar and a grammar of taps? The answer arrives not in words but as a loosening in your jaw, a weight drawing down your eyelids, the chains’ soft commentary settling into a meter your breath can keep. You glimpse, before you let go, the slit of window where rain has carved two paths through the beard of frost on a bar; they look like tears on a blackened face. You smudge them with your thumb and the cold bites you for the impertinence. You accept the bite.
“Tomorrow,” you whisper to the crack. “Teach me another way.”
“Tomorrow,” the crack replies, in the voice of stone that is only the ghost of a man’s breath. Then even that ghost grows quiet.
You tuck your tallowed hands into your sleeves, feel the wool rasp softer than before, and curl around the knowledge that someone else is lying awake an arm’s length and two walls away, listening for your taps the way you now listen for his. The dungeon is still a dungeon. But its silence has acquired edges. And you, who came here to learn where prisoners slept, discover that sometimes the bed is made of voices thin as threads, strong as knots, passed hand to hand through winter.
The first sound is faint, a low creak overhead. Then another, heavier, closer, the thud of leather against timber that carries through the stone like a drum. You freeze, instinctively counting the rhythm. One, two, pause. One, two, three, drag. The pattern marks him more surely than his face ever could. You know this gait: the tall one with the limp, the guard Michel named.
The footsteps roam across the ceiling, slow and deliberate. Each board groans, each joint complains, and the dungeon beneath seems to flinch. You picture him above you, wrapped in a thick cloak, a key-ring heavy on his belt, his breath visible in the dim light of the brazier. He pauses by the hearth, perhaps to warm his hands, and you feel the absence in the rhythm—silence pressing down through the floor like another weight.
Historically, guards in medieval castles often doubled as jailers, their patrols timed less by clocks than by the needs of fires and meals. Records from 14th-century England mention gaolers who were required to make rounds “at every watch of the night” to check for escape attempts. Curiously, a German chronicle tells of a prisoner who learned to track his keeper’s limp through ceiling creaks, using it as a measure of time—his own personal hourglass of footsteps.
Now you do the same. You listen as the boots cross again, nearer the wall, then away, then back. Each step stirs dust that drifts down through cracks, invisible but smelled: dry wood, faint coal, the sour tang of leather oil. Your tongue tastes it before your nose names it. The air grows sharper, tinged with ash from the hearth above, a fleeting scent of life you cannot reach.
The dog follows. You hear its claws clicking on the boards, quicker than the boots, lighter, eager. It snuffles, then whines once, as if asking to be let out. The jailer mutters something too muffled to catch. Then comes the scrape of iron—keys on a table, a ladle in a pot. The sound is ordinary, domestic even, but to you it is exotic, the music of another world. Could you sleep while such reminders of warmth and freedom move so close overhead?
You shift beneath your blanket, pulling it tighter. The straw whispers. The chain murmurs. The footsteps stop. Silence drops heavy into the cell. You hold your breath, ears straining. Then—three steps back, deliberate, as though he heard you and is listening in turn. Your heart kicks against your ribs. For a long moment, the dungeon feels like a stage with two actors: you below, him above, neither able to see the other, each imagining too much.
Then the limp resumes, slower now, as though carrying thought. The boots cross to the far side. A hinge creaks, and the smell of stew thickens briefly, proof of a door opened and closed. You swallow, the taste of onion and marrow sharp on your tongue. Hunger gnaws with fresh teeth, crueler for being teased.
Michel taps once from his crack—gentle, steady—reminding you not to speak. You answer with two knuckles, then fall still again. The footsteps are gone, replaced by the softer rhythm of the dog settling, claws scratching as it curls, breath slowing into a huff. You imagine its flank rising and falling near the brazier, the kind of companionship prisoners once begged for in records: dogs admitted to cells, not as torment but as comfort, their warmth worth more than chains could ever take.
A lesser-known custom in some gaols: jailers renting dogs to wealthier prisoners for the night, the animals doubling as guards against vermin and blankets against cold. The poor only listened to the scratches above their heads, imagining. You, tonight, are among the poor.
The ceiling creaks once more, then holds. Silence. The dungeon resumes its own voice—drip, chain, straw, the faint breath through cracks. But the echo of footsteps lingers in your bones, a reminder that life continues just out of reach. Above is fire, stew, wool, a dog’s fur. Below is frost, straw, iron. You lie between them, the thin floor separating two worlds.
You turn your face into the blanket, inhale its sour wool, and let the memory of boots fading into silence become your lullaby.
It cuts through the dungeon like a blade—sharp, sudden, alive. A bark, close enough that it rattles the bars in your slit window. You flinch, then listen harder. Another bark follows, deeper, slower, then a growl stretched long as a warning. The sound makes the straw tremble against your ear, though the dog itself is yards away in the castle yard above.
You crawl closer to the embrasure. Through the lattice of frost, you glimpse only a corner of sky, gray as slate, but the bark tells you more than sight ever could. The dog is out there, pacing the snow, stamping prints into drifts, tail stiff with purpose. Each sound maps the yard in your mind: the echo bouncing from tower to wall, the muffled return off timbered doors, the faint scatter of startled birds taking flight.
Historically, dogs were essential to castles, not only for hunting but for guarding. Records show that gaolers relied on them to warn of escape attempts or unrest. Chronicles mention hounds trained to patrol walls and yards, their senses sharper than any soldier’s eyes. Curiously, a 15th-century German account tells of prisoners befriending the yard dogs by tossing them scraps through their windows—alliances of hunger and kindness, where a dog’s bark could change from alarm to companionship.
You wonder, could you try the same? You have no scraps, no bread crusts to offer. Only your voice. You whisper low through the bars, testing the air: a single syllable, meaningless but soft. The dog barks again, sharper this time, and you pull back, heart quickening. Yet the bark does not call guards. It fades into a low whine, then silence, as though the beast has tilted its head, puzzled at the sound of you.
The smell of the yard rides the wind: snow, straw, dung, and the faint acrid tang of smoke. It is almost clean compared to the dungeon’s rot. You inhale greedily, pressing your nose against the iron, frost biting your skin. The air tastes of open space, of a world that still moves beyond these walls.
Another bark erupts, but this time it is playful, higher in pitch. You close your eyes and imagine it bounding through drifts, shaking powder from its fur, breath steaming in joyful plumes. You see it curling later by a brazier, paws tucked, eyes closing in warmth you can only dream of. The image makes your chest ache, not from envy but from longing—for a touch of fur, for the simple weight of another body resting against yours without chains or suspicion.
The dog barks once more, then growls low, this time at something unseen in the yard. Perhaps a passing stranger, perhaps only the wind itself. The sound vibrates through the stone and into your ribs, and strangely, it comforts you. A living guardian walks above while you sleep below. Could you rest more easily knowing that? Perhaps. Even if the guard is not for you but against you, it is still a sign of life, of order, of something beyond frost and silence.
A lesser-known practice in some gaols was to keep mastiffs chained in the yards, their presence as much psychological as practical. Prisoners wrote of these animals in letters smuggled to families: “The hound sleeps in freedom, and I in bonds.” Yet some spoke of them with affection, watching their habits through cracks, imagining friendship where none was possible. You feel the same now. Each bark is both a reminder of captivity and an echo of the world outside—a world where warmth, loyalty, and play still exist.
The chain at your ankle shifts as you lie back. The straw crackles. The dog barks one last time, distant now, fading into the yard. Then silence closes over the dungeon again. But you keep the sound with you, tucked like a coal in your chest: proof that something beyond stone and frost remembers how to breathe.
You pull the blanket over your shoulders and whisper into the dark, half to yourself, half to the dog above: “Guard me too, just for tonight.”
The door groans open, and with it comes a draft of air not much warmer than what already sits in the dungeon. But the smell arrives—faint, sour, unmistakable. Food. A wooden ladle clatters against iron, then a hand thrusts a tin cup through the bars. It sloshes, spilling a little onto the straw at your feet. Thin gruel, more water than grain, steaming faintly in the torchlight.
You seize the cup with both hands. The metal burns from heat, then cools too quickly, as if the warmth itself wants to flee. You lift it to your lips. The first sip scalds your tongue, but you hold it there anyway, greedy for the heat. It tastes of barley stretched too far, of smoke and a hint of salt, but mostly of water—the sort that carries the flavor of wood ash and rust. You swallow, and the liquid falls into your stomach like a stone into an empty well.
Historically, castle prisoners were rarely given meat or bread. Records show that gruel—oats or barley boiled in water—was the staple ration, sometimes thickened with peas, sometimes thinned to near nothing. Gaol accounts from the 14th century note that wealthy prisoners could buy better fare from the kitchen, while the poor lived on “the cup and the crust.” Curiously, one chronicler from France wrote that guards deliberately served the gruel hot, not as kindness, but because it forced prisoners to eat slowly, reducing the chance of fights over portions.
You sip again, more cautious now. The steam fogs your cheeks, seeping into your hair, damp against your frozen skin. For a moment you feel almost human—sitting with a bowl, eating something warm. The illusion falters when you bite into a husk that grinds against your tooth, bitter and gritty. You spit it out, and it lands on the straw, where a rat immediately scurries to claim it.
You watch the rat chew, whiskers twitching. The smell of the gruel mingles with the dungeon’s mold and smoke until you can hardly separate them. Could you sleep with such a taste in your mouth? Perhaps. Hunger is its own lullaby, but so is satiety, even when it is slight. The cup empties too fast. You tip it, licking the rim, desperate for the last traces of warmth. Then it is gone.
You stare at the bottom, where a thin film of grain clings to the tin. You scrape it with your fingernail, gather the paste, and press it against your tongue. The flavor is bland, but the act is defiant—wringing the last drop from what little you’ve been given. You lick your finger clean and sigh.
The jailer retrieves the cup without a word. His hand smells faintly of woodsmoke and grease. The door slams shut, and the silence grows thicker again. You are left with the faint heat settling in your belly, quickly cooling, quickly fading, but there nonetheless.
A lesser-known practice in some prisons was the sharing of gruel between cells. Prisoners poured a portion through cracks or slid a bit beneath doors, a gesture of solidarity stronger than any prayer. You think of Michel in the next cell and wonder if he has eaten. You wish you had saved a spoonful to tap through the wall, though you know the jailer would have noticed. Still, the thought warms you as much as the gruel itself.
You lie back on the straw. The steam has already vanished, but the ghost of it lingers in your throat. Your stomach feels less hollow, your body less brittle. The hunger is not gone, only quieted. But quiet is enough. You close your eyes, and for the first time in many hours, the idea of sleep does not feel like surrender—it feels like permission.
The gruel’s warmth fades too quickly, leaving your body shivering again. The chain rattles as you shift, tugging the blanket higher, but the cold seeps through regardless. Then, a sound: a low shuffle from the next cell, followed by another. Not rats this time—these are heavier, slower, measured. A voice, hoarse and careful, whispers through the crack: “Closer. If they don’t see, we share the heat.”
You hesitate, but then you inch toward the seam in the wall. The straw crunches beneath you. A hand meets yours through the gap, fingers numb, skin rough. Another hand follows, then a shoulder pressing against stone. The contact is faint, separated by rock, but the intent is unmistakable. You are not alone in this dungeon.
Hours later, when the jailer is gone and silence has settled again, the prisoners lean closer still. Some cells have wider cracks, and through them bodies press shoulder to shoulder, or backs touch backs through narrow apertures. It is awkward, uneven, but warmth travels in strange ways. Even breath drifting between seams feels like a gift.
Historically, chroniclers described prisoners “lying close as beasts in winter stables,” their bodies forming a kind of communal furnace. Records from London’s Newgate and Rouen’s gaol mention nights when fifteen or twenty men shared a single narrow chamber, huddled in heaps against the frost. Curiously, ethnographers note that in some regions, strangers became “brothers of the cold,” bonds forged not by blood but by proximity. A prisoner released in Lübeck wrote that he remembered the warmth of another’s ribs more clearly than the face of his rescuer.
You shift closer to Michel’s wall. His chain scrapes, then quiets. “Better,” he breathes, and the word fogs faintly into your ear as if the stone itself has exhaled. Another sound joins—someone farther down, humming under their breath. The tune is not clear, more vibration than melody, but it spreads warmth of its own, threading through the cells like smoke.
You close your eyes and imagine you are in a barn, pressed between animals, their fur thick, their bodies radiating heat into yours. You feel phantom warmth even in the absence of fur, carried by imagination as much as by flesh. Could you sleep like this, tethered by chains, touching strangers through walls, sharing air as if it were a blanket? Perhaps this is the only way to sleep at all.
The smell thickens with closeness—wet wool, mold, unwashed skin—but instead of revolt, you feel steadied. The scent says you are not alone. You inhale and accept it as proof of survival, the odor of endurance. It mingles with the faint musk of rats and the mineral tang of frost, creating a perfume unique to this cell block.
A lesser-known trick comes to mind: peasants in northern villages sometimes buried embers in pots of ash and set them between sleepers, so that their combined breath kept the coals alive till dawn. Here, there are no embers, but perhaps the principle holds. Your breaths, Michel’s breaths, the breaths of others—all weaving together into an invisible hearth, one you cannot see but can feel.
You tuck your knees tighter, letting the blanket fall partly over the crack. A draft disappears. The wall against your spine no longer bites as sharply. Slowly, your trembling eases. Outside, the dog barks once, then curls quiet again. Inside, the cells hum with shared silence, broken only by the faintest rustle of straw and the synchronized sighs of men making night survivable.
And as your eyelids grow heavy, you realize: in a dungeon built to divide, warmth travels anyway. Through cracks, through breath, through bodies pressed close, prisoners huddle not out of choice but necessity—and necessity has a way of becoming something like kinship.
It rises slowly, thick and stubborn, like smoke that refuses to leave a chimney. The blanket draped across your shoulders has absorbed everything: your sweat, the straw’s damp, the frost that melted under your breath. Now it exhales its burden into the air. Wet wool. You know the scent immediately—rank, sour, a little sweet, heavy enough that it seems to coat the tongue as much as the nose.
You pull the fabric tighter despite the smell. The wool scratches your neck and arms, but the weight is something to cling to. Each fold holds a pocket of stale warmth, though the warmth is lined with mildew. You bury your nose in it anyway. The scent is unpleasant, but it is yours, a shield that separates you from the deeper stench of straw, mold, and rats.
Historically, wool was both blessing and curse. Records from medieval households show that wool blankets were prized for their warmth but dreaded when wet, as they absorbed more moisture than linen and took days to dry. In dungeons, damp was constant; ethnographers later noted that some gaolers never even bothered to wash the rags, believing dirt made them “warmer.” Curiously, one 15th-century letter mentions a prisoner wrapping himself in a sodden wool cloak so foul he nearly gagged, yet he swore it kept the frost from killing him.
The smell deepens as the blanket steams faintly from your body heat. You can taste it now—wool fat, lanolin gone rancid, mingling with smoke. Each breath leaves a greasy film in your throat. Could you sleep inside such a stench? You shift, adjust the folds, try to find a pocket of fresher air. But every corner of the fabric carries the same story: rain, sweat, mildew, years.
You rub the wool between your fingers. The threads are coarse, knotted, swollen with damp. They squeak faintly, a sound like wet rope straining under weight. You imagine sheep huddled in fields, their fleeces soaking with sleet, the smell carried into barns, into spinning, into weaving, and finally into your dungeon. This blanket is a journey of centuries reduced to one foul odor.
The damp makes the wool cling to your skin. It grips like another set of chains, refusing to let go. You tug it loose and the fabric peels away with a sucking sound. Beneath it, your rags are clammy, your flesh goose-pimpled. You almost prefer the embrace of the wool—repulsive, yes, but at least it holds you, at least it pretends.
A lesser-known habit of prisoners was to hang rags over torches or lanterns, not to dry them fully but to bake the stench into something sharper, more tolerable. Smoke masked mildew. Here you have no such luxury. You think briefly of Michel in the next cell, whether his wool stinks the same, whether he too breathes through the fabric as though it were an animal skin still warm on the body.
You press your face deeper, closing your eyes, surrendering. The scent becomes overwhelming, almost narcotic. It drowns the taste of iron in the air, muffles the drip, blunts the sound of chains. For a fleeting moment, you pretend it is not prison smell at all but memory—childhood winters where wet coats steamed by the hearth, where snowmelt darkened sleeves, where laughter rose above the odor of drying wool. You cling to that illusion until it dissolves, leaving only the dungeon’s version: no hearth, no laughter, just wool that remembers storms it never escaped.
Still, you keep the blanket wrapped around you. The stink is a burden, but also a tether. Could you give it up? No. Not while frost waits with open hands. You will endure the smell because it means you endure.
You lie back, straw snapping beneath you, wool clinging like a sodden beast. The air grows thicker, almost unbreathable, but you breathe it anyway. Each inhale is defiance. Each exhale is survival. Wet wool may choke you with its memory of storms, but it also swaddles you against the greater storm gnawing at your bones. And in that contradiction, you find the narrow space called rest.
The straw has finally quieted beneath you, the wool’s stink settling into a background haze that your body accepts like a bad dream. Your eyelids grow heavy. Breath slows. Frost seems to pause its crawl. You almost drift. And then—
A scream rips through the stone.
It is not sharp and clean like a cry from the gallows. It is ragged, drawn out, torn from a throat that has forgotten language. The sound lurches up the stairwell, bounces down the corridor, rattles against your ribs. You jolt awake, clutching the blanket tighter, heart hammering.
The silence after is worse. The dungeon listens with you. Even the drip seems to stop for a beat. You hold your breath, waiting. And then another scream arrives—shorter, gasping, cut off by something you cannot name. You shiver, though not from cold alone.
Historically, medieval castles were not only fortresses but centers of authority. Records show that interrogations often took place in chambers directly above or adjacent to prisons. Prisoners below would hear everything—boots pacing, ropes creaking, cries carried through cracks in the floor. Ethnographers later noted that fear of hearing torture was itself a punishment, driving men into madness before a hand was laid upon them.
Curiously, some accounts tell of prisoners pretending to join the screaming. They would wail in chorus, mocking the tormentors, turning terror into defiance. One 14th-century chronicler described a cell block erupting in a grotesque “choir of agony” whenever a victim cried above, confusing guards, enraging lords.
Tonight you do not sing. You listen. The screams taper off into moans, then vanish, swallowed by the stone. Your ears ring in the silence that follows. You wonder if the man—or woman—still breathes. You wonder if you will be next.
The wool blanket tightens around you as if it shares your fear. You taste copper on your tongue, not from blood but from the iron scent that seems to thicken after each cry. The air vibrates with memory: rope pulled taut, water poured slow, fire crackling against flesh. You shake your head, but the images stick like burrs.
Could you sleep after such echoes? You try. You roll onto your side, close your eyes. The darkness behind your eyelids is no quieter. The screams replay themselves in shifting tones—now male, now female, now your own voice twisted into pain. You clench your teeth, push your face into the straw. But the straw holds whispers, thin and scratchy, urging you awake.
You remember stories: guards dragging chains along corridors, deliberately waking prisoners with clangs and shrieks, laughing at their terror. Was that scream real, or staged to keep you restless? The thought churns your stomach. You swallow hard, listening again.
The silence returns, dense and smothering. A dog barks faintly from above ground, then falls quiet. Somewhere far away, you think you hear church bells, soft as ghosts. Time slides strangely; seconds feel like hours. You breathe into the wool, each inhale heavy with lanolin and fear.
You whisper to yourself—just one more hour, just until dawn. But the dungeon has no dawn. Only flickers of torchlight that rise and fade, never matching the sun. You realize you may never see light again. And in that thought, your heart pounds louder than any scream.
The corridor stays empty. No footsteps approach, no doors open. The only sound left is your own pulse, rushing in your ears, pretending to be the ocean. Slowly, against every instinct, your body drags you back toward the edge of sleep. Yet even in dreams, you know, the screams will wait. They always do.
You feel it first as a brush across your ankle, light as a thread of straw. You tell yourself it is only the straw shifting, only your imagination. But then another tickle comes, firmer, moving up your calf. You freeze. The wool blanket tightens around you, your breath trapped in your chest. And then, unmistakably, tiny claws skitter across your skin.
You fling your leg, straw rustling, chains clinking. The weight tumbles away—a squeak, a thump, then silence. But silence in a dungeon is never whole. It quivers, waiting for the next intrusion. You listen, ears pricked, and soon you hear it: faint scratching, a gnawing at wood, a squeak that echoes off stone. You are not alone in the dark.
Historically, rats thrived in medieval castles, especially in dungeons where food scraps, moldy straw, and human waste created perfect breeding grounds. Records from castle inventories even note payments for cats kept specifically “to chase the vermin of the gaol.” Archaeologists found gnawed bones in cell pits, proof that rats fed on what prisoners left behind—or, when hunger pressed, on the prisoners themselves.
Curiously, there is a tale from a 14th-century chronicle in which a man condemned to starve shared his cell with rats. Instead of devouring him, the creatures curled beside him for warmth. The gaolers mocked him as “the rat-king,” yet he swore the animals’ company kept him sane through endless winter nights.
Your cell feels full of them. You hear claws on stone, the swish of tails in straw, the squeaks that burst like laughter before they vanish again. One darts over your chest; you slap at it, too late. It disappears beneath the blanket’s fold. You thrash, heart racing, until you shake it free. Its small body thuds to the floor, followed by the sound of several others scattering.
The smell of them mingles with the wool and straw—sharp, musky, sour. You taste it as much as smell it, the tang sticking to the back of your throat. Could you sleep in such company? You pull the blanket higher, tucking your knees in, cocooning yourself. But the rats are undeterred. Their world overlaps yours now. They are your restless bedfellows.
One gnaws at the iron of your shackle. The sound is steady, like teeth on bone. You almost laugh—if only they could chew you free. You imagine a horde of them stripping through the chain, leaving you loose. But they gnaw for their own reasons, never yours.
They dart close again, bold with hunger. A paw brushes your cheek; you flinch. You blow out a hot breath, and the creature scurries away. For a moment, you picture them as guardians, small and persistent, each squeak a reminder that life refuses to vanish in this frozen grave. Then you remember the bones archaeologists found, and the thought curdles.
You lie back, eyes wide in the dark, every sound magnified. The straw shifts. The wool itches. Somewhere close, a tiny body breathes in quick bursts. You are part of their nest now, whether you choose it or not. They will curl near your warmth, they will scratch at your rags, they will wait for your crumbs, your spills, your weakness.
You close your eyes, whisper to yourself that they mean survival, not threat. That even vermin have their place in this chain of winter. But the next squeak breaks the spell, and you jolt again, heart racing. Sleep becomes a fragile thing, broken by every tiny claw. Yet sleep will come, because exhaustion always wins. And when it does, the rats will still be here—restless, breathing, sharing the night.
At last, exhaustion drags you down, despite the scurry of claws and the stench of wool. Your body yields to the dark, though your mind does not fully surrender. Sleep here is never whole—it drips and fractures like water seeping through stone. You slip into a dream before you realize you’ve left waking.
In the dream you are outside. Snow drifts, soft and clean, falling into your hair. The sky is open, filled with stars so bright they sting your eyes. You stretch your arms wide, and the air is sharp but pure, the kind that burns your lungs in a way that feels alive. You walk across a field of frost, and your chains are gone, your steps light.
But then the dream folds inward. A bell tolls, deep and hollow. The snow darkens, melting into straw beneath your feet. The stars dim, replaced by the glow of torches. You blink, and you are back in the cell, though half of you still feels the open field. Your hand reaches for snow, but closes around damp straw instead.
Historically, chroniclers wrote of prisoners whose minds slipped into waking dreams after long confinement. One English gaoler noted in 1378 that a man “spoke with kings in his slumber and rose to bow before shadows.” Ethnographers have argued this blurred state was not madness but survival—an inner rebellion against walls and frost.
Curiously, in some monastic prisons, jailers recorded that prisoners dreamed of feasts so vividly they claimed to taste the bread upon waking. One account from Cluny tells of a monk who wept because the dream-banquet was more nourishing than any real crust he was given.
You feel the same. A crust touches your lips in dream; you bite, and crumbs scatter across your chin. But when you open your mouth in waking, you taste only wool and smoke. You cough, startled by the dissonance. The cell and the dream argue inside your skull. Which is more real—the starry field, or the dripping stone?
You drift again. A rat squeaks, but in your dream it becomes a bird’s call, echoing from a forest canopy. You almost laugh at the trick. Could you teach yourself to turn every dungeon sound into something gentler? The drip into a brook, the scream into a hunting horn, the chain into church bells?
You lie still, eyes fluttering beneath lids. The dream refuses to let go. You are both prisoner and wanderer, chained and free. When the frost crawls up your ankles, dream snow blankets you instead. When wool scratches your throat, dream wind caresses your cheek. The two worlds overlap, blurred, impossible to separate.
Your breath slows. You whisper into the dark: perhaps this is enough. If you cannot leave the dungeon, you can at least trick it. Reality may bind your body, but dreams slip through cracks no gaoler can seal.
And so you surrender. To frost, to wool, to straw, to screams, to rats. To fields of stars and feasts of bread. To everything woven together in a tapestry where the threads no longer know if they belong to night or day, prison or meadow. You sleep, though not entirely. You dream, though not completely. You exist somewhere between, and there—just barely—you find rest.
You wake to a pressure that feels older than sleep itself. Cold iron presses into your wrist, into your ankle, into bone. The chains are not merely wrapped—they are part of you now, stitched into your skin like a cruel embroidery. You tug once, instinctively, and the bite sharpens. The links grind, metal against flesh, a sound you feel more than hear.
You draw your hand close, the shackle clinking as it scrapes. The skin beneath is raw, tender, ringed by ridges that sting at the slightest movement. You rub your thumb over the wound, and it feels like touching fire trapped in frost.
Historically, gaolers rarely lined shackles with cloth or leather. Records show they fastened them directly to bare skin, indifferent to sores or blood. Archaeologists have uncovered shackles from castle ruins, their insides polished smooth not by kindness of design but by centuries of flesh worn down.
Curiously, there are accounts of prisoners soaking scraps of straw in urine and stuffing them beneath the iron to ease the bite. Disgusting, perhaps, but damp straw made a crude cushion, and ammonia stung less than iron’s cut.
You try shifting your weight, but the chain tugs back, reminding you of its dominion. The links scrape the floor like the dragging of bones. Each movement echoes louder than your breath, louder than your heartbeat. Could you sleep with such fetters gnawing at your body? You must, for there is no other choice.
You close your eyes, but the pressure persists. Even in stillness, the iron bites. Your mind begins to shape the pain into rhythm—the pulse at your wrist, the burn at your ankle, the clink of links like a lullaby in reverse. It becomes a cadence, a cruel music that insists you belong to the dungeon.
Your skin itches under the cuff, and you scratch with a filthy nail, desperate for relief. A thin warmth leaks, though you cannot tell if it is blood or sweat. You taste iron at the back of your throat, even though you have bitten nothing. Perhaps it is the air, or perhaps the chain’s taste seeps straight into your veins.
The straw beneath you shifts, and you imagine it rising to cover the metal, to soften it. But the chain resists, always slipping free, always finding your skin again. It is as if the links seek you, hungrier than the rats.
You wonder how many before you bore these same marks, the same circles of fire etched into their limbs. You press your cheek against the cold stone, whispering to no one: I am not the first. I will not be the last. The dungeon does not answer, but the chain does. It tightens with every breath you take, as if agreeing.
Still, you pull the wool higher, wrapping it around the iron, tricking yourself that the bite is dulled. The fabric itches, but itch is better than pain. The links grow quiet under the folds, muffled enough that you can pretend they have loosened. You know they haven’t. Yet the illusion matters.
You close your eyes again, counting your breaths against the clinks. Slowly, slowly, the rhythm becomes less jagged. You let yourself believe that even iron can grow weary, even chains can sleep. And with that thought—absurd, tender—you drift a little, wounds throbbing in time with the silence.
You open your eyes to stillness so thick it feels alive. The dungeon holds its breath, and for the first time all night the drip, the squeak, the shuffle of vermin seem to vanish. Only your pulse remains, a faint drum inside your ears. It is the silence before dawn, though dawn itself will never reach this place.
You push your head against the damp straw, listening harder. The torch beyond the corridor guttered out some time ago; you sense its absence in the dark, the way the air has cooled, the way shadows have thickened into one unbroken void. The silence is not comfort. It is a presence, heavy, waiting.
Historically, prisoners often spoke of “false dawns” in castles—moments of hush in the deep hours when even guards ceased their steps, as though the building itself slept. Records from France describe gaolers taking these silences as omens, a signal to prepare the gallows or fetch the keys.
Curiously, there is one tale from a German chronicle of a man who swore he could tell the hour by silence alone. “When the dungeon hushed,” he said, “I knew dawn stood outside, whether I saw it or not.” He lived to be freed, and claimed for the rest of his days that he still heard morning through stone.
You wonder if this is such a moment. The air tastes different—less iron, more frost. You inhale, and the cold enters deep, clean, almost sweet, as if dawn presses against the walls, testing their strength. Could you trust silence to guide you when light cannot?
Your chains are still. The rats, quiet. Even the wool’s stink seems gentler, hushed with the air. You wrap yourself tighter, cocooning into the absence. For a moment, you imagine snow blanketing the entire castle above, muffling all sound, tucking even the guards into uneasy sleep. The silence is snow. Thick, white, endless.
You close your eyes, half-expecting a rooster’s crow from some farm you’ll never see again. Instead, your ears strain toward faint vibrations—stone creaking, the sigh of distant timber, perhaps even the breath of another prisoner buried deeper in shadow. Or perhaps nothing at all.
The silence becomes its own kind of torture. Each second grows heavier, each moment demanding you break it with a cough, a shuffle, a whisper. You resist, holding yourself perfectly still. If dawn is coming, you want to hear its first knock.
But dawn here is not sunrise. It is the sound of keys. It is the bark of orders, the clang of doors. And so you wait, ears aching, heart racing, every nerve strung taut like bowstring. You listen for the return of sound. You listen for the crack that proves silence cannot last.
When at last a drip resumes in the corner, it is almost a relief. One drop, then another, then the faint shuffle of a rat testing its courage. The silence breaks, and the dungeon exhales. You exhale with it. Dawn has not come, but its shadow brushed against you. And in that brush, you survived another hour.
The silence shatters with footsteps. Slow, deliberate, iron-heeled. Each strike against stone echoes like a drumbeat, closing the distance. You curl tighter under the wool, your body stiffening with every step. The chain at your ankle rattles once, betraying your wakefulness. The guard knows you hear him. Perhaps that is the point.
He stops just beyond the bars. You hold your breath, waiting for words, for keys, for blows. None come. Instead, something small tumbles into the straw beside you. You flinch at the sound. A crust of bread. You reach for it with trembling fingers—only to feel its weight wrong, its surface too smooth. You lift it toward your face, and the sour smell of stone dust fills your nose. Not bread at all. Just a rock.
A laugh follows, low and rasping, rolling out from the guard’s throat. He does not speak. He only laughs once, twice, and the sound fades as he walks away, boots clanging against the corridor. The joke is complete.
Historically, gaolers were notorious for tormenting prisoners with false gifts—mocking them with promises of food, dangling water out of reach, even throwing bones stripped bare of meat into cells. Records from one English castle describe guards tossing turnip peelings into the straw, jeering at men who scrambled for them as if for treasure.
Curiously, a 15th-century chronicler noted a gaoler who took pleasure in carving loaves of wood. He would hurl them into cells, listening for the gnashing of teeth as prisoners bit down and splintered their gums. He called it “the feast of fools.”
You stare at the rock, its grayness sharp against the golden straw. Hunger gnaws, sharper now for the false promise. Your stomach twists, as though even the illusion of food has roused it into greater ache. Could you eat the stone anyway, just to feel weight in your belly? You laugh bitterly under your breath, a sound almost identical to the guard’s.
The wool scratches your chin as you pull it close. You close your eyes, but the rock presses into your ribs, impossible to ignore. You shove it away, yet it rolls back, as if mocking you again. You imagine the guard listening even now, smiling at your struggle.
The taste of dust lingers in your mouth, though you never bit it. The dungeon has a way of turning jokes into truths. You cough, spit, wipe your lips. Then you whisper into the darkness, asking no one in particular: Is cruelty sharper when it starves, or when it mocks?
The rock lies still. The straw settles. The footsteps have long since faded. Yet the echo of laughter remains, curling through the corridors, seeding itself into your mind. You wonder how many more hours until the next jest, the next false gift, the next reminder that even hope can be weaponized.
You press your face back into the wool, its stink preferable to the memory of laughter. You try to let sleep come, though it arrives fractured, uneasy. And when you drift, you dream of bread that turns to stone the moment it touches your tongue.
At first you think it’s the chain, a faint knock against the ring as you roll your ankle. Then the sound widens, ripples through the stone like a pebble cast into a frozen pond. A single tone, round and cold as the moon. Another follows, then another, each one traveling down the stairwell and into your ribs until your bones hum along. Bells. Somewhere above, the world keeps time while you shiver.
You hold your breath to hear them better. The notes are not bright; winter has wrapped them in wool. Snow softens the courtyard, and the sound lands on it the way a warm loaf lands on a cloth—no clang, only a thickened thud that spreads sweetness. The bell speaks again, a little lower now, and your cell answers with a murmur in the mortar, a soft metallic aftertaste in the air, as if the bronze itself leaves flavor behind. Could you sleep while time calls your name from the roof? Perhaps, if the call were kinder. Perhaps not, because it reminds you that dawn exists where you cannot see it.
Historically, bells marked the hours long before city clocks, their voices carrying across fields and through castle yards to call the living to prayer, labor, and rest. Records show monastic bells for Matins in the deep night and Lauds in the first blue of morning; curfew bells (“cover-feu”) at dusk ordered hearth fires banked and shutters latched. Castle chapels kept their own smaller bells, and town churches beyond the walls tolled for market days, for storms, for funerals, for feast-day processions that prisoners could hear but never join. Curiously, in some regions people believed bell-bronze could break storms and scatter demons; ringers would haul on ropes during lightning to “cut” the thunder, even while their hands went numb with sleet—a piety that charred more than a few steeples and sent ringers tumbling, but it endured because fear has its own liturgy.
Now the pattern shifts—slow, then quick, then slow again—as if a hand has changed on the rope. You picture the rope itself: hemp roughened by frost, fibers slicked with tallow to keep them from fraying, the grease leaving a faint animal tang on gloves. You can almost smell it, a ghost-thread of fat and hemp rising through the cracks to braid with the dungeon’s sour wool and straw. You close your eyes and let the rope pass through your mind—a line that runs from a ringer’s red hands to a wheel, from wheel to bronze, from bronze to air, from air to stone, from stone to you.
Michel taps once through the seam—are you hearing this?—and you answer with two knuckles, yes. Together you lie there, strangers joined by a bell neither of you can see. The sound moves like weather: some notes arrive thin and high, a knife-edge of copper; others roll in low and round, like a dog’s chest when it growls at something beyond the yard. When the bell pauses, the world holds its breath. When it speaks again, the rat in the corner starts, and a flurry of straw whispers as small bodies remember they are alive.
You try to count. One… two… three… It breaks your counting, deliberately or by chance, and you accept the scold. Bells are not beads to slide; they are waves to ride. So you ride—back into summers where bells rang over harvest, over bread ovens, over the small thunder of hooves on a bridge. You taste heat, then winter yanks you back with the iron flavor of the present. The bell strikes again. Your stomach answers with a hollow knock of its own.
From above, the guard’s dog barks—twice, impatient—then stops, perhaps cowed by the bell’s old authority. The bark leaves a little warmth in your chest, a pawprint of heat that fades quickly but proves you are not made only of stone and frost. You tuck that pawprint under your ribs the way you tuck straw under your hips: small comforts layered against a large cold.
The tone changes. This is not Matins with its thin, insistent call; this is something broader, a bell speaking to more than monks. Maybe the parish church outside the walls is telling the town to wake—bakers to stir the leaven, fishwives to break ice from buckets, boys to stamp the yard and shake snow from the hound’s back. You imagine shutters cracking open, a child stepping out to taste the air, breath painting a white cloud before a hand pulls them back inside. You imagine a woman crossing herself, whispering a hope you recognize without knowing her words: keep the cold from the bones; keep the hunger from the door; keep the iron from the ones I love.
Another peal—then a flutter of small notes. A sanctus bell, perhaps, from the castle chapel: a bright little creature compared to the town’s bull-voiced bronze. It trembles rather than tolls, a silver ring the frost can’t muffle. The sound makes your teeth ache with its purity. You smile anyway. Some noises are so clean they wash the mouth.
“Historically,” you tell yourself, because saying what can be known steadies the mind, “people measured life by bells more than by sun.” Monks rose in the dark; farmers covered their fires at the curfew’s call; gates closed at evening bells and opened at prime; markets opened on a chime and shut on two; even punishments took their cue from bronze: executions at noon, penances at vespers, prayers for the condemned when a certain toll unfurled across the town. In some places, collectors went door to door with a little handbell to gather alms “for prisoners and the poor,” the ring a thin bridge between kitchens and cells you can almost cross with your ears.
Curiously, a winter practice appears in a few old notes: when frost thickened until wood rang dull and ropes stiffened like boards, ringers wrapped the clappers in cloth for funerals—muffled bells, sorrow turned inward, a heartbeat heard through mittened hands. You think of that now: sound wrapped in sadness, sadness wrapped in sound, the world above bedding grief in felt while you bed your bones in straw.
The bell falters once, slips on a note, then rights itself. A hand must be cramping; a shoulder must burn. You picture the ringer gritting his teeth, maybe muttering a joke to the boy at the rope’s tail—keep pulling or the saints will freeze solid. Your lips twitch. Gentle asides travel well even through stone. Could you sleep with this much life beating above you? Part of you says no—how can anyone rest while time calls? Another part, the tired animal in the straw, says yes: rhythm is rhythm, and every rhythm can be ridden down into dark.
The dungeon answers in its smaller orchestra. Drip resumes its patient metronome. Chain gives a soft high note when you flex your ankle against the blanket’s rim. Straw keeps its papery hush. Your breath, steady now, draws a thin fog onto the wool and mints it with frost that shines when the bell’s wave passes, as if sound could throw light. You are nearly certain it does.
Michel’s whisper arrives after a long peal: “Lauds.” You roll the word on your tongue. It tastes of smoke and Latin and bread you cannot have. Lauds means praise. Praise with a blue-gray sky pressing on snow. Praise with fingers too numb to fold properly. Praise with rats for congregants and the dog for deacon. You manage a small amen that is mostly breath. The stone takes it kindly and does not return it sharpened.
The bell stops. The silence after is not the terrible hush you felt before. This one is threaded with footsteps far away and the creak of a gate-lintel straining under snow. It is the silence of begun things. Up there, coals are raked; pails knock; someone curses gently as the wind steals a hat. Down here, you pull the blanket closer and realize the pealing has left heat in you—as if bronze could lend a little of its forge to bone.
For a heartbeat you hear a different sound, or think you do: a small bell very near, delicate as glass. You look up, listening hard. Nothing. Perhaps it’s only the memory of the forbidden candle’s lick or the star you traced on the wall answering the news of day with its own thin chime. You allow the fancy; it harms no one and helps you.
Could you mark your hours by bells you never see? You begin to try. One peal: shift the straw under your hip. Two: rub your wrists where the iron wrote its circles. Three: tuck the blanket under the chain so the bite dulls. When the sanctus dances, you count links and trade a humming breath with Michel through the stone. When the town-bell swells, you close your eyes and pretend the sound is warm bread torn open, steam on your face. Ritual needs no altar but the body. You give the bell your body and it gives you a shape to inhabit until hunger comes back for its share.
The dog barks once more, bright and businesslike, as if the bell has told him what to do. Above, men will shoulder spears, carry buckets, stamp snow from boots. Someone will spit on the flagstones and the spittle will freeze before it spreads. Someone will laugh because his friend slips. Someone will lean into a kiss stolen quick in a doorway that smells of onions and damp wool. The bell pulled those threads taut, and for a moment you feel them tug across your ribs. It aches, but in the way stretching aches—hurt with purpose.
You lie back. Frost draws its white fern along the blanket seam where your breath escapes; you admire its work and do not disturb it. Smoke from the corridor torch creeps under the door and makes a sentence that cannot decide on its verbs before it unravels. The bell has gone quiet, but the sentence remains: you are here. You are cold. You are not alone. Time moves anyway.
You whisper toward the slit—the old parasocial habit sliding back in: “Could you sleep to bells?” The answer comes from your own chest, from the stone, from the straw, from Michel’s soft tap that says I hear what you hear. Yes. If you let the sound be a blanket and not a door. Yes. If you accept that the world above is not an enemy but a weather you can breathe.
You tuck your chin, hide your mouth in wet wool, and learn the bell’s after-silence the way a sailor learns the lull between waves. In that trough, small and brief, you begin to drift.
You hear it faint at first, a dry insect sound seeping through the planks above the corridor and the stone beyond your bars. Not boots. Not keys. A whisper that comes and goes, quick, nervous, precise. Scratch—lift—scratch—lift. Quills. Someone is writing in the rooms above while you lie here counting frost. The noise skips like a reed pen crossing rough paper, catches on a splinter of wood in a writing board, then moves on. It is the sound of decisions taking shape in ink.
You roll to your back, listening harder. The breath in your chest quiets to make room. The straw under your shoulder crackles and goes still. Even the rat in the corner pauses, whiskers stalled mid-twitch. Scratch—lift—scratch—lift. The rhythm becomes a path in your mind: a scribe’s hand traveling across lines ruled in ash, pausing to sand the wet strokes, resuming while the brazier sulks in a corner. You picture the way the room must smell: warm iron, damp wool steaming, the faint meat-sour of tallow candles, and above all the sweet, ferrous tang of ink made from oak galls, iron salts, and wine vinegar. Your tongue seems to taste it where you lie, a blackness you cannot swallow or spit.
Historically, castles kept rolls and registers as jealously as treasure—gaol delivery lists, recognizances, writs that ordered who should be held and who could go. Records show clerks scratching names in Latin hands that curled like frost on windowpanes, marking debts, sureties, pardons, deaths. Some castles housed the court itself—eyres and assizes that came like winter storms—so that judgment and confinement shared an address; parchment downstairs named the beds of straw below. Curiously, a few 14th-century inventories note that when quills were scant, clerks sharpened the flight feathers shed by the castle’s own geese and dogs were sometimes set to guard sacks of parchment as if they were meat, because rats loved vellum almost as much as they loved bread.
The sound sharpens, closer now—perhaps the scribe shifts chair and board toward the wall that rides above your corridor. The quill scratches, then hovers; you hear another thing: the faint blow across a fresh word, breath scattering wet shine to matte. You imagine the exhalation purling down through chinks, mixing with the dungeon’s cold to become a ghost that smells of gall and patience. You pull the blanket up to your nose and inhale. Could you sleep while someone writes your life in a hand you cannot see?
You try to picture the page itself: your name somewhere between lines of formula, crowded by verbs of custody and phrases like “to have and to hold,” which never meant comfort down here. Maybe there is a mark beside you—an X for bread delivered, a small circle when straw is issued, a hash when a fee is paid and the door opens. You wonder if anyone has crossed you out before your body has had the chance to do it for them.
Scratch—lift—scratch. Sand. Tap of a knife on horn to clear the nib. The dog upstairs thumps its tail, bored but warm. The bell from earlier sits quiet in its tower, and your cell grows aware of time in a different key: not bronze, but black strokes laid one by one. “Historically,” you whisper—because this habit steadies you—“ink outlasts hunger.” It is a poor comfort. But it is true.
Michel taps twice into the seam. Hearing it? You answer with one slow touch. Yes. You add a second tap that means Careful. Quills can be as loud as keys when they write the wrong thing. You both go still for a breath that tastes of vinegar and smoke.
The scratching resumes, and now you catch the counterpoint: a second pen, slower, more deliberate, perhaps an older hand correcting the first. Two rhythms, learner and master, like a small choir practicing a psalm without voices, only the rasp of feather on skin. The idea almost makes you smile—parchment is skin, after all, the ghost of a calf pressed flat and bleached, now being covered in words that will decide whether human skin sleeps under straw or not at all.
Above you, the chair legs drag. Wood complains. A throat clears. A small cough lands like cinders in your cell, still hot enough to be human. Then the voice of the older hand, muffled by floors: a question shaped like a blade—who pays? The younger replies, too quick, and scratches again, and you know without hearing the words that someone else’s life just tilted. You taste bitterness and cannot name whether it’s gall or envy.
Records show that gaolers and clerks assessed “garnish” and “fees” like weather: a price for chains put on, a price for chains taken off, a price for the straw that catches frost, even a price for the candle stub you dream about. Ethnographers reading court rolls found scrawled margins where clerks added notes about who had friends, who had none, who sent a priest, who sent a pie. Curiously, in a handful of documents you can almost see the scribe hesitate; a blot blooms over a name where a hand must have shaken, as if ink knew mercy briefly before it dried into law.
The quills pause. Silence gathers—this one is not the terrible hush that kills sound, but the thinking-quiet that feeds it. The room above rearranges itself: the faint slosh of vinegar in a shell, the whisper of sand shaken from a small leather bag, the soft scrut of pumice pulled across a line crossed wrong. You close your eyes and see the powder gleaming like frost on the word that failed, smell it like the dust that drifts off your straw when you shake it. Paper above, straw below—different weather, same winter.
You shift your wrists. The iron complains, then calms when you stuff a fold of wool between skin and shackle. The motion catches a ridge on the wall; your fingers find letters again, those carved prayers. You press the pads of your fingers into a shallow name until it prints cold into your skin, a seal that says remember me when they forget me upstairs. You wonder if the clerk ever comes down and sees these words he writes in reverse—stone pleading back to ink.
The scratching returns, brighter, as if the pen has been freshly cut. You hear the crisp beginning of a capital, the methodical pick of horizontals and the long, careful descender of a letter that loves its own flourish. The older voice murmurs approval. You imagine the lesson: keep the nib split but not too far; keep the angle even; do not press when the gall bites or the line will dig and the page will buckle. You think of how your body has learned the same—do not press your heel to the stone or the cold will climb a vein; keep the angle of your knees or your back will scream; do not pull hard against the chain or the skin will split and you will salt your own wounds with winter. Scribes and prisoners, both perfecting pressure.
Your stomach twists. The thought of lists cures hunger for a moment and then worsens it. On such a list someone decides whether today you are given a cup of thin gruel or nothing. On such a list someone marks that Michel exists, that you exist, that the dog need not be counted, though its warmth could make a line on any honest ledger: heat lent to the world.
A lesser-known detail rises from some remembered scrap of talk: sometimes, in hard years, scribes mixed lampblack into thin ink to stretch a bottle, and those pages faded quicker than true gall. In poor light, you could not tell which was which—until time made liars of the cheap strokes. You imagine your name written in good ink or bad, dark forever or paling until it is an echo on a page, and you wish fiercely for the cheaper kind, for the letter that dies before you do.
The quills stop together. A wax seal takes their place—soft thunk of a lump pressed to a wick-stub, sweet fat smoke, then the hiss of a matrix ring dropping to kiss the pool. You can see it as if you were there: a crest you barely recall from banners, now impressed on red. The smell slinks down the cracks, different from tallow—the clean, honeyed note of beeswax warmed by human heat. For a second it is summer. Then the cold takes the scent by the throat and shakes it to gray.
Keys jingle. Paper rustles. The older voice speaks a word that sounds like basta or enough through stone. Chairs scrape back. Boots—soft-soled—cross toward the door. You feel every step on your ribs. The latch lifts. The breath of the room turns, touches the corridor air, and is gone. The door falls shut. Silence fills the hole quills leave.
Could you sleep now that the scratch has stopped? You might. It is a strange mercy to know the decisions are finished for the hour—not for good, never for good, but for this watch. You lower your head to your arm and the wool rasps kindly for once, as if it, too, approves of pauses.
Michel taps once, a question without words. You answer by drumming lightly the number of your links. Then, after a beat, you tap one more—a borrowed blessing from bells and quills both: still here.
You let your eyelids lower. Before you fall, you build one small ritual for yourself, a ledger of the body: thumb against the star you traced on the wall; heel lifted from the stone; blanket tucked under iron; breath counted to five on the way in, to seven on the way out. The list is clean. It requires no ink. It writes itself on warmth that refuses to be itemized.
Somewhere a rat resumes its quiet industry. Somewhere a drop remembers its fall. Somewhere above, the dog shakes and the soft clack of claws answers the memory of the bell with its own punctuation. The page of the castle turns. No one sands this line. It dries by itself, in air that smells of wool and frost and the faintest echo of honeyed wax.
“Hey,” you almost say into the blanket, the old aside slipping out of you before you can catch it, “could you sleep to the sound of someone writing your fate?” You do not wait for an answer. Your body writes a simpler sentence: you sleep because you are tired. And for a little while, the only scratching you hear is the quiet rasp of your breath gilding the edge of the wool with silver.
You wake with your tongue pressed to iron. You don’t remember leaning that close, but the chain lies where you fell asleep, and your lips grazed the shackle. The taste blooms instantly—sharp, bitter, metallic—like blood but colder, less forgiving. You gag softly, pulling away, but the flavor clings. Rust does not leave quickly; it lives in the mouth like a stain.
You lick your teeth, trying to scrub it away, but the taste spreads, iron filing every crevice. You spit into the straw, and the spittle shines faintly in the dark before the fibers drink it down. Your throat aches with the flavor, as though the dungeon itself had slipped a nail into your stomach.
Historically, rust was more than nuisance; it was proof of neglect. Records from castle inventories show gaolers petitioning for new irons because old ones corroded so badly they cut flesh unintentionally, spreading infections that killed more surely than rope. Archaeologists analyzing bone near dungeons have found lesions consistent with tetanus—“lockjaw” born not from weapons but from rust gnawing at wounds.
Curiously, some prisoners believed rust carried power. A German folktale describes men scraping flakes into water, drinking it as medicine against weakness. The practice lingered, even when it killed, because belief itself was a shield. Rust meant strength, rust meant iron in the blood, rust meant survival—though it often meant the opposite.
You run your tongue over your gums again, and the taste deepens, now mingled with the sour wool, the stale breath of rats, the smoke crawling under the door. It is everywhere. You cough, throat raw. Could you ever forget this taste? You wonder if you’ll carry it forever, if even free air would not wash it away.
The chain rattles as you shift, and a faint powder drifts off—rust falling like orange snow. You catch some on your fingers, rub them together, feel the grit embed in your skin. You raise it to your nose. It smells faintly sweet, almost like dried blood. Your stomach clenches, half hunger, half revulsion.
Michel taps faintly from his wall. You answer with two dull knocks. The taste in your mouth thickens as if the iron answered too. You imagine him licking his own shackle, the same metallic ghost riding his tongue. Two prisoners tasting the same note, played by iron against unwilling mouths.
The wool offers no escape. It smells of lanolin and mildew, but beneath that the rust taste persists, seeping into air, into breath. You curl deeper under the blanket, but the iron remains against your ankle, unshakable. It warms faintly from your skin, and the warmth releases more of the bitter scent.
You close your eyes. In the darkness behind them, the taste becomes a color: deep, ruddy brown. It spreads like a stain across your vision until the whole world is painted in iron. You try to replace it with other tastes—bread, apples, even straw chewed as a child’s dare—but rust always returns, the dominant note in the dungeon’s song.
And yet, strangely, you cling to it. The taste is proof. Proof you are alive, that your mouth can still rebel, that your body still registers insult. You swallow hard, grimacing, and the rust slides into your stomach, joining you. Iron outside, iron inside. Prison and prisoner becoming the same.
You whisper into the wool: I will not forget you, rust. And you know you won’t.
The bell’s after-silence settles like ash, and somewhere in the ache of your bones you know the year has reached its hinge. The air tastes different—thin, glassy, as if light itself has gone brittle. Midwinter. The sun, far above roofs and ramparts you cannot see, has stooped as low as it will go. You feel the fact in your body before you can name it, like an animal reading the pressure of weather in its fur.
The dungeon admits no day, yet even here the world tilts. The drip slows enough that you can count a breath between beads. The corridor torch seems to burn bluer, its smoke writing fainter letters along the ceiling. The dog above has barked less today, saving its voice as if sound were firewood. Your own breath draws the same white fringe along the blanket’s edge, but it hangs there longer now, reluctant to melt. Could you sleep inside a year’s deepest night? Or does a night this long insist you keep watch whether you mean to or not?
Historically, people marked this hinge with stubborn brilliance. Records show households across Christendom tending a great yule log—hauled in green, crowned with ivy, fed for twelve nights until it collapsed into a bed of luck-bringing ash. In towns, the Church folded older winter customs into feasts: Advent vigil, the Nativity, Lauds against the cold blue morning, then days of bread and ale shared, alms gathered for “prisoners and the poor.” Parish accounts from 13th- and 14th-century England list coins and loaves carried down to cells on Christmas Eve, mercy scaffolded by liturgy. Curiously, in some places people whispered that at midnight beasts knelt, wells turned sweet, and bees hummed a tiny hymn inside their hives—a choir of creatures saluting the hinge of light. You think of the dog above and almost smile.
You have no yule log, only the memory of one. Still, the cell changes its key. The draft through the embrasure is slower, as if the wind itself wrapped in wool. Snow has become a harder powder, sifting less, squeaking when it slides. You lift your head and lay your cheek against the straw mound you have built; the frost there is crisp as spun sugar, glittering where the corridor glow reaches. You whisper into the wool: “This is the bottom of the year.” The stone listens, as it always does, and offers back a silence that feels like a nod.
Michel taps once through the seam. You answer with two gentle notes: here. Then you both keep still, as if stillness were the rite. In that stillness you inventory your small world—chain eased by a fold of blanket; ankle salved with the last gray smear of tallow; straw braided into low ridges that lift your spine from the wet; ash sprinkled where the stone was slickest; the window-slit curtained by your plaits so the sky must ask permission before it enters. Every trick you’ve learned gathers close tonight like household gods on a shelf.
The air carries a scent you have scarcely noticed these past weeks: faint greenery. It is not real—no holly hangs in this corridor—but your mind conjures it anyway, a sharp, resinous ghost twined through the smoke. You let the ghost stay. You remember how ivy felt when wrapped around a bannister, how its chill bled through cloth; you remember the soft shine of holly berries in lamplight, and the way children swore they saw stars trapped in the leaves. You lift your eyes to the bars and catch one true star winking between frost lashes. It is not trapped. It is simply stubborn.
Could you make a feast out of nothing? You try. You rub your hands briskly inside your sleeves until they prickle with a counterfeit heat. You draw the blanket up and tuck it tight, making a cowl that smells of lanolin and old smoke. You press your heels—not flat, toes cocked—to the stone, so the cold cannot kiss the vein. You count the links as a kind of grace before meal, number for number, breath for breath. Your stomach complains, but the counting answers it with a rhythm the way bells do. It is not bread, but it is a crust of order, and order nourishes in its own thin way.
From above comes the murmur of voices that do not belong to guards alone. A thread of song drifts through timber and stone—thin, off-key, brave. You do not know the words, only the step of them, falling and lifting like a child climbing a low wall. It might be the castle chapel trying a hymn against the cold; it might be a pair of kitchen boys testing a carol they only half remember; it might be no more than the wind catching a shutter and giving it a tune. You decide it is a carol meant for ears like yours. You breathe it in and give it back as a hum too quiet to carry—praise disguised as breath.
“Historically,” you tell yourself softly—because true things steady you—“misrule walked at midwinter.” In halls, a Lord of Misrule or an Abbot of Unreason turned order upside-down so the year could right itself again: servants crowned with paper, masters pouring ale, dice rattling where ledgers slept. In prisons, misrule wore poorer clothes. A guard might soften, toss an extra crust, look away if two cells traded warmth through the cracks. Records show donations this week spiked in town ledgers—for bread, for fuel, for those below—and sometimes a clerk’s quick hand struck through a fee with a blot that looked almost like pity. Curiously, one parish roll notes a single candle sent “to comfort the darkest place,” with no further address, as if the sender trusted the candle to find you by its own light.
You think of your forbidden stub, long gone to smoke, and feel the yearning like a splinter. Yet you have other flames tonight. The straw catches frost that catches the corridor’s glow and gives it back as silver. Your breath fogs and glitters at the seam of wool. Even a rat’s eye sparks once in the margin of dark, a coal that blinks and is gone. Small lights, but they count.
Michel taps again—three, pause, one. You recognize the pattern you invented together for story. You press your lips to the seam and offer him one in thirteen words, because breath is dear: On my solstice once, we burned a log bigger than the child. He answers with eight: On mine, a dog slept at my feet like fire. You laugh, a soft, absurd puff that stitches new stars along the blanket’s edge. The dog above thumps once, as if called by name. You both fall quiet to hear whether anyone comes. No one does. The castle is busy with its own longest night.
Hunger returns—honest and without malice. You fold your hands under your ribs and imagine a trencher set down on a board: black bread, a twist of salt, a ladle of pottage with a sweetness of parsnip at the edge. You taste it fully, because the mind can feed where the hand cannot. For drink you pour snowmelt from your cupped palm—clearer than bucket water and colder than language. It burns kindly down, lighting a path through you that the chain cannot block.
A lesser-known winter trick surfaces from some old talk in a market you can barely recall: on the solstice, folk turned their coats inside out to confuse misfortune, then righted them at first light so luck would find its way home. You have no coat, only this sour wool. But you can turn something else. You lift the blanket’s corner and flip it so a dry seam faces your cheek. The scratch changes its note. The smell changes a little, too—less of long nights, more of old barns. Folly? Perhaps. Yet the body registers the difference and writes a small thank-you down your spine.
You remember the carved star on the wall—the uneven points you traced in a previous watch. You reach for it now. Your fingers find its cold grooves, and you rest your palm there until the ache of chill becomes a kind of bright. “Hold,” you murmur to the star—not to keep fear out this time, but to keep a minute of peace in. The instruction feels like a child telling snow not to fall so hard. Still, you say it. Words have work even when they do not persuade the sky.
The night deepens, if deepening is possible when dark already feels whole. Then, subtly, something loosens. The cold does not ease, but it shifts its stance; the draft through the slit climbs half a note; the rat that has been patient in the corner ventures and retreats twice as if deciding which year it belongs to. You know—not by sight, not by clock, but by bone—that the hinge has creaked and the door of light has begun to open a finger’s width. Could you sleep on that margin? You try.
You make your litany one more time: ash below; plaits beneath; mound of straw under spine; rags; blanket; skin; breath; star; neighbor; dog; bells; quills; rust; snow; and the stubborn ember that is the body. You let the list slow your ribs the way a psalm slows a nave. When the draft licks your temple, you call it blessing. When the chain nudges your ankle, you call it witness. When hunger speaks, you call it company. Names do not change facts, but they change nights.
From far above, too far to be this castle, a bell tests a single note and lets it fall. Not now, you think, but soon. Soon there will be a slightly longer day you will not see, and someday, if the gate opens, you will feel that surplus on your skin like a miracle so ordinary it burns. Until then, you will keep this hinge in your chest.
You tuck your chin deeper, making a cave of wool and breath. Frost feathers the edge until it looks like a small winter forest, white branches touching your mouth. You lick one twig and it vanishes. You smile into the damp. “Hey,” you whisper, because you cannot help the old aside, “could you sleep knowing the sun has turned?” The dungeon answers in its plainest language: a drop falls, then another. Time, resumed. You let go, not into summer, not yet—but into the knowledge that summer has at least remembered your name.
The morning after solstice comes without light. Only sound: the scrape of boots on frozen flagstones, the shuffle of a bucket against stone steps. And then, a noise different from all others—pads and claws, quick and unashamed. A dog. You know it instantly, because its trot carries weight and ease, not burden like a guard’s march. The straw beneath you rustles as you lift your head, listening harder.
The claws click, pause, click again. A low whine leaks through the cracks of the door, thin as smoke. The wool prickles at your chest; you clutch it tighter, as if the blanket too wants to draw closer to that sound. For a heartbeat you imagine the dog slipping under the door, wriggling down the corridor, curling against your side until its body heat floods your ribs. The vision is so strong you nearly reach out a hand.
Historically, dogs lived in every part of a castle: hunting hounds with lords, curs in kitchens, mastiffs chained to gates. Records show gaolers often kept dogs not only for warning but for warmth. In some accounts, prisoners bribed guards with scraps to let a dog linger near their cells on cold nights, its presence both comfort and humiliation. To sleep in straw beside vermin was suffering; to sleep in straw beside a hound was envy.
Curiously, one 15th-century tale tells of a mastiff that chose prisoners over its master. Each night it crept into the dungeon, stretched across three cells at once, and shared its heat. When its owner found out, he beat it—yet the dog returned, limping but loyal. The chronicler notes: “More mercy was in that beast than in the men that held the keys.”
The dog above scratches at something—door, post, maybe snow. Its nails rasp the timber in a rhythm you could almost mistake for scratching at parchment again, but lower, hungrier. Then a shake: collar rattling, ears flapping, the shiver of fur scattering droplets. The smell drifts faintly down: wet hide, smoke, and hay. Against the wool’s rancid reek, it is a relief, a scent of fields you may never touch again.
You pull the blanket closer, press your face into its edge, and inhale through the gap. Could you sleep on the memory of a dog? Perhaps. You remember nights long past when a mutt curled at your feet before the fire, its breath puffing into the air like a bellows, its ribs rising steady as a psalm. That warmth lingers in your bones. You draw it forward, let it live again, let it melt the rust still staining your tongue.
The guard whistles once—sharp, commanding. The dog barks, bright and strong, a sound that cuts frost like steel. Your chest swells with it, involuntary, as if the bark were a draught of heat poured straight into your lungs. The sound rolls away, claws clicking after boots, and the dungeon grows empty again.
Yet the warmth remains. Not real, but memory. Enough. You tuck it deeper, between heart and chain, the way you might tuck straw under your hips. You whisper toward the seam where Michel listens: The dog’s warmth is ours tonight. He answers with two knuckles, quick and certain.
And so you close your eyes. The straw shifts, the wool rasps, but above all you hear the echo of pads on stone, claws on wood, breath steaming into cold. A guardian you’ll never touch, yet one who touched you all the same. Sleep creeps in on that echo, softer than frost, steadier than bells.
It arrives not with a growl but with a hollowing—an inside-out wind moving through your middle, lifting everything light and stealing everything heavy. Hunger’s sharpest hour. You know it by the way your body chooses between shiver and stillness and loses to both. Your hands go slow. Your jaw aches from clenching against nothing. You curl tighter under the wool until the blanket smells like a shed where animals used to sleep, and you envy those animals for remembering how.
The night behind you felt long, but this hour unthreads even the memory of sleep. Your mouth tastes ghost-bitter, a residue of rust and smoke. You swallow, and the swallow echoes into emptiness. The straw under your spine remembers gruel the way a barn remembers summer: inaccurately, beautifully, cruelly. You try to call up yesterday’s heat, the tin cup against your lips, but your stomach refuses the trick. It is smarter than your mind and less polite.
Historically, poor prisoners in medieval gaols survived almost entirely on charity—alms begged at church doors and recorded in parish rolls as “for the prisoners and the poor.” Records from London and Paris show that the gaoler’s ration, when given, was mostly a ladle of pottage or a hunk of black bread, and that those with coin or friends could buy better while the rest waited for the bell and the basket. Curiously, more than one winter account mentions men binding their bellies with cloth or rope at night, tightening the knot so pressure dulled the pangs; some called the band a “hunger girdle,” a poor cousin to the belts that nobles loosed at feasts.
You try your own girdle now. You slide the blanket’s edge into a narrow rope and cinch it across your stomach, not hard—enough to persuade, not bruise. The pressure is a hand on a frantic horse. Your gut tosses once, then settles into a sulk. You breathe carefully, counting to five in, seven out, letting the numbers do the work bread would do if you had it. Could you sleep this way? Perhaps, if the counting holds and the chain keeps still.
Michel taps once through the seam—awake?—and you answer with two knuckles—hungry. The stone drinks the word and returns nothing edible. He waits, then sends a slow pattern that means remember the ash. You smile despite the ache. The ash you spread under the slickest flagstone does nothing for the belly, but it reminds you of cleverness, and cleverness is a kind of broth.
A rat rustles in the corner, finds something, makes a joy-sound too near a squeal to be dignified. You close your eyes and refuse jealousy. “Eat, small thief,” you whisper into the blanket. “Leave me your heat.” The wool captures the words and returns only the smell of lanolin turned sour. You lick your cracked lip and taste iron again. It does not help.
The corridor door sighs somewhere far along the run. For a moment you hope—bucket, ladle, the thin salvation of a cup—but the steps pass on, their rhythm wrong for feeding. They are delivery of something else: wood, perhaps, or an order folded and sealed. The smell that follows is not marrow or oats but damp leather and old smoke, a scent that tastes like reading rather than eating. You feel foolish for hoping. Your stomach punishes you for optimism with a wrenching twist that leaves a bright halo in your vision.
You curl around the pain until it passes. When you open your hands, your palms hold nothing but straw-dust and the faint grit of rust. Once, you chewed straw to trick your mouth into believing. The memory makes your tongue ache. You will not do it again. There is a line between survival and self-rebuke, and chewing the bed tastes too much like the second.
“Historically,” you murmur—because true things stave off panic—“winter rations tightened when roads froze and mills stalled.” Town records speak of bakers shorting loaves, of millers guarding their stones against ice, of markets thin on fish when rivers sealed. Castle kitchens stretched pottage with pease and turnip tops, and bones were boiled until they surrendered their ghosts. In such seasons, prisoners were last in the line of mercy.
Curiously, in a few grubby notes tucked beside tidy ledgers, you find mention of kitchen boys slipping suet lumps to “those below,” chalking it as spillage. One says he hid a scrap of dripping in the seam of a wooden bowl and sent it down with the gruel, trusting smell to find it. Another claims a scullion smeared tallow along the rim of a cup—dangerous charity, half candle, half fat—so the first sips carried calories the clerk would not count. You think of the little gray salve Michel sent and the sting that turned to softness, and you feel a loyalty to boys you will never meet.
The dog above shakes—tags or a ring on its collar clink—and pads toward a door you cannot see. The sound interviews your hunger like a gentle priest: have you eaten? No. Do you remember what eating is? Yes, too well. Could you bless a meal you don’t possess? You try. You picture a trencher of black bread so dense it leaves the print of your fingers; you picture onions sweetened in a pot until they melt into something like kindness; you picture a bowl with a skin of fat that breaks at the first touch of a spoon. The imagining hurts and helps in equal measure. You persist.
Your belly knots again. You slide your feet against the stone—not flat; never flat; Michel’s rule—letting cold climb as a distraction. Pain answers pain with a compromise. The knot loosens. You exhale carefully and listen for a bell that will not ring for you.
From the seam comes a rhythm you haven’t heard before—Michel’s knuckle very soft, three beats, pause, two, pause, one—story? You press your mouth to the crack and give one back that tastes like bread even as it takes it away: Once I licked a pot so clean the cook saw herself in it and laughed. He returns with: Once my mother saved lamb-fat in a jar and called it winter’s candle. You grin into wool you cannot see and the grin warms a circle on the fabric the size of a coin. You keep trading. The exchange is not food, but it is something food has always been: shared, salted with laughter, swallowed in company.
The chain nudges your ankle. You tuck its bite under a fold and imagine it as the table’s hard edge against your leg. You set out invisible plates: one for you, one for Michel, one down for the dog if it ever came. You pour snowmelt into an absent cup and drink the cleanest water you will taste today. It carries the mineral signature of the castle through you—a geology of survival.
Hunger argues again, sharper now, and you reach for your one honest tool. You count. Links. Breaths. The little constellation of frost that forms and reforms along the blanket seam with each exhale. You name the stars you have made—Dog’s Breath, Prisoner’s Eye, Straw’s Crown—and trace them until your focus blurs the ache. Could you sleep like this, with a belt made of numbers where a feast should be? It seems impossible, then possible, then already happening. That is hunger’s other trick: it burns you to ash and leaves a bed of coals that looks like peace.
A lesser-known practice flickers up from memory: some captives knotted a few grains into thread and let them soften there with each breath, then sucked the thread as if it were a rosary of food. You have no grain. You do have thread, rag-shreds and straw plaits, but turning them into pretend sustenance feels like crossing into a country you will not return from. You let the idea pass with a nod of respect to those who needed it more than you do right now.
The cell settles around you. Straw sighs at the weight of your hip. The wall folds its cold around your shoulder without malice—stone never means, it only is. The wool stinks and warms in the same breath. Somewhere a bell tests a single distant note and thinks better of it. Somewhere the dog dreams, its paws trotting against the floorboards in a chase it wins every time. You borrow victory from that sound and store it like fat.
Your stomach, having flung its best knives, begins the duller work of gnawing. Dull is easier to outlast. You loosen the blanket-girdle a finger’s width—not reward, not surrender, just kindness—then turn your face toward the slit where frost gilds iron like old lace. A pale smear of day hides behind cloud; you cannot see it, but your eyes insist on squinting anyway, as if light could drip this far.
“Could you sleep hungry?” you whisper—parasocial habit slipping out—“like really, truly empty?” The dungeon, which does not eat or starve, offers its practical answer: a drop falls, unhurried and exact. Time will outlast both appetite and satiety. You align your breaths with the drip, not because it feeds you, but because it keeps you from chewing the air.
Slowly, the edge rounds. Your thoughts unhook their claws from the future where bread exists and lie down in the present where breath does. The belt across your belly is a comfort now, not a fight. The chain behaves under its quilt. The straw plaits cradle your spine with their poor sailor’s kindness. The rat in the corner sleeps the way only full things do, and you bless it with a mean little smile that is nonetheless sincere.
You start to drift. Hunger follows—always—padding like the dog, curling where your ribs meet. It will be there when you wake. But you have taught it manners for an hour. It licks its paws and pretends to keep watch. You let your jaw loosen; the iron taste recedes, leaving only wool and smoke and the faintest sweetness from yesterday’s dream-apple, which does not exist but also does.
You fold yourself around the absence you cannot fill and treat it like a guest who has stayed too long but not forever. In the space between pangs, a small quiet opens like a hand. You place your head in it and close your eyes.
You keep the hunger quiet as best you can, counting links, tasting smoke and wool, when Michel’s whisper sifts through the seam: “Have you a shard?” You frown, then your fingers remember the chip you worried from a cracked stone days ago—hard, glassy, the color of wet crow. You ease it from its hiding place in the straw. It bites your thumb with an eager edge. “Good,” he breathes. “Hold it. Low. I’ll send the heart.”
Something knocks the crack, softer than bread, warmer than stone. You press your fingers in and draw out a scrap the size of a fingernail. It’s dark as old honey, velvety, light. It smells faintly sweet, like a forest after rain and smoke. “Tinder,” Michel says—the word barely a breath. “Keep it dry. Strike. Toward it. Not away.”
You set the scrap on your palm the way you once cupped moths as a child, coaxing flight. You brace the shard above it, bring the chain’s ring down at an angle, and snap. The sound is small—flint kissing iron—but light leaps, a cold star that dies before your eyes can own it. Again. Again. Your wrists ache, the cuff rasping your skin, but stubbornness is warmer than wool. On the fifth blow a spark lands and does not die. It crawls into the tinder and glows the red of a dog’s eye at dusk. You freeze, then breathe the way a mother would—low, patient, coaxing. The scrap sighs and blossoms into a coal the size of a lentil.
Historically, fire in the Middle Ages began like this more often than with great logs: flint and steel, or flint and iron, driving sparks into tinder made from fungus (amadou) or charred plant fiber; rushlights of pith dipped in fat; embers banked in ash to keep a breath of flame alive till dawn. Records show even gaolers kept tinderboxes for night rounds, and the poor tucked a coal deep in ash so morning could be lit with memory instead of struggle. Curiously, accounts from alpine prisons mention tinder scraped from horse-hoof fungus smuggled in a hatband, a gentleman’s fashion turned into a pauper’s hearth.
You cup the ember with both hands. Its heat is barely a word, yet it speaks. The cell changes around it. Shadows draw nearer, curious as rats. Smoke threads rise thin and blue, carrying a sweetness that out-argues wool and rust. You could cry from the simple proof that warmth is not a rumor. But tears would drown the coal. You blink dry and feed it breath.
“Now,” Michel whispers, and you feel, more than see, a second gift nudging the seam: a twist of straw gone stiff with grease. Tallow. You grin like a thief. You touch the greased twist to the coal and it hesitates—as if asking permission—then takes. Flame climbs the plait in a pale tongue that wavers at every draft, a candle without a candlestick. You shield it with your palm and your blanket’s rim, and the cell leans closer, hungry for a story.
The light reveals everything it touches as if for the first time: the carved star on the wall gleaming in its grooves; frost along the blanket edge turning to glittering dew; your chain shining where the tallow smear polished it; the straw mound looking almost golden again, as if a lost summer briefly remembers its name. Warmth licks your knuckles. It hurts, then heals, then makes your skin confess just how cold it was.
Could you keep a fire this small without letting the dungeon know? You work with monkish care. You pinch off the burning end and lay it on a shard of clay you saved from the bucket’s broken rim. The clay warms and keeps the twist off wet stone. You feed the flame a bare pinch more grease, then a whisker of dry straw. The flame fattens into something confident enough to make a shadow of your hand. The shadow trembles. You smile at your own shaking.
Smoke pools at the top of the cell and then tucks itself under the blanket lip you’ve pinned as a windbreak, as if grateful for a roof. The smell is animal and sweet—tallow-soft, with that faint wool-and-sheep honesty that has clung to your world for weeks. It tastes like broth dreamed rather than drunk. You press your face into the edge of the blanket and sip it the way you would the steam of a cup. Your stomach answers with a sound that is almost a purr and almost a knife.
You remember your forbidden candle stub and how its death felt like a door closing. This is different. This is not light for seeing; it is fire for living. Its work is not to paint the wall but to push winter back an inch. You rub your wrists where iron wrote its circles and hold them near. Heat lifts the sting out of the sores, turns the itch into a soft ache you can befriend. You hold your ankles in the light’s reach and feel the cold crawl backward like a tide that has found a reef.
The dungeon listens. You can feel it. Stone does not hate fire; it contains it. But iron marks it, and men smell it. You cannot let the flame boast. You lower it, pinch again, and tuck the live end under a small hill of ash you’ve hoarded from the corridor torch—ash you scraped with a splinter days ago for traction and bed. Ash cools and protects, lets a coal sleep. You breathe on the mound and feel, rather than see, the ember pulse like a mouse under straw. Banked. Hidden. Yours.
Michel taps a single beat that means good. Then a longer rhythm: show you a wick? You slide to the seam. He sends a thin reed through—a rush pith scraped clean, pale as bone. “Dip,” he whispers, “just the tip.” Your tallow twist obliges, and you have, for the first time in your life below ground, a rushlight. You set it in a crease of clay, wedge the reed upright between two pebbles, and touch the buried ember to its head. It blooms quiet as a held breath.
The light this makes is thinner than your candle’s was, but it lasts longer and asks less. It writes a bright line along the edge of your chain and paints the carved letters on the wall with a scholar’s patience. You can read the cross again, and the shallow name, and the uneven star. You trace them with a finger made warm enough to feel. “Hold,” you tell the star, because the ritual has worked before. The star glitters as if agreeing.
The heat from so little flame should be a joke. It is not. Your blanket, fussed into a tent, holds the warmth like a fist. Your breath adds its share. The rushlight’s small sun adds more. Frost at the seam withdraws a hair’s width from your mouth. The stone’s bite dulls. Could you sleep by such a star without waking suspicion? You test the corridor with your ear: boots far away, the guard’s dog yawning so loudly you hear the soft whuff of it; no keys, no laugh. You lift the rushlight, pinch, and it dies to a glow that still breathes under ash. You have not made light; you have made a future light.
Historically, the poor stretched flame the way the rich stretched silk: night by night, inch by inch. Rushlights burned quick, so women dipped twenty at once and measured time by their dying; braziers glowed in corners where smoke could escape; men banked embers and prayed the ash would keep the heart till morning. Ethnographers noted that in low places—mines, huts, and yes, cells—people talked to their hidden coals as if to dogs: stay; hush; good. You do the same now under your breath, and the ember seems to obey because you believe that it does.
Curiously, there are notes—half rumor, half record—of prisoners who hid a coal in a hollowed heel of bread, or in a ram’s horn stopped with clay, carrying a day’s worth of warmth in something that looked like junk. One gaoler wrote a complaint: “They make fire out of nothing and call it piety.” You laugh silently, and the laugh warms your lip enough to sting the crack there into healing.
You should let it sleep. But your hands, newly ambitious, want one more lesson. You lift the reed again, touch its charred tip to the ember, and grow a bead of fire the size of a pea—no more. Then you do something foolish and holy: you warm a stone. A small one from your straw—smooth, river-born, smuggled in a kitchen bucket ages ago by chance. You set it just close enough that it drinks heat without screaming for attention. After a minute you slide the stone into the straw beneath your spine. Heat radiates into your back the way memory radiates from bells: not loud, not bright, but definite. You almost sob. You do not. The dungeon will hear.
Above, the dog stamps, turns, lies. You feel the floor carry its weight to you. You imagine it is your coal enlarged, your coal with a heart and a tail. The bell far off tests a note too shy to keep. Smoke from the corridor hesitates at your door, meets your tented wool, and chooses another country. Stars—real ones—are a rumor beyond the bars, but inside your cave you have stitched one to a reed and taught it your name.
Could you be happy over so little? The better word is grateful. Gratitude tastes like tallow, like smoke, like the sweetness of tinder fungus riding your tongue. It is not pleasant. It is right. You let the rushlight burn a finger’s breadth, then you pinch, bury, and breathe a promise into the ash: not yet dead; not tonight.
You settle the blanket back over the seam so no glow betrays you. The dark returns, but it is a different dark, warmed by the secret the ash holds. Your wrists no longer throb with iron’s insistence, only murmur. Your ankles ache in a voice you recognize and do not fear. The straw under your spine has learned a new word—warm—and repeats it in a dialect so faint you need your whole body to translate.
“Hey,” you murmur into the wool—old habit, gentle joke, quiet as ember-breath—“could you sleep knowing there’s a fire the size of a lentil hiding in your hand?” The dungeon, which has been a lung of frost all night, sighs once in a different key, as if even stone respects anything that resists it without shouting. Michel taps a single beat that means good night across eras and walls.
You curl around your hoarded coal, which is only heat and also hope. Above, the dog dreams; outside, snow takes a slow breath; somewhere, a clerk’s wax cools on a seal; somewhere else, a bell thinks about ringing and decides against it. Inside, your ember turns under its gray blanket like a small creature bedding down. You fold your arms, arrange your toes the way Michel taught, and let sleep find you by following the scent of tallow through the dark.
You don’t decide to surrender; your body drafts the treaty without you. It begins with a kindness that isn’t kind—shivering slows, then pauses, then fails. The tremor that kept you awake, kept you angry, kept you alive, grows tired of itself and puts down its tools. In the quiet that follows, a strange order settles in your limbs: fingers obedient as carved wood, jaw gentle as a closed door. Numbness spreads like a truce flag. You think, foolishly, that this is better. It is not. It is winter asking you to sign where it points.
You test a finger and feel almost nothing. Straw pricks, yes, but from far away, as if it were happening to a cousin of your hand. Your breath comes shallower, slower. Frost gathers at the seam of the blanket where it always does, but now it grows a thicker lace before each exhale melts it. Your chest learns a shorter road and takes it. Could you sleep like this? The question tastes sweeter than it should, like the first sugared almond at a feast. Sweetness is a warning. You pull the wool tighter and tell yourself stories until your own voice sounds like someone else’s.
Historically, medieval surgeons did not speak of “hypothermia,” but they knew winter’s damage well enough. Records show that writers like Guy de Chauliac described injuries from cold—chilblains and frost-bite under the names pernio and gelatio—and advised slow, cautious warmth and ointments rather than thrusting frozen flesh straight to the fire. They knew sudden heat breaks what cold has made brittle. Curiously, ethnographers collecting folk cures in later centuries heard echoes of those older habits: red wool threads tied round wrists to “draw out cold,” raw onion or snow rubbed on burning skin, and soft blessings breathed into mittens as if wool could keep a promise. You have no red thread, no onion, only breath and stubbornness.
So you begin with breath. Five in. Seven out. Your ribs scratch the wool like a quill over parchment—scratch, lift, scratch, lift—until the rhythm steadies. The ember you banked in ash answers with a tiny pulse you cannot see, only feel, a mouse asleep in your palm. You bring your wrist near that hill of gray and the skin there tells you a true thing: there is still warmth in the house. The knowledge outruns the heat itself and warms you a degree more than physics allows. You call that the soul’s trick and you bless it for cheating.
Your feet are the worst. Even held toe-cocked as Michel taught, they begin to drift away toward a polite oblivion. You bring them back with tasks: flex, count links, press heel against braided straw, name the prickle that returns. Pain is a language you understand; numb is a silence you cannot trust. The iron ring at your ankle nibbles like a small, patient mouth; you tuck wool between it and skin, and the bite becomes pressure, bearable as a hand.
The cell’s smells change when feeling thins. Wet wool steps back. Smoke rises. Straw rot turns sweeter, like apples that have stayed too long in a cellar. Rust stays where it always lives: on your tongue. You roll a pebble of water—the snowmelt saved from the slit—around your mouth to lift the iron taste and trick the flesh there into remembering it belongs to you. The water is so cold it squeaks against your teeth. You think of fish under ice and swallow anyway, and the swallow burns a clean line down your chest as if someone drew a candle through you.
“Stay with me,” you whisper into the dark—half to yourself, half to the little coal, half to the listening stone. Your voice comes back as a thin fog against the wool and turns to lace at your lips. It is a ridiculous thing, to witness your own breath as embroidery. The ridiculousness helps. You smile, and the smile hurts your chapped mouth just enough to prove it’s still yours.
You shift, slow as liturgy, into the posture you’ve learned is least dangerous: knees drawn, heels lifted, spine on the straw ridge you wove, shoulder against straw rather than stone, cheek tucked into the blanket’s fold. Your body remembers the map before your thought does. You become a small animal in its winter den, tail to nose, smoke curling above your roof. The rushlight stays asleep in its ash cradle; you let it sleep. Even light must be rationed.
From the seam between stones, Michel taps once—alive?—and you answer with two knuckles, though you have to aim by memory because your fingers can’t be trusted with edges. He adds a soft flutter that means breathe long. You obey. The torpid part of you complains—why work, when rest feels so warm?—but the sensible part wins because you have coached it all night. You praise yourself for picking a side. Cheap praise, maybe, but cheap bread still feeds.
The dog above sighs in its sleep, a big-lunged exhale that shakes a dusting of snow from some lintel into the yard. You hear it land as a soft thud, a snow-blanket thrown on the world. You imagine pressing your hand to that flank, feeling the heat travel into you the way the warmed stone under your back is doing now, slow, steady, shameless. Even the imagining lends degrees. A star pricks through the frost eyelashes on the bar; you accept it as company, not rescue. Stars rarely climb cell stairs. They sit outside and teach you to go on.
Numbness says, Lie flatter. You refuse. Numbness says, Loosen your mouth and let it all go. You refuse again. You bargain instead. “One finger,” you tell winter, “and one toe.” You choose them: left index, right big toe. You move each every turn of the drip-clock. The drip obliges, present as priest, exact as the registrar’s quill. In a place that takes your choices, you make these two and hold them like contraband.
Historically, winter inside stone killed men as surely as rope, but slowly; parish rolls list deaths “of cold” that the law never counted as execution but might as well have. Records show that on feast days alms were carried down to cells by boys with baskets and a handbell—hot pottage and black bread for those who waited. Curiously, there’s a line in one such roll where the scribe, perhaps from pity or from pride, added two words beside a name: “slept warm.” The man died a week later, yet somebody wanted the margin to remember he had one good night. You plant that phrase in your mouth like a seed. Slept warm. Not now, maybe not tonight. But someday your bones will use those words like a blanket.
The wall cools your temple, then fails to chill it further—the limit of stone. You take that as victory. The straw under your back talks in its papery way. It says, I was grass in a field once; I knew sun. I keep a little of it for you. You believe the lie enough to keep breathing. The ember under ash turns once like a sleeper and pulses again. You almost coo to it—good fire—then remember ethnographers wrote that low places speak to their coals like dogs and smile at how quickly you have joined the canon.
There is a moment—every watcher of the cold knows it—when drowsiness blooms like a winter flower. The body insists that warmth has arrived. It hasn’t. Your mind lights with odd kindnesses: the wool’s stink seems cozy, the chain’s weight like a hand’s, the straw a feast to lie upon forever. You spot the trick, barely. “No,” you tell the blessing that isn’t. “Not yet.” You lift the chosen finger. You lift the chosen toe. You recite—ash, plaits, straw, rags, blanket, skin, breath, star, neighbor, dog. You add ember this time, because now you have one. The flower fades. You keep the stem.
Curiously, there is a superstition you half remember from markets where women sold wool by weight: that you must never sleep with your head pointing north in deep winter, or sleep will go on traveling without you. You cannot know which way you face in a dungeon that eats compass points for breakfast. You make up directions of your own. “I sleep toward the dog,” you murmur, and let that be south, because south is where warmth lives in maps. The act of naming counties the cold cannot govern gives you another five breaths without surrender.
The bells outside keep their counsel. The quill above has gone silent. The dog’s paws move once in a dream. Somewhere water remembers that it is meant to fall and resumes its old arithmetic—drip, drip, drip—like a clerk counting coins in a chapel porch. Your body counts along and finds itself paying very little out and still moving forward.
You draw the blanket’s edge to your mouth and bite—gently, just enough to wring a thread of attention from the wool. The taste is lanolin and smoke and the faint, oddly clean tang of frost. Click your teeth. Wiggle the toe. Tap the knuckle. Five in. Seven out. You have turned your body into a church where a single monk keeps the office, whispering psalms to a congregation of rats and embers. Could you sleep inside such a service? Maybe. If the monk stays on his feet. If the ember keeps faith.
You think of Michel’s mother’s jar of lamb-fat—the winter’s candle—and imagine a finger dipped, touched to the wrists, passed to the ankle, made into a spell that isn’t a spell but works anyway. You picture your own wrists as lamps; you are stingy with oil and generous with time. You fold your hands under your ribs to warm them. A quiet spreads there—not surrender, not yet, but something that rhymes with it. Truce, perhaps.
“Hey,” you say to no one and to me and to whatever sits above the bars counting nights, “could you sleep now if you promised to wake?” The question sounds like a child offering terms to the sea. The sea is kind tonight. It sends one soft wave: the ember’s heat traveling the length of your spine and settling in your neck like a small dog making a bed.
You let your eyelids lower, not heavy but deliberate. The chosen finger lifts once more. The chosen toe follows. You press your tongue to the wound in your lip until it stings and tastes of iron, and that sting writes your name across the dark one last time. Then the monk begins another psalm in a voice made of breath and wool. The ember breathes under ash. The dog above breathes above snow. You breathe between them, and winter, satisfied that you have signed for rest but not for leaving, lets you pass.
You wake to a smell that does not belong underground. Warm yeast. A whisper of scorched crust. It threads the corridor ahead of footsteps and arrives at your bars the way summer arrives at a window—delicate, sure, rude with happiness. Your stomach riots. You sit up too quickly; the chain answers with a bright chime, and frost shakes off the blanket seam in a silver dust that glitters and dies.
The steps are not the limp of the tall guard. They’re smaller, lighter; a bucket lip knocks a stair on the turn and someone hisses a boy’s oath that ends in a laugh. A dog’s collar clinks once, then the honest scrape of a snout testing air. You can feel the heat of fur without touching it, the way a brazier warms a room it cannot see. You pull the wool tight, try to look like someone who does not care about bread, and fail. Your whole body leans.
Historically, towns and parishes sent “doles” in the dead of winter—coins and loaves collected at the church door, marked in rolls as for the prisoners and the poor. Records show that Christmas-tide and the days after the solstice swelled those lines: white loaves for the sick, black for the many, pots of pottage when there was meat to spare. Castle accounts list gatekeepers receiving baskets “at the grate,” the cost noted in tidy Latin while the steam rose in untidy joy below. Curiously, some places stamped alms-bread with a cross or the parish seal so it could not be resold; the mark sank into crust like a small star that kept its shape even when teeth found it.
The boy comes into view with the guard behind him—another man today, shorter, the buckle on his belt polished by habit. The boy’s cheeks are red from air that has remembered how to bite. He carries a shallow basket under his cloak like a secret he can’t keep. The dog slips ahead, trots to your bars, and gives a single quiet huff as if saying, Yes, you. You’re here. The huff smells of hay and cold nose. You can almost feel the wet of it.
The guard squints, his breath sewing smoke into the corridor. “No begging,” he says without energy. The boy glances up, then down, then up again with practiced innocence. “Two short loaves left,” he answers, which is not a question but a verdict. The guard makes the sound grown men make when they’ve lost a battle to a child and to their own better selves. He shrugs as if the cloak of his job slides off one shoulder and lets it hang there for a heartbeat. “Fast,” he says. “And no talk.”
The boy sets the basket on the floor and lifts a loaf the length of his hand. Steam threads from a small tear in its side, thin as a pulse. He pushes it through the bars. It catches for an instant, then yields to your fingers. Your skin burns from the brief contact, the happiest sting you have had in weeks. You bring the loaf close and the smell takes you by the throat—grain and yeast and that faint, miraculous sweetness of browned crust. You could weep into it and it would forgive you.
“Slow,” Michel whispers through the seam like a prayer and a joke. “You’ll sleep better.” You had already decided to eat like a thief—fast, secret, remorseless. But the first bite stops you. The cross stamped in the top makes a shallow ridge against your lip; crumbs stick to your tongue like summer dust clinging to a child’s palm. You chew. The inside is denser than the smell promised, a peasant’s loaf that had to feed many, but it is bread, and it is warm, and the heat runs to your wrists the way rushlight does—quiet, thorough, unafraid.
The dog inserts its nose as far as iron allows and snorts bread-scent back into the cell. You break a crumb and press it through for whiskers and a wet tongue. The guard notices and starts to scold, then decides not to. He has the look of a man who grew up with dogs and remembers what mercy feels like in fur. He claps the boy’s shoulder instead. “Go,” he mutters. “Before the others smell you.” The boy nods, but not before his hand vanishes beneath his cloak and emerges with a wrapped nub no bigger than a thumb. He lets it fall into the straw the way a child “drops” a coin he means you to find. Tallow. You swallow gratitude with bread; both burn kindly.
You are careful—Michel’s word still ringing in your ear. You break the loaf in your blanket so crumbs fall where rats won’t parade them to the world, and you eat in small, deliberate bites that seem to grow in your mouth instead of vanish there. The crust scrapes your sore lip and the scrape writes joy in iron ink; the inside yields and the yielding teaches your jaw again how to believe. You hold one last mouthful against your palate until warmth travels up into your sinuses and down into your chest and all the way to the coil of ash that guards your ember. The ember, ridiculous, answers—heat announcing itself to heat.
Down the corridor, other bars chime as other hands reach. The boy’s voice thins into distance—“Only two—share—tell them to come to the church if they can hear it.” The guard’s boots recede. The dog barks once, businesslike, then twice, pleased. Their sounds climb the stair and dissolve into the upper air where bells live, where smoke writes long sentences and finishes them, where the day’s thin light tries the yard and sees whether the snow will admit footprints.
You keep one piece—small, precious, more promise than food. Michel taps; you answer; you slide your scrap into the seam. His fingers meet yours, as rough as yours, as careful, and for a moment the stone between you behaves like a table instead of a wall. The bite goes where it needs to go. You hear a soft noise that might be more exhale than laugh. “Slow,” you remind him, because saying it to someone else makes you mean it.
You save a thumb’s worth to make a magic older than candles. You cup the last crumbs with the pinch of tallow, knead them into a gray paste, and press a smear along the blanket edge where your breath frosts it. The fat darkens the wool and seals some wind; the smell of sheep and kitchen fights the damp. You touch another whisper to the chain at your ankle where the bite returns whenever you forget it exists. The paste sits there like a poor man’s blessing.
The taste in your mouth changes. Rust falls back. Lanolin takes a step behind yeast. Smoke moves from enemy to spice. The straw underneath, always sour with rot, almost passes for a floor you picked on purpose. Could you sleep on bread? The answer is yes, not because you are full—you are not—but because the body recognizes heat with a gratitude that outruns hunger.
“Historically,” you murmur into the wool because knowing steadies you even when crumbs do better, “some parishes sent the Boy Bishop or the choir to sing at gaol doors, doles handed out between verses.” Records show coins tied into corners of cloth, loaves marked with crosses, and names read aloud before a chapel altar where a clerk once wrote in his neat hand pro captivis. Curiously, a baker’s book survives in one town with tiny drawings beside certain entries—not letters but icons: a barred window, a dog, a bell—reminders to carry warm bread to those who hear but cannot go. You imagine a line of such pictures marching across a margin like saints thin enough to pass through iron.
You picture the baker this morning—forearms dusted pale, breath fogging his own shop, shaping small loaves fast because the bell has spoken and the road is stubborn. You picture the church door open to air so cold it has a taste; you picture hands dropping coins that struck like funerary bells in the alms box; you picture the boy with the basket being told, the gaol first, then the almshouse. You bless them all in a language made of crumbs and exhale. The wool captures the blessing and stitches it into frost lace.
Michel taps again—three, pause, two: Saved some. You smile without seeing. You feel the dog’s bark again in your ribs, though he’s long gone; you feel the ember shift under ash as if it, too, has eaten. The cell smells briefly like a kitchen after Mass: yeast, smoke, wool, a ghost of onion rising from boards that sleep above. The air tastes like the kind that fills a lung and convinces it another breath is worth the trouble.
You lie back and make your small census. Frost along the seam, thinner now. Straw plaits under spine, stronger because warm backs trust them. Chain muffled where tallow sits between you and iron. Carved star under palm, cold but patient. Ember under ash, breathing like a creature awaiting its name. Dog somewhere above, probably asleep again, a heap of heat living out mercy without thinking it a virtue. Bells not yet, but soon. Quills idle. Snow considering whether to fall.
You tuck the blanket as Michel taught—narrow roll under knees, edge pinned under hip, a poor man’s carpentry that makes a room out of rags. You close your eyes. The last sweetness of crust still clings to your teeth. The taste says world, not cell. Your tongue tests it again and the bell in your chest answers with a low note that is not bronze but blood.
“Could you sleep,” you whisper—old aside, softer than ever—“with bread still warm against your breath?” You do not wait for the dungeon to reply. It speaks in its own old way: a single drop falls, exact and merciful; a rat, satisfied for once, curls without mischief; stone leans back from your bones by a finger’s width. The answer is yes. Not the sleep of banquet halls—not the long, careless drop of men who never learned winter—but a sturdy doze tied to warmth by a string.
You let go of the string just enough to drift, and keep the end looped around your wrist. If the loop tightens, you will wake; if it slackens, you will follow. Either way, the loaf’s steam has braided itself with your breath, and the night, which was a wall, becomes for a little while a door you lean against from the inside, warm.
The bread’s warmth fades to an ember in your chest, and you drift until the key learns your door again. Metal sings, wood answers, and cold barges in like an invited lord. “Up,” the guard grunts—neither the limping one nor the soft-shouldered man from the alms. This one speaks as if the air were debt and you owed him breath. “Straw out. Beat it.”
You scrabble the bedding into a ragged sack with your hands, straw whispering like dry rain. The chain at your ankle pulls you short until he relents with a second key and a gesture toward the corridor ring. “On,” he says, fixing you there to keep you clever but close. A tug, a nod, and you are tethered longer than last time—enough to drag the palliasse to the threshold. Cold climbs your wrists as you work. The wool blanket clings, wet and loyal; you peel it away and sling it over your shoulders like a poor man’s cloak. The smell of wet lanolin wakes every rat in memory. You do not care.
Historically, poor sleepers in castles lay on straw-stuffed sacks—palliasses—that were beaten out in winter mornings to shake frost and vermin free. Records from French and English keeps alike mention prisoners ordered to “beat the palliasse” at daybreak, then return to the same stuffing by night, as if cleanliness were a ritual that washed nothing but time. Archaeologists, scraping old floors, find lines of crushed seeds and grain hulls along the walls where straw gathered and rotted—a sediment of sleep. Curiously, household accounts far above your station speak of heating bricks or stones by the kitchen fire, wrapping them in cloth, and slipping them into beds; when charity or accident allowed, a gaol-bent servant might smuggle one to a cell, a “warm brick” turned holy by the distance it traveled.
The corridor breathes, a long gray throat. You tug the sack into the yard and the world lunges at you—sky, real sky, so pale it looks like someone rinsed the blue out and forgot to put it back. Snow crouches along the edges of stone like a dog waiting for orders. The dog that belongs to the castle is already at work, nose to drift, tail flagging, leaving hieroglyphs of paws across the yard and shaking a winter of water from its fur in a sound that is somewhere between rain and bells. Your breath goes taller in your chest, surprised to find itself outside. You taste iron from the rails and lake-water from the air and a sweetness that can only be sun thinking about returning.
“Here,” the guard says, tossing a stick so battered it is more knot than wood. You take it like a pilgrim takes a staff and set to work. The straw sack slaps under your blows, each strike puffing a halo of frost that winks in the light before falling as glitter to the flagstones. A cloud of small lives lifts with it—fleas, mites, prayers—and the dog sneezes in solidarity. You grin despite yourself, and the grin hurts your lip in a good way, reminding you that faces are muscles, not only masks.
Michel stands two doorways down, tethered in the same way, his blanket a hooded habit, his hands red to the knuckles. He raises the stick in greeting; you raise yours back. No talk. The guard’s eyes travel, measuring silence like grain. But stick on sack makes speech enough. You fall into a rhythm—beat, turn, beat, lift—and the straw answers, its papery voice growing cleaner as ice lets go and vermin lose their kingdom. Your wrists wake to the work. Your shoulders burn and celebrate the burning the way a man blesses a pain that is not cold.
The sun is low but honest. It seems to pour itself along the southern wall in a narrow gold river, then shatters on the iron bars of a cell like light learning to speak in syllables. You aim your sack into that river when you can, sliding it like a salmon between shadows to drink heat. For one fierce minute, the straw crackles in the light and lets go of a smell you almost forgot: summer. Green, crushed, dusty-sweet. It lives and dies between heartbeats, but your nose remembers enough for your bones to nod.
Could you sleep standing here, face to the wall, cheek to the stone warmed by a thin noon? You try, closing your eyes into the gray day until the sun licks your eyelids in a color you name honey because the word itself thickens the light. For that blink, the frost stops composing lace and writes in water only. You let it. Then the guard clears his throat—a cough with a key in it—and the river on the wall moves on, and your sack goes light where it’s dry and heavy where water clings, and you bend back to the stick.
The dog sidles close when the guard looks away. Its breath is cabbage and smoke and clean fur. It gives the sack one investigatory bite and discovers there is no marrow in straw. You scratch behind its ear with the back of your hand—the safe end—and your fingers find heat that rides your blood backward into the cell, into the coal under ash, into the carved star on your wall. “Good,” you whisper, and the dog answers with a sound that is not a bark and not a growl—a church of sound with no words. Then it moves on, leaving a print like a warm seal pressed into your morning.
The stick grows less useful and more true the longer you hold it, as if your hand teaches it to be the right shape. You knock a last sheet of frost from the palliasse and let the sack sag open. Straw spills like a harvest into winter. You shake the sack itself—a wind-flag of rags—until its seams stop weeping ice. Then you kneel and scoop. Your fingers sting, then numb, then sting again when the sun returns for one more pass and convinces your skin to live. You carry the sack back to your door, the chain following like a sullen dog that has learned your pace, and you pour summer back into winter, stuffing the palliasse in layers, foam for a sea you will navigate horizontal by night.
The guard nods once, bored into mercy. “Enough.” He twitches his hand and your ankle knows the meaning before your brain does; the tether clicks you free of the corridor ring and bites you to the inside ring again. He looks at your blanket, at the edge you have stiffened with tallow and crumbs, at the way you fold it like a man who has learned a map of warmth. His face changes a finger’s width toward human. “Curfew,” he says, which in his mouth means door. The wood swings, the iron mouths sing, and the cell swallows you back.
Inside smells different. The straw is sharper, brighter, almost cheerful in its clean pain. The ash you scattered days ago takes the wet that tries the flagstones and makes it behave. You make a hollow for your spine and line it with braided straw, sailor’s coils for a sailor who never leaves harbor. You set your sack like a hill against the wall so your shoulder can lean into straw and not into stone; you remember Guy de Chauliac without naming him and move slowly, because sudden heat breaks what cold makes fragile. You lay your wrists over the ash mound where the ember sleeps and feel—yes—the slow-talk of warmth speaking into your skin. “Wake,” you ask the coal, like a friend you have learned not to shake. The ash breathes red, then black, then red again. You build a wick from the corner of rush you saved, just enough to prove light can still be made, just not yet. You bank it again because you have learned to love futures as much as flames.
From the seam, Michel’s tap: one, then three—sun? You answer with two, then one—brief. The wall holds your words like a mother holds bread for later. The dog above punches the boards once with joy and settles. The drip considers its career and continues. Smoke from the corridor flattens along the ceiling and writes nothing you can read but everything you can smell.
You test the work. Heels cocked, not flat. Blanket rolled under knees. Edge tucked under hip. Chain tucked under edge. Wool stiffened with tallow at the seam where your breath makes a country only you inhabit. You slide your palm over the carved star and press it the way a child presses a seal into warm wax. “Hold,” you say, and it holds because you say it. Your mouth remembers bread, not rust, and your teeth find a crumb you hid from yourself, and your jaw makes a prayer out of chewing.
Historically, days like this divided time: beating the palliasse at first light, a cup of pottage when fortune remembered your name, inspection in a corridor where cold did not ask permission, and then hours of stone thinking about you while bells thought about others. Records show that the “justices in eyre” or at gaol delivery cleared prisons by season—winter not least—and that some sleepers went from straw to court to rope in a noon. Sleep in those lives became what it is for you now: a craft requiring tools. Curiously, a small set of rules survives in a gaoler’s marginal notes: “Lift heels; keep breath; plait straw for back; ash for slime; tallow for bite; count; pray; if a dog passes, borrow his heat.” It reads like nonsense to men with featherbeds. You read it with your bones.
Could you sleep after the yard, after the sunbeam, after the stick taught the sack to be a bed again? You do not so much sleep as set out your craft. Breath to breath. Link to link. Ember to ash and ash to ember. You stitch the hour to your body with a needle made of counting. You listen to the corridor scribe who is not there, to his quill made of drip, writing your survival line by line across the inside of your chest. The bell far away begins to think about evening. You think about nothing but the small country you have built out of straw and heat and neighbor and dog and word.
“Could you sleep like this?” you murmur—habit, charm, joke—and the wool catches the words and makes them into a fringe of frost you lick away without shame. You close your eyes. A sound like a hand smoothing a blanket comes from above—only the guard shifting a log, but you accept the blessing anyway. You pull winter over you and turn it wrong-side in, the way people did at solstice to confuse misfortune. The dungeon nods, ancient and fair: you have beaten your bed, you have stolen a sunbeam, you have banked a star. Payment made. Permission granted.
You let your shoulders fall into straw not stone. You give your weight to the hill you built with your own hands. You make a promise to your left index finger and your right big toe and keep it for two more breaths, then four, then seven. The dog above gives one last sleep-sigh that warms the boards through memory alone. Your ember turns once in its ash cradle like a child finding the cool side of a pillow. The world narrows to wool and the clean knife of air you measure like treasure. The bell is still silent, which is also a bell.
And in that silence, you sleep—not forever, not safely, but rightly, as a craftsman sleeps beside his tools, ready to wake when the metal speaks.
The ember has learned your name. It breathes once under ash, then lower, then lower still, no longer a star, just a remembered pulse. You lay your palm above it without touching and feel a warmth so slight it would not register in a richer house, yet here it is a benediction. The frost along the blanket seam answers by spinning quieter lace—whiter, finer, whispering as it grows, like snow gossiping about summer and finding it hard to believe.
You take stock of your night as a craftsman does his bench before leaving it: ash smoothed like soft sand; plaits of straw coiled into a low hill where your spine can float; tallow at wrist and ankle where iron would otherwise write; the curtain of straw at the slit window that taught the weather to knock; the small stone warmed to the temperature of mercy; the carved star under your hand—still uneven, still holding; Michel breathing through the seam, alive, with a rhythm you recognize better than your own. Above, the dog has settled with a grunt you have learned to call blessing. The castle keeps its long breath, and you keep yours.
Historically, people slept in two acts: a “first sleep,” then a waking—an hour for prayers, for mending, for talking softly—then a “second sleep” before dawn. Records from household books and sermons mention this middle watch as if it were another room in the house, a time when the mind walked and the body waited. You have lived the watch in its clearest form: counting links, nursing coals, speaking to the next soul through stone. Curiously, in some places folk tucked a piece of blessed bread under the bolster on certain winter nights—especially near the Nativity—believing it kept hunger-dreams and vermin from the bed; if rats nibbled it, they were said to forget their names and find their way elsewhere. You almost laugh, because names have been the one thing you and Michel have kept safe.
The bell does not speak, but silence answers with traces of it—bronze remembered in the stone, a taste like old pennies that is somehow kind. The quills upstairs are still. Their knives sleep, their sand cools, their gall dries to a gentler smell; for a few breaths no one writes your body onto paper. Your chain shifts with your exhale and decides, for once, not to argue. The straw-saints you braided—unblessed, unofficiated, but faithful—hold their shape. The window’s thin mouth shows nothing but a slate of cloud, and even that makes peace with you by not blowing.
Survival is not comfort. You know that now in marrow and in tongue. You won a night, but the night did not love you for it. You warmed a single stone, and your back sang gratitude while your feet stayed wind. You ate bread, and your belly learned joy while your ribs learned patience. You hid a coal like a sinful jewel and called it virtue because it did only good. This is the paradox the frost hisses as it writes white fern along your wool: you can live here; you cannot live well; live anyway.
Could you sleep to such a verdict? You have learned to. You breathe low, slow—five in, seven out—until your ribs take their own counsel. You keep your promise to the left finger and the right toe, lifting them now and then like small flags to tell winter you are not yet conquered. You think of the dog’s warmth traveling through boards like an old psalm, of the bell that called the town to lauds and the baker to his bench and the boy to the alms basket and the dog to your bars. You think of Michel pressing a crumb through stone and you pressing one back, of the way a wall became a table for an instant and decided to remember it. You give each thought its own breath and let it drift like smoke toward the slit where snow once walked in and learned its manners.
The ember dims again—just a thought of red now, a vow more than a flame. You bank it deeper, whispering the word people used in low places where coals were treated like animals: stay. The ash obliges, and in obeying it becomes not burial but cradle. Your palm hovers one last time, steals a thread of warmth, tucks it into the place between ribs and heart where warm things are safest.
You take up your simple litany a final time—ash, plaits, straw, rags, blanket, skin, breath, star, neighbor, dog, bell, bread, ember—and step down it like a stair. At the bottom, you find a floor that is not stone but the slow, patient tide of sleep. You do not fall; you lie down on it as a weary ferryman lies down on the dock, knowing the river will be there when he rises.
Let the frost keep its gossip; let the smoke keep its pale alphabet; let the rust keep its old story in your mouth but softer now that yeast has spoken a newer one. Let the dog keep watch for both sides of the door. Let the clerk keep his pen capped. Let the bell, when it chooses, cut the sky with a bright line you will feel in your bones as warmth rather than sorrow.
If you want more nights like this—kept, not cured—then, well… you know which bell to ring. Only if you truly enjoyed the keeping. For now I will ring nothing. I will only stand this quiet watch at your side, counting with you, until your breath counts without me.
Close your eyes. Curl the blanket under your knees and tuck the edge beneath the iron the way we learned together. Place your palm on the carved star—yes, that one—and tell it hold. It holds. Hear the dog above give one last sleep-sigh, honest and large. Feel the ember below answer with a breath that arrives only because you asked gently. Let the snow outside remember how to be a blanket and the stone inside remember how not to be your enemy for a while. Be the small, stubborn heat a body makes. No more; no less.
When you wake, the craft begins again. That is the burden. That is the blessing. Tonight, you have survived, and survival is not comfort. But it is life, and life is what your breath is making now, quietly, beautifully, in a room that was built to forget and is forced, by your sleeping there, to remember.
Rest. I am here. The frost writes. The ember listens. The dog keeps. The bell waits. You sleep.
You let the edges dissolve. The room grows simple: wool against mouth, straw under spine, air in, air out. Nothing urgent, nothing sharp. Just breath moving like a small boat across very still water.
The ember under ash becomes a warm idea that hums. You do not need to see it. You only know it is there, the same way you know the dog above has turned once, sighed, forgiven winter again. The slit window cools your cheek a finger’s width from the blanket. You turn your face the tiniest amount and the air changes flavor from wool to stone to almost-snow. Choose the one you like and stay with it.
Count five slow heartbeats. Then seven. If you miscount, that is all right; the numbers will keep themselves. Your jaw unhooks. Your hands learn their weight again and decide to keep it. The chain lies quiet, a circle that does not need to speak.
Now notice the small chorus: drip far away, softer than before; straw answering with a papery hush; your own breath laying frost-lace along the seam, stitch by stitch. You have time for this. You have time for everything that matters tonight.
Let your shoulders sink and your heels stay cocked away from the stone. Let the star under your palm be cool and faithful. Tell it hold, or do not; it holds either way.
Picture a small field in summer—no, do not picture, only feel the warmth of it in your back where the warmed stone is. Let that warmth widen a thumb’s width, then another. If it stops, it is perfect. If it goes on, it is perfect.
You are safe enough to sleep. You are tired enough to sleep. You are allowed to sleep.
Breath in. Breath out. Straw. Wool. Quiet.
I’ll keep the watch. Ring nothing. Move nothing. Just rest.
Good night. Good night. Good night.
