The Quiet Wing was the Lessaran prison for the struck, and it was quiet, which was the only thing it had ever been built to be.
It ran along the old river side of Sallowmere, a long gallery of cells cut into a stone so grey that the damp had turned it almost black at the base. The floor was flagged with slabs that held the cold as a churchyard holds it, and the walls sweated in the mornings and dried in the afternoons, and the air that came in through the high slits was thin and wet and smelled of the river mud below the wall. There was no sound in the gallery except the warders’ boots and the drip of the water from the roof into the buckets at the far end, and the voices of the women in the cells, which were almost never raised.
Mireille was put in a cell at the bottom of the gallery, with a grey blanket and a tin cup and a stone bench that was a finger too short for her. Her satchel had been taken. Her cloak had been taken. The Census had gone with the clerk at the Assembly’s foot of the stair, and she had watched it go, and she had not been able to make herself cry in front of him, which she thought was a Chancery habit she had never been able to unlearn.
