Briant gives a glance back, slowing his pace only enough to allow you to catch up. He's not as chatty when he's 'at work', but you detect muted gratitude for your assistance in his expression before you both head inside.

Your footsteps bang off hardwood floors, echoing in stone halls that hold no sounds of life and living to create the diffuse undercurrent of a populated hold. It reminds you a little of the lonely villa in the Trantio hills, with its mournful emptiness; but the walls are large quarried stones with tall ceilings, rafters with hanging candlestick holders instead of plastered walls and lamp sconces. You spot pits and chips in the stone walls as you prowl through the dark; signs that tell vague stories of battles previously fought that got at least this far into the keep... or started inside. It's dark in here; there are no windows on the lowest floor, so light only creeps in from the open door reflecting in fractions down the halls; but that's enough for you, and Briant seems to know where he is going, leading to a flight of stone stairs to the second floor where arrow slit windows are slightly more generous with illumination and finally you begin to hear the muted mumbles of conversation. You track it down to a locked door, and Briant bangs on it with his fist.

"Donallo ! Donallo, sors maintenant!"

Two voices cry out at once.

"Partez!" - masculine, mature, exhausted, fragile, desperate.

"Aidez moi! Aidez-moi s'il vous plaît!" - feminine, hysterical, tentatively hopeful, full of tears.

Either might have been enough. Briant looks at you, toes at the door, and then coordinates a countdown from three to one, after which you both slam it with a standing front kick that mashes free the tenon of the lock and bangs the door open. At once you are assaulted with that awful, familiar smell of human incarceration; sweat, and puke, and misery, and filth. The master bedroom within might have been sumptuous and princely, but almost all the masterwork furniture is toppled or scarred. The walls are scratched, spattered in places with blood. The naked flame of an oil lamp with a smashed glass chimney lights the room from one corner. Fragments of it rest on the ground beneath it, in a scatter of dried and crusted blood; the wall behind it scorched and blacked from where oil must have once been scattered. A great four post bed dominates the room, a man standing by its side, a woman tied with one wrist and ankle to each post like a prisoner on a rack. From Briant's stunned hesitation, you gather this dishevelled and harrowed looking man is Lord Donallo. The woman on the bed, you gather at an educated guess based on the matching silver rings on her and the man's hands, is his wife (or someone elses). Like so many other humans you have seen in subjection, she has the remnant of natural beauty hiding under the dirt and deprivation; a lingering shipwreck of a woman, whose big blue eyes may once have held more than abject misery. Her tattered and stained shift is in worse condition his dirty tunic. Based on the wild bruising and abrasion sores on her arms and ankles, she has been held in this way for weeks. In the heartbeat of silence, she lets out a sob.

Briant is paralyzed with the sight of the tableaux. Donallo looks between the two of you, shakes his head with mournful understanding of the scene, and raises one hand, palm up, begging patience.

Spoiler: OOC:
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Briant is stunned by the scene; Taalia is much more familiar with similar things, so she is not, and might choose to act, or not, immediately.