“She’s beyond your reach at this time, Queen’s Guard. Save your strength for another moment. She’s bloodied, but not broken; look!”
The three of them turned to look, but the wagon had long since disappeared. The Mort cavalry marched onward, seemingly endless.
“Who are you?” Galen demanded, turning around again.
But the man and his companions had already faded into the crowd.
Kelsea’s dungeon was eight feet by eight feet. She had discovered this by walking the length of each wall, measuring paces. Three of the walls were stone, well built; Kelsea’s fingers could detect no cracks or leaks. The fourth wall was made up of iron bars and a door, beyond them a hallway of indeterminate length. The sounds from this hallway were not good: some screaming, some moaning, and, down the corridor, one man who could not stop babbling, holding an interminable dialogue with someone named George. The fact that George was not there to hold up his end of the conversation was no impediment to this poor soul, who seemed determined to convince his invisible friend that he was not a thief.
There was no way to measure time. They had taken her watch in the camp, and Kelsea was already finding out that the worst of a bad situation was the uncertainty of hours passing. Meals provided some respite—though not much, as they were usually cold vegetables, occasionally combined with some sort of meat that Kelsea could not identify. She forced it down all the same. Meals did not seem to conform to any set schedule, and it could be a long while before the next arrived. Water also came erratically; Kelsea had learned to ration her drinking bucket.
She could see very little; the Mort did not allow prisoners so much as a candle. Some of these inmates were undoubtedly being kept alive against their will, for Kelsea had heard more than one voice down the hallway beg for death. She saw the logic behind the deprivation of light; the darkness was in itself a terrible thing. She had shown greater kindness to her own prisoners, even to Thorne.
But thinking of Thorne was a mistake. By her best guess, Kelsea had been down here for four days, and she had discovered that a dungeon was of little use for anything but reflection. Over those last weeks in the Keep, watching the Mort draw closer, there had been no time for self-assessment, but here there was nothing else, and she thought often of Arlen Thorne, kneeling on the platform, his face twisted in agony. He had been a traitor and a trafficker, a brutal man who did not blanch at torture. He had presented a clear danger to the Tearling. And yet—
“George, you must believe me!” the man down the hall shouted. “I did not take it!”
Kelsea wondered why there was no one to quiet him. She rarely saw anyone here, only jailors and the servants who brought the food. They provided a brief moment of light with their torches, enough for Kelsea to have mapped out her cell, with its empty floor and two buckets. She had not seen her own jailor since her arrival, and was just as happy to have it so. The darkness, the monotony, the unscheduled nature of meals . . . these things were at least gloomily predictable, but the jailor was a pure variable, and Kelsea preferred the grim certainty of her solitude.
It was cold down here, and dank—she had seen no moat around the Palais, but moisture was certainly leaking in from somewhere—but Kelsea was relatively fortunate. She had worn a warm dress for the early morning excursion across the bridge, and the heavy wool had taken minimal wear on the long road. She only felt the chill on rare occasions when wind moaned through the dungeons, a sure sign that there were either multiple entrances and exits or a failure in the structure somewhere. She spent much of her time near the bars, listening, trying to understand the spatial distances in this place. The Palais was not as tall as the Keep, but it covered an enormous acreage. She might be as far as half a mile from the outer walls.
At this moment, Kelsea sat against the wall beside the bars, trying to judge whether she was really hearing a certain sound: scratching and scraping on the far side of the wall. Based on the dim, torchlit glimpses she’d gotten on her way in here, there was another barred cell over there. The Mort didn’t like to waste space, nor did they like to give prisoners the barest sliver of privacy. There was someone there, and that someone was scraping something against the wall, repeatedly and without pattern.
Kelsea cleared her throat. She hadn’t had a drink in several hours, and her voice seemed to feel each syllable as its own special rasp.
“Hello?” she called in Mort.
The scraping stopped.
“Is someone over there?”
The scraping resumed, slower now. Kelsea felt that whoever was over there was doing it deliberately, to show her that he’d heard but simply wasn’t answering.