“Don’t be absurd.”

“It is not treachery to deliver the vested G’deon into a certain death by poisoning? What is it, then?”

“Who made you judge, Zanja na’Tarwein? You are nothing but rogues, you and Karis both–a couple of fools with too much power and not enough wisdom. You must be restrained, for the future of Shaftal. If you will not accept restraint, then you must be killed. I regret it, yes. But it is you who have made the choice, not I.”

“I have too much power?” Suddenly the entire conversation did indeed seem absurd, and Zanja uttered a laugh, quickly choked off by the pain of her ribs.

“You are all the more dangerous for not knowing what you are doing. Fifteen years ago Harald G’deon made the last and greatest error in his life of errors, when his courage failed him and he cursed Shaftal by filling a weak and inappropriate vessel with his power. For fifteen years I have managed to keep Karis in control. Yet the moment you came to Shaftal, before Karis ever met you, before she ever even knew your name, she began to break her restraints. That is your power, Zanja na’Tarwein: the power to attract, the power to influence, the power to awaken that which should be left asleep. If I allowed you to exercise that power, this very land would be destroyed.”

Zanja said, “You lived with her for years, and yet you do not know her. She would destroy nothing.”

“Your people were destroyed by the very Sainnites that Harald allowed to get a foothold in this land!”

“My people were destroyed,” Zanja said, “by the dream of a misguided seer. If the people of Shaftal had given that seer proper guidance, rather than calling her their enemy because her father was a Sainnite–”

Mabin leapt to her feet and struck her.

Zanja said, “You see, you are not defeating the Sainnites. You are becoming them.”

Mabin struck her again. Then, without a word, she left Zanja alone in the darkness, taking even the lamp with her.

Zanja lay still, hoping for the pain to ease, waiting for her breath to slow. Four witnesses there were to the true nature of Mabin’s betrayal of Shaftal, one from each of the four ancient orders of the Lilterwess. They would have a credibility that Mabin herself could not contravene. And Norina, for all her faults, would not rest until she’d seen justice done. Zanja lay silent in the dark hold of the boat, willing Medric to see her, to understand what she was doing, to convince Emil and J’han and Norina to flee to safety while Mabin, rather than pursuing them, waited for a visit from a woman who was dead.

“Accept the willing sacrifice of a katrim,” Zanja entreated them. “Don’t waste your lives trying to save mine. Go, and make my death and Karis’s death be of some significance. That’s all I ask.”

Several times a day, they came in to lift her up over the bucket that served as her toilet. Often, they also left her a meal and fresh water. Usually, Zanja scarcely even noticed the food, except as a means for measuring the time. She felt no hunger, and even to drink water required more effort than it was worth. Though the worst of her pain began to ease after a few days, she hardly got up from her pallet, for her splinted leg and bandaged ribs made movement nearly impossible in that cramped space. She heard Mabin pacing up and down the length of the boat’s deck, for hours at a time, like a wild animal in a cage. Zanja lay starving in the darkness below where she walked.

Twenty‑one meals had been served when Zanja’s door opened and Mabin stepped into the cargo hold once again. “We will force you to eat if we have to,” she said.

Zanja had been expecting and preparing for this visit all morning, for her prescience seemed enhanced by hunger, just as a seer’s ability to envision the future might sometimes be enhanced by fasting. “I cannot stop you from doing what you like,” she said.

“Such despair is unbecoming in a warrior.”

“Despair is what makes my confinement endurable. I would give you some as a gift if I could, then perhaps you would be less restless. The sound of your pacing interrupts my thoughts.”

“Your thoughts will be even more interrupted if my Paladins have to pour cold gruel down your throat and force you to swallow it or drown in it.” Mabin hung the lamp from the lamp hook. She held a pistol, and despite Zanja’s apparent weakness took care not to turn her back on her. “I expected Karis would come for you by now.”

“No doubt,” Zanja said.

“Tell me what you think she is doing.”

Zanja closed her eyes, and there she saw Karis, as she had never seen her in life, lifting and swinging a great hammer, with the molten metal flying at each blow. Sweat polished the great muscles of her back and shoulders, and sunlight caught on her skin, and in her hair, as if she were made of gold. “She is working at the forge,” Zanja said. “All these years you knew her, and you never knew how strong she is.”

“Nonsense,” Mabin said. “If she had returned to Meartown, I would know.”

But Zanja felt a little peace. Karis seemed so intent on her work, surely that meant she had found contentment at last.

Now the time Zanja had bought for her friends’ escape was indeed running out, and she could only hope that Medric’s dreams had brought them all to a place of safety. She began to eat a little– enough to placate Mabin, she hoped, but not so much that it would dull her heightened senses. Mabin came into the cargo hold and talked to her for hours at a time, and Zanja devoted all her energies toward making the experience more unpleasant for Mabin than it was for her.

She was aided in this endeavor by an astonishing run of bad luck that began to plague her captors and to harry Mabin in particular, as only small annoyances can. Zanja learned firsthand about the mice and maggots fouling the food supply, but she also heard hints of other irritants as well: an infestation of fleas, broken ropes and fouled lines, unseasonably cold and wet weather which forced her captors into close quarters, and an unpredictable tendency for the boat to slip its anchor. Already tormented by these unremitting vexations, Mabin could not endure with any grace Zanja’s deliberate attempts to infuriate her.

By the end of another two days of questioning, Zanja knew she had put herself in grave danger. This battle of wills between the two of them operated with its own logic, and had long since become far more than a mere delaying tactic. Though she lay awake that night, she fell into a restless sleep at last. Night upon the river was a silent time, and Zanja slept with her ear against the wood that separated her from the water. Sometimes, in her dreams, it seemed she could hear the water sliding past, but tonight she heard something else: a faint, rhythmic tapping, sometimes close and sometimes far away, almost as though someone were swimming up and down the length of the boat, drumming lightly upon its hull.

Near dawn, Zanja awakened abruptly. She was cold–and wet.

Her pallet and blankets were soaked with cold water. The water was collecting in the lowest point of the hold, where it stood in a puddle a hand’s width deep, but she could not figure out its source. Every part of the hull seemed wet, as though the wood was weeping. She dragged herself up the slope of the hull and waited to see what would happen next.

By the time the door was opened for her morning meal, the water was knee deep, and the man who had opened the door uttered a surprised yelp at the little river that flowed over his feet when he forced open the door. Soon the boat echoed with pounding footsteps, and Mabin came with three guards behind her to search the cargo hold for the puncture that they assumed Zanja had somehow put through the hull. “After we repair the leak you’ll sleep in water,” Mabin said. “You’ll have only hurt yourself.” But they had scarcely begun their search when someone came to the door with the news that the aft hold was half full of water as well.