‘What’s your name?’ asked Clariel. She leaned back as if to yawn, and took a look at the wall to see if her handiwork of the night before was noticeable. It wasn’t too visible, not on the wall itself, but she was disturbed to see spots of fallen mortar on her blankets and sheets. In the daylight, the sprinkled mortar was quite a bright yellow, possibly even obvious enough to be seen from above.

‘Can’t say,’ said the girl cautiously. She shrugged the basket off her back and set it on the floor.

‘Sharrett!’ roared Reyvin from above. ‘Don’t talk to the prisoner!’

Sharrett sighed and rolled her eyes. Clariel winked at her, and the girl smiled. She took a small loaf of plain bread and a round of soft cheese out of the basket and put them on the table, filled up the water jug from a bottle, and with her face screwed up and nostrils clamped as best she could, tied a string several times around pot and lid of the chamber pot to make sure it would stay shut in her basket and swapped it for a new one.

‘Thank you,’ said Clariel quietly. She was thinking about when she had been Sharrett’s age and much more carefree than this streetwise urchin. She had worshipped her father, and been both afraid and respectful of her mother, and the world had seemed an open, easy place. Even back then she had been drawn to the wild, and had spent many happy hours in Estwael’s parklands. In retrospect the age of nine or ten had been among the happiest times of her life.

Sharrett finished sorting out the chamber-pot swap, and crouched down to settle the basket on her back before starting up the ladder. When she got to the top, she was helped up over the edge and then the guards pulled up the ladder. As they began to fix the shutters closed again, Clariel called out.

‘Hey! Can I have a candle and some friction lights?’

‘No!’ shouted Reyvin. ‘Orders!’

The final shutter came down, and once again the prison was locked in darkness. Clariel shivered. With the dark, she felt the walls come closer, the air grow more still and dead. Worse still, she couldn’t imagine a way out. It felt like she had reached an ending in her life, that it had stopped with her parents’ death, and this was just a short continuation …