The harsh regime the prisoners had been kept under relaxed by degrees. Inside the cell block, the individual cells were only barred at night. They could talk to each other freely outside those times, as long as it didn’t interfere with their chores. The women were made to work in the vegetable plots inside the walls, fetching and carrying water, doing laundry in vats of boiling water, from sunrise to sunset. It was back-breaking, exhausting labour that would have been hard if it had been done for themselves or with the promise of pay.

Neither Stanislav nor Dalip were compelled to join in. The pit was deemed sufficient for them, but, led by the older man, they turned up every morning to do their share. Hoots of derision had joined the slaps and kicks which had been common enough to begin with. They tailed off as the prisoners got used to their roles. And now, a week later, casual violence was mostly redundant. Of course, the guards weren’t going to boil washing or weed between rows of cabbages. Then again, they’d thought they weren’t going to die in the pit either. That they might made them realise the geomancer didn’t care about them one way or the other: prisoners, guards, they were all the same in her mind.

The threat and the promise was that the regime grew to be normal, when it was anything but. Their lives consisted of mean meals, hard physical labour, beatings and captivity.

Dalip was with Stanislav in the pit, training with short wooden sticks instead of knives.

‘We must rebel. While the memory of Charlie’s death remains fresh,’ said Stanislav.

‘Before my next fight?’

‘Your next fight will be against something that you cannot hope to defeat. Remember that you are supposed to be scared. You are not. You are simply too angry at her to be scared. That is why she shut Charlie in with the boar. He was scared when you were not.’

‘But I was scared,’ Dalip protested.

‘She does not want ordinary frightened. She wants you to experience such terror that you piss yourself and run screaming for the door. You will not give her that, whatever they put in here with you.’

‘Don’t be so sure.’

‘And if it is the dragon?’

Dalip thought about that. They had all seen it early on: almost as if it had made a show of itself. Then it had been conspicuous by its absence. The sky above the castle was strangely blank without it. But the gates had remained open, and the guard not reinforced. It was still around, that was certain.

‘Well, maybe,’ he conceded. He ought to be terrified of it, but he was already thinking of ways of cutting it, if only he could get close enough.