“You tell me Garranon is your friend,” I said.

“Garranon is my friend,” she agreed.

I stared at her and she met my gaze steadily. I hadn’t really considered the Tamerlain as anything except a servant of a weakened, treacherous god. That Garranon was a friend of the Tamerlain was beyond belief. Had he had such a powerful ally, surely she would have shown herself sooner—saving his brother, destroying his enemies. Something. If my life had been hard at the hands of my father, Garranon’s had been worse.

“How long have you been friends?” I asked.

My disbelief stung and she jerked her chin up, a low growl in her throat. “He has been mine since he came here to Estian, a child, alone and afraid. He saw me—as no one from that place has ever seen me—and he feared me not. Since that night when he slept curled against me, a child even by your short-lived reckoning, he has been my friend.”

I believed her suddenly, but it didn’t improve my opinion of her. “A friend who watched as the king raped a child.”

“It was never rape, that happened before he was here. The king used herbs . . . magic.” Even in her inhuman face I could read anguish. She’d known that herbs and magic don’t mean it wasn’t rape.

While we’d talked, the last of Jade Eye’s drugs had left me. Without their aid, my terror of the Asylum, my claustrophobic anger at my inability to fight back effectively against Jade Eyes had been growing in my belly. The addition of bone-deep anger at the pain of a child—for all that he was now an adult well able to take care of himself loosed the ties on my spiteful tongue.

“And now I’m supposed to allow you to helpme ?” I asked.

She shot to her feet as if I’d hit her, and for an instant the rage in her eyes made me think my worries about my current situation would be over even sooner than I’d believed possible—though I’d been hoping for Oreg rather than death.

She snarled soundlessly, then stalked away from me. Facing the wall she said, “You knownothing about it. I was constrained, as was my master. I had to watch and do nothing.” The tension left her in a rush and when she turned back to me, there was only sorrow in her eyes.

“So much damage had been done to the fabric of this world, it was all my master could do to hold it together. Do you think He wanted to let His temple fall to foreign armies He could have destroyed with a touch? But even so much might have been enough to burst the dam built to keep humankind alive. He . . . I couldn’t even save one child.”