She walked in tentatively, a horrible creature with seven heads who was going to poison me with the tears that tracked down her face. I scuttled away from her as far as I could, but she kept coming.

“Tis,” I said, though I hadn’t planned on saying anything at all. “Stay back. Please?” If she tried to touch me, I knew I would die. But the little voice had been forced out of hiding for fearI would hurther .

She backed away then, and left me to my safe haven while she raked out the straw that didn’t belong to my nest. I stood glued to the far wall, shaking.

When she left, I wept as she had, but I didn’t know why. I didn’t stop until the monsters came again.

THEYHELD MY HEAD UNDER WATER THIS TIME, BUTI didn’t struggle because Jade Eyes told me not to. I held my breath until I passed out. Then they—and I—did it again.

This was something new, and in my drugged exhaustion it seemed perfectly sane to peer through the depths of the water and look for . . . safety, sanity, I don’t know what. It seemed to me that I could see it just on the outside of my vision.

“See what?” Jade Eyes asked, after I awoke coughing and choking the second time.

I blinked at him like an idiot; even after four years, the mask of stupidity I wore throughout my youth was more at home on my face than not. Tosten liked to tease me about it.

Tosten. Hurog.

“Something to fill the hole in me,” I said, realizing after I said it that it was true. I rolled off the wet bench and back into the water without help this time.

Hurog,I thought.Dragon, come take me.

Dragon claws snatched at me, dragon magic, filled me for a moment. I knew this dragon.

“Oreg!” I screamed underwater.

Then between one instant and the next it was gone, and the hole that separation from Hurog always left inside me was all the emptier for having once been filled. It was infinitely worse than the pain in my head, and some part of me believed that I would never be whole again. That this time they would succeed in taking Hurog from me.

A hand, not dragon claws, hauled me out of the water and strapped me down to the table in the center of the room.

“Did you feel that?” asked Jade Eyes excitedly to his fellow mage. “That’s what his magic felt like on the trip over here. Have you ever felt anything like it?”

I cried for Oreg’s loss. Even in the state I was in, I realized that Oreg had tried to rescue me—and he’d failed. There would be no rescue. And if Oreg couldn’t rescue me, no one could.