Shaking, shaking until my teeth rattled. Where is she? Where is the miller’s daughter? A gauntleted fist to my right cheek, smash! Where is she? Speak up, slut! A blow to the left cheek, thud! Use your tongue or we’ll cut it out for you, a little bit at a time!

It hurt to speak. The words wouldn’t come out right. Gone. Gone where you’ll never find her. My aching jaw, my bleeding mouth and muzzy head turned the words into a string of nonsense. I had to stand straight. I had to look brave. But everything was wavering and swirling around, and I wanted to be sick. You’re a thug and a bully and an abuser of women, I tried to say. And so are your men, because they follow your lead. You are not fit to be chieftain. The dung heap is too good –

Slam! The floor was hard under my face. Something thudded into my ribs. All I could see was black. Filthy slut’s only good for one thing. Mathuin’s voice. Throw her in the lockup with the men. Maybe by morning she’ll be ready to tell a different story. If she survives that long.

Pain, leering faces, dark corners. Shadows, filth, shame. Under it all, a cold fury that never went away. One day I’d bring him to justice. I’d hurt him as he’d hurt all those women. I’d burn him alive as he burned my sweet boy, my lovely man. I’d stick my knife in his chest and twist it, and I’d watch him suffer and die. When I got out of this stinking hole, I’d make him pay.

The door creaked open. They were coming! I crouched down beside the pallet, arms wrapped around myself. Waited for the clang of Slammer’s stick on the bars.

‘Blackthorn?’ A woman’s voice, slurred with sleep. ‘You all right?’

‘Shut up,’ growled another woman.

My heart hammering, my body all cold sweat, I blinked and opened my eyes on the long chamber full of sleeping women. Wrenched myself back from the dream. The stink of that place still clung close, the screaming, the mindless dark. ‘Sorry,’ I murmured. ‘Nightmare.’ As indeed it was; not only the unfinished business I had left behind, but the unsavoury mess I now found myself mired in. Why in the name of the gods had I suggested to Flidais that I might be able to help? There was no answer for what she wanted. I was not even sure I’d want to share it with her if there was – her decision to appease the man who had abused her sickened me, even as I understood that hers was a pragmatic and, at heart, an unselfish choice. If she did make the best of this marriage, she would be helping her family back home, the family that was facing no lesser enemy than Mathuin of Laois.