I turned around to see her biting her lip, and looking fairly wild-eyed. Well, crap. “Are you about to lose control again?” I asked, because I wanted to hear what they were saying, now more than ever.

“I didn’t lose control the first time!” she said, her eyes flashing. “I don’t lose control!”

I thought that would have been more convincing, if she wasn’t doing it right now.

“All right—”

“No, it is not all right; nothing about this is!” She looked past me, and her pretty face flushed puce. “That’s Aeslinn, isn’t it? The Svarestri king?”

I opened my mouth to reply, but she didn’t give me the chance. She suddenly whirled around and started inside the building behind us. And I realized that I hadn’t been sitting by a freestanding wall earlier; I’d been sitting by the side of what, from this angle, looked suspiciously like a certain mobile castle.

“Come inside,” she told me from a doorway. “Come now!”

She really should have been a nanny, I thought, as my feet automatically obeyed. I followed her past a thick, pointed archway into a gloomy inner room, which was lit only by sunlight slanting in through a series of tall, narrow windows. It was large, maybe meant for an audience hall or a ballroom, although it was hard to tell as there was no furniture.

There was no party going on right now, either.

Instead, groups of miserable looking people sat huddled together on the hard stone floor, leaking mud and dirty water everywhere. They weren’t much cleaner than the guy outside, and stunk to high heaven. The frozen nature of the scene, with no air circulating, should have minimized the stench. But it had collected within the walls, to the point that I wondered where the fey had found them, exactly?

Because this was less of a bog pit than a sewer.

Which probably explained why the guards were on the peripheries, maybe thirty in total, hugging the walls. There were at least twice as many captives, huddled in the middle, some of them children. And that seemed to be the final straw for the telepath.

She’d been standing there, looking at a small child of maybe four, who was peering out from inside an older woman’s shawl. The captives were skinny, dressed in rags, and some of them were barefoot despite the cold. The child wasn’t one of them; somebody had wrapped strips of cloth around his feet in lieu of socks, and he had a tattered tunic on, under the coating of mud.

But he didn’t look healthy, and the old woman was worse. I wondered what happened to him if she died? I wondered what happened to any of them, now that the Svarestri had them? Although what they wanted from them was beyond me.

They obviously had nothing left to take.