A terrible stench rolled out to meet her, all too familiar from her years of warfare; Dorrin pinched her lips and set the lamp on a ledge. Facing her were three cell doors. Her stomach roiled. She had been locked in the left-hand one, as punishment: days and nights of terror.

She lifted the bar on the first door. Empty. The second … she gagged at the stench. Here someone had died, and recently. As she stepped into the cell, light revealed the carrion beetles scuttling for cover from a corpse too small to be an adult. Tears burned her eyes. Too late … would she always be too late?

In the third cell she heard harsh, uneven breaths. By the lamp’s light, she saw a naked man, curled on the floor, streaked with his own filth. She bent lower; his face had been battered, one eye gouged out. His swollen tongue protruded from cracked lips.

“Falk’s grace,” she whispered. “Give him ease.”

At her voice, the man groaned and stirred.

“Help is here,” she said. She unplugged her water bottle and dripped a few drops on his tongue. “Soon you will be better. I promise.” He shuddered. Backing out of the cell, she called Vossik, who came into the outer room at once. “I need a burial party and someone to carry a wounded man,” she said.

She went back to the wounded man and poured a little more water on his tongue as she waited for the others to arrive. He roused a little, groaned, moved his tongue, and opened his one eye. “Wha—nooo … no more.”

“No more,” Dorrin said. “It’s over.” She dripped more water in his mouth; he swallowed.

“Who—”

“The Duke’s dead,” Dorrin said. The man’s ruined mouth stretched in what might have been a smile. “The prince sent me, to be the new Duke.” She gave him a little more water. He blinked, and she realized that with the lamp behind her, she was only a black shadow. “We’ll get you out of this very soon …”

“Tam—?” Hardly a breath of sound at that.

Dorrin had already realized that the young person in the next cell was probably this man’s brother or son. She dipped her head. “I’m sorry … Tam … died.”

“Gird’s grace,” the man said; his one eye closed.

A squad arrived then, clattering down the stairs and into the dungeon. Dorrin went back out into the main room, explained in a low voice what she’d found.

“Only three cells?”

“In this part of the dungeon, yes. There are twenty on the other side, through the door to the left as you came down the stairs. But this is where Liart’s priests lived, where the most dangerous magery is, so I had to check this myself. You’ll be safe enough now. Clean up the boy’s corpse and lay it on a table upstairs, under a cloth. If his father lives to morning, he’ll want to see it.”

By full dark all the prisoners were upstairs in the keep, munching bread and cheese, their cells left to the rats and beetles. The man from the torture cell clung to life with the help of the cohort’s physician; his son’s body, under an embroidered bed hanging from the main house, lay surrounded by candles with two of the cohort to give an honor watch. Dorrin sent for Sir Valthan to witness what she had found, then told Selfer to supervise their care and the external security while she returned to the house with Valthan, who still needed an accurate list of Verrakai family members.