“Briony! Help me!”

At first she thought the startling voice came from the thing in the well, but it sounded like a real person—a young man, frightened as she was frightened. Was someone calling her? But why call her by that unfamiliar name?

The thing in the well did not stop or even slow the sticky slap of its climb. Qinnitan tried to scream, but could not. She tried again, but the scream could only build and build inside her until it seemed she would burst like a flooded dam.

“Briony! I’m here!”

She could feel him, as if he stood just on the other side of the well—could almost see him, a pale, pale boy with hair as flame-red as the streak in her own dark locks, a boy staring at her without seeing, his eyes haunted…

“Briony!”

She was terrified. The thing’s wet fingers were curling on the lip of the well and the boy couldn’t even see it? She wanted to know why he called her by that strange name, but instead when she found her voice at last she heard herself ask him, “Why are you in my dreams?”

And then the blackness burst up from below and the boy blew away like smoke and the shriek at last came rushing out of her, rising, ragged….

Qinnitan sat up, gasping. Something had a grip on her and for a moment she struggled fruitlessly against it until she realized it was not huge and chilly but small and warm and…and frightened. It was Pigeon. Pigeon was hanging onto her, grunting with fear. He was terrified, but he was trying to comfort her.

“Don’t worry,” she said quietly. She found his head in the darkness, stroked his hair. He clung to her like a street musician’s monkey. “It was just a bad dream. Were you frightened? Did you call me?”

But of course he couldn’t have called her—not in words. The voice had been a dream, too. Briony. What a strange name. And what a terrible dream! It had been like the nights when she had lived in the Seclusion, when the priest Panhyssir had given her that dreadful elixir called the Sun’s Blood, that poison which had left her feverish and terrified that it was stealing her mind.

Remembering, Qinnitan shivered helplessly. Pigeon was already asleep again, his bony little body pressed against her so that she couldn’t lower her arm, which was already beginning to ache a little. How could she have believed that the autarch would simply let her go? She was a fool to linger here in Hierosol, only a short distance across the sea from Xis itself. She should pack up in the morning, leave the citadel and its laundry behind.

As she lay cradling the boy in the darkness, she heard something moaning: outside the dormitory, the winds were rising.

A storm, she thought. Wind from the south. What do they call it here? “Red wind”—the wind from Xand. From Xis…

She rolled over, gently dislodging Pigeon. His breathing changed, then settled into a low buzz again, soothing as the drone of the sacred bees, but Qinnitan could not be so easily calmed. Winds push ships, she thought. Suddenly, sleep seemed farther away than the southern continent.