Her thoughts drifted to other things, to the turmoil in the Four Lands, to the betrayal by her own Druids, and to concerns for her family. It was possible that those enemies who had dispatched her here would try to eliminate Bek, as well. Once he found out she was missing, her brother would come looking for her. Her enemies might try to stop him. It wouldn’t be the first time that an enemy had come after members of the Ohmsford family with that idea in mind. The fact that she was Ard Rhys made the current generation of Ohmsfords targets in a way they hadn’t been since the time of Shea Ohmsford and the Warlock Lord.

The longer she spent thinking about the ramifications of what had happened to her, the more determined she became. Her sense of indecision and confusion disappeared. Her fear turned to anger. She began to pull herself together, to regain the shattered pieces of her confidence. She no longer accepted her imprisonment as a condition about which she could do nothing. No one had ever imprisoned her and kept her so. She had not gotten so far in the world by giving in to her weaker emotions. She had not survived by giving up in seemingly impossible situations.

She tested the strength of the chains and belt again, this time trying to move the belt around her waist so that the buckle was more to the front. She was able to do this by sucking in her breath and jerking her hands all the way to the right. This brought the buckle around to her left side far enough that she could see how it was made. What she saw gave her hope. If she could find something to hook it on, she might be able to pull the leather tongue free of the metal clasp and then loosen it from the catch, as well.

A search of her cell walls, stone block by stone block, turned up nothing. What protuberances she discovered were too smooth or flat to be useful. She turned her attention to the door. The handle was a smooth metal grip fastened to the door at both ends. No help there. But on making a careful check of the hinges, she found a metal nail head on the lower hasp that had worked free from the wall just far enough to offer a possible hook.

She spent the next hour working the leather of the belt tongue, where it passed through the buckle, around the nail head and pulling it loose, inch by inch. All the while, she listened for the sounds of her jailers, for the soft scrape of boots on stone, for the tiniest creak of a door opening. She heard nothing.