The cousin said, “Or you could find nothing at all out there, and be forced to return empty-handed, in which case you may find the collapse of la reine’s authority quite useful.”

Jean-Claude’s sneeze escaped like a cat bolting through a hole in the fence.

Travers scowled and called for porters. A brace of aeronauts with dull, incurious eyes came in. They hauled Jean-Claude to his feet and towed him away. They hauled him to the ship’s manger, shackled him by his neck to the wall in a stall next to a hog, and left him in the stinking dark. He was too cold and weak to fight them, his vision was a blur, and he could not even talk his captors into being gentle.

Jean-Claude was not the sort of person to wallow in misery. He’d been wounded before. He understood pain, but he’d never met anything like this Torment that tied his tongue. Again and again he tried to speak, to utter even a single syllable, but each attempt brought another wave of terror and paralysis.

He wept. His throat could still make noise, because the frustration and humiliation came out in an animal whine. It would only get worse from here. If Travers could lock his voice away so easily, how long would it be until he lay waste to courage and reason?

Jean-Claude could not withstand another round of such torture. He must escape. But how? If he could have talked to a crewman … but he must put that thought from his head.

One thing about having been raised a peasant was he knew how to push on. Winter didn’t care if he starved, so he pushed on with the plow after his father died. He was barely tall enough to reach the handles and not strong enough to make the furrows straight, but he turned the soil and planted the seed and tightened his belt and did not die. When the drought came, he dug the well deeper and carried water for months on end, and when the floods came he dug ditches and built dams, and it never occurred to him to give up or give in. Quitting was a luxury only the rich could afford, knowing they could always sacrifice someone else to survive.

Jean-Claude tugged at his collar. It was fastened with a padlock, which he might have picked if he had a wire. The hold was dark, but there must have been light leaking in from somewhere, for his wounded eye could make out the vague shape of the chain where it looped around a stanchion and was fastened to itself by another padlock. If he had some kind of leverage, he might break the lock. Alas, this pigsty suffered from a lack of convenient crowbars.