The chain wasn’t long enough for him to reach the door, but he could reach the sides of the pen. He peered through a gap between the planks. On one side were bales of straw and on the other a massive pig. It slept leaning against the boards of Jean-Claude’s stall, its bulk enough to bow the wood. Its back was lined with scars, and its snores made the deck vibrate. There was two hundred kilos of muscle if he could figure out how to use it. An enraged hog could easily demolish the stall, but that wouldn’t get Jean-Claude out of his collar, and then he’d be stuck here with a quarter ton of angry pork chops. Even so, the bowed-out planks gave him an idea.

Jean-Claude worked his way along the plank until he found where it was nailed to the upright. In the weird half-light, he could make out the nail heads. He ran his fingertips over them until he found one that hadn’t been hammered flat. He gripped it with his fingertips, but it was not loose. He grabbed the edge of the plank and pulled. It refused to budge. He might be able to work it out eventually, but time was not his ally. Travers could have him fetched at any moment, and Builder only knew how much of himself he’d lose. The idea filled him with the sort of animal fright that made rabbits hide in their burrows even when the floods came to drown them.

Yet that fear was normal, not the sorcerous terror that Travers had inflicted on him. This was fear he knew how to work with. He scooted to the center where the bulge was greatest, reached through to the hog’s bristly back, and gave the great beast a really good scratch. The pig stirred in its sleep, grunted with porcine pleasure, and leaned into the scratch. The plank creaked in protest. Jean-Claude kept scratching until he heard the unmistakable squeal of a nail being dragged through wood. With a sharp pang, the board came loose. Jean-Claude worked one of the exposed nails and pulled it free. It was too thick to use as a lock pick, but that could be remedied.

His pulse running quick, alert for the sound of anyone approaching the pen, Jean-Claude pulled his chain tight, placed the iron nail against it, and began filing it down.

Isabelle found that she could paint details within details on the canvas of the everdream, like a mathematical spiral that curled in on itself but never logically reached a center. Into the memory of her father’s bloodshadow she etched echoes of betrayal. Once she had been a man named Elia, doge of Udina, betrayed when his great uncle murdered his wife with the thought of replacing her with a woman more closely tied to his branch of the family.