CRANKS! the terrified voice inside his mind screamed. But he knew, he knew that wasn’t it. This was too measured, too . . . planned to be the nightmare crazies that had haunted his grandparents’ people. Flooded with fear, he finally seized upon his own instincts and forced himself still, forced himself to wait for an opportunity to understand what was happening, an opportunity to resist. He lay under the pressure of those holding him, swathed in darkness and the cold ice of terror. The room had grown silent.

There were footsteps, the creaks of the floorboards coming closer to his head. A new voice, one he didn’t recognize, a woman’s, sounded from nearby. She said two words, as laced with dread as the drip-drip-drip of liquid from a corpse.

“She’s gone.”

Someone grabbed Isaac by the arms and started dragging him across the floor. It was a bumpy ride.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A Cold Cliff

Kit. The boy, Kit. The boy he’d saved from his savage father. (Uncle? Stranger? Didn’t matter.) The boy was all the Orphan could think about, for days and weeks, even now as he’d marched into the middle of nowhere with priests and priestesses of the almighty Cure.

The group—old and young, all who deserved to see—stood in the midst of a snowstorm, although the snow more resembled sharp, pointy pellets of ice flying through the air like small bullets. The only reason the group as a whole hadn’t been sliced and sheared by the flying pricks of ice-blades was because the wind howled incessantly, in both strength and direction. The frigid air with its accompanying bites of hard snow swam in great circles around them, shifting up and down and out and back, never gaining the fierce impetus needed to damage and cut.

The Orphan thanked the Cure for small favors, no matter how tiny and very unlike an actual favor they were. He had bands of leather fastened, tightly, around his upper arms, his wrists, his thighs, his ankles. Bound tightly enough to warp the natural contour of his muscles and nerves and tissue with great pain, burning like a microscopic flow of lava had leaked into the tiny spaces between his cells. Together with the harsh environment it inflicted a great, searing discomfort that would make him a better man, a better servant, a better participant in the troubles to come. Which suited him fine.

Kit.

Saving Kit had changed something deep inside Minho. No, not changed. Completed. He squirmed his arms and legs, seeking comfort against the bindings. Yes, completed.