By the time Kaden reached the low shelf, his muscles had gone rigid with cold. It was all he could do to hold on to the stone with one hand while keeping Triste’s head above the water. He could feel her trembling beside him, shivering uncontrollably. Wet hair plastered her skin, and her lips had gone a blue so dark they looked black in the smoky light.

“Kaden,” she whispered between chattering teeth.

Before he could respond, two men lunged from the shadows, seized her by the elbows, and lifted her, shaking, from the water.

“Careful,” he said. “She is tied. You could hurt her.”

The guards ignored Kaden, dragging Triste roughly onto the stone shelf while he hauled himself, sodden and shivering, into the cold air.

Only after he had coughed the last salt water from his lungs, then straightened, could he finally take in his surroundings. When he first passed through the gate he thought himself submerged in the ocean somewhere, but now he could see that they had surfaced inside a large chamber, perhaps fifteen paces across, walls and ceiling cut from the same undressed stone. In the center, the black waters of a pool glistened in the torchlight. The place reminded him faintly of Umber’s, back in the Bone Mountains, but where Umber’s Pool was open to the wide arc of the sky, this room was dark and cold, cut off from everything by the cave’s roof.

The Ishien, too, were nothing like the monks he remembered. Despite Tan’s warning, Kaden had expected them to look vaguely familiar. Instead of robes, however, the three men in the chamber, two of whom pinned Triste roughly against a wall, wore greasy leather jerkins and sealskin. None had shaved their heads, and though only one had a proper beard, a week’s worth of stubble obscured the jawlines of the others. Most striking, the Ishien were clearly warriors; each wore a short sword at the hip and carried a loaded crossbow. The speaker had leveled one of those crossbows directly at Tan.

“Rampuri,” he said, the word ringing like a curse.

“Point your weapon at the girl, Hellelen,” Tan responded.

“I will point my weapon where I please.”

Kaden stilled his shivering and tried to read the scene. Loral Hellelen looked to be around Tan’s age, a tall, wiry Edishman with a rough blond braid running halfway down his back. He might have been handsome once, but a cadaverous hollowness had gouged away his cheeks and sunk his eyes in pits so dark they looked bruised. Kaden watched those eyes carefully. They glittered in the torchlight, bright, almost feverish. Hellelen’s finger stroked the trigger to the crossbow.

“It was a foolish gamble, stepping through that gate after twenty years.”

Kaden glanced over at Tan. No one at Ashk’lan had ever called Rampuri Tan a fool, but if the older monk was nonplussed, it didn’t show.