It proved nearly impossible to track the passage of days inside the cold chambers of the Dead Heart. There was no sun or moon. There were no stars to follow in their circuit through the sky, nothing but smoke, and damp, and the constant stench of salted fish. Kaden was given his own small cell in which to sleep, but whenever he opened the door he found a guard outside—sometimes Trant, sometimes another of the Ishien. Each time, he demanded information about Tan or Triste, neither of whom he’d seen since arriving, and each time he was refused. His own impotence in the face of the armed soldiers was galling, but he couldn’t think of any way around it. The Ishien had blades and bows; he did not. The Ishien had military training; he did not. He briefly considered trying to wrest a weapon from one of his guards, but could dream up no scenario in which such defiance ended in anything other than his own death or imprisonment.

While the guards allowed him to move freely between his cell and the mess hall, the rest of the fortress was off-limits. At first, Kaden tried spending more time at the long tables where the men ate, hoping he might learn something about Triste or the Csestriim. The Ishien, however, proved guarded to the point of paranoia. Some glared at him, clutching to their silence like a shield. Some screamed in his face. Most simply ignored him, moving around him as though he were no more than another wooden chair.

It was maddening not to know what was going on, either inside the Dead Heart or beyond. For all Kaden knew, Annur had fallen into the grip of some Csestriim tyrant while he wandered the subterranean halls. His frustration, however, was solving nothing, and so he crushed it out, gave up talking to the Ishien altogether, and started spending the majority of his time in his cell instead, cross-legged on the stone floor, practicing the vaniate.

The trance didn’t seem important, not compared to Triste’s imprisonment, or the uncertainty of Valyn’s fate, or the murder of the Emperor of Annur. But Kaden couldn’t do anything about Triste, or Valyn, or his own dead father. What he could do was practice the vaniate. He could make sure that if the time came when he needed it, he would be ready.

Despite having entered the trance several times in the Bone Mountains, he still found it surprisingly fickle and elusive. Some days he could fall into the emptiness after only a few breaths; others, the whole exercise proved impossible, like trying to grasp an air bubble under the water. He could see it, but not feel it. Touch it, but not hold on to it. When he closed his mind’s fist around its shimmering absence, it slipped away.