It was a meager consolation, but the cell did not offer any other, and as the sound of retreating boots echoed to silence, he began to realize just what he had risked in trying to defend Triste. What he had risked, and how badly he had failed. Panic prowled his mind on velvet feet, and for a while it was all he could do to keep from hurling himself at the door, from screaming into the darkness. Instead, he found the middle of the room as well as he could, sat cross-legged on the stone floor, and closed his eyes, replacing the darkness of the world with his own inner darkness, the emptiness of the cell with a greater emptiness. When he finally emerged from the vaniate, the fear remained, but it was a small thing, a distant scream like far-off smoke against a vast, silent sky.

Methodically, he set about exploring his cell again, running his hands systematically over the stone, testing the privy hole, reaching up for the invisible ceiling. He went to the door last, hoping it would offer some recourse that the rest of the stone had refused. Steel or iron banded the thick wooden slab, metal cold and pitted beneath his fingers. A small slot opened at the very bottom, barely the height of his hand—for food perhaps. He found a keyhole narrower than his finger halfway up, briefly allowed himself to imagine that he might pick the lock and break free, then squashed the hope. He had no tools, nothing but his robe, and even if he had, he knew nothing about locks, nothing about escape.

Only when he had exhausted the other possibilities did he finally speak.

“Hello?” he asked, voice little more than a whisper. Even that was enough to crack the brittle shell of the vaniate. “Triste? Are you there?” He hesitated. “Kiel?”

The darkness lisped his own syllables back to him, but there was no response. He tried again, raising his voice, then again and again, over and over until he was bellowing, pounding his fists on the door’s indifferent steel. When he gave up, the silence clamped down once more, closing on the cell like a vise.

It might have been a day before the first meal arrived—maybe two—there was no way to tell, no mechanism to divide the time, to part one chill, invisible day from the next. There was silence, then bootheels on the stone beyond the door, a wooden trencher shoved beneath, bootheels retreating, then silence once more. Kaden felt sick, dizzy, but he forced himself to eat.