(Tanner Sack is hardier than Bellis. He is released into the care of Shekel, who is crying for worry of him, who grabs him and hugs him with a bawl of relieved misery to see Tanner’s broken shuffle. Tanner shrieks as Shekel’s hands grip his lacerated back, and their two voices mingle before Shekel leads Tanner on to where Angevine is waiting.

"What they do to you?" Shekel moans repeatedly. "Why?" And Tanner shushes him and stutters that there were reasons, and that they’ll not talk about it, that it’s over now.

These are momentous days. There are great decisions taken. There are mass meetings to discuss the war and the city’s history, and the avanc and the weather and the future.

Bellis knows nothing of any of this.)

Days later, Bellis Coldwine sat up, her fever almost gone. She ate and drank for herself, spilling a great deal from her violently shaking fingers. When she moved, she bit down against the pain. She did not know that all the guards in the corridor were very used to her screams.

She roused herself the day after that, moving as slow and tentative as someone terribly aged. She half tied up her hair and draped a long, shapeless shirt over herself.

Her door was not locked. She was not a prisoner anymore. She had not been for a week.

There were guards in the corridor, in that deep prison wing of the Grand Easterly, and she called one over to her and tried to meet his eye.

"I will go home now," she said, and felt like crying when she heard her own voice.

To Bellis’ shock, it was Uther Doul who helped her home.

The Chromolith was only two ships port of the Grand Easterly, but Doul took her by aircab. She sat away from him in the gondola, horrified to feel her fear of him-which had disappeared over the months, replaced by other emotions-returning. He studied her without visible pity.

Hehad not sentenced her, of course. But every time her mind returned to that extended, bloody, murderous, torturous hour a week previously, with cut-up images of pain, her own screaming, she saw Uther as what he was, an agent of Armada, the power that had done this to her. The man who wielded the whip had been irrelevant.

When she entered her rooms, Doul followed her, carrying her possessions. She ignored him. Moving carefully, she found a mirror.

It was as if the violence that had been done to her back had spread and ravaged her face. She looked drained of blood. The lines and crow’s-feet that had been slowly marking her for more than ten years had become like gashes, like the wounds cut into the faces of the Lovers. Bellis fingered her cheeks and eyes in horror.