“We will stay.” Her gaze is blade-sharp again. The tension between them crackles, shifts, back to the way it was before Treila’s arrival. But then Voyne falters. She glances toward what she cannot look at, and her eyes slide off, and it looks like it hurts. She can tell it’s wrong. “Unless—unless we can return, after. Perhaps some distance will help break whatever is influencing my mind.”

Phosyne looks to Treila.

“Is it one way?” she asks.

“I don’t care,” Treila says.

And that is a good point. Once they’re out, they’re out.

“No,” Phosyne translates, lies to Voyne. “So we’re going to take the chance.”

Voyne shifts uneasily, as if she wants to argue, and Phosyne prepares herself to command, but it isn’t necessary. Voyne nods, then gestures for Phosyne to precede her. “Clear the way for me?” she asks.

She sounds vulnerable when she says it.

They creep out once more into the echoing, empty keep. The distance between the tower and the tunnel seems longer this time, but then, every excursion Phosyne has made in the last week has been harder than the one before. Voyne follows at a safe distance, but Treila stays close.

“An odd situation,” Treila says.

“Just another of many. The feast, how was it?”

“Wine-soaked,” Treila says. “A girl could lose her head in there. Everybody else has.”

“If something happens,” Phosyne tells her, “if we don’t get out right away—the water is safe. In the cisterns. It has some fortifying effect. Clarifying.” She gestures back toward Voyne.

“And what will we have to pay for that?” Treila asks.

Phosyne frowns. “Pay?”

Treila throws her a gleaming smile in the dark. “Don’t worry about it,” she says.

Phosyne wonders if she should.

“You’re taking this better than most,” she ventures. By most, Phosyne mainly means herself and Voyne. They’re holding it together, sure, but Treila is . . .

Treila looks energized by it all. She plunged into the belly of the beast to blend in, and has come out of it looking not disgusted, not exhausted, but exhilarated.

In answer, Treila looks back at Ser Voyne. Voyne’s head turns, eyes averting. She almost stumbles on the next step, which Phosyne doesn’t think she even notices. “I’ve already had all the rules of my life turned upside down before,” Treila says, finally. “It’s easier to keep your head when you know it’s all you can rely on.”

25

25

Ser Voyne wants to be herself again.

She’d almost managed it, in the tower. She’d almost moved past the echoes of Phosyne’s commands, the blurriness of her memory. But now she can’t look directly ahead of her, if directly ahead of her is Phosyne’s “friend,” and she can feel herself beginning to unravel again.