Iltani raged, the veins in her neck standing out against her skin. “You absolute piece of sheep manure. You call yourself a lugal?” She was backhanded to the carpet, yet again, by the guardsman’s heavy paw. She got up on her knees, her eyes glittering, and rammed her head into his groin as hard as she could. The man bellowed, and she was knocked sideways by the hilt of another guardsman’s sicklesword, but this time, her eyes rolled back into her head and she lay still.

“But Dagan wouldn’t stand a chance against me.” Nasu pulled with all his might against his chains. “He’s not a fighter.”

Next to me, Dagan bristled. “I certainly knocked you to the ground before.”

“Ha!” Uruku’s sharp laugh of delight echoed throughout the throne room. “A quarrel already!”

Dagan strode forward, pulling the guardsmen with him, his passion making him forget his pain. “Uruku, listen to me. Set us up in a Trial of Ordeal. I will fight Nasu to prove I tell it true. But you must let them and my ummum go free.” He jerked his head to me and Iltani.

Gudanna smiled at Dagan, self-satisfied like a cat. I could imagine her with a gray tuft of squirming prey in her mouth.

“You are in no position to bargain, boy. But I will promise you this: If you best Nasu, and deliver the nin, you can have the girl of your choice. If it’s one of them”—she pointed her eyes like daggers at me—“so be it.” She looked at Shiptu, who stood quivering near Nasu, her shoulders stooped. “And your ummum will be released.”

As they tugged us out the entrance Nasu, Assata, and Shiptu had been led in, a scuffle sounded around the side of the Palace wall. The clash of metal against sandstone brick. Soft grunts and a throaty cry from Assata. A man’s angry curse. The wet squish of a weapon hitting flesh.

Then, moments later, it was still, and the only sounds were our own uneven breaths and the chains chinking together as we were dragged toward the Pit and whatever the gods had decided our fates should be.

SHIFTING TO RELIEVE the pressure of the ropes around my hands, the press of my healing satchel against my belly, I tried to drift back into the few moments of restless slumber I’d managed since being tossed into this outbuilding near the Pit. Before posting themselves around the perimeter, the guardsmen had left Nasu’s and Dagan’s weapons with them for the trial, warning us that if we used them to end our own lives, they’d kill Shiptu, Dagan’s brothers, and Iltani’s parents.

Shiptu had been taken back to the dungeons to await the ending of the trial. My heart hurt at the thought of her down in the damp, not knowing whether her son would live or die. Either Assata lay dead in a gutter somewhere, her eyes picked from her head by the birds because the guardsmen had gotten the best of her, or she’d simply used her apparent weakness to her advantage and led them into a trap. I pictured her free from the city, racing toward Laraak to gather the warriors who would come in and free us all, Arwia—no, Sarratum Arwia—at their head. My throat ached with all the ways it could go wrong, but I was clinging with all my might to hope. Assata had winked at me. It had to mean something.