“Then we’ll move camp.” The way Sven said this implied their conversation was over. No compassion. It made me sick.

Didn’t he realize that if they saved Runt and helped Bastiaan they would have two loyal followers with great insight, connections, and a Talent? They hadn’t even asked after Bastiaan’s Talent! They were disregarding him before even knowing him. Sven was trying to rid himself of Bastiaan—that much was clear.

I could no longer sit in silence. “Sven. Will you really leave Runt in the dungeon? Possibly to die?”

“We’ve no way of rescuing him. It isn’t worth the risk.” He leveled a stare at me. “It’s not like I have a wish in my pocket.”

The breath left my throat. The neutrality with which he said these words—able to deliver a jab with such ease—disgusted me. His patience was wearing thin. He seemed to be a different person around Bastiaan.

Bastiaan’s gaze flickered between Sven and me. Seeing. Reading. Waiting . . . for what? Sven to explain his asinine comment? Or did Bastiaan already suspect?

“So what’s the news from the schloss?” Hedy challenged, as though she expected Bastiaan to withhold it now that he knew they wouldn’t help Runt.

I officially disliked her.

“The king is going to stop up the Well within a fortnight.” A blunt axe blade to the thigh would have been less of a blow.

I leaped to my feet as though to run to the Well that very moment. “So soon?” My outcry was lost amid the others’.

Kees’s protestations rose the loudest. “He doesn’t have the authority to do that. The Well of Talents doesn’t belong to Fairhoven.”

“Yet he’s doing it,” Bastiaan said flatly.

Sven seemed unconcerned. “He can’t.” That silenced us. “He can’t stop up the Well because he can’t get to it. There are no maps in the schloss.”

“He’s the king.” Bastiaan sounded pitying. “He has resources we commoners can’t fathom.”

“I’m not common of mind,” Sven retorted. “This is no desperate assumption. There’s one map left intact and the king doesn’t have it.”

“Do you?” I asked. It was almost like he wanted one of us to ask.

“My grandfather is the commoner who burned the maps of Winterune.”

My mouth went dry. “Your . . . grandfather was the madman?”

Sven cut me off with a sweep of his hand. “Not mad. He was betrayed. As a young man he was servant to a militair charged with getting water from the Well to bring back to the king and his nobles. The militair died in the Trials, but my grandfather completed the task. He risked his own life to bring water back to the schloss alone. He never drank any for himself, out of loyalty to the king.” He said the word loyalty with a sneer.