(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Vivenna wakes sore and terrified on the splintering wood floor of a slum room, her hands bound behind her, a gag in her mouth, her expensive foreign skirt twisted around her legs. A figure stands silhouetted against the predawn balcony, carrying more Breath than she does, and when he turns toward her she recognises the man who choked her with her own drapes — Vasher. He hauls her up by the hair, tells her flatly that he has not decided whether to kill her yet, and warns her not to give him another reason. He cuts her hands free with a hunting dagger, throws the knife into the far wall, and reaches for the deep black sword on the bed.

Wrapped in its sheath the sword bleeds a thin wisp of black smoke. He undoes the clasp, drops the unsheathed weapon at her feet, and bellows at her to pick it up. The nausea climbs her arm before her hand even closes on the hilt; when her fingers touch the grip a polite voice in her head offers — almost cheerful — to kill someone for her today. She drops it and retches onto the floor. Vasher grunts as if surprised, picks the sword up himself, clasps it shut, and throws a towel over what she brought up. He warns her she may scream all she likes — they are in the slums and no one will care, except him — then carries her into a smaller room, ties her wrists to a doorknob, and tells her in close, foul-breathed earnestness that he has work to do, work she has forced on him, and that if she runs he will find her and kill her. He locks the door behind him and goes.

For an hour she sits and cries herself out. Slowly an old tutor's lesson comes back: the time to escape a kidnapper is at the beginning, while you are still strong; expect no rescue and no ransom; better to die trying than to be used against Idris as a captive. Her wrists are raw and bloody from working at the knots, and her stubborn refusal to learn Awakening now seems exactly the self-righteous foolishness Denth had warned her it was. She wiggles the gag loose with her tongue and tries: *ropes, untie yourselves.* Nothing. She tries again with a clearer image. Nothing. Finally she stops concentrating — stops *trying*, the way she stops trying when her hair shifts unbidden between colours — and Commands once: *untie*. The Breath flows out of her like a held exhalation, the world dulls a fraction, and the rope around her wrists jerks, unravels, and drops to the floor in a circle of drained wood. She unties her ankles, pockets the spent rope hoping Denth can later recover the Breath she invested in it, and runs out into the false dawn.

She wanders the slums in the bleached white-haired panic of her unrecovered locks, head down, looking for a discarded cloak. The buildings are tall and shadowed; she is going in circles. Then a broken statue of a horseman in a small square stops her — she remembers it from Denth's old directions to Parlin, weeks ago — and she works back from it to the safehouse. The street door is unlocked. She lights a lantern at the head of the cellar stairs and goes down quietly. The cellar smells musty; small game carcasses hang from the walls; *someone has been here recently*, she thinks with a flicker of hope.

Then her lantern picks out a man tied to a chair, head bowed. *Parlin?* — and his face is sliced open, his eyes dead, his pulse gone. The carcasses on the walls are not all game. A parrot. A monkey. A lizard, fresh, opened and cut. A hand falls on her shoulder. Tonk Fah is grinning down at her from the dark under the stairs.

She runs and collides with Denth coming down the steps the other way. He catches her arm, almost kindly. The thing he hates most about being a mercenary, he tells her, is fulfilling the stereotype: people assume you can't trust mercenaries, and they're right. He explains it as he has explained it to her a dozen times before, when she was not listening hard enough to hear what he was saying. Kidnapping is hard work, and it is easiest when the subject never knows she has been kidnapped. They were never her men. They have been her wardens since the restaurant. Lemex did not die of sickness — a man with that much Breath does not, and they could not let him work against them. Parlin was an accident; he refused to say where Vivenna had gone. Under the stairs are two more sacks: her father's recovery agents, in Idrian army boots, killed before they could reach her.

Denth wants to know who tipped her off. Nothing tipped her off — Vasher tipped her off, by stealing her. He sees her ragged wrists for the first time and curses; whatever he had planned has to change. He tells her to repeat *my Life to yours, my Breath become yours* so they can take her Breath away from her. Vivenna meets his eyes and says, instead, *howl of the sun. Attack Denth. Howl of the sun.* She had heard Jewels use the phrase on Clod in the cellar after the Highlands raid; she has saved it ever since. Clod's fist hits Denth in the face and throws him into Tonk Fah. Vivenna shoulders past Jewels, who falls; her foot breaks through a step as she tries to follow. Vivenna reaches the upper room, slams the door, latches it, and runs out into the dawn-lit street, ducking into the smallest, dirtiest, darkest alleyways she can find — a princess again, and alone again, and this time without anyone left to mistake for an ally.