The room was the biggest I’d seen on the keep’s upper levels and it was full of cages. In a land so poor in metals, I was looking at a fortune to choke the greediest merchant back home. Still, I didn’t imagine the women looking through those bars appreciated being surrounded with such wealth. They ranged from a frail-looking grandmother to two maidens barely blooming into womanhood. The other three were much of an age with myself and one held the fugitive child close to her skirts. All were Elietimm by their colouring and features and, by local standards, their gowns were well cut and expertly sewn. But the clothes hung loose on them, gaping at the neck and slack in the waist. All the captive faces were drawn with hunger kept just short of starvation by a prudent jailer.

The little girl looked at me, hugging her woolly animal. Her mother’s sage dress was stained and creased with wear, the hems dirtied where she’d been unable to avoid the spreading pile of ordure she’d done her best to keep in one corner of her prison. Could Olret not even grant his prisoners a chamber pot? Or was that the point? How better to humiliate these women than by denying them even the most basic dignities? All had fingernails rimed with black, fair hair lank with dirt, filth engrained in the creases of faces and necks. They had nothing to sit on, not so much as a blanket to soften the iron bars beneath their feet. Only a crude hide spread out below each cage, edges curled and tied into corners to catch the soil before it reached the floorboards and threatened the ceilings below.

I hadn’t exactly decided to leave but was considering backing out of the room when I realised I couldn’t. Nothing hindered my feet but I knew for a certainty that the only way I could move was forward. All the women watched intently. It was a fair bet one of them was using Artifice on me but, oddly, I didn’t feel particularly threatened.

“Good day, ladies.” A step forward was easy enough but I knew instantly I still couldn’t take it back.

“Please come beyond the door.” The mother spoke urgently, her Tormalin as good if not better than my Mountain speech. That was a fair point. I moved and the door swung closed behind me, bolts sealing me in with a soft rasp as the grandmother muttered a rapid charm.

“Who are you?” the mother demanded. Locked in a stinking prison, I wouldn’t have bothered with niceties either.

“A visitor, from over the ocean.” It may be mere childhood myth that giving the Eldritch Kin your name hands them power over you but I wasn’t taking any chances with unknown practitioners of Artifice. “Who are you?”

“I was wife to Ashernan, master of Shernasekke.” The mother wasn’t bandying words with anyone who might help her. “We are all of that clan; my mother, my sisters and their daughters.”

“I thought Ilkehan destroyed Shernasekke.” I matched her directness, aware someone might interrupt us at any moment. Then I’d be in trouble but we’d deal with that as the runes fell.

“Ilkehan with Olret yapping at his heels.” The grandmother spat copiously in wordless disgust.

Her back against her bars, one of the sisters sat with coppery gold skirts rucked up to pad her rump. “What Evadesekke sees, he covets. What Evadesekke covets, Kehannasekke steals. What Kehannasekke steals, Rettasekke hides.” The obscure pronouncement had the bitter resonance of old, acknowledged truth in the Elietimm tongue.

“How do you come to be here?” I asked the lady of Shernasekke.

“Olret stole us out from beneath Ilkehan’s nose.” She waved a disdainful hand at their foul prison. “He offers us a choice: marriage with his blood or this squalor.” Her mother barked with weary laughter.

“Marriage will give Olret a claim on Shernasekke land to rival Ilkehan’s right of conquest?” I guessed, glancing at the two nubile girls. Marriage by rape is a long and dishonourable tradition in Lescar, where inheritance squabbles fester from generation to generation and more than one duchess took her wedding vows with a dagger at her throat.

“He will only have a claim when the bloodlines are joined by a child.” The other sister scowled from her foetid cage, twitching her mossy green skirts as she stood.

The lady of Shernasekke smiled. “He may have cut us off from home and hargeard but we can summon power from our common birthright to rule within this room.”

So this neglect might be more precaution than calculated torment.

“It is both,” the woman in green told me.

“Are you reading my thoughts?” I asked warily.

She shrugged. “A simple enough trick.”

“One that Olret cannot master.” The grandmother came to the front of her cage, eyes webbed with age and sunk deep in her wrinkled face. “That’s the other reason he risks Ilkehan’s wrath to keep us in this captivity. We hold all that remains of Shernasekke’s lore and Olret would dearly love to add that to his own.”

“Mother!” protested the sister in the green gown.

“Why dissemble?” argued her other sister. “Olret condemned our clan to be crushed beneath Ilkehan’s heel without us to defend Shernasekke.”

“This one is no friend to Olret.” The old woman stared at me. With her clouded eyes I doubted she could see much beyond the length of her arm but something was giving her uncomfortably accurate insight. She grunted with satisfaction. “Nor her friends.”

“You’re here with others?” One of the young girls spoke for the first time, hope naked on her face.

“Can you get a message to Evadesekke?” The woman in gold scrambled to her feet. “We have ties of kinship there.”

“Dachasekke will help us once they know we are still alive,” her sister in green insisted. “Froilasekke too.”

“Our quarrel is with Ilkehan,” I said carefully. “We’ve little interest in involving ourselves in strife we have no part in.” If you can’t see the bottom of the river, you don’t start wading.

“Olret will trade us to Ilkehan if some turn of fate makes that worth his while or if our surrender proves the only way to save his own skin.” Shernasekke’s lady looked at me and I knew her words for simple truth.

These women had some powerful Artifice among them and, like Guinalle, the skills to work their enchantments without constant incantations. It was also a relief to know Olret wasn’t able to look inside my head and learn I’d been up here. This wasn’t the brutal, damaging enchantment that Ilkehan had wrought on me and around me but all the same, none of these women were showing any qualms about taking what they wanted from my thoughts or imposing their will on my body. Was that the resonance of undeniable truth I heard in their words or treacherous magic convincing me of their lie? There didn’t seem to be any of Guinalle’s ethical tradition in Elietimm Artifice; it was either brutal or insidious.

“Are you truly speaking honestly?” I raised my eyebrows at Shernasekke’s lady.

She shrugged. “You can only decide such things for yourself

“When I’ve done so, I’ll come back.” I found myself unhampered by enchantment as I turned to leave. The bolts slid back at a whisper from the younger maiden. As I slid through the door, I saw her looking at me with a misery that her elders refused to admit.

I hurried along the corridor. Those women were getting food and water, however inadequate, and I didn’t want to meet whoever was bringing it. Slowing on the stairs, I dug a vial of perfume in my belt pouch and dabbed a little in the hollow of my throat. The scent cleansed the prison stink from my nostrils and hopefully masked any clinging to my clothes. Then I heard steps in the corridor where Olret’s son slept his fevered dreams and froze. Creeping silently down, I stole a glance around the corner and saw the nurse walking away from me. I hurried on down but heard boots coming up below me. Turning, I fished my parchment out of my pocket and walked back up as if I had every right to be there.