When Dwayne sat up to the jangling accompaniment of chains, he was transported back to the island plantations, where slaves had sung hymns of salvation, where overseers had cradled whips stained with blood. It took a lot of slow breathing to remember that he wasn’t in that hell, that instead he was in purgatory, chained to the Tower’s basement floor with no magic, no help, and a headache that made it hard to come up with good reasons as to why he hadn’t been rescued yet.

  At least he had a soil bucket. That made it all better.

  Click.

  “Good morning,” said Dwayne.

  “It’s not-” Sioned snapped her mouth shut.

  “So,” Dwayne continued, ignoring her slip of the tongue, “you didn’t sleep well either?”

  Despite the mask, Sioned’s glare was still obvious. “Don’t be smart.”

  “Unfortunately, that’s why Bruce abducted me.” Dwayne found a cup, another lunch wrap, and a letter waiting for him on top of his notes. “Will she not be joining us today?”

  “Dean Bruce,” corrected Sioned.

  “Considering what she’s done to me,” Dwayne’s chains jangled as he gulped down the contents of the cup, “I don’t think she deserves my respect. Has she told you what I’m supposed to do today?”

  “Read the letter.” Sioned headed towards the stairs. “I gotta get some air.”

  “Let me know if the city’s still there.”

  After making a rude gesture involving two fingers jammed upwards, Sioned stomped up the stairs. As soon as she was gone, Dwayne pulled the wrap out of its paper and ate as much of it as he could while considering the question written on the inside: “Condition?”

  Tired, sore, bored, terrified.

  Whatever was in those purple pills, it didn’t give good sleep, which was part of why it had taken Dwayne the better part of the four waking hours it left him to neutralize the tytumber. Finding a way out of here with so little time was daunting.

  A quick perusal of Bruce’s letter revealed it to be mainly insults - for example “This is what comes of asking a savage to do a civilized person’s work” - mixed in with the occasional threat, but Dwayne had expected that response to his entirely fake proposal. The only interesting part of the letter, aside from its empty side, was Bruce’s proposal to use spell preparation to create the magical cores, but only because that meant she hadn’t read Magdala’s after-Offering report. Even if Dwayne could prepare Qe spells, the technique would interfere with Qe core creation so much that it would turn azade into tytumber.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Tossing the letter onto the scrap pile, Dwayne returned to pondering his main problem: escaping. Even if he could make a Ri core, doing so would mark the end of his usefulness to Bruce and the end of his life. As such, his only move was to try to draw this process out, to show just enough progress to keep Bruce from becoming frustrated. It was too bad tytumber slowed him down so…

  Dwayne blinked. Was that it? Yesterday, when he’d cast Ri’a’tha, the result had been delayed considerably in defiance of all his previous experience. Implicit in all his magical instruction was the assumption that a cast spell’s effect happened immediately, but perhaps that was never true. Perhaps there was always a delay, one usually so short no one had noticed.

  He had to be sure. There was one other possible source of the delay: the salamander stones in the braziers. He needed more data. Luckily, he had most of what he needed: paper, writing utensils, and the mysterious cabinet of gears and springs, whose largest gear could be used to track a minute-like unit of time. Unfortunately, actual time was in short supply. If he had to rely on the scant minutes he had before the purple pill took him, his progress wouldn’t just be frustratingly slow, it would be fatally glacial.

  At least that meant Dwayne had something far more interesting to send to Rodion than his mere physical condition. He managed to get most of it down before more stomping heralded Sioned’s return.

  Crumpling the wrapper, Dwayne dropped it into the cup and asked, “How was the fresh air?”

  Sioned froze. “Why aren’t you doing anything?”

  Strange. She seemed afraid. “I’ve been reviewing my notes. Here.” Dwayne held out the half-eaten wrap. “It’s for you.”

  Sioned started him then stopped. “What did you do to it? Did you spit in it?”

  “I ate half.” With his other hand, Dwayne began writing. “So there’s some spit, but that didn’t bother you last time.”

  “I was watching you last time.”

  “If I didn’t want you to have it, I would have tossed it into the soil bucket.” Dwayne sketched out a proposal that used tytumber to modify the timings of spell castings. “Go ahead, eat. You look like you need it.”

  Sioned inched towards him. “Is this still thanks for cleaning you?”

  “No, not really. I just can’t eat this much.” Which was bad because if he was going to escape, he’d need all his strength. For completeness sake, he noted in his proposal that the Ri core creation process would go much faster if he was free of the tytumber. “Good food deserves to be eaten.”

  Sioned darted forward, snatched the wrap out of his hand and then retreated to her chair to devour it.

  Dwayne chuckled. “You eat like Mei.”

  Sioned paused mid-bite. “What do you mean?”

  “Like the larders will burn tomorrow.”

  “I mean… You ate with her?”

  Dwayne blinked up at her. “Of course, why wouldn’t I? She’s my friend.”

  “Yeah, right, friend.” Sioned popped the last of the wrap into her mouth then adjusted her mask. “Just cause she can’t say no, don’t mean you’re friends.”

  “Oh, this is a noble versus commoner thing.” Dwayne returned to his work. “I doubt I could make Mei do anything. Besides if Mei cared about things like that, then the fact that I’m Wesen and an ex-slave would matter much more to her.”

  “Why?”

  Dwayne stared at Sioned. “Cups, have you ever met a noble?”

  Sioned shrugged. “I’ve met you.”

  “To real nobles, I don’t count. You’d know that if you’d ever actually met one.” Dwayne folded up his proposal and put it into Bruce’s envelope, which he tossed at Sioned. “There. That’s my real proposal. Tell Bruce if she wants to make any real progress, she’ll let me do it. Now,” he stood up and walked over to the soil bucket, “I need some privacy.”

  Sioned grabbed the envelope and fled.