“Eight days is an exaggeration,” Kaelen said, his tone dry as kiln dust. “Seven days and twenty-one hours. Let us not pad the bill before I file the grievance.”
Sera choked on a breath that was half a sob and half a cough. Her fingers dug harder into the torn blue cotton of his sleeve.
Above them on the rim of the pit, nobody moved.
Blood-Captain Varga stood frozen on the shattered shale, staring down into the fresh thirty-yard chasm with dead, white eyes. His broadsword hung loose in his hand, its steel tip trembling against the loose stones.
Behind Varga, twenty more guards joined the twenty already at the rim; all forty stood rooted to the dirt like wooden posts. Not one of them drew a bow.
“He split the rock,” a sentry muttered, stumbling back into the sagebrush. “He didn’t even drop his slippers.”
Let them stare, Kaelen thought, shifting Sera’s weight against his left hip. Every second they spend contemplating my sleeping robe is another thirty seconds of peace before someone asks me to carry firewood.
His right arm hung completely dead at his side.
