"As usual, you men always jump to conclusions about what we women intend. It's quite tiresome."

"When I met you last, you tried to kill me."

"Are you sure?"

"Hmm. Let me think. A naked knife. A mostly naked woman. I admit that part was appealing."

"Why in the hells would I come to kill you stripped to the waist?"

He chuckled, although it sounded exceedingly like rolling pebbles in his mouth, a trick he had tried when a lad with predictable results. He felt now, too, as though he had swallowed something small and hard that wedged in his throat. There was still a little water left in the cup, and he sipped at it and recovered and could speak.

"I thought it was a clever ploy to distract my attention."

She laughed as she grinned down at him. The flame of the light gave her complexion a glowing cast, bathing it in gold. Her eyes were very dark, heavily lidded. Her mouth was lush and very red. Delectable.

"Aui! The hells," he muttered. "I'm delirious."

"No doubt. All the better reason to climb that rope and escape your prison."

"With your help?"

"I'm the one with the rope."

He lifted a hand and was pleased he had strength enough to gesture in a casual way, reflecting a degree of unconcern he did not, in fact, feel, not with her hanging over him in such a position that he got a look right down her vest to the rounded shadows beneath. He remembered-very well-the curves she had on her.

"I'll pass."

"You'll wait for the justice of this corrupt council? I think you'd do best to be well shed of them, for they've been colluding with all manner of folk who will be happy to kill you once they have conquered Olossi. Which they are like to do if you can't get a message to the northern reeve halls, which I wish you would do by climbing this rope, calling your eagle, and leaving this place as soon as ever you can."

"Oh. Slow. I beg you. That was too much and too fast, my sweet."

"I've not given you permission to call me your 'sweet.' "

"Maybe not, but you ask me to trust you. That should give me a few privileges, don't you think?"

"Why shouldn't you trust me? You're such an easy target now that had I wished to kill you, you'd be dead already."

"It is a great comfort, knowing that. Why did you try to kill me before?"

"As I said, you misread the signals."

"A knife thrust at my guts is a strange way to signal something other than murderous intent."

"I had to protect myself. I wasn't sure who had sent you. You might have been on the side of our enemies."

"Who did you think had sent me? Who are your enemies? And who are you?"

She looked away, over her shoulder, then back down at him. "Best we get you out of here before we're interrupted, then I'll tell the tale."

"So, again, you're saying I must trust you."

"Or stay here. Your choice."

"How did you get here? Where are the guards?"

"Aui!" She had a very attractive way of setting her jaw when she was exasperated. "You talk too much, after all. Just like other men. Here I hoped you were different."

"Oh! Eh!" He laughed, although it hurt his head and his ribs to do so. "Now you've appealed to my vanity. I can't bear to be 'just like other men.' "

He tried to stand but found he was too weak to do it easily. Setting a hand against the wall and one on the ground, he managed to lever himself up, but he had to lean against the wall lest he collapse. He was cold, and then hot, and then cold again, in waves that made him sweat and shiver. "Whew. I'm sorry to say, it'll be hard for me to climb that rope."

She withdrew. A second rope slithered over the lip and its end dropped to the floor. Two bare feet appeared, gripped the rope as she eased her body over the lip. She shinnied down hand over hand at a speed that should have burned her thighs, landed softly, and paused with a hand still on the rope to fetch a tiny globe from her cleavage. It was glass, of a kind. With it balanced in one palm, she blew into it, and it lit with a pretty flame that cast an aura of light before her.

"I'll help you up," she said.

He stared at her tight sleeveless vest and short kilted wrap. The rig showed her figure to advantage, and she knew it. She smiled, amused by his stare.

From above, a snap like the sound of a door slid hard shut cut the quiet.

Her smile vanished as quickly as it had come. She stepped forward to examine him, and the floor of the cell, under the glow of the globe light. He became aware of what he must look like and how he must reek. For the first time, he got a good look at the coating of dried grime that had slicked the floor, every possible thing he could disgorge from his body: blood, vomit, diarrhea, urine, the worst sort of spume.

She lifted the globe to the level of his eyes. "Did they try to poison you?"

"I don't know. I ate a little rice earlier. It-stayed down."

"Follow the light." She moved it slowly from side to side, but she watched his eyes. "Did you take a hard blow to the head?"

"That I did."

"Ah. Sometimes that will make you cast out your stomach. Yes, you've quite a few signs of that illness. You'll want a bath and your clothes washed. We best hurry, for this is taking longer than I had planned for. Can you walk?"

"I don't know."

By the way she tilted her head just a little to the right and then back a little to the left it seemed she was considering options and discarding them.

She touched the globe to those rich lips. Its light extinguished immediately.

"I'll put it back in its warm setting, my sweet," he said hopefully.

She looked at him sidelong in a way that would have set him aflame if he wasn't feeling and smelling and looking like a dead rat well run over and left in the dank to get really ripe. Then she tucked away the globe, slung a strong arm around his waist, and helped him over to the rope. There was nothing seductive in the action. She tied him up in the rope to make it a seat around his hips. He was so dizzy from moving that he couldn't even say what he would like to say about where her hands were working because the words went awhirl and he had enough to do to stay on his feet as she rigged him up and left him standing there. She climbed swiftly up the knotted rope and eased herself gracefully out of the hatch. A moment later, the rope drew tight, strained, and he grasped with all his strength to avoid pitching backward as she hauled him up. He rocked. He shut his eyes, but decided that was worse. His knee rapped the hot surface of the lantern, but not hard enough to shatter anything, by Ilu's mercy.

The room above, which he did not remember, was a holding cell with rings along the far wall where folk could be chained up until ready to be moved. She had used one of these rings as her lever, with the rope pulling over it, and when his head came up past the opening she tied it securely, crossed back to him, and used main force with her arms hooked under his armpits to drag him up and onto the floor. There he sprawled. While he panted, trying not to sway although he wasn't moving, she cut him loose from the rope now tangled around his legs.

"You'll have to walk the next part." She stepped back and pulled up the lantern.

"Where are the guards?"

She knelt beside him. There was a pleasant smell to her, like jasmine, but under that a scent he recognized with a kind of delayed shock: She smelled of eagles.

"You'll need this."

Her hands were cool as she lifted his head enough to slip a leather thong over it, settling it at his neck. He groped at his chest, found the bone whistle. He groaned, would have wept had he retained water enough for tears. "What bell is it?"

"Middle night."

"I can't use this until daybreak. Once they discover I'm gone, they'll search for me."

"Which is why we must hurry." She got an arm under him, and with her help he stood. The whistle gave him strength.