A Man Rides Through by Stephen Donaldson

and in pain on his knees against her bars—touched her, and she relented a little. "You really ought to be in bed. You aren't going to be hunting anybody for a while. If the Castellan doesn't tear it out of me—and if he lets me live— I promise I'll tell you everything I can when you're well enough to do something about it."
     
    He didn't raise his head for a long time. When he finally looked up, the light had gone out of his gaze.
     
    Tortuously, like an old man whose joints had begun to betray him, he pulled himself up the bars, regained his feet. "I always trusted him," he murmured as if he were alone, deaf and blind to her presence. "More than Nyle or any of the others. He was so clumsy and decent. And smarter than I am. I can't figure it out.
     
    "You came along, and I thought that was good because it gave him something to fight for. It gave him a reason to stop letting those Masters humiliate him. So then he kills Nyle, kills"—Artagel shuddered, his eyes focused on nothing—"and you're the only explanation I can think of, you must be evil in some terrible way I don't understand, but you want me to go on trusting him. I can't figure it out.
     
    "I saw his body." Like an old man, he turned from the door and began shuffling down the corridor. "I picked it up and held it." Brushing at the dried stains on his nightshirt, he passed beyond Terisa's range of vision. His boots scuffed along the floor until she couldn't hear them anymore.
     
    She stood rigidly and watched the empty passage for a while, as erect as a witness testifying to what she believed. Like the Tor, he said that Nyle was dead. And he could hardly be wrong. He ought to be able to identify his own brother's body. And yet she didn't recant. Unexpectedly, she found that she was supported by a lifetime's anger. A childhood of punishment and neglect had taught her many things—and she was only now starting to realize what some of those things were.
     
    Her hands shook. She steadied them as well as she could and began to eat the bread and stew she had been brought, pacing back and forth across the cell as she ate. She needed strength, needed to pull all her resources together. King Joyse had told her to think, to reason. Now more than at any other time in her life, she needed the stamina and determination to think clearly.
     
    To the extent that it was possible for anyone to do so, she intended to defy the Castellan.
     
     
     
    When he came at last—several hours and another meal later—she was almost glad to see him. Waiting was no doubt much easier to bear than rape or torture, but it was harder than defiance. Solitude eroded courage. Half a dozen times during those hours, she quailed, and her resolution ran out of her. Once she panicked so badly that afterward she found herself on the floor in the corner with her knees hugged against her chest and no idea how she got there.
     
    But she was brought back from failure of nerve by the fact that she knew how to survive waiting alone in a cold, ill-lit cell. She had recovered her ability to blank out the dark and the fear. Paradoxically, the decision to meet her danger head on restored her capacity for escape. And when she surrendered to fading, she rediscovered the safety hidden in it and felt better.
     
    For this she didn't need a mirror. Mirrors helped her fight the erosion of her existence; they weren't necessary if she wanted to let go. And it was letting go, not desperate clinging, which had kept her sane when her parents had locked her in the closet.
     
    Nevertheless the time and the waiting, the cold and the inadequate food exacted their toll. There were limits to how far she could stretch her determination. She was almost glad to see him when the stamp of boots announced his coming and Castellan Lebbick appeared past the stone edge of her cell.
     
    Now he would hurt her as much as he could. And she would find out what she was good for.

 
    But the sight of him shocked her: It wasn't what