“Are you all right?”

I opened my eyes to find Amelia looking at me with an expression of concern. “I think I might live,” I said.

A ghost of a smile crossed her face. “I’m sorry I exploded like that last night. I know it’s not your fault, and you certainly didn’t ask to be here. I was just kind of upset.”

I looked at her, really noticing her for the first time. She wasn’t beautiful in any conventional sense, but she was pretty enough, with brown hair touched with auburn highlights and warm hazel eyes. She was sitting cross-legged on her own thin pallet with her hands folded in her lap. I noticed that her wrists were crossed by dozens of thin scars. I could guess where those had come from. “How long has he been doing that to you? How do you stand it?”

A sad darkness of memory entered her eyes. “It’s hard to track time here, but I think it’s been almost two years. And I stand it because I must. I’ve come up with a thousand escape plans, but none of them are any good. Humans are adaptable creatures. We can learn to live with almost anything.”

I shook my head, just hoping that I’d be able to gain such calm. From the looks of things, I’d have plenty of time to develop it.

I would have been gratified had I been proved wrong on that count, but it turned out to be all too true. The next day was much like the first. We were shut up in the dark for the night, and the morning brought breakfast and an open door. That afternoon Lord Morren called for me and I was again forced to endure the pain of the power transfer spell. The only variation was that later that evening he called Amelia into the workroom. She stumbled back into our cell an hour or so later. Her wrist was bloodied and her eyes were full of pain. My own wrist was still a mess, and the bone-deep ache of pain that came from Lord Morren’s spell had never quite faded, but somehow it was worse seeing her like that. She collapsed onto her pallet. All at once I felt protective towards her. I wanted to comfort her, but I couldn’t think of anything to do or say. Jascin came up a few minutes later and shut the door for the night. I lay awake in the darkness for a long time before finally falling asleep.

That was the general pattern of our days. Sometimes Lord Morren didn’t need either of us, and we would sit in our little cell and talk. Some days the door was left open, others it remained shut. The pain of the power transfer spell was bad, but those long hours in the darkness were the worst. If I’d been alone I might have started beating my head against the walls, just to have something to do, but having Amelia there to talk to helped. She continually amazed me with her ability to deal with any hardship. She didn’t seem fazed by anything. That one breakdown on the very first night was the only sign of weakness she ever showed.

“I don’t know how you do it,” I said one day as we spoke in the darkness. I had no idea of the time, it could still be early in the morning, or afternoon might be coming on. With the door firmly shut there was no way to tell. “You stay so calm, no matter what.”

She laughed a short, bitter laugh. At first I’d done most of the talking, but lately she’d opened up and spoken more. “I’m just better at hiding it. The only thing in all this horrible mess that I can control is my own reaction to events. Inside I’m just as upset as you, I think, but if I don’t show it, it gives me a little power, or at least the illusion that I have a little power.”

I could understand that. My own way of gaining control was through knowledge. I watched Lord Morren every chance I got. I noted what spells he used and how he used them. Every scrap of knowledge was that much more chance I’d have to someday use it against him in some way. Though most days I despaired of ever having any kind of chance. What hope did I have of doing anything against Lord Morren? He was everything I wasn’t. There were days when the despair was so thick I felt I’d hit rock bottom.