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those racking spasms.
    Another flash of the revealing lightning burst. There was a girl in the bed, holding both hands over her mouth and nose, her shoulders shaking. And over those muffled hands her eyes were wide open, looking straight into Roane’s.

CHAPTER 3

    ROANE MOVED without any conscious volition, at least afterward she could remember none. When she was thinking again she found herself face down in the stinking morass of the bed, a struggling body pinned under her. One of her hands was across the girl’s mouth, and Roane was using her own weight to try to subdue the other’s struggles.
    There was a sharp pain in Roane’s gagging hand and she snatched it away instinctively. The girl had bitten her. But the shrieks she feared might follow did not come. Instead the other spoke in a low voice:
    “Why try to smother me, you dolt?”
    Roane jerked away, nursing her bitten hand. She fumbled her beamer out of its belt loop, set it on low, and turned it on. And with her hand about it for a shield, she held it full upon the other.
    The pale face caught in that light was streaked with black smears; dark hair tumbled about it. Below the determined chin was a broad metal collar, and from that a chain stretched into the dark. The girl caught at the collar with both hands, worried at it, though she continued to stare straight at the light as if seeking Roane behind it.
    “If you are not one with the offal below,” she said in a whisper, “then who are you?”
    “I came here to shelter from the storm,” Roane said evasively, in a whisper even more constrained. “I heard them bringing you and I hid.”
    “Where?” The girl asked that eagerly as if the answer held some desperate meaning for her.
    Roane switched the light so it touched the headboard as a pointer. “Behind that. There is space enough.”
    “But where you were does not tell me who you are,” the girl returned sharply. “I am the Princess Ludorica!” And there was a note in her voice which canceled out the dirt streaks on her face, the clinging stench, the collar that confined her.
    Roane looked at that collar, and in her a small spark of anger flared. By all the urging of her training she should leave here right now. She could use that niche ladder. By the strongest oaths known to her people she was pledged not to make any contacts. Revenian quarrels were no concern for off-worlders. The old laws on noninterference were strictly enforced. And yet—that collar—
    “I am not of Reveny,” she said, evading once again, striving to keep her answer as low as she could.
    “Thus making this matter none of your affair?” the Princess snapped. “What are you then, a Vordainian spy? Or perhaps a smuggler from over-border? He who will not reveal his face nor speak his name cannot thereafter be troubled if we see him as a walking evil.” She repeated the last as if she quoted some saying. “Can you be bought? My offer will be very high—”
    Roane wondered at the calm control of the Princess. Instead of sitting in this odorous box with a chain and collar making her fast, she might have been at ease in her own palace, save that she held her voice to a whisper. And now Roane saw that what she had first thought another smear of grime across the side of the girl’s chin was the darkening of a large bruise. Now and then Ludorica did hesitate between one word and the next, as if she found speaking somewhat difficult.
    “Who are those men below?” Roane had a question of her own. That they had so dared mishandle the heiress to Reveny’s throne meant they were not common criminals. And the more she learned of what lay behind this, the better she could plan what to do. Though she already knew she could not turn her back on Ludorica.
    “Since I had to play the swooning female, that they use me with less alertness, I did not see too much of them. They wear foresters’ jerkins, I do not believe honestly. And how I came into their hands—” She shrugged and