A darkness gathered, overhead and all around. Thunder and rain crashed, deafening, but not a sliver of lightning showed in the inky ceiling that smothered the sky. With no lantern remaining, true darkness fell.

“Moss?” Ashes felt as if her own voice came from a distance.

“I’m here. It’s all right.”

“Yes. It will be.” And those words didn’t feel at all like they’d come from Ashes. She hadn’t thought to say them. Yet she instinctively believed they were true.

The barge rocked. The cage slid.

The darkness whispered. In the direction Ashes had last glimpsed Fal, a scream wound into the thunder and crashing rain. Another scream answered, this one closer, perhaps in the cage with Ashes.

Something wet and slick slithered over Ashes’s toes.

The cycle will turn.

“Be still.” Ashes spoke the words into the pitch black surrounding her. She knew Moss would listen. She couldn’t see if anyone was close enough to hear. “Be still, and they won’t harm you.”

Despite her words, her own heart pounded. If this was the answer to her prayer, then it came with deadly risk. Tentatively, Ashes reached out a hand and closed her fingers around the cage bar just below Moss’s hand, bracing herself so that she would not stagger or step.

More shrieks rose, outside the cage but also within it. Ashes’s advice had gone either unheard or unheeded.

“Did you…” Moss spoke close to Ashes’s ear but hesitated.

Did you know this would happen? Did you ask for this?

Did you make this happen?

Whatever Moss might have asked, she didn’t. The barge tipped hard. Ashes slammed into Moss and then into the bars. She pressed the soles of her feet flat and managed not to move them. Something heavy and ropy bumped her ankle, and she held her breath.

A buckling sensation rolled beneath her feet. The barge slammed in the opposite direction. Ashes and Moss wrapped their arms around the bars and kept their places, but the sharp, whistling sound of the anchor ropes breaking snapped through the falling rain.

The barge teetered dangerously further, lifting the end where Ashes and Moss stood into the air. Then it slammed down into the water and spun away. Something shoved at it from the further side, and Ashes recalled the hummock with long swamp grasses near their camp site.

The barge spun again, the opposite direction this time, dizzyingly fast. Ashes kept her feet beneath her, but her knees gave way. She sagged, holding herself upright only by grabbing onto the cage’s bars. Moss grunted but stayed standing.

Another crash. The barge shuddered. Splintering and shouting and screaming echoed, some from near and some from far.

And then nothing, only the storm.

Rain fell so hard and so heavy that Ashes felt she was breathing water. She pried her fingers from around the cage bar and experimentally lifted her hand toward her face, but her eyes refused to see what she knew was right before her.

“It’s not natural.” Moss’s voice spoke close to Ashes’s ear, with a cadence that suggested she was shouting. Their shoulders pressed against each other. Even so, Ashes could barely hear Moss over the storm. “This darkness. I can’t see anything at all.”

It was the middle of the night, in the middle of the swamp, in the middle of a storm. Even so, Ashes felt Moss was right. It seemed wrong that it should be so utterly impossible to see. She closed her eyes—as if that made a difference—and tried to judge her situation without her sight.

The barge’s surface slanted beneath her feet, thrumming and groaning now and then, as if it tried to escape whatever it had crashed into.

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“We hit a tree, I think.” Moss’s shoulder shifted against Ashes’s, as if she peered around in an attempt to see into the pitch black. “But we’re no longer moving.”

The splintering, yes. It must have been a tree. And despite the thrumming of the deck beneath Ashes’s bare feet, there was no sense of motion.

That bright something Ashes had felt when the storm began fluttered anew into her throat.

“We’ve run aground.” Ashes whispered the words in Moss’s direction. The sound of rain swallowed her words, but Moss would have drawn that conclusion already, anyhow.

Around Ashes, the slithering darkness murmured wordless approval. The touch of hope in Ashes’ throat soured ever so slightly.

Whatever had answered Ashes, she didn’t think it was Keres. Twenty years ago, Ashes had escaped with Moss not only from the Vithtak occupation of Lechat Leriand but also from this presence, with its scent of bitter herbs and oily touch which brought into Ashes’s mind the thought of stingers and fangs.

The crashing of rain into the surrounding water and reeds subsided to a lesser roar and then to an almost pleasant patter. The pounding of water against her skin eased to a gentle touch. Ashes shivered.

Shimmers of gray and silver emerged from the darkness, teasing as firefly glows, so soft that at first Ashes didn’t realize she was seeing anything. Gradually, the unnatural shroud of darkness receded. Faint moonlight glowed through clouds, providing barely any light at all.

It was enough to unveil the comfortingly familiar lines of Moss’s face inches away. Moss glanced toward Ashes, pressed her fingers lightly around Ashes’s, and rose slowly from her crouch.

“Carefully,” Ashes called up to Moss.

Outlines traced themselves across the canvas of night, of trees and waving grasses. And there, mere feet from Ashes, the barge’s edge tipped almost into the water. A wet length of thick coils undulated and then slipped off the barge and into the water. The swamp’s rain-chopped surface swallowed the ripples of its passage.

Ashes held her breath and squinted at the barge’s surface around her feet. No snake shapes slithered or coiled anywhere near her. The departing glimpse she’d caught had been the last of them.

She let out the breath and inhaled more deeply. The sweet scent of rain cleansed the air, and the bugs had gone. A trace of darker scents crept in with the sweet, though, of blood and sour vomit and excrement.

The dark stripes of the cage’s bars fell across her vision of everything beyond it. Wherever the barge had crashed, however it might be grounded or damaged, they remained locked inside.

She and Moss and who else? Ashes turned her attention to the murmuring darkness within the cage. The rain let up even further, and the clouds overhead shifted, painting paler shades of gray which added depth to the nightscape.

Human-shaped heaps lay unmoving on the cage’s floor. The flutter of hope in Ashes’s throat faltered. She’d prayed for aid. That hadn’t included a wish for anyone’s death, certainly not those who were in no better situation than hers.

Certainly no better, now.

The Church of Cycles had schooled Ashes in the ways of Keres. Death was not to be feared. It was only an extension of life beyond the boundaries of mortal comprehension.

The gods give, and the gods take away.

But it was not usually Keres’s way to bring death directly, only to ease the natural passage.

Who did bring the storm? Who holds responsibility for it?

Among the bodies inside the cage, a handful of others still stood or staggered to their feet. Outside the cage, no one was immediately visible, neither slavers nor the slaves who’d served them. Ashes couldn’t imagine that anyone simply standing on the barge’s deck had avoided being cast into the lake.

If one had, though, then there was little time to waste. Ashes grasped the bars closest to her and pushed against them, forward and back in a rocking motion. They didn’t give.

Something had to have broken, somewhere. There must be a way to get out.

Ashes looked toward Moss’s dim outline. “Help me.”

Moss placed her hands alongside Ashes’s. Together, they once more heaved against the cage’s bars.

Again, the bars held.

“Meleri?” A male voice spoke low from inside the cage.

“I’m here.” A female voice answered. “I’m all right, I think.”

Waxing moonlight picked out a hint of red hair—Charak, who had chided Arrold earlier for his attempt to negotiate with Barab, the slaver overseer. The woman who felt her way haltingly toward him was the same plump woman with lank black hair who’d caught Charak when Barab struck him away from the bars.

Others reached hands toward each other, helping one another to their feet and speaking in low, dazed tones.

Too slow. They’re moving too slowly.

Accustomed to fending for themselves, Ashes and Moss by unspoken consent discounted and ignored those others. Stepping to the side, they tested the next set of bars.

“The barge spun and crashed. Surely something’s been knocked loose or broken.” Ashes tried not to end with a question’s uptick.

Something.

“We won’t give up.” Comforting certainty flowed through Moss’s tight words. “Keep trying.”

That’s our life. That’s how we’ve come this far—don’t give up. Keep trying.

Nothing gave. Ashes and Moss side-stepped again, brushing past the pale young blonde woman with her foreign clothing, who stirred slowly from crouching to standing. Again and again they moved, stepping over and around bodies which had come to rest against the bars.

A thin and tall woman with short black hair took notice, and her head turned as she watched Ashes’s and Moss’s progress. After a second’s hesitation, she moved to the bars as well and began to test them.