The Palace of Impossible Dreams Read Free

Cayal’s fault she was here, sold into slavery and lost to everything she had ever known or loved. In his blind enthusiasm for death, he’d thought only of his own desires when he’d so willing left Arkady with his enemy, the Tide Lord Brynden, as a hostage.
What was he thinking?
Surely it must have occurred to him that the Lord of Reckoning would go for the more immediate revenge, by harming Cayal’s lover—Brynden would have assumed, knowing Cayal, that Arkady could be nothing else—rather than wait for the possible chance to see an end to him, a dubious prospect given they were both immortal.
    What was
I
thinking
, Arkady berated herself silently,
to go along with such an idiotic plan in the first place?
    But there was little to be gained by agonising over how she got here. She’d be much better employed finding a way to escape.
    Arkady was neither innocent nor blind. She knew what lay ahead of her, and it wasn’t the wild imaginings of a duchess suddenly confronted with cruel reality. Arkady had been in this place before.
    Thoughts of suicide were not uncommon among slaves, particularly new ones. As a result, the Senestrans wisely ensured their valuable possessions lacked the means to act upon them. Arkady allowed herself a small, sour smile, thinking she and Cayal finally had something in common.
We both want to die, and for wildly different reasons, we’re both unable to act upon it.
    At least she
could
die, she supposed, which was something to be grateful for. Confronted with every deadly weapon known to man, Cayal was still unable to end his torment.
Her
biggest problem, Arkady knew, would be finding a method that was quick enough to ensure death. She was never left alone, so even if she’d been able to tear her shift into strips to make a noose and then find somewhere in the low, cramped cabin to hang herself—unlikely, given she couldn’t even stand upright—the others would stop her before she had a chance to tie the first few knots.
    No, Arkady needed a method that was quick and irreversible. She would only get one chance at this and did not intend to survive it. The punishment for a slave caught attempting to escape through death would make being handed to the crew of the
Trius
seem mild by comparison.
    Arkady needed a weapon, although she couldn’t imagine any circumstance that would involve a sailor willingly surrendering such a dangerous implement to a mere slave—and the sailors were the only ones who had what she needed: a knife or a marlin spike preferably . . .
    Or a scalpel
, she thought, as the vaguest hint of a plan began to form in her sleep-starved mind. Arkady pulled down the shoulder of her shift to examine the scabbed-over burn of her slave brand. The interlinked chain symbol was hard to make out in the gloom, but she could tell, just from the dull throbbing pain, that the burn was probably healing cleanly.
    Pity.
If it was infected, she could ask to see the ship’s doctor and have some hope of being treated. Live slaves were the Senestrans’ lifeblood, not dead ones. They would treat a slave with an infected wound—and the treatment would be lancing the wound to drain the pus.
    To do that, the ship’s doctor would need a scalpel.
    Arkady pondered the idea for a time. If the doctor came to lance an infected wound, and she was quick enough, she could grab the scalpel fromhis hand and slice through her own carotid artery before anybody had time to react. It was quick, clean, relatively painless, and unstoppable. Once her artery started pumping blood across the cabin, no doctor, no matter how skilled, would be able to stop it. It was a better than even wager that any doctor stuck on a Senestran slaver wasn’t the best practitioner, anyway . . .
    There was one fatal flaw in her plan, of course.
    The salve they’d applied in Elvere after she was branded had done its job. The wound was clean and healing