The idea pleased her, and she ate the rest of the meal with relish, all the while plotting how she might arrange the man’s demise.

When she was finished, the man took the tray and left.

She listened to his footsteps recede, to the door opening and closing behind her, to the snick of the latch snapping shut, and then to the heavy, doom-laden sound of a beam falling into place across the outside of the door.

Then once again she was alone, with nothing to do but wait and dwell upon the ways of murder.

For a while, she amused herself by tracing one of the lines painted on the ceiling and attempting to determine whether it had a beginning or an end. The line she chose was blue; the color appealed to her because of its associations with the one person whom, above all else, she dared not think of.

In time, she grew bored with the lines and with her fantasies of revenge, and she closed her eyes and slipped into an uneasy half sleep, where the hours seemed, with the paradoxical logic of nightmares, to pass both faster and slower than normal.

When the man in the gray tunic returned, she was almost glad to see him, a reaction for which she despised herself, considering it a weakness.

She was not sure how long she had been waiting—could not be sure unless someone told her—but she knew it had been a shorter period than before. Still, the wait had felt interminable, and she had feared that she was to be left strapped down and isolated—though not ignored, surely not that—for the same drawn-out stretch. To her disgust, she found herself grateful that the man was going to visit her more often than she had originally thought. Lying motionless on a flat piece of stone for so many hours was painful enough, but to be denied contact with any other living creature—even one as lumpish and abhorrent as her jailer—was a torture in and of itself and was by far the harder trial to bear.

As the man unlocked her from her restraints, she noted that the wound on his forearm had been healed; the skin was as smooth and pink as a suckling pig’s.

She refrained from fighting, but on the way to the privy room, she pretended to stumble and fall, hoping to get near enough to the platter that she might steal the small paring knife the man used to cut the food. However, the platter proved too far away, and the man was too heavy for her to drag toward it without alerting him to her intentions. Her ploy having failed, she forced herself to submit calmly to the rest of the man’s ministrations; she needed to convince him that she had given up so he would grow complacent and, if she was lucky, careless.

While he fed her, she studied his fingernails. Previously, she had been too angry to pay them heed, but now that she was calmer, the oddity of them fascinated her.

His nails were thick and highly arched. They were set deep within the flesh, and the white moons by the cuticles were large and broad. In all, no different from the nails of many of the men and dwarves she had dealt with.

When had she dealt with them? … She did not remember.

What set his nails apart was the care with which they had been cultivated. And cultivated seemed the right description to her, as if the nails were rare flowers a gardener had devoted long hours to tending. The cuticles were neat and trim, with no sign of tears, while the nails themselves had been cut straight across—not too long, not too short—and the edges smoothly beveled. The tops of the nails had been polished until they shone like glazed pottery, and the skin surrounding them looked as if oil or butter had been rubbed into it.

Except for elves, she had never seen a man with such perfect nails.

Elves? She shook off the thought, irritated with herself. She knew no elves.

The nails were an enigma; a strangeness in an otherwise understandable setting; a mystery that she wanted to solve, even though it was probably futile to try.

She wondered who was responsible for the nails’ exemplary condition. Was it the man himself? He seemed overly fastidious, and she could not imagine he had a wife or daughter or servant or anyone else close to him who would lavish so much attention on the caps of his fingers. Of course, she realized she might be mistaken. Many a battle-scarred veteran—grim, close-mouthed men whose only loves seemed to be wine, women, and war—had surprised her with some facet of their character that was at odds with their outward guise: a knack for wood carving, a tendency to memorize romantic poems, a fondness for hounds, or a fierce devotion to a family that they kept hidden from the rest of the world. It had been years before she had learned that Jör—

She cut off the thought before it went any further.

In any event, the question she kept turning over in her mind was a simple one: why? Motivation was telling, even when such small things as fingernails were concerned.

If the nails were the work of someone else, then they were a labor of either great love or great fear. But she doubted that was the case; somehow it felt wrong.

If, instead, they were the work of the man himself, then any number of explanations were possible. Perhaps his nails were a way for him to exert a modicum of control over a life that was no longer his own. Or perhaps he felt they were the only part of himself that was or could be attractive. Or perhaps caring for them was merely a nervous tic, a habit that served no other purpose except to while away the hours.

Whatever the truth might be, the fact remained that someone had cleaned and trimmed and buffed and oiled his fingernails, and it had not been a casual or inattentive effort.

She continued to ponder the matter while she ate, barely tasting her food. Occasionally, she glanced up to search the man’s heavy face for one clue or another, but always without success.