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Scent came to her first, and the scent was of steam and soap, with a touch of rosemary. Then came the sense of hard pressure at her back, not the soft mattress. And there was no weight of furs on her, either.

It was warm, extremely warm. As sensation came back to her fingers, she flexed them, and ran them over the surface she was lying on.

Wood.

There was no wood in her cell except the beams of the ceiling.

She fought against the clinging hold of the potion, struggled to free herself of it, feeling hope begin to stir. She had to see where she was! Finally, she got her eyes open, and looked up at the ceiling above her. It was tiled in blue mosaic. And although it was not tiled in a pattern she recognized, she knew very well what this must be: a Roman bathhouse in a Roman or Roman-styled villa.

She was where she was always groomed while she was unconscious. Only this time, for some reason, she was alone. These rooms echoed dreadfully; if there had been anyone else here, she would have heard the breathing, even if they didn’t stir.

So, alone, and somewhere other than her cell. Hope took on strength. By this time, she knew exactly how soon she could move as the potion wore off; she was nearly on fire with impatience, until at last, she was able to sit up.

She had been lying on a wooden bench very near a small soaking pool, smaller than the one she knew in Arthur’s villa. This definitely was a Roman bathhouse, for the entire interior was paved in mosaic—blue with scenes of mermaids on the walls, brown with plants on the floor and in the pool. Her hair was still damp and a bit heavy but not soaking, so someone had been drying it before she had been abandoned. She was in a chemise, but not a gown, though there was a clean one nearby.

There were, in fact, a great many things nearby . . . including a knife that someone must have been using to clean and trim her nails. It wasn’t a big knife, but it was more of a weapon than she had seen in far too long.

With her eyes fixed on it, she held her breath and listened. There was a lot of commotion going on in the far distance. Shouting. Fighting? Something urgent had interrupted the people grooming her, and kept them occupied long enough for the potion to wear off. If that was fighting, they might even have forgotten her.

At some point, though, someone would realize that they had been gone too long. She had to act, and act quickly.

The first thing she did was to don the gown, slit it up the middle, and use strips she cut from the towels she found to bind the result to her legs like a pair of trews. She followed that by making crude cloth shoes of the remains of the towels. Once, she would have been able to go barefoot in anything but snow. No more. And if she managed to escape, she couldn’t afford damaged feet. She braided her hair roughly, tied the end with a bit of scrap, then hunted, quickly for what else might be useful.

She took what was left of the towels, the knife, and the pumice stone she found there, and a dipper, shoving everything but the knife into a small wooden bucket. She didn’t have the time or the strength to break up the bench to get a club, but she could swing the bucket to bash someone with, and she had the knife.

The only entrance into this room probably led to the changing room. She eased toward the doorway and peered cautiously through it. The next room, also paved and walled in mosaic like the first, was empty, but unfortunately there was nothing useful there in the way of clothing or a weapon.

There were two more doors into the changing room. She could not afford to take the wrong one, lose time, possibly be trapped in the one with the cold bath in it. She listened again, going over how a bathhouse was laid out in her mind; there would be at least one room that had a cold bath in it, but any sound would be coming from the doorway that led to the rest of the building.

That way. What she wanted was the quickest way outside, one that didn’t pass any more rooms. Granted,