CHAPTER NINETEEN
Ceres woke as she always seemed to wake now, with water thrown on her, cold and dirty enough that she gasped at it. Automatically, her tongue darted out, trying to collect some of the moisture there, because in the dungeons of the castle they gave her almost nothing.
“Look at her,” someone called from above her. “She’s like an animal!”
“Filthy little thing,” another jeered. “Dressed in scraps like that!”
It didn’t seem to matter to them that it had been Stephania who had hacked her hair away; Stephania who had let her men tear Ceres’s clothes until they were little more than a few bare strips of cloth. The slaves there wore more.
Ceres looked around her, and when she saw where she was, she shuddered. She was back in the training pit beneath the castle, the sand beneat
