Now she was alert again, and her eyes were back in focus. But because she was lying on her stomach, with her wrists and ankles roped tightly together behind her back and her spine bent into an excruciating arch, she couldn’t do anything except take it from Grigo. ‘You bitch,’ he shouted, raining blows down on her ribs and thighs with a thick wooden staff. ‘You messed up my face.’ So Brindle’s father had been right. Only Duma and Vik were dead. Treacherous Grigo, Sulpa’s special friend, (‘You don’t know him as well as I do’) was still very much alive. Ria felt pleased that at least she really had messed him up. Even in the dark, lit only by the guttering flames of brushwood torches, with her own face crushed sideways against the spiky marsh grass of the valley floor, she couldn’t miss Grigo’s brow, split from his hairline to the bridge of his nose, or the big gaps she’d knocked in his front teeth. Then – THUMP! – the heavy staff cracked hard against a rib and, despite her best efforts at self-control, she groaned.
