Alaric had not simply imprisoned his daughter.

He had imprisoned her testimony.

He had built, around a decade of theft, a wall made of her own supposed madness, and the genius of it was that the more she protested the wall, the higher it grew.

“How long,” Caspian asked quietly, “have you been trying to tell people?”

Something moved in her face — the particular, careful surprise of a person who has just been asked the one question that assumes she is sane.

“Ten years,” she said.