This spot at the front had become a place for me to relax, to focus my mind on the tasks that lay before me. With the benefit of real, undisturbed sleep on my side, I could finally begin to formulate plans to escape. Not now, but for when we would inevitably return to Zebrica. Admittedly, there still wasn’t much I could do with the Princes and their honourguards present. But since finding a surprising asset in that Zelac and his ability to make darkdream tonic, simply waiting this farcical sentence out suddenly became a far more tenable option. Since I already knew I wasn’t going to be freed after the conclusion of this tour, that simply meant I would be returned to Greenstone, or tossed into some other much easier-to-escape prison. In the former’s case, that meant my escape plan remained unchanged, since even a month’s time wouldn’t magically undo the tensions I’d sown there. In the latter? Well, with seventeen prison escapes to my name so far—eleven Imperial, five Zhaaneph, and once in the small Z’Haran protectorate’s sole prison—I don’t expect to be held there for more than a month.