The chapter starts, and we go back in time just a little bit, to the moment of Terisa’s capture by Eremis, Gilbur, and the High King’s Monomach. In the chaos of King Joyse’s audience chamber, Eremis grabs Terisa and pushes her at the transition point. She feels the “bottomless instant of translation,” and finds herself surrounded not by the sunlight streaming through the clerestory windows of Orison, but by torch- and lamplight, all of which is instantly doused at Eremis’s command. A voice Terisa doesn’t recognize asks what went wrong, and Eremis tells the owner that Geraden is still alive, and mustn’t be allowed to see the room they were translated to. The voice agrees, but before Terisa even has time to consider who its owner might be, Eremis forces her down a hallway and into another room.
In an almost completely dark room in the depths of Eremis’s stronghold--wherever it may be--Terisa, wholly in the rogue Imager’s power, finds that only her rage can sustain her against the insistence of his hands. Refusing to give way to panic, she fights with the only weapon she has--the only weapon she’s had for so much of her time in Mordant--logic. She learns the consequences of her ill-advised trip to visit him when he was in Orison’s dungeons, and what she told him there of Joyse’s seemingly intentional decline. She discovers that she is indirectly responsible for Queen Madin’s abduction, as Eremis tells her that it was a way of getting Joyse out of the way long enough for Eremis’s plans to come to fruition. And she learns the secret of simultaneous translation--it is not, as Barsonage and Eremis discussed so long ago, simply a matter of translating one glass inside another, but of a specific oxidate used in the creation of one mirror to prevent the other from shattering.She had never been strong enough against him. Her concentration had never been strong enough. While he had approached her in the audience hall...she had tried to reach out into the mirror that had brought him here and change it. Her need was that extreme: she didn’t care that what she was trying was probably insane. Her strange and unmeasured talent was her only weapon. If she could fade, if she could go far enough away to reach his mirror--
His hands made that impossible.
And in the meantime, Terisa, now chained to the wall, is completely at Eremis’s mercy. Well, almost completely. Her thoughts are still her own, and as he taunts her with the truth, and touches her as he’s always intended to touch her, she keeps from going completely mad with a very simple mantra
She gains a reprieve, however, when the same unfamiliar voice she had heard when she first arrived at Eremis’s hideout says from the doorway, “Festten wants you.” Furious at being interrupted yet again just when he is about to have his way with her, Eremis takes some convincing, but finally agrees to go see the High King. As he’s leaving, Terisa asks one last question.I’m not yours. Never. I’ll find some way to kill you. No matter what happens. I swear it...
Far away in her mind, she was imagining his death...
She was going to kill him. All she had to do was stay alive long enough...
At the moment, her determination to kill him was all that kept her from despair. There simply wasn’t room in her for so much anger and the horror of seeing her last hope collapse...
If he had let her arms go--just for a second--she would have done her best to put his eyes out.
[Talk about a villainous line. God, I hate Eremis. But his particular brand of evil is unspeakably delicious. Malign and jubilant. Light and hard. Yum.]“Why are you doing this?”
He must have paused. His tone was at once hard and light; malign; jubilant.
“Because I can.”
Eremis leaves. Alone at last, Terisa reflects on her failures and missteps, and her absolute murderous rage against him. When she starts rebuttoning her shirt, however, the unfamiliar voice comes again. And Terisa realizes that she is face to face (more or less) with the Arch-Imager Vagel. Faking nonchalance as much as possible (she’s chained to the wall in an oubliette on a bed big enough for whatever Eremis has in mind while being watched by the man who is possibly the most powerful Imager in the world, and who can see in the dark, after all), she tests the length of her chain, and asks Vagel why he puts up with Eremis, why he serves a man who is less powerful than he is, instead of the other way around.
[Think about this for a second. Who else would agree with the Arch-Imager here? Elega certainly would. Terisa herself would--Terisa, whose position in Mordant, always uncertain, has fluctuated from one end of the power spectrum to another. What about Kragen? Without his position as the Alend Monarch’s son, his talents might never have put him in the Contender’s seat. The Tor takes control of Orison by virtue of his position more than his talent, which of late has been mostly drowned in wine and grief. It’s a singular statement on power, and it’s straight out of the mouth of the most mysterious and possibly fearsome villain in the whole book.]Power [says Vagel] is more often a matter of position than talent.
Vagel informs Terisa that he serves Eremis because Eremis has made himself irreplaceable to High King Festten by virtue of a) the secret oxidate that allows for simultaneous translations and b) his position as a respected member of the Congery, which allows him access to the secret places of Orison; and that neither of things would be enough on their own if they didn’t lead to the ultimate reason Vagel serves--revenge on Joyse and Adept Havelock. When Terisa suggests that Eremis is just as likely to double-cross Vagel--to keep revenge on the King and his Dastard to himself--Vagel responds with a hiss and a curse and a promise:
Vagel leaves, and Terisa is alone once again in prison, trapped in the dark. She wants nothing more than to fade, as she always did when her father locked her in the closet, but she finds that she’s still too full of rage. She is still too full of volition, of willingness to live and fight. Having tested her chain, she decides to explore her cell. It’s something to do, and anything she can learn about where she is might come in handy. She feels along the wall, trying to measure how far she’s gone, when she touches another manacle. And the hand it holds, and the body it belongs to, and its face.“...before I am done I will roast Joyse’s guts over a slow fire. I will hear him howl until his mind goes, or by the stars! I will take my satisfaction from Eremis himself.”
Nyle.
So Terisa’s theory is proved right. It gives her only momentary relief, though. Talking to Nyle, she finds out that he believes he’s being kept as bait--and as a toy for Master Gilbur. He believes that’s why she’s being held prisoner as well, as bait. Bitterly, he explains that he truly thought he was doing what was right--he knew that doing Elega’s bidding would never make her love him, but he was convinced by her conviction. Terisa struggles to keep herself from being sick at the thought of what Gilbur and the rest have done to Geraden’s brother, and can’t help but feel bitter herself when Nyle begins blaming Geraden for preventing him from completing his portion of the scheme. Worse than that, though, is how he blames himself. He tells her, finally, that he agreed to his last betrayal--the fake murder and consequent framing of Geraden--because Eremis & Co. threatened to destroy Houseldon if he didn’t. And Terisa finds that she can’t afford sympathy.
Brutally honest, she tells him that they destroyed it anyway.
[This may be the source of the Terisa-as -molested-child theory tossed around in the MN Discussion. I personally don’t think it’s a concrete indicator of molestation during her childhood--she was abused as a child, certainly; and she’s certainly been molested by Eremis. I suppose you could ask how she would know what a molested child feels like if she hadn’t been one; but logic would then force you to ask how she knows what child molester feels like, and the argument falls apart. Interesting discussion, though, right?]Far away from her, Nyle groaned softly, as if she had just slipped a knife between his ribs--as if she had just cut down the defenses, the self-justifications, which kept him alive in his fetters.
She went to him, feeling at once as brutal as a child molester and as vulnerable as a molested child.
Eventually, she gets Nyle to talk to her again, and has time only to learn that he believes they’re being held in Esmerel before Eremis suddenly returns. And equally as suddenly, she finds that she’s found that point of concentration and focus she needs to withstand the panic and rage she feels in his presence. She asks him why he’s holding Nyle in the same cell, and he tells her that it’s because he desires a witness to her degradation, so that when Geraden comes for her, he can send Nyle out to tell him all about it. In the midst of Eremis’s exposition, she finds what she’s looking for--a chaos of Images running through her mind, a blank space, like a gap in existence. A place to fade.
He comes toward her, prepared to pick up again where he left off before Festten’s summons. She asks him to remove her chain so that she can show him what she learned from Geraden.
[This may be one of the most satisfying crotch-kicks in all modern literature.]Chuckling, he took hold of her arm and clicked the fetter off her wrist.
Because she was so far away, she did nothing to betray herself. And because she was so full of anger, she didn’t hesitate.
Before he could secure his grip, she swung her leg with her strength and kicked him in the crotch.
And at that moment, Terisa sees an Image as sharp in her mind as if it had been “acid-cut.” She has no idea where she’s seen it before, but she doesn’t care--it’s away from here, this cell, Eremis--and as he reaches for her, prepared to take his revenge, she feels a touch of cold as thin as a feather and as sharp as steel slide straight through the center of her abdomen.
She falls backward into the wall, watches dimly as Eremis pulls himself back just in time to avoid being taken with her, and after the infinite moment of translation, falls onto the floor of a completely different place.
It’s Adept Havelock’s hall of mirrors in the basements of Orison, and Master Barsonage, Geraden, and the Adept himself are staring at her as if she had just tumbled out of a coffin.
Because someone feels compelled to do what they can rather than just sliding through life...but I'm pretty tired today, and doubt I am making any sense, so I'll stop now while I'm ahead. 
