It ends when you decide and we both drink, and find out who is right... and who is dead.
There's a bit more action this time around, as Balsa must figure out a way to get out of the trap the palace is trying to spring. There is to be a manhunt, where soldiers and volunteers will search every inch of the country in order to find "the second prince's murderer". Still injured, she uses the jewels to buy the freedom of a bunch of slaves, foreign slaves mostly, so that reports of strange women will be everywhere. And then she looks north to her homeland, Kanbul.
Even better than the first volume, this disc shows Balsa the strategist (at one point, a palace assassin says "I admire this woman, even though we are enemies.") at her best. She uses all her resources: the orphans Toya and Saya to gather more supplies (the previous ones were lost trying to outrun their pursuers), Tanda to make the deal with the slavers, and Torogai, the water-witch, to do what she does best. (And no, the thing she's best at is not "making it rain".) And then Balsa thinks about what her enemies would anticipate that she would do, and turns it on its head.
The main conflict in this series is that Chagum has the egg of a water spirit in him. His people revile those types of spirits -- the first mikado killed a water spirit to found the country -- and call them demons. The mikado himself, Chagum's father, believes that killing Chagum is the only way to prevent a horrible drought, and there's evidence to show that this might be correct. But at the same time, the title of the series refers to the bearer of the egg -- Chagum. So I'm guessing that the truth is somewhere in the middle.
The story stays very strong, but the CG here (especially in the mountains) was not as good as it had been previously. It seems to work best with set pieces, like the water wheel or the star chart, but they keep using it for backgrounds that occasionally look really wonky.
Love it thus far, though. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens in volumes I haven't already seen.