by Cora Avery
Kirk folded his arms stubbornly. “I told you, I cannot serve you. You will be dead soon. If I’m bound to you, then I will be weakened and eventually perish.”
“Listen, Kirk. Lavana is working for the Throne, the King, the descendent of the one who destroyed your home. If Lavana takes this now, then the Throne will be victorious. And if she becomes the Crown, then you can be sure there will be many more homes razed and burned as yours was. Please.”
Kirk swore under his breath as the ogre’s fist bashed into the balcony doors, but didn’t quite fit through. Magda toppled and slammed onto her face, screaming as her broken arm hit the ground. She rolled over onto her back and received a mouthful of dust as the ceiling cracked.
“Some mistress you are,” Kirk said near her ear. His tiny hand grazed her temple. She assumed the touch was binding him to her service, but she was so pain-addled she could not feel the power of the connection forming between them.
“I will take the Enneahedron, Mistress,” he said.
Then he turned and swept up the seed and the Enneahedron, even though it was as tall as he was and three times as wide.
She blinked through the dust-clouded tears pooling in her eyes. “Thank you, Kirk.”
“Where will this seed take me?” he asked.
“To an old friend, Tamia,” she said. “Tell her everything that’s happened. She will help you reach the Spire.”
“As you wish,” he said grimly, “Mistress.”
He popped the seed into his mouth and vanished.
And then, just as Python had said it would, everything went dark.
SHE WOKE TO Lavana screaming at her. “Where is it? What did you do with it?”
Stunned to be opening her eyes, Magda smiled and received a sharp slap across the face for it.
She was in a dark room somewhere. Pain began to filter back into her consciousness, but her arm seemed to be somewhat better than before. She could wiggle her fingers at least. Either someone had healed her or enough time had passed—days—that her body had been able to heal itself. Pixies could heal more quickly than many races, though that did not mean they couldn’t be killed by particularly egregious wounds.
“She’s still in the healing slumber,” a bored voice said from the darkness.
“I know that!” Lavana shouted.
She seized Magda’s arms, sending a searing wave up Magda’s shoulder and into her head, causing her consciousness to cut in and out like a faulty light bulb.
“I will find out what you did with it! And then I will kill you.” She released Magda again, who began to sink away from Lavana and the shadows around her. “Put her back in the irons.”
“That will only slow her healing and make this process go on longer,” the bored voice reported.
“Shut up,” she said. “I know what I’m doing.”
“I hope so,” the voice said in a vaguely threatening manner. And then Magda slipped back into darkness.
When she woke again, she was face down on a freezing, grimy surface. Her head ached and she was glad not to have anything in her stomach, since she was sure she would’ve lost it. Instead, bile burned the back of her throat.
Something furry brushed by her face—a rat. Before she could think to send it off, the creature squeaked and darted away. A pebble struck her cheek, stinging. She winced and groaned.
“Oh, sorry,” a voice said. “I was trying to hit the rat.”
She touched her cheek. It came away red.
Great, she had only been awake two seconds and was already bleeding again.
But then she realized it was her right hand she was looking at. She flexed her fingers. A general stiff ache pervaded her, but her arm was healed. Slowly, she peeled herself off the damp stone floor.
“I wouldn’t move too far,” the voice said again. “They put you in the middle of the cell. They probably didn’t realize that it’s the safest place.”
She squinted through the darkness, hissing as her vision first fixed on iron bars. Her headache redoubled. She put her hand flat on the floor and measured her breaths until the worst of it passed.
“I’m back in the Lands, aren’t I?” she said, lifting her head slowly again. “Where are you?”
“Here.” Through the gloom, she sighted movement. Her eyes adjusted and focused on the vague outline of a person sitting in a cell that shared a wall of bars with hers. His hand lowered once she had fixed on him, but his face remained lost in shadow.
“What did you mean?” he asked. “Back in the Lands?”
She ran her hands over her face, sighing. “I was exiled. Where are we? Who are you?”
“Who are you, exile?” he shot back.
“I’m the one you hit with a rock,” she said, wincing again at the bleeding spot on her cheek. She surveyed the cell. Near the door was a pitcher of water.
“I wouldn’t,” he said. “The bottom is made of iron, to make you sick.”
She recoiled from the pitcher. “Or to kill me.”
“There is a crack in the stone,” he said, “by the grate. Water runs down the walls and pools there. You can drink that.”
She squinted again into the dark. The iron left her head throbbing and made it difficult for her to see as well as she would have otherwise.
She crawled over toward the iron grate that was bisected by their shared wall. It stank strongly of piss and shit and rats, but the stones around it were broken up, crumbling, and a small puddle had collected in one of the fractured spots. She leaned close to it, sniffing, just to be sure it wasn’t all rat urine. She sipped it. The gritty flat taste of stone and dirt scraped over her tongue. She slurped it all up, sucking it like soup until it was nothing but a damp hole.
Then she scooted back toward the middle of the cell.
“You must’ve done something very bad. Lavana is livid,” he said, a smile in his voice.
She kneaded her temple, attempting to assuage the iron-induced headache. “Lavana. She brought me here.”
“You don’t remember?” he asked.
“It’s coming back to me,” she said. “There was an ogre.”
“You fought an ogre?”
“If you call being thrown twenty feet and having your arm broken fighting, then yes, I fought.” She twisted around, searching the gloom. “Are we alone?”
“There are only two cells,” he said. “Having trouble seeing?”
“The iron,” she said, rubbing both temples now. “It’s giving me a headache.”
“Is that all?” he asked. “I was violently ill for days.”
“You haven’t seen a warrior here? His name is Damion.”
“You and the guards are the only ones I’ve seen for two days,” he said. “Lavana was here before that, but no one else.”
“She hasn’t found it, has she?”
“Found what?” he asked.
“The Enneahedron.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
Silence settled between them for a time, except for ambient sounds of rats scurrying, water dripping, and the soft hoot of an owl calling . . . She lifted her head.
“A blue owl,” she said. “I haven’t heard one of those in . . . years.”
“Are you a Rae?” he asked.
Turning towards him, she attempted to focus through the interference of the bars, but still, he was shrouded, nothing but a darker silhouette amongst shadows.
“You’re doing something,” she said, “to prevent me from seeing you.”
“How could someone do that?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “What manner of creature are you? Why are you here?”
“If you’re a Rae, why didn’t she just kill you?” he asked, ignoring her questions.
“She wanted to kill me, but she thinks I know something.”
“About the Enneahedron.”
She let out a long breath and then laughed.
“Something humorous?” he asked.
She smiled up at the iron bars overhead and the stone
ceiling above that.
“For seven years I’ve been exiled, and now that I’m finally back, finally home, this is where I end up.”
She raked her fingers into her hair. The thick swath that hung over her forehead and fell across her brow was knotted and damp like dead dog fur. As she combed her fingers through it, smoothing it, it occurred to her . . .
Reaching into her shadow’s vault, she was greeted with nothing but emptiness. Her chest heaved around a sob. Lavana had taken her finger-knives. To have her weapons seized . . . she may as well have been a corpse.
“What is your name, shadow stranger?” she asked after a time.
He was silent, and she wondered if he had fallen asleep. If the blue owl was calling, then it must’ve been very late.
But finally he answered, “Kaelan.”
“Magda,” she said.
“And are you a Rae, Magda?” he asked.
She dropped her chin to her knee. “I was.”
“But you’re not anymore?”
“I haven’t been a Rae for a long time.”
“I didn’t know you could give up being a Rae,” he said.
“Apparently you can’t,” she said. “But I certainly tried.”
“You didn’t want to be a Rae?” he asked. Though his voice was soft, she could hear the skepticism, as if he thought she was lying for some reason.
“I wanted to be Radiant,” she said. “And then I was exiled. And I realized . . .”
Her chest hurt, wondering what had happened to Damion and Riker, if they were dead or had somehow managed to escape. And Kirk, where was he? At least, she guessed, Frank didn’t have to worry about her bringing him anymore trouble. For a strange moment, she longed for nothing more than to wake up from this nightmare and find herself tangled in her cheap, scratchy sheets on the tiny, hard mattress in her messy, ugly mobile home by the sea.
“What did you realize?” he asked.
“I realized that I was nobler as a poor exile in the mortal world, than I ever had been as a Rae in this one.”
She pushed up to her feet, holding her ground for a moment as another bout of dizziness pushed through her. Then she took a series of deep breaths and refocused.
The room beyond the bars was stone, barely big enough for their iron cages. The bars above her butted against the rough ceiling, but were not bolted to it. The cage was pushed up against another wall where two narrow slits along the top allowed fresh air in. So they were not entirely underground. A broader gap sat between the cell doors and the wooden door that led out of the stone room. She edged closer to the perimeter of her cell. The bottom of the cage was bolted to the floor, but the stone was shale, soft. Water had eaten away at it. Many of the bolts were loose, the iron rusted, especially around the grate, which was not bolted either, simply laid into the floor and weighed down by the cage.
“What are you doing?” Kaelan asked.
“What do you think?” she asked, crouching by the grate again. Their shared wall bisected it, but if it had not, it would’ve been big enough for a person to fit through.
“There is no way out,” he said.
She glanced over at him again.
Though she could see the bars and the wall behind him clearly, he remained shrouded by shadow. Whatever manner of creature he was, he didn’t want her to see him. There were numerous races that possessed the ability to cloak themselves, shape-shift, become invisible. His voice, soft, deep, plain, gave little away. For all she knew, he could’ve been disguising that as well. It would not have concerned her, other than the fact that they were trapped in here together. If she tried to escape, he could alert whatever guards were around or he could help her. So the question was, could she trust him?
“I heard of someone named Kaelan once,” she said.
“Did you?”
“Yes, a forest imp. Quite a prankster, I’m told. I met a nymph who cursed him with such language . . . quite unlike a nymph. He was always hiding their hair combs, dropping black toads on their heads—black toad piss stinks like soured milk, you know, and sticks like superglue. She’d had to shave her head because of him. You know how vain nymphs can be . . . The nymphs finally snared him with gorgon rope. Had him hanging by his ankle in a walnut tree and left him there for weeks, she said, pelting him with nuts and rotted apples to teach him a lesson. People came from miles around to laugh at him. Was that you?”
“What is superglue?” he asked.
She sighed. A rat squeezed out between the holes in the grate, a fine big black one.
A soft scrape signaled that Kaelan had moved.
“Careful,” he said. “They’re not afraid of us. They’ve been trying to chew on you.”
“Well, I can’t blame them,” she said. “I’m sure a Pixie would make a fine meal.”
She held out her fingers and allowed the rat to sniff them. Then she slid her fingers over the rat’s head. Sinking deep into her own mind, she allowed the flurry of her rushing thoughts to float high above, out of reach like a flock of birds, and communicated only with emotion and sensation. She fed into the rat’s mind her own heart-pounding panic from being trapped, the thirsty urgency of needing to escape, and the image of her watching the rat come up through the grate along with her desire to do what he had done. In return, images filled her mind from the rat: the sewer below, its length and size, its routes; the joy of his freedom in running through the tunnels; and a very comical image of her squeezing, as he had, through the holes of the iron grate and joining him racing on all fours, rat-like, through the tunnel.
She chuckled and imparted to him the focused frustration of not fitting through the holes of the grate and the pain of the iron’s touch on her body.
The rat empathized with her dilemma.
Removing her fingers from his head, she returned to the disarray of her higher thoughts.
“Do you have any food?” she asked Kaelan.
“If I did, I would probably want to keep it for myself. Lavana has locked us in an iron cage. Do you think she feeds us very often?”
She scratched the rat on the back of the head, trying to figure out how to reward him without food. One of his ears was partially missing, curled up on the edges as if something had taken a bite out of it. She ran her finger gently over the ragged edge.
Then a hunk of bread hit her shoe. She snatched up the stale half-eaten roll and tore off a large chunk, feeding it to the rat.
“If I had known you were going to give it to the rat,” Kaelan grunted, “I wouldn’t have—”
“Ssshhh.” She placed her fingers back on the rat’s head, planting one image and then another of more bread, piles of it. Then she took a bite of the roll and gave the rest to the rat, who put it in his mouth and hurried back down the hole.
“You communicated with it, didn’t you?” Kaelan asked. “What did you tell it?”
The bread was so hard the crust cut into the roof of her mouth, but she gnawed it down to mush and swallowed.
“Thank you for the bread,” she said, retreating to the center of the cage where the nauseous power of the iron was slightly less.
The wooden door swung open. Firelight flooded into the prison, casting impish dancing shadows. She stood as a warrior entered. Two more hovered in the hall behind him. Face hard as the stone around them, he unlocked her cell door. Mail gloves of a goldish hue protected his hands from the iron as he pushed open the door—could it actually be? Ichor-gold? Metal of the gods? The only substance that could protect a Pixie from iron.
“Come out,” he said.
“Why don’t you come in?” she said, taking a step back.
“You won’t like it if we do,” he said.
“I have a feeling I’m not going to like it either way.”
The two other guards barreled in. She managed to spin away from the first, sweeping his leg out from under him and causing him to stumble into the iron. He hollered as he hit the bars, but the bronze plates of his lamellar shirt protected him from the worst.
The second guard kicked her in the back, sending her sprawling onto her face. She’d known the attack was futile in terms of escape, but she’d needed to unleash some of her reckless aggression. And watching him collapse on his knees and vomit all over the stone gave her more pleasure than was probably healthy.
The guards descended, slamming their knees onto her back, crushing the breath out of her, and lashing her hands.
On the ground, the first guard heaved, spewing and shaking.
She grinned as they lifted her to her feet, and she realized that it may not have been a noble life, but somewhere inside, she had always been and would always be a Rae.
THERE COMES A point when words for pain run out.
Agony, anguish, torment . . .
As Lavana’s goblin pressed a brand of cold iron against her skin, on her arms, her chest, her legs, the pain-words exhausted themselves until she was laughing hysterically through her tears.
“Torture madness,” the floppy-eared, rust-skinned goblin reported, pushing up his spectacles on his mushed-in nub of a nose. “Happens to your kind now and again.”
“You’re useless.” Lavana shoved him aside, causing him to drop the iron rod with a clang onto the stone.
She slapped Magda’s face, again and again, until Magda’s laughter was choked off by blood springing up when one of her teeth was knocked loose.
Lavana seized her shoulders and shook her. Her pale blue eyes flashed with reflected torchlight. “Where is the Enneahedron? What did you do with it?”
Magda’s head lolled on her shoulder. Every time she was about to pass out, the goblin blew some damned glittering dust over her and she was wide awake again, drowning in sick pain sweat. She’d thrown up the bread and every bit of bile in her stomach, soiled herself, gone into a waking coma for a time, but had been relentlessly snapped back to awareness by the goblin. She’d screamed her throat raw and begged for them to stop, and yet, she hadn’t answered the question. Even she was surprised.