Chapter 17
Something, Something, Me Caught La-La
Baz was tugging on my hand, pulling me nearer to the cage and its unfathomable prisoner.
I dug in my heels. All too soon I’d have to confront the unbelievable, the inexplicable, the absolutely fucking impossible that I was seeing. I knew that, of course I did.
But I didn’t have to do it now.
I didn’t have to do it yet.
There were plenty more never-ending tunnels and creepy caves we could explore first.
One of his lumoons raced ahead, flying upward ten-or-so feet to the top of the cage. When its soft glow shone upon the woman’s face, it was no longer a choice; I couldn’t take another step.
Baz tugged on my arm, only turning toward me when I didn’t budge. “What is it? Are you alright?”
My stare was fused to the woman, but I could hear the worry in his voice. How strange that my mortal enemy should care. Even stranger that I liked his concern. He stepped so close that the rope linking us sank limply to the floor.
The caged woman had seen us. Her keening ratcheted up, becoming intolerably piercing while she clutched the bars and struggled to drag herself to a seated position.
Baz squeezed my shoulder. I jumped.
“Velle.” His voice was softer than I imagined him capable. “What’s wrong? You look…”
“Like I’m seeing something that … can’t be? ’Cause this is impossible…”
“Yeah, like that. Though my long life has taught me that little is truly impossible. It’s usually a matter of perspective and patience.”
“Aren’t you the philosophical one.”
He huffed a chortle.
I sent one of the lumoons I hadn’t created, but that obeyed my wishes anyway, to join his in exploring the cage. We approached while I absorbed every detail—until my memories pressed down on my shoulders and chest as if I’d never escaped the cage—not any of the cages I’d ever been locked up in.
This cage was identical to the pair that had imprisoned Teo and me in Zaraga.
The bars, thick and bespelled to resist the strength of a s?nglure, were worn by my own hands.
The frigid iron floor bore the indentation of my defeated, curled-up body, since the prison was too cramped to stand or lie down.
The cold would rise off the sea in a damp mist. Nothing I did, no wish I made, ever warmed me.
It was worse when Rafaela locked Teo in the cage beside mine. My inability to save him stung more than the cold, than the hunger—the madness.
When I noticed the lock on the cage, I lost track of the passing minutes. I no longer heard the incessant keening.
Eventually, Baz wrapped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me against his body. His arm was muscled and heavy, and I desperately wanted to lean into him.
He lowered his lips to my ear. “Tell me what’s going on with you right now.”
For the first time, I wanted to share with someone other than Teo, or sometimes Marina.
I wanted to tell him all about how I’d practically been born into a cage.
How it had taken long years for Teo and I to have bedrooms that didn’t have bars in place of walls.
How even once we’d escaped the fighting pits of our childhood, for decades the palace had been just another prison, with luxuries that made it easier to overlook our confinement.
When the walls had finally fallen from around us, it had taken many more years to trust that freedom—and by the Ethers, was it tenuous.
Every time Rafaela punished us, the struggle to believe we were free—that we’d ever truly be free—began anew.
He rubbed my arm in what might have been an attempt at comfort. I offered nothing.
He exhaled heavily. “Let me help you.” It sounded like a plea, causing me to blink myself away from the image of the cage’s lock that had so captivated me.
Within the cage itself, the prisoner now knelt beside the bars, clutching them with fingers so thin their knuckles were knobby.
Her face nearly squeezed through, when I knew precisely how far apart they were spaced—a fit much too tight for an adult’s head.
What had once been a fine dress, but had since fallen into disrepair, hung from her frame as if she were little more substantial than a hanger.
Her hair was loose and long, falling in straight sheets around her body, emphasizing her gauntness.
In the lumoonlight, her locks glimmered a shiny black as dark as the abyss.
Her eyes, so piercing they glittered like onyx, were darker still.
“The cage…” I said. “The cage is…” I couldn’t finish.
Its lock was unique. Forged by a master artisan, and activated by a sorcerer’s casting to be wholly unbreakable, the locks had been shaped into seven-pointed crowns, each of the peaks culminating in a barbed spike. Teo and I had exhausted ourselves trying to bust them open.
“Familiar,” I eventually said. “The cage is familiar.”
I felt Baz’s sharp eyes on me, trying to see into my past, to read my life story. But the woman’s eyes were on me too, and I couldn’t look away.
The agonized wailing shrank to a whimper, before quieting entirely. Then, the woman’s mouth began moving rapidly.
“We can’t hear you,” I called across the dozen feet that still separated us.
She unwove a single hand from around the bars, while leaving the other clutching them, as if afraid she’d become untethered if she were to let go.
With her free hand, she started gesticulating in an urgent frenzy.
She spoke more rapidly too, slapping and squeezing the air to emphasize her point—whatever it was.
“We still can’t hear you. Not a word you’re saying.” I glanced at Baz. “You can’t hear her either, right?”
He’d already been looking down at me. “No. Only when she cries.”
After many more fruitless words and gestures, she screamed—loud and sharp enough to flay flesh. Strangling the bars, she leaned back into her arms, threw her head back, and yelled again.
“I definitely heard that,” Baz said, advancing. This time, when he dragged me along, I willingly followed. “I couldn’t understand what she said though. You?”
“No. Nothing.”
We halted a body’s length from the cage, its floor at eye level. The smell of old decay turned my stomach.
While the woman was renewing her efforts to communicate with us, I spotted a skeleton behind her. In a crumpled heap, it curved around the circular floor. The skull was capped in clumps of dull, matted black hair. Rags of a faded dress lay in patches across pale bones.
“The fuck?” Baz snarled. “She’s been locked up with someone’s dead body so long it had time to completely decompose?”
“Appears that way.”
I stepped closer and stretched a hand toward her. She pressed herself against the bars and extended an arm to me. Our fingers were mere inches away from touching when I hesitated.
She squawked and lunged for my arm. I pulled it back.
This had to be some sort of dark magic. Some hideous faithum I’d never heard of…
Without looking away from the prisoner, who continued reaching for me, I told Baz, “I recognize her. She’s in the center of a portrait I’ve studied a hundred times, if not a thousand. It’s at the palace, in Zaraga. It’s one of Rafaela’s few possessions from her time before marrying Alonso.”
At the mention of Rafaela, the woman let her arm, hanging through the bars, fall between us. Her eyes, already as dark as I imagined possible, deepened to the unrelenting black of the abyss.
“So she’s a Tulon, then?” Baz said.
“Yeah. She’s a Tulon.”
“Which one?”
“See, that’s where it gets impossible. The woman in the portrait who looks exactly like this one…?”
“Uh-huh?”
“It’s Rafaela, in the very last portrait that was made of her complete family before she was sent away to Zaraga to marry at the age of seventeen.”
“You’re suggesting”—Baz looked from me to the female and back—“that this woman is your dame, Rafaela Eudova?”
The woman shook her head violently. Her hair swung only slightly instead of amply as it should have.
“I don’t know what I’m suggesting,” I said, “only that this doesn’t make sense. Rafaela is in Zaraga’s palace, or at the very least she’s definitely not here. And she’s older. She looks older.”
Though centuries had passed since Rafaela married Alonso, she appeared only to have aged a decade at most. It was the way with s?nglures.
For those of the blood, as Rafaela was, their bodies aged normally only until their mid-twenties.
For those of us who’d been rebirthed, we aged much more slowly until the equivalent of that same age, and then also stopped.
After that, the passing years were visible mostly in the burdens of hard experiences.
“So,” Baz asked the woman, “are we to understand that you are not Rafaela?”
Her mouth started up again, and though it moved so fast she must have been explaining everything, once more, we heard only silence.
Again, she screamed—this time, it was a raspy, frustrated bellow.
“Sounds like she really isn’t,” I said. “But if she’s not Rafaela, then who the scorch is she?”
The woman was silently—though emphatically—answering. Her hands were a blur of pointed insistence.
My eyes widened. “Are you Mauldrene? The castle, are you somehow the castle?”
She stilled as if considering, but ultimately shook her head.
“Then who are you? Speak slowly. We’ll read your lips.”
She did so, and I followed every careful arch of her lips.
“Did you get that?” I asked Baz.
“Nope. I thought you were doing the lip-reading.”
“I was.”
“And?”
“And I apparently suck at lip-reading. I thought she said ‘something, something, me caught la-la.’”
As if caught by surprise, he rumbled a quiet laugh. “Let’s start with getting her out of this cage, and then out of Mauldrene’s guts. We can figure out the rest after that. My friends will help us too. They possess a varied skillset.”
“How fantastic.”
He frowned.
“Don’t look at me like that. They all hate me. Why should I bother liking them?”
“Maybe if you bothered being nice to them, they would learn to like you.”
I snorted. “Yeah, as if that’s likely.”
“Stranger things have happened than the Bazrians learning to like our enemy.”
I stared into his stormy ocean eyes a beat too long, and then hurried to break the contact. “Like finding my young dame stuck inside a cage in a possessed castle?”
“That definitely counts as strange.”
The woman slumped to the floor of her cell and plonked her head against the bars with a low thud. Then she did it again—thudddd.
“Don’t worry,” Baz told her. “We won’t abandon you. We’ll get you out of here.”
“Don’t promise her that.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause that’s no ordinary lock. Believe me, a thousand hours of trying won’t open it without the correctly attuned magic.”
A single brow arched menacingly. “That sounds like you’re talking from experience.”
“Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. Either way, doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
My heart squeezed. I scowled. “All that matters right now is getting all of us out of here.”
Biceps twitching, Baz prowled up to the lock to examine it. I didn’t have to. Beyond the familiar seven-pointed-and-barbed crown of Tulon’s crest, I knew the lock would have no keyhole.
“Without a sorcerer or whoever had the lock keyed to them, there’s no getting it open,” I said.
“What about the bars? Will I be able to pull them apart? She’s slight as a reed. I’d only need to open them a bit for her to slide through.”
“No idea. I was never able to, neither was Teo. But you look a lot stronger. What’s your fae power? Is it strength?”
He snickered. “Sneaky, trying to get it out of me like that.”
“I wasn’t aware your power was a secret.”
“Did you read about it in any of those history books you were carrying around with you?”
“No. The authors avoided the topic entirely.” Which was highly annoying.
He shrugged. “You have your secrets, I have mine.”
“But I don’t have secrets. You know everything about me.”
“Oh no, I’m quite sure I don’t.” His eyes brightened. “Though I will learn your secrets. Every one of them.”
My pulse quickened before I got it to steady. When Baz chuckled, I knew he’d heard it.
“You’re cocky.”
He gave another infuriating smirk. “I am indeed … cocky … but I have very good reason to be so. I will get to know all of you, Velle, and that’s a promise.”
I harrumphed. “Keep your promises to yourself—I have no need for them—and focus. You’ll need something to stand on to reach high enough for good leverage on those bars.” I spun in place. One smooth stretch of cave led into another. “Great, there’s nothing to use, nothing at all.”
Also searching for some helpful advantage, Baz circled the cage. I had to pace behind him, since the asshole still had me tethered to him as if I were a fucking mare.
“I could sit on your shoulders,” he suggested.
“Fuck no, you can’t.”
“Not even to save her?”
“You must weigh twice what I do.”
“If we leave, even if we intend to return, who’s to say we’ll ever find our way back here?”
“Dammit. That’s a valid point.”
“I’m chock full of them.”
“You’re chock full of dragonshit, is what you are.”
“Aw, don’t be mean.”
“You haven’t seen mean yet,” I snapped. “And before you say it, trying to kill you—when I had very good reason—doesn’t count.”
“It definitely counts.”
I tsked. “For all I know, you’re a weakling who can’t spread anything apart.”
He beamed a wolfish grin, his eyes swearing that later, when it was only the two of us, he’d remind me just how good he was at spreading me apart.
“Shut up.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Uh-huh. Sure you didn’t.”
“I didn’t say a peep. I’m as innocent as a faeby.”
Tutting, I circled the cage, next reached up for the hand of Young-Rafaela’s lookalike. “We’ll figure it out somehow. We won’t leave you caged and alone,” I was saying as I pressed my fingertips to hers—
My hand slipped, not catching on hers—as if she were made only of shadow.
Baz was at my side in an instant. “What the fuck?” After several seconds of our mutual staring, he said, “And I was about to climb the cage to open the bars too.”
I snorted. “Of course you were. Of course you can.”
“Don’t want to make it too easy for you.” But he sounded distracted.
“I won’t be making it easy for you.” My eyes were only on her.
Young-Not-Rafaela’s face crumbled, losing all of its previous animation. I smiled sadly up at her, suggesting I understood, when of course I didn’t—couldn’t. I, at least, had always gotten free eventually. She, it appeared, never would—even if we found the way to release her from this prison.
Tenderly, though it wouldn’t make a scorching difference, I caressed my fingers along hers. All I felt was cold.
“She’s a phantom,” Baz said.
In unison, the woman and I nodded.
Whoever she was, we had arrived much too late to save her.