3. N #2
Bars. A cage. They had her in a cage. She struggled to hold down her panic … she’d passed through a gate to another’s estate, and they’d made her prisoner? It didn’t feel right, but she clung to it. That, she could understand.
The woman asked her another question. Triana shook her head, not understanding.
The woman paused and frowned, thinking, then started again, saying each word slowly and separately, as though to a child.
“What be thy name?” the woman asked, slowly and clearly, enunciating each distinct syllable.
Best to claim rank now. That was … well, always the case. Claim rank, establish that you are someone to be reckoned with. Do that first. First impressions. “V’dann Triana er-Lord Falcion,” she said, making each syllable as distinct as the woman had.
The woman looked at her, confused …. “I do not ken ye.”
More words, then she slowed again. “Thy accent is most passing strange, and the … words …. How dost thee call thyself?”
Triana saw her look back, where a male emerged.
They exchanged a few more words that she struggled to follow.
“How dost thee name thyself,” the woman puzzled for a moment, searching for a word, “for ummm, for … simple?”
Triana closed her eyes. She felt a headache coming on. “Triana,” she replied. For simple, it is. For now.
“Trey’ana,” the woman replied, close to her ear, “wood-sprite.”
The woman leaned close to place a cup into her hands and Triana was able to smell her …
not the perfumes of a proper elven lord’s lady, but scents of simple soap, and some light scent.
She opened her eyes. Her own condition appeared quite the worse for wear.
No decent bath in days, hands scratched dirty, and clothes quite the wreck.
The woman pressed a cup into her hands. Water?
She sniffed it carefully to be sure, before sampling it, then drank deeply.
It had a metallic taste, as though out of some sort of a tank, but it was water, and she was parched.
She emptied the cup and passed it gratefully back to the woman, who set it aside.
The woman looked away to where another stood, a male Elven lord, looking tired …
with none of the exaggerated fussiness that was all the fashion.
“Canst’ thee stand a bit, and ummm … ” another exchange with the male behind her, the words again too quick to follow, “and rest upon the table?”
The water had steadied her nerves a bit, and given her a moment to collect herself. The woman helped her stand and steadied her while she sat on the table. Her belt felt odd, as though loosened at some point, which set her heart racing. How long was I out? What did they do?
She still had no idea what was going on, or how she came to arrive here from the cave, and why would I be in a cage? The sparse clues did not bode well, regardless of the small kindnesses. She adjusted her belt, tightening it, while buying time, trying to get her whirling thoughts into some order.
She had begun to pick up the cadences and patterns of their speech.
It took her some time to parse the phrasing …
the oldest plays and dramas used a similar rhythm and accenting.
She’d never much liked those, preferring her entertainments to be more lively, but she could recall enough of the high-flown elocution to puzzle out a rough gist, when they slowed enough for her to follow.
The accent proved altogether different … nothing like back home.
She focused. The woman seemed to be asking her what was the last thing she remembered. Triana considered a moment …. Best take it slow. Use whatever advantage you have. She shook her head slowly from side to side.
The female exchanged a few quick words with the male. Triana could not follow the rhythm, before she spoke again, this time slowly and carefully, to Triana …. “Lest we not fall into error, be that yay or nay?”
“Nay,” replied Triana.
“For yay?”
Triana dipped her head slowly, one time.
The woman smiled at her. “It be so here, too. Same same. Thee makest progress already.”
Triana took a moment to study the male and female.
Both looked elven—or at least, not human, but shorter and broader than she was used to …
the woman was thick-waisted and large-busted in the way no decent elvenborn woman would allow, and the male was paunchy and Ancestors!
had a receding hairline? Their dress, in robes and smocks, seemed serviceable enough for something like slave work in areas where their lords would have to set eyes on them, and their roles here …
servants? Well … not entirely unexpected.
She didn’t have any elvenborn servants, but others did.
She preferred slaves. Easier to manage, with no opinions that did not match hers.
She might not know the male’s social status, but the wand or rod he held in his gloved hands looked quite serviceable as a weapon.
He would not have allowed the woman to enter the cage without having a way to defend themselves.
She still felt drained from whatever had brought her here to be much of a threat, but she appreciated they might think so. She filed that thought away for later.
She glanced quickly around the room she was in, and a peculiar one it was.
The room, sterile and unadorned with any decoration she could see, contained cages, tables of instruments, and …
mostly blocked by the woman’s body … a partial view of a smaller portal, about the size that allowed travel between manors.
Additional cages lined the far wall, but did not quite fit.
The walls appeared to be made of kind of water-worked or fused stone, without corners or edges, but with shapes that flowed into each other, smoothed and even.
The cages appeared jammed and cramped, too many for the room, really, and clearly added later.
She had seen rooms like this before, in the oldest parts of the oldest estates, when magic had been used to sculpt and mold … it wasn’t stone, exactly … though the walls here were stone. One more point of confusion.
The sense of disquiet she felt when waking bloomed in her stomach.
The room took on sinister tones. Her father had kept a small place of this sort, for extracting confessions and conducting interrogations.
She began to wonder at the purpose of the table she sat on, then firmly put that thought away.
These two had either brought her here, or worked for someone who did.
They did not seem ready to carve into her just yet, so be cautious, be cooperative, go gently.
Triana took the woman’s hand to steady herself, suddenly dizzy, leaned hard against the metal bed …
the table … woman had called it. A fleeting fantasy had her grabbing the woman and taking her hostage to shape an escape.
Reality intruded. She could barely stay upright.
The woman gave her a moment to steady herself.
Then the woman moved to one side, and Triana nearly fainted when the thing that the woman’s body had been hiding was revealed.
The Thing that had seized her, gray-scaled and as menacing under the sterile white light of the room as it had been in the cave, rested a few paces away, locked in another cage.
She shrank away from it in fear. The woman followed her gaze, and looked as terrified of it as Triana felt.
Their eyes met, and Triana felt the first real communication that she fully understood.
The woman was as frightened of the thing as she was.
The female addressed the male, using the slightly up-pitched and wheedling tone that Triana instantly recognized as the same tone her mother had taken with her father whenever she wanted something.
In it were mingled both hope that this time the request would be heeded, and resignation in anticipation that the request was not going to be fulfilled.
Hearthmaster … is … husband? Interesting.
Triana listened to the exchange, thinking she understood about one word in six.
Enough to know the woman … he addressed her as …
something like dama-sel … wife? had just used Triana as her excuse to quit this place.
The woman’s obvious distress left the … hearthmaster …
unmoved. Triana held her peace, wishing the woman success.
She wanted no part of this room with its instruments, tables, cells, and … that Thing.
The Hearthmaster appeared vexed. Triana understood the expression, if not the entirety of the words.
Female silliness … the “vapors,” or whatever they called it here.
She’d heard dismissiveness like this before, when the male elven lords thought she wasn’t listening to them.
Never with her, oh no, at least not in her presence …
and certainly not once she’d come into her lordship, and held Falcion in her own name.
But that same slighting tone; always about women.
Weak, silly, fearful for no cause. Useless for anything but running the household, and even then, better have a male supervisor.
The Hearthmaster did use what sounded like a name …
Andaleisia. The dumpy figured woman had a name.
Andaleisia. And they were not servants …
not if the woman could wheedle the “hearthmaster” …
the husband … into taking them elsewhere.
Either that, or she is inferior in rank to him …
. She strained her memory for the fleeting recollections of those ancient plays.
But I think “hearthmaster” means “master of the house,” so he’s the one in charge here.
And it couldn’t be just this one room, either.
The fact that there was an entire room devoted to interrogations strongly suggested that this was just one small item in a much larger structure. So, a manor at the very least.
The contrast between them and the notion that they commanded a manor created such dissonance in her thoughts that she felt unsteady.
Him? An elven lord? Where are his robes of state, his slaves, his …
hair, of all things. Hair was the easiest thing for a mage-physician to spell up, if it came to that.
This made no sense. No one in the whole world lived like this.
But that’s a portal. What if it’s not between manors? You wouldn’t dump your guests into an interrogation room.
She felt a sudden clench in her stomach. The Gate she touched, that she tried to work to get out of the cave, to get home, to get anywhere else but there. Well, she had accomplished that … she was someplace else than there. But where?