What was a first, at least lately, was that I didn’t feel like crap.
I waited for the usual pain/exhaustion/nausea combo to kick in, only it didn’t appear interested. Instead, I felt like I had at Caleb’s, after taking the Circle’s special joy juice: distant acknowledgment of the body’s dissatisfaction, but nothing screaming at me. Nothing at all.
Well, except that I was freezing.
Something was over my face. I pulled it off to discover that my slave outfit had been tossed on top of me. It was thin and fairly useless against the cold, but I put it on anyway while checking out the latest version of hell I’d ended up in.
Only to discover that it was just a cell.
I waited, crouched on cold stone, for the punch line. For the vicious ward about to fry me or the pack of slavering dogs about to attack me or the insane prisoner about to decide that I was a threat. But nada.
Just a cold stone block of a room, some straw on the floor, a couple buckets—one filled with water—and a pallet that nobody had bothered to ensure that I landed on.
I stared at it.
It even had a little pillow.
For a minute, I just stayed there, processing that, along with the fact that I wasn’t even tied up. Then I got to my feet and walked to the door. There was a small, high window in it, like it had been made for someone a lot taller than me. But by pulling myself up by the bars, I could just make out a narrow hall with more flickering lanterns.
And the fact that nobody had even bothered to post a guard.
I was starting to feel strangely . . . neglected.
However, they had searched me, and they’d done a thorough job. Because everything was gone: Billy’s necklace, Rosier and his pack, even my bright-eyed chameleon. I guessed the fey had seen something like it before.
But not something like my evil dark-magic bracelet.
The chain of interlocking knives around my wrist made a soft chink, chink when I jumped back down. The fey must have taken it, too, but, as always, it had returned. Meaning that at least one part of the plan had worked. I just didn’t know where the witches were, or where Pritkin was, or what had happened to Rosier, or what was happening in general.
But other than that, everything was fine.
I rolled my eyes at myself and decided to go find out.
“Do you think, just for once, we could not have a hissy fit?” I whispered to my knives. “I need you to stab the lock. Not the nearest guard, not another prisoner’s butt. Just the lock.”
I got a definite spoilsport vibe back, which I ignored.
And then I remembered something else from the debacle at Gertie’s.
“And do it quietly.”
To my surprise, they did. Well, more or less. The lock was stabbed a dozen times in a few seconds by a couple of ghostly knives doing a jackhammer impressi
on. And while it wasn’t exactly quiet, it also wasn’t loud enough to bring anybody running.
Assuming anybody was there, since I’d yet to see a soul.
I creaked the door open—carefully, because this was too easy. Maybe the fey were testing me? Maybe this was some sort of trap?
Or maybe, I decided, as I walked unmolested down the hall, peering into other, empty cells, they just didn’t worry about you if you weren’t at least part fey. So far, it was the only thing I liked about them. Arrogance like that had saved my ass more than once.
And it was about to save Rosier’s.
I peeked around a wall from about knee height, then abruptly jerked back. But a glimpse had been enough: Rosier, in a cage, surrounded by fey, being poked at with sticks. And with the haunted look of a puppy in the middle of a bunch of unsupervised toddlers.
Or, more accurately, like a specimen in a very strange zoo, because he wasn’t the only thing locked up. Cats, birds, even an extra-large rat were in similar cages, arrayed along one wall, making me realize why Pritkin had made that comment about my familiar. Apparently, witches in this era actually used them.
Who knew?