“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.
