Oh boy, y'all. I'm really excited about this chapter. We're past the crying (mostly), we're upping the tension, Bee gets a little more resourceful, and I finally get to do a title drop!

I'm looking forward to hearing what you think—is it plausible, written okay, etc.? I hope so, but again, I'm a plot-writing novice. A word of advice, support or constructive criticism would go a long way. Also, music (classical and otherwise) will be referenced in this and several other chapters, so if anyone has any lesser-known recommendations for classical music, please let me know; I'm not actually a music expert or a violinist, I'm only writing about one.

And finally, thank you so much to everyone who is reading, following, favoriting, and reviewing: y'all make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside!

Chapter 6: Title Drop

Tomorrow came at last, but things still didn't make sense. Frankly, I was starting to think that things might never make sense again.

I'd slept fitfully into the early afternoon. Between the ominous sounds of construction outside my window and the screaming of crows flying around the tower all night, I was ready to rip my hair out in exhausted frustration.

I grabbed my phone with a lethargic hand. Six percent battery left; still no bars. I took a deep breath; after spending most of yesterday sobbing uncontrollably, I'd made a pact with myself: I wouldn't cry again—not a single tear—until I made it back home. After all, I'd cried more in the last two days than I had in the past two years put together. It had to stop.

With a now-familiar thunk of the lock, the cell door opened. "Morning," I muttered as Einar appeared in the doorway.

"But it is after—after noon now, miss." Einar glanced up at me briefly, before looking quickly back down at the ground. "Your food," he offered, handing me a tray with the same stale bread, mushy vegetables, and unidentifiable meat as yesterday. "And the wizard is—er, occupied, I believe, with other matters today. He expects a g-…a guest to Isengard soon, I have heard, and is making preparations. Perhaps you will continue your—your work with him after his guest departs."

"Oh. Great." I swallowed heavily. "Thanks, Einar." In all my panic at being locked up and possibly being in a make-believe book universe (I winced as I realized how ridiculous that sounded), I'd almost forgotten that Saruman said he'd be coming back to continue his interrogation.

Numbly, I watched my guard clear away the empty food trays from yesterday, and I winced in sympathy as he replaced my pee bucket with an empty one. "I bet Saruman isn't paying you enough to do this job," I muttered sourly.

Einar didn't respond, but the corners of his mouth twitched upwards briefly as he left the room, and it occurred to me that, against all odds, I might have made a friend here.

The day passed even more slowly than yesterday, if that were possible.

So far I'd succeeded in my not-crying pact, but without an outlet for my panic, I was at my wit's end. I paced back and forth across my cell like a caged animal, pulling at my tangled hair and biting at my nails until I nearly drew blood. I was going to lose my mind in this cell—if I hadn't lost it already.

The shadows lengthened on the walls. The battery on my phone eked away to three percent as I listened to more of my music to pass the time. And despite myself, my thoughts kept drifting to the book I had tucked away in my violin case. I'd been trying to ignore it—why feed the insane thoughts drifting through my mind, after all?—but I couldn't stop wondering if maybe it could help me figure out what was going on.

It was early in the evening when I finally gave in to my curiosity. Bracing myself, I opened my case and pulled out Nathan's copy of The Fellowship of the Ring.

My hands shook as I examined it in the gold evening light. The book was a hardback, but small, like the pocket Bible my mom used to carry around, and it was clearly very well-loved: the edges were frayed, and deep cracks had formed in the book's spine. I studied the image on the cover of the book for a long moment: nine silhouetted figures walking along a path, one leading a pony, one with an axe, one with a bow and quiver slung over his back, one leading the group wearing a pointed hat and carrying a staff like Saruman's…This was the Fellowship; I knew that much. I flipped the book over.

"'No imaginary world has been projected which is at once so multifarious and so true,'" I read aloud. It was a quote from C. S. Lewis, emblazoned in gold letters; the words sent a chill down my spine. Even C. S. Lewis is going on about how real this book is, I thought impatiently. What is wrong with everyone? "'Here are beauties which pierce like swords, or burn like cold iron.'"

I opened the book hesitantly, irrationally afraid of what I might find, and flipped through the pages until I found a map of Middle Earth. I sucked in my breath sharply. "Isengard," I read, seeing a tiny tower marked on the page, nestled between a huge mountain range and a forest. And there's Dunland, I noticed. To the north, just like Einar said. I stared at the mountains on the map, my blood feeling cold and thin in my veins.

Standing up shakily, I looked back and forth from the map in the book to the mountains out my window, panic building up in my chest until I thought I might burst. Were the mountains in the same place out my window as on the map? I couldn't tell, but it certainly looked like it; so what did that mean? Did that mean—

I nearly jumped out of my skin as the cell door unlocked.

I whirled around, my heart pounding painfully. "Jeez, Einar, you scared me," I gasped—but it wasn't Einar in the doorway.

Another man stood there, dressed in the same Renaissance-fair-hobo style I was getting accustomed to. "Who are you?" I asked hesitantly, hiding the book behind my back hastily.

"Tarbyn, son of Felmyn," the man said carelessly, as though pleasantries like that were a waste of his time. He stepped into the cell, holding up a lit torch in the twilight, analyzing me closely.

Tarbyn looked directly at me as he spoke, clearly unafraid of me the way Einar was. He looked just as unkempt and dirty as Einar, but bigger, broader, and at least ten years older, with leathery-looking skin and a wiry beard. Something unpleasant shone in his eyes, too, and I stepped back. But maybe it was just the lengthening shadows and my heightened paranoia making him look so creepy, I thought. "So are…are you from Dunland too?" I asked him, trying and failing to sound lighthearted.

"Aye."

Tarbyn stepped closer. I stepped back. "What are you doing here? Where's Einar?"

"I came to see if the rumors were true, about the sorceress the wizard collected from a far-off land." He sneered. "They seem to have been greatly exaggerated."

I crossed my arms, prickling at the word 'collected' but not wanting to make him mad. "Well…I'm sorry to disappoint you, then," I said blandly, but it seemed that Tarbyn wasn't finished.

"After all the rumors I've heard, all the efforts the wizard's gone through, this is it?" the man slurred, staring at me accusingly, and I wondered suspiciously if he was drunk. "After all, I heard tell Saruman has a flying machine stored away from your world—this ugly, scrawny thing is all he's brought back?"

"Flying machine?" I repeated, confused. "You mean the helicopter?" The man shrugged in response, taking a steady step towards me. I swallowed. "Um, while you're here, though, I have a question for you," I added, hoping to distract him; I didn't like the look on his face, predatory and mocking. "Can you just explain to me, in very, very clear terms, where I am?" This might be my last chance, I thought wildly. I was grasping at straws now, I knew, but I had to be sure.

Tarbyn raised a bushy eyebrow and folded his arms. "What do you mean? You're in a cell in Isengard."

My eyes narrowed, and I opened the map in my book again. "And where is Isengard? Geographically, I mean."

He looked at me as though I'd been dropped on my head as a baby. "North of the Riddermark, and south of Dunland and the Misty Mountains. It borders the forest of Fangorn and lies along the river Isen." He snorted impatiently. "A child would know this."

But I wasn't paying attention to him anymore. I was studying the book, tracing my hand over the black lines of the map. They were all there…Fangorn, the river Isen, the Misty Mountains...everything was just like Tarbyn said—

Suddenly the book was wrenched from my hands. "Hey!"

"What do you have here, sorceress?" Tarbyn examined the book in the torchlight. He pulled at a page curiously as though he'd never seen paper before, and the map tore free from the book with a horrible ripping noise.

"Stop it!" I exclaimed. "What'd you do that for? That's my friend's book!" I scooped up the fallen page in my hands. Nathan would be furious.

"I have never seen a book like this," Tarbyn observed. "Witchcraft from your homeland, I imagine." He tossed it onto the floor with unease in his eyes, as though he'd been handling a live snake.

I clutched the torn page in my hand so hard it started to crumple. I should have known that this man would be just as crazy as Einar or Saruman…in utter desperation, with my last dying ember of hope, I tried one last time. "Have you ever heard of Texas?"

Tarbyn looked at me as though I were crazy. Maybe I was. "Teck-sis? No."

"The United States of America?"

"No. I'm growing tired of these questions."

"What about…what about a story called The Lord of the Rings? Have you ever heard of a man called Tolkien? What about—"

Without warning Tarbyn struck me across the face. "That's enough nonsense! Women like you shouldn't speak unless spoken to."

I staggered back, tears of shock welling in my eyes. I tasted blood on my lip. "You say we're in Middle Earth?" I yelled, backing a good distance away from Tarbyn. I was shaking from head to toe, and wondered briefly if I was going to vomit. "Well, I don't think much of y'all's manners in Middle Earth, asshole!"

Suddenly Tarbyn was only inches away from my face, and the smell of horses and alcohol was strong enough to make me gag. So he'd been drinking, then—my heart sank even as my blood turned to ice. He grabbed me at the juncture between my shoulder and neck, his thumb pressing against my windpipe. I strained away from him, struggling to breathe—

"Tarbyn!"

The man whirled to face the cell door and sneered. Einar stood there, pale and homeless-looking as ever, a torch in one hand and a small tray of food in the other. "Evening, Einar," Tarbyn said casually, and I managed to wrench myself away from him, gasping for breath and shaking. "Come to see your friend?"

Einar stepped back nervously, looking at the floor. "N-n-no, I…I only—"

"Frightened of your own shadow, you are," the man laughed.

"You know the—the White Wizard will not want you to lay a—lay a hand on her," Einar managed, his voice strained as he set down the tray of food on the ground. Despite myself, I felt a sudden pang of affection for the poor guy. "You know he spent years inv-venting a spell just to bring her here."

Tarbyn jutted out his chin and for a moment I thought he might hit Einar, but he just snorted and spat on the ground between them. "Aye, you're right," he conceded, looking thoughtful. "The wizard's gone half mad spying on this other world."

"Exactly," Einar said, looking relieved, but Tarbyn wasn't done yet.

"All those years the wizard spent, studying his little scrying glass, sending things there and bringing things here, and for all his efforts he winds up with that scrawny thing," he sneered, sending a mocking look my way. "I don't know why he's even kept her alive," he added. "If I were the wizard, I'd've thrown her to the orcs without a second glance, sorceress or no." He laughed at the horror on my face, but something he'd said gave me pause.

"Wait," I exclaimed. "What d'you mean, he sent things there? Saruman sent things from here to my—"

Tarbyn's fist connected with my jaw for the second time, and stars exploded behind my eyes. "I told you not to speak unless spoken to!"

"Tarbyn," Einar protested weakly, eyes darting between us.

"You were right, Einar," Tarbyn sneered as he advanced towards me, his hand grabbing my throat again. "The wizard worked far too hard to end up with this scrawny, nosy little sorceress, if a sorceress she really is. He would probably reward me for ridding him of a burden such as her." He pulled me closer, and I jerked my knee upwards the way I'd seen women do in movies, making satisfying contact. Tarbyn released his grip on my neck but swung the torch in his other hand at me, so close that the heat seared at my face as I leapt back. With a snarl, the man lunged at me, eyes burning in the torchlight.

Some instinct told me to use my phone, and without thinking I grabbed it from my pocket, brandishing it in front of me like a weapon. I thought for sure Tarbyn would laugh at me again, but instead he faltered, staring at the white light of my phone's screen as though mesmerized, suspicion in his beady eyes.

Quickly, I opened my music and pressed play: the third movement of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony shattered the silence of the cell.

"What is that? An incantation of some kind?" Tarbyn snarled. By some miracle, he was backing away now, the blood draining from his leathery face. "Stop it!" Both Tarbyn and Einar looked uneasy, clammy, as though I were truly putting a spell on them.

They had never heard a symphony before, I realized. The truth was clear on their stunned faces: they had never even conceived of such sounds, let alone that that noise might come out of a little device like the one in my hand. Seizing my chance, I turned up the volume as high as it would go, the strings and percussions and brass rising in a wild, bombastic crescendo so dramatic that the unease on the men's faces was transforming into terror. I would have laughed at the way their jaws dropped, but my heart seemed to have lodged itself somewhere in my throat.

Without another word, Einar fled into the hall, beckoning the other man to follow, and I felt a twinge of guilt at the fear in his eyes. Tarbyn hesitated—he jerked forward as if to knock the phone out of my hand, then seemed to think better of it, clapped his hands over his ears and ran after his companion. Einar gave me one last frightened look and slammed the cell door shut behind him.

I didn't move for a long time after they'd gone.

My whole body was numb. I stood motionless in the dark, my heartbeat drowning out the symphony still blaring from my phone. Finally my body came back to life; I hugged my arms to my chest, rubbing at my neck and face as though trying to scrub away the feeling of Tarbyn's grasping hands on my skin.

I couldn't believe he had threatened and hit me like that, or that I'd managed to scare him away, at least for the present. And I couldn't believe that after all this, everyone in this tower still held that we were in Middle Earth, that The Lord of the Rings was true.

I couldn't believe it…I just wouldn't. Middle Earth wasn't real. It was the product of an old professor's imagination, it was fiction—magic and wizards and dragons and things I'd stopped believing in decades ago…I stood there, trembling, thinking about all the things I'd learned since arriving here, and I finally broke my promise to myself and let out a sob of despair.

The book had been right, hadn't it? The map was accurate, and then there was that quote on the back—the quote that made my blood freeze and my breath catch in my chest—I buried my face in my hands—no, don't cry, don't cry—but it was all real, how could it be real?

"It's true, isn't it?" I breathed, and saying it out loud made me more certain than ever. "Oh, God, it can't be—"

Abruptly the music stopped.

"No!" I jabbed at the home button on my phone, but it was too late. The light on the screen went out, throwing the entire room into darkness. The battery had run out at last. And with it went all my connections to my friends and family, to my whole world, and now…God, now I was entirely alone. I sank to the ground, feeling farther from home than I'd ever been in my life.

I was afraid, then, in the pitch dark, the all-consuming silence of my cell, afraid in a way I had never been before. I was lost, utterly and terribly lost, immeasurably far from home, and I could see no way of getting back. And in the absolute isolation closing in around me in the dark, I knew somehow, with complete certainty—

"I'm in Middle Earth," I whispered.

I groped around in the dark until I found the book that Tarbyn had thrown aside, and clutched it in my hands like a lifeline. I sat down on the ragged straw bed, staring numbly into the darkness. I didn't cry anymore; all my tears had gone. I straightened my shoulders in the dark, my hands steady on the book in my lap. Something was steeling itself inside me, the sheer force of it making my head spin—it pierced like swords and burned like cold iron, and I knew then that no matter how, no matter what it took, I was going to find my way home.

I didn't remember falling asleep. The fear, the grim resolve, the lightheadedness of knowing I was in Middle Earth all must have caught up to me at some point, though, because I woke up to the pinkish light of dawn flooding my prison cell. I blinked owlishly in the light for a moment, until I recognized the familiar thunk of the door unlocking.

I sat up in a rush, suddenly wide awake—if Tarbyn had returned, I had nothing to protect myself with now. "Einar, is that you?" I asked, crossing my fingers as the door swung open.

But it wasn't Einar. It wasn't even Tarbyn.

My luck had never been that good.

"Get up." Saruman swept into the cell, and despite the ridiculousness of his clothes and beard and staff, I froze; he looked every inch a wizard. And if I'm really in Middle Earth, then he's really a wizard, he's a real, actual, honest-to-God— "Now!" The wizard snapped, and I scrabbled to my feet, pieces of straw sticking out of my tangled hair.

"What d'you want?" I asked, trying and failing to keep my voice even. If he was here to make me examine those horrible weapons of his down in his storerooms, the tank, the helicopter, the engines and military drones…I didn't think I could bear going down there again.

"One of my servants has just told me something very interesting," Saruman replied, a horrible obsessive glint in his black eyes.

"Oh?" I said carefully. It was then that I noticed Tarbyn, lurking behind Saruman in the corridor outside my cell. He smirked at me, and I flinched. So he'd tattled on me somehow, had he?

"Indeed," the wizard smiled. "I have been informed that you have something in your possession that is very valuable to me. Something I have been seeking for many years."

A horrible feeling was growing in the pit of my stomach. Unable to stop myself, my eyes flickered back to rest on the threadbare mattress, where Nathan's copy of The Fellowship of the Ring still sat, torn, dirty, and covered in pieces of straw.

"Oh."

"Now, Beatrice," Saruman, said, his voice low. "It is time you gave me that book."

End note:

To clarify, the specific bit of music Bee plays is about seven and a half minutes into the third movement of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony. I highly recommend looking it up (actually, listen to the whole thing if you have an hour and a half to spare)—that part in particular leads to a very striking chord that is commonly referred to as—no joke—the "death shriek." It's metal AF and I like to think it would scare some medieval, superstitious bozos out of their wits. What do y'all think?

I'll try to have the next chapter out soon. Also, I-have-crippling-anxiety-about-the-quality-of-my-stories I mean ahem, I hope you take a second to review! It means more than you think!