CHAPTER 26: Caged

Alanna blinked sluggishly, her thoughts sloshing around in her mind like wet paper. Her head pounded hard with her heart. She felt cramped. She was lying on something hard. Where was Jarinth? She sat up and bonked her head on a metal bar as the ground lurched. She gasped and clamped her arms around her stomach until the swaying ceased. Only then did she risk a glance around.

Her surroundings were unrecognizable. She was in a red room, sitting in a cage—a bird cage, complete with the round top, three feet wide and just as high. Peering over the edge of the floor revealed a shocking fifteen-foot drop to the ground. A glance up confirmed her suspicions: she was hanging from a ceiling.

"Alanna?" a man choaked hoarsely.

Alanna jerked her eyes to her right, where a cage identical to her own hung three feet away. Long, straggly curls of copper topped a pale man who, by his lean body, could only be a scholar—perhaps a mage. His eyes skirted wildly, and he kept jerking as if to rid himself of an ever-persistent fly.

"Don't you recognize me?" he gasped.

She squinted, struggling to keep him in focus as her mind continued to tumble around and around and around in her head. She rubbed her eyes, looked again, and then gaped. A masculine replica of herself, right down to her purple eyes, stared back.

"Thom?" she cried.

"Mithros, Alanna, what—" he interrupted himself with a coughing fit that lasted too long, then heaved, "What the Chaos are you doing you here? You have no chance against Hanno—he'll kill you!"

She drew back at the mention of killing as it let loose an onslaught of memories. Suddenly she remembered where Jarinth was. Alanna pulled her knees to her chin, wrapped her arms around her legs, and sat completely still as the image of her dead teacher burned a hole in her mind.

Steps sounded from below, sharply echoing up to them. Someone laughed. "Ho-ho, she's awake!" the voice of Hanno called tauntingly. "Good afternoon, Alanna! Come now, we're not still mourning Jarinth, are we? We mustn't do that. She's dead, dear, and she's not coming back." Fresh tears streamed from Alanna's eyes. When she didn't scream in reply, he chuckled and left again.

"Alanna?" Thom whispered. "Alanna, he said 'Jarinth'—"

"Not Jarinth of Marinstha, surely?" someone gasped.

Too forlorn to be shocked by the unknown voice, Alanna turned to her left, where another cage hung, this time trapping a brown Carthaki. He spoke unaccented Common despite his foreign appearance. A scabbed gash sliced his cheek in half, and his left arm rested in a sling.

Alanna nodded glumly. "She's dead."

"Jarinth's dead?" a woman yelped.

This voice had come from her right, from Thom's direction. When she glanced at him—wincing, because he looked more ragged with every passing second—he ducked, and she spotted a blond Tortallan behind him. Behind her hung another man—brown-haired, this time. A glance to her left revealed even more cages of people. She turned back to Thom, awed. "What is this?"

"This is Duke Hanno Mago's prison. Welcome!" the woman behind Thom greeted for him, however dryly.

"We've all somehow gotten on his bad side, and now here we are. Hi, I'm Razi Ofir. I spoke out against slavery. I've been here for about a month." The Carthaki with the impeccable accent bowed.

"I'm Jenna Kent," the blond woman introduced herself. "I'm a Tortallan spy, like the majority of us here. I've been here for about six months."

Alanna waved weakly to both of them. This was crazy. She turned to Thom. "How and when did you get here, may I ask?"

"I've been here for about a year," he answered, looking away. Alanna got the picture that she was touching a sore spot for him. "I had a run-in with a friend of mine, Roger of Conté."

"What?" Alanna cried. "You were friends with Roger?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

Alanna turned to Razi for an explanation of her brother's behavior. Razi shrugged with his good shoulder. "He's been dwelling on it for a year, Alanna. Nobody knows what happened."

"But what has Roger got to do with any of it?"

"Oo, I know! I know!" Jenna cried. Somehow Alanna had a hard time believing she had been living in this Chaos-sent prison for an entire six months. "Hanno works for Roger. Apparently he thinks he'll be Roger's right-hand man when Roger's king—do you know about that? How Roger is going to be king?"

"Roger is not going to be king," Alanna countered flatly.

"I'll take that as a yes, you do know. And, yes, actually, I'm pretty sure he is."

"No, he's not. Jon has a ton of people protecting him—Raoul, Gary, Jarinth—" A flood of grief washed over her, raising the hairs on her arms and trickling coolly down her spine. Jarinth was dead.

Jenna sent her a consoling look. "Come on, honey—I know you're unhappy about Jarinth, but she's dead. You have to move on."

"I can't believe I was so stupid!" Alanna cried furiously, ignoring the rocking of her cage as she punched the air. "I should've known something was up when she fell asleep last night. He probably drugged her or something."

"Yes, Alanna, you made a stupid mistake," Razi said firmly. "Someone under your care died. Learn from your mistakes and don't repeat them. There are other lives in the world to save."

Jenna glowered at him. "Why tell her that? You make it sound as if there's a chance she'll get out of here and ever get to save those lives."

Alanna didn't hear this comment, though, stunned as she was by Razi's words. He was right: mourning over Jarinth wasn't going to help anyone. And with one of the royal family's most powerful guardians dead, half the trouble of killing the king was gone too. Roald, Lianne, Jon, and even Tortall as a whole needed her to get out of here and help them. She nodded. She needed to think.

"Why are we still alive?" she asked abruptly. "I mean, what's the point?"

"There's no point," Razi replied, shaking his head sadly. "Hanno just knows that dead people can't suffer. He likes causing us pain. It goes to show how big a threat Jarinth was that he killed her. Every evening, now, he takes one of us and… plays with us, for lack of a better word. It's horrible." He shuddered and hugged himself with his right arm. Alanna wondered what had happened to his left limb. "He also likes to keep us handy, in case we're needed. He can always kill us later, but he can't bring us back from the dead. Sometimes Roger comes, too. He grabs one of us and leaves again. That person is never seen again. And you, Thom, and I, along with a couple others here, could make good ransoms, if needed."

"So, more or less, we're alive today because Hanno is a pack rat," Jenna summed up cheerfully.

Alanna rubbed her head. The first step to escaping was getting out of these cages. She twisted around and found herself staring straight at a lock that held down the top half of the cage. She studied it for a moment, noting its insane simplicity, and then reached for her Gift—and gasped when she couldn't. Her magic was gone. The pool of power within her was inaccessible, blocaded by—

"A dampener spell," Thom told her quietly. "I know; I've tried."

Alanna grabbed for her ember-stone, and her stomach lurched when her hand met only cloth. She glanced down and swore. Before, she hadn't realized it. Now, she was quite aware of how, besides her breastband, loincloth, and shift, she was naked. Her dress, shoes, and jewelry were all gone.

"There has to be another way out of here," she cried.

"There isn't," Jenna replied. "I even had hairpins in here at one time, but they didn't do anything but burn me, because the locks melt metal."

"What we need is an outside person," Alanna thought aloud.

"That's asking a lot. Even if you screamed really, really loud, you wouldn't attract anyone, because the room is magicked to keep all sound inside."

Alanna groaned, and leaned her face against one of the cage's cool bars. How had she managed to get herself into this mess?

Just then, a door squealed open below them, and the hated voice of Duke Hanno called up as jovially as ever, "Hello, my dears! How has your afternoon been? I do hope you don't mind my interrupting the festivities, but I have work to do with one of you. Hm, let's see, who should it be today?" As he spoke, the cages detached from the ceiling and began to lower, as if of their own accord, to the ground, periodically jerking nastily. Alanna cradled her pitching stomach and clamped her eyes shut until a bang assured her arrival to the ground; had she anything in her stomach, she would have thrown it up. On her sides, Thom and Razi didn't seem affected at all, as if used to it.

"Should we choose… our newbie, dearest Alanna?" Hanno swooped in on her, and she jumped; he swept away again, laughing. "Surely you've heard of our game here, Alanna. We do it everyday. Once a night I come in here, I take one of you, and we play games for a bit. Then I bring you back here, and you can't look me in the eye ever again. Would you like to try, dearest Alanna?" She glowered silently, and he raised his eyebrows. Slowly, he came towards her. "Didn't your mother ever tell you that you have to be careful doing that to your face, because it might stick that way?" He reached into the cage to touch her face. She tried to evade him but lacked the space. His finger trailed down her cheek, and she shuddered; he smiled. "Yes," he said softly. "Yes, I think I'm going to play with you tonight."

He stood up briskly and motioned to Alanna. "I'll take her." His two slaves, from their posts at the door, started forward.

"No!" Thom suddenly shouted. Alanna glanced at him, startled; he didn't look like he had enough energy for such a volume. "No, you can't take her; she can't do it. You'll kill her, you bastard; you'll kill her!" With that, he collapsed in the little space he had, too weak to hold himself up.

Nobody listened anyway. Hanno's slaves opened Alanna's cage, chained her hands together, and yanked her out of the cell. At first she fell to her knees, too stiff to walk. But as they jerked and kicked, she forced herself first to rise to her feet and then take a trembling step forward. It occurred to her to attack with magic, but, when she tried, she found the dampener spell still haunting her.

"You can do this, Alanna!" Jenna suddenly cried.

"Yes, Alanna, you can survive this," Razi echoed.

Hanno just smiled. "Of course you can survive it," he told her kindly. "What's the point of filling you with pain if you're not alive to feel it?"