Ailith
Ailith screamed when John shoved her behind him, his sapphire sword already drawn by the time the warrior burst from his cage. The blue light flared in a single, piercing pulse, flooding the clearing with light and casting shadows across the dark underworld.
“Ailith, I’ll handle him. You go for the bairns. Find Heilyn and see if you can free any of them.”
Without hesitation, she ran to the first cage and pressed her hands against the surface, searching for a latch or a seam or anything she could manipulate. The child inside was a lass of around four, motionless, her gaze fixed straight ahead on the warrior in the green block opposite. Ailith moved her hands across the entire face of the cage, top to bottom, side to side. Nothing. No seam. No hinge. No break in the surface at all. It was smooth as river ice and faintly warm, and she told herself the warmth meant the child was alive, trying not to think of what it meant that she couldn’t open it.
A shriek of laughter erupted from somewhere down the long row, high and grating, unmistakably Gruin. Then it cut off sharply with a sound like a quick scream.
She left the first cage and moved down the line, running her hands over each one as she passed. They were all the same. Identical surfaces, identical seams that were not seams. The children inside didn’t blink, didn’t turn toward her, showed no sign of her presence at all.Red hair,she told herself.Blue nightgown. Flowers at the neckline.She scanned each small face in turn and kept moving.
“Ailith, hurry.” John’s voice, sharp and breathless, came from behind her. “Find the two, and we’ll go, then come back with more warriors. I can’t keep him at bay. His swordsometimes disappears from sight. Then it casts shadows that blind me.”
“I can’t find a lass that young.” She kept moving, cage to cage. “How do I open them?”
She grabbed the cage of the smallest child and tried to shake it. What if she knocked it off the shelf? Would the cage pop open?
Or break? It might hurt the wee bairn inside. She shook it, then tried hitting it with her fist. “Ouch!”
“Ailith?”
“I’m fine. I tried to punch it, but it was like hitting a boulder. Any suggestions?”
Steel rang behind her. “I don’t know. Keep looking. Keep trying anything you can think of.” Her brother grunted from the thrust of his next swing, his voice amplified in the silence.
She stopped in front of a lad who looked about the right age. Brown hair. Brown trews.
The clash of John’s sword grew louder. “What the hell? Ailith, the warrior’s gone, but the next one is waking. He’ll be stronger than the last. Hurry.”
“How did the warrior’s cage open?”
“It just dissolved. You have a few moments, then we’re leaving. I don’t like these invisible swords. It swings and doesn’t appear again until it’s about to slice me open.”
The second warrior came at him, and the sound of it made every muscle in her back tighten, but she forced herself to face the cage in front of her.
“Milo?” She pressed her hand flat against the surface, directly over the boy’s chest. “Is that you?” There was a rock a few steps away so she grabbed it, though it was cold as ice, but she ran at the cage, throwing the rock at the side of the cage so as not to hit him if it broke through.
The rock bounced back and hit her arm.
“Damn it!” She stared at the wee lad in front of her. She was failing terribly. He was right in front of her. Then it came to her. She’d carry the whole cage out. She bent her knees and reached under the shelf, trying to lift the cage from it. John could help her get it up the staircase.
It didn’t budge. She pushed against it, unable to move it.
No movement. No recognition. She put her face close to the surface and studied him the way she studied a vision, looking past the stillness for what was underneath. Her gaze locked on the piece of plaid clutched in his tiny hand.
The cold crystal threw her back in time to a different cage deep in a cellar. Her ankle chained to a stake in the corner of the cage, dirty water in a bowl, the sound of tiny feet racing in the next cell. She closed her eyes and willed the vision away—for Milo, for Heilyn.
She opened her eyes and looked at the wee bairn suspended above a ledge in front of her. “Milo, you look like your Uncle Edan.”
The next vision came without warning, the way the true ones always did. Two men and a boy on a wooden dock, sun on the water behind them, the smell of brine and fresh catch rising off everything. One of the men was Edan, smiling, more at ease than she had ever seen him. The other had the same jaw, the same set to the shoulders. Milo’s father, Arne. And the boy between them reaching up with both hands for something small and silver and wriggling.
She followed the vision without thinking. “Are you going fishing?”
In her mind, Edan set a small fish into the boy’s cupped hands.
“Good catch, Milo! He’s wiggly but the fish won’t hurt you.” It was as if she stood on the dock with the laddie.
Milo squealed and squirmed, and the fish leaped free, bouncing off the dock and into the water. The boy’s wail of grief lasted exactly two seconds before Edan caught him under the arms and swung him over his head, turning the wail into laughter.
