“The cage…” I said. “The cage is…” I couldn’t finish.
Its lock was unique. Forged by a master artisan, and activated by a sorcerer’s casting to be wholly unbreakable, the locks had been shaped into seven-pointed crowns, each of the peaks culminating in a barbed spike. Teo and I had exhausted ourselves trying to bust them open.
“Familiar,” I eventually said. “The cage is familiar.”
I felt Baz’s sharp eyes on me, trying to see into my past, to read my life story. But the woman’s eyes were on me too, and I couldn’t look away.
The agonized wailing shrank to a whimper, before quieting entirely. Then, the woman’s mouth began moving rapidly.
“We can’t hear you,” I called across the dozen feet that still separated us.
She unwove a single hand from around the bars, while leaving the other clutching them, as if afraid she’d become untethered if she were to let go. With her free hand, she started gesticulating in an urgent frenzy. She spoke more rapidly too, slapping and squeezing the air to emphasize her point—whatever it was.
“We still can’t hear you. Not a word you’re saying.” I glanced at Baz. “You can’t hear her either, right?”
He’d already been looking down at me. “No. Only when she cries.”
After many more fruitless words and gestures, she screamed—loud and sharp enough to flay flesh. Strangling the bars, she leaned back into her arms, threw her head back, and yelled again.
“I definitely heard that,” Baz said, advancing. This time, when he dragged me along, I willingly followed. “I couldn’t understand what she said though. You?”
“No. Nothing.”
We halted a body’s length from the cage, its floor at eye level. The smell of old decay turned my stomach.
While the woman was renewing her efforts to communicate with us, I spotted a skeleton behind her. In a crumpled heap, it curved around the circular floor. The skull was capped in clumps of dull, matted black hair. Rags of a faded dress lay in patches across pale bones.
“The fuck?” Baz snarled. “She’s been locked up with someone’s dead body so long it had time to completely decompose?”
“Appears that way.”
I stepped closer and stretched a hand toward her. She pressed herself against the bars and extended an arm to me. Our fingers were mere inches away from touching when I hesitated.
She squawked and lunged for my arm. I pulled it back.
This had to be some sort of dark magic. Some hideous faithum I’d never heard of…
Without looking away from the prisoner, who continued reaching for me, I told Baz, “I recognize her. She’s in the center of a portrait I’ve studied a hundred times, if not a thousand. It’s at the palace, in Zaraga. It’s one of Rafaela’s few possessions from her time before marrying Alonso.”
At the mention of Rafaela, the woman let her arm, hanging through the bars, fall between us. Her eyes, already as dark as I imagined possible, deepened to the unrelenting black of the abyss.
“So she’s a Tulon, then?” Baz said.
“Yeah. She’s a Tulon.”
“Which one?”
“See, that’s where it gets impossible. The woman in the portrait who looks exactly like this one…?”
“Uh-huh?”
“It’s Rafaela, in the very last portrait that was made of her complete family before she was sent away to Zaraga to marry at the age of seventeen.”
“You’re suggesting”—Baz looked from me to the female and back—“that this woman is your dame, Rafaela Eudova?”
The woman shook her head violently. Her hair swung only slightly instead of amply as it should have.
“I don’t know what I’m suggesting,” I said, “only that this doesn’t make sense. Rafaela is in Zaraga’s palace, or at the very least she’s definitely not here. And she’s older. She looks older.”
