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Which made it pretty damned close to paradise.
After a while, I put out a hand but didn’t touch anything. I felt around with a toe, but there didn’t seem to be anything down there, either. And strain as much as I liked, I still couldn’t hear a sound.
That was okay; it gave me time to think.
I thought about taking a nap.
It would be so easy here, to just drift away. . . .
But there was something I needed to do first. Something that scratched at the inside of my head like a persistent fingernail. It was annoying, like an insect I couldn’t shoo, or like Rosier when he was talking and talking and—
Rosier.
I needed to find Rosier. And then we needed . . . we needed . . . we had to do something that I couldn’t remember right now, and chasing down the memory that skittered around inside my skull sounded like way too much work. But it was important, and Rosier would know what it was.
I had to get to Rosier.
I wondered how.
And the next second, my butt hit a dusty, hardwood floor with a thump.
It was a loud thump, and it hurt like I’d fallen from a height. For a moment I just stayed there, dazed from the shock of the fall, waiting to be grabbed, to be jerked up, to be reimprisoned. But none of that happened.
Possibly because no one was there.
I took stock.
Dirty wooden floor, check. Big, hulking wood thing, check. Rosier—no Rosier. But I was back in what I guessed was the Victorian equivalent of war mage HQ, where I’d been a second ago. Or maybe not a second; I couldn’t really tell. But it felt like longer, and my head felt a little clearer.
I realized I was holding a box.
It was black and shiny, the same one they’d imprisoned me in, at a guess. And I’d been right: I had seen ones like it before. The mages used them as magical traps, and as an alternative to coming up with cells for bad girls like me.
Or bad boys.
Slowly, I got into a crouch, and then even more slowly, I poked just my eyeballs over the edge of the wood thing.
There was another box.
It was just sitting there, all alone, out in the open, without even anyone to guard it. And I guess that made a sort of sense. Why worry about people in little boxes? People in little boxes didn’t go anywhere.
Well, not usually.
But whether it had to do with mother’s blood, or with being Pythia or what, I’d never had any problem opening the things. It had mostly gotten me into trouble before, when I’d let out stuff I wasn’t supposed to. Like when I’d ended up rooming for a while with three old women, ancient demigoddesses the Senate had imprisoned and I’d accidentally released.
That had been fun.
I’d spent more than a few moments in those weeks cursing whatever Fate thought it was a laugh to constantly mess with me.
I was sort of okay with it now.
Now I just had to let out Rosier.
Which would have been a lot easier if another man hadn’t just come in from the hall.
He was big and brown-haired and bearded, and dressed like a war mage. I’d just stood up when he banged the door open and I spun around and stared at him. For a moment, we just stayed like that, me with my back to the counter, my box hidden behind my leg, and him with his coat half off, water rolling off the waxed leather to puddle at his feet.
And then he blinked and finished taking off his coat.
