“You aren’t the same person you were,” I said quietly. “And you aren’t on your own anymore.”
“I’m so tired of being afraid.” Anne sounded dull and weary and utterly wretched. “I wish I didn’t . . .”
“There’s nothing wrong with being afraid of people who want to hurt you. I’d be more worried if you weren’t.”
“Easy for you to say. You and Vari and Luna are never scared of anything.”
I laughed out loud at that. Anne looked up in surprise. “What?”
“Anne, I’m scared of more things than I can count. If I ever sat down and tried to make a list, I’d be there all week.”
“But you don’t . . .”
“I’m eight years older than you; I’ve had time to get used to it. Look, you remember when we first met? You were twenty then, right? When I was that age, I was much more screwed up mentally than you were. I’d just gotten away from Richard and I was terrified out of my wits that he’d come after me. I couldn’t hold any kind of job or relationship, I treated everyone like they were out to get me, and I slept with a weapon under my pillow. But it gets better. It takes time and you have to work at it, but it does.”
Anne was silent. “Have you ever talked about it?” I asked.
Anne shook her head.
“Vari? Luna?”
“Vari knows bits. Little bits. Luna . . . she asked, but . . .”
“Why did Sagash bring you here?”
Anne was silent for a little while, long enough that I started to think she wasn’t going to answer. “He found out about us because of Miss Chandler,” she said at last. “She was his . . . student, I think. We didn’t know. We just thought she was on her own; we’d never heard anything about Dark mages back then. I was payment. That was the way Sagash explained it. He wanted an apprentice, and I was the price.”
“And you lived here for nine months?”
Anne nodded, not meeting my eyes.
“What was it like?”
“It was horrible,” Anne said softly. “The only other people were Sagash and his guests. Not all were Dark mages, but they were just as bad. I’d . . . I’d look at them when they came in and wonder what kind this one was, and whether Sagash would give me to them. I never had any say, not about anything. What I wore, what I did, where I went . . . He controlled everything. The only choices I had were the ones he gave me, he was changing me into something and I couldn’t stop it. I just watched and I kept losing myself, one bit at a time . . . I tried to run away but it never helped; there wasn’t any food and eventually I’d have to come back or starve. After the second time Sagash put a collar on me so he could hurt me and track me, and I couldn’t even run away anymore. I had to come back each time, for training . . .” Anne fell silent again.
“What kind of training?” I said quietly.
“I can’t tell you,” Anne whispered. “I can’t, I don’t . . .” Her shoulders shook and she started to cry. “I didn’t want to, he made me. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me . . .”
I held Anne closer and she kept crying quietly, tears mixing with sniffs, one hand tight on the mesh of the armour at my chest. I didn’t ask her any more questions. Maybe she could have answered and maybe not, but pushing her to do it felt too heartless. Eventually she fell silent. She was huddled up against me, the coat still wrapped around her, and listening to her breathing I realised she’d fallen asleep. From a glance into the futures, I could tell this slumber was a deeper one; she wasn’t going to be waking up so easily this time.
Well, now what?
Anne was pressed up against me, which pretty much ruled out any more path-walking. We still needed to get out, but it wasn’t immediately obvious how. Trying to retrace our steps to the main gate would just lead us into a battle with a squad of constructs, which would draw in Sagash’s apprentices. I’d sucker-punched Darren once—I didn’t think it would be so easy to do it twice.
The best approach would be to find some other way out, but for that I’d need Anne’s help, and she was obviously exhausted. From the signs of it she’d been using a combination of terror and her own life magic to keep herself in a state of hypervigilance for three days straight, and she wouldn’t be able to think clearly until she’d had a chance to rest. For that matter, I was having trouble thinking clearly too. I hadn’t had much sleep since this whole thing had started, and it had been a long day.
I rested my head back against the stone and gazed up at the beams of moonlight slanting through the windows. The creak of the sails, the whisper of wind, and the distant waves blended together into a soothing, gentle sound. Anne slept next to me, still and warm. I found my eyes drifting closed, and chided myself, looking ahead to check the futures in which I sat here and stayed awake. It didn’t look as though anything was going to disturb us—in all the futures I could make out, we’d be left alone until sunrise. Still, even if I’d checked, there was always the chance of something changing, no matter how small. I let my eyes close, feeling the presence of my armour around me, watchful.
I shouldn’t go to sleep, but it felt good to rest my eyes. Just for a little while . . .
Chapter 8
I drifted through dreams, old memories rising to the surface and sinking into the depths. A door opened and I stepped through.
As I did everything changed, becoming focused and clear. I was standing in a hallway made out of some kind of black stone. Soft lights glowed from holders, reflecting off the walls. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all made of the same substance—it was somewhere between stone and glass, with a mirrored finish which cast back the light with perfect clarity. I brushed my fingers across it and found it cool and smooth to the touch. Turning, I saw an open doorway behind me.
I didn’t recognise this place but there didn’t seem to be any immediate danger, and I was curious. I walked down the corridor.
The corridor opened up into a large curved room. A long dining table of dark wood sat in the centre; bowls made out of a vivid green glass were spaced along its length. A little farther away was a sofa and a set of chairs, all the same distinctive shade of green, contrasting oddly with the black-glass walls. Lights hung from the ceiling, but the room was dominated by the row of massive arch windows along the left wall. They had no glass or panes, and the view I glimpsed was so bizarre that I walked up and leant on one of the windowsills so that I could gaze out.
The windows led out onto a railed balcony made of the same strange black glass, and beyond was an impossible landscape stretching away to infinity. Giant trees rose beside mirrored lakes, stretching up into a clear blue sky. The trees were the size of tower blocks, and only the perspective gave a clue to how vast they were. The biggest looked as though it could have cast St. Paul’s Cathedral in its shadow, and tiny wooden buildings and round platforms peeked from its twisting branches. Farther away I could see rolling hills, distant grasslands, and sunlit mountains on the horizon. All of the landscape teemed with life; birds flew, grass and trees and flowers crowded the hills. It was a lush, verdant land . . . until you looked down. A few hundred feet away, at ground level, the grass and trees were cut off abruptly, as though with a knife. A black wall formed a perfectly curved arc around my current location, stretching to the left and the right until it was hidden by the edges of the window. The difference was razor-edged and startling—outside the walls flowers bloomed in grassy meadows, while inside everything was sculpted from the same black glass, without so much as a blade of grass to break up the unnatural smoothness. The outside was natural, wild, and alive; the inside artificial, ordered, and dead.