Kay felt pain. A slow, mean throb at the back of his skull, pulsing in time with his heartbeat. Then the rest of him arrived—the ache in his shoulders, the stiffness in his legs, the sour taste of old bile at the back of his throat. He tried to move. He felt cold, damp earth under his palms. It was hard-packed; not mud. Kay forced his eyes open.

  The world swam. A ceiling of dark wood and woven roots loomed overhead, threaded with faint, pale growths that gave off a sickly light. The air smelled of wet soil, old sweat, and something sweet that didn’t belong. He lay on his side in a narrow strip of space. Bare ground, with someone’s boot inches from his face.

  “Easy,” a voice rasped. “Don’t sit up too fast. You’ll vomit on my feet and I’ll have to kick you out of spite.”

  Was that Sid?

  Kay blinked until the blur pulled itself into shapes. He was in a cage—long and low. The bars were pale and smooth, thicker than his wrist, sunk deep into the floor and arched together overhead. Something that looked like bamboo but finer, jointed in strange places, the surface too even to be wild.

  Men lay or sat hunched along the sides. A few he recognized by colors—Timberlake, Yellowhill. Most just looked gray and used. Sid sat with his back to one of the bars, legs stretched out in front of him. His skin had the waxy look of old tallow. A deep bruise darkened one side of his face, purple and yellow under the white of his beard. His breath came shallow, but his eyes were clear enough.

  “About time,” Sid said, and it sounded like he’d had to walk the words up from somewhere low. “I was starting to think I’d have to lead a prison break myself.”

  Kay pushed himself up onto one elbow. The room tilted, then steadied. He wanted to curse at the woodcutter that was hammering away at a tree inside his head.

  “Sid,” he managed. “You look terrible.”

  Sid snorted weakly. “You look like you lost a fight with a cart wheel.”

  A figure shifted in the gloom nearby.

  “So you live,” Sire Klod said. His voice was rougher than Kay remembered, but the bite was still there. “Good. I’d hate to have gone to all this trouble just to share a cage with corpses.”

  Sire Klod sat with his back to the far curve of the bars, one knee up, arm draped over it. His surcoat was torn, the yellow boar smeared dark. One eye was swollen nearly shut. There was a strip of dried blood on his neck where mail had been cut away.

  Kay took a breath, then another, trying to piece the last clear moments together. The rampart. The fire. The elves coming out of the water. Three bodies at his feet. A fourth blow from nowhere.

  “What happened?” he asked. His voice sounded too loud in his own ears. “The camp, the men—”

  “Ambush,” Sire Klod said. “What else?”

  “I gathered that,” Kay snapped, sharper than he meant to. His head throbbed in answer. He struggled up until he could sit, back to the nearest bar. “How did we get from a half-built wall in the marsh to… this?”

  Sid closed his eyes for a moment, like he was listening to something only he could hear. When he opened them again, they were tired but steady.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  “After you went down,” he said, “the line held. For a bit. Then the fog started moving again.” He lifted one hand, fingers twitching slightly. “Like it had hands. Couldn’t see five paces. I lost track of you. Lost track of half the left flank, truth be told.”

  Sire Klod picked up the tale with a grim shrug. “Same with us. When we were near the endpoint of our scouting mission. The fog rolled in. They hit my riders when we tried to wheel back around. I should have charged gloriously and died. While we fled, men were dragged off their horses, the mounts panicked. Something hit me hard.” His mouth twisted. “We broke. Tried to pull back toward your lovely ditch. Didn’t make it.”

  He tapped the side of his head with two fingers.

  “I woke with a sack over my eyes. Something in it smelled like rotten flowers.”

  Kay looked around the cage again. The bars didn’t creak when he leaned against them. They didn’t move at all.

  “How long?” he asked. “Since they took you.”

  “Hard to say,” Klod said. “They kept us blindfolded the whole way. But I counted steps when I could. Time between rests. Call it… half-a-day? Maybe more. Maybe less. I don’t know how long I was out for. But long enough for my legs to hate me and my tongue to dry out.”

  Sid made a low sound of agreement. “Felt like half a day,” he said. “Could’ve been three hours. Could’ve been ten. They don’t march like men. For all we know, they walked us around in circles for hours on end, then took us under a dead tree.”

  Kay swallowed. His throat felt raw. “You’re sure we’re underground?”

  Sid tilted his head back toward the ceiling. “No wind,” he said. “Air’s close. Sound comes back on itself. Hear that?”

  There was a faint drip somewhere beyond the cage. It echoed wrong—too flat and too near at the same time.

  “A natural cavern,” Sid said. “Or something they’ve carved. Based on these strange bars, I’d guess the latter.”

  Kay looked again at the bars. Up close, they looked almost grown, not built—each length bending just where it needed to, merging with the next in smooth joints. No nails. No ropes. No gaps big enough to fit a wrist through. He reached out and wrapped his fingers around one. It felt neither warm nor cold. Just… there. Solid, with a faint give under the skin, like living wood. He set his shoulder and pushed. The bar didn’t even creak.

  “It might as well be steel,” Sire Klod said. “I’ve already bloodied my hands on them, if you’re wondering. No use. Whatever this is, it remembers where it was put.”

  Kay let go. His fingers tingled where they’d touched it.

  “Any other ideas?” Kay asked quietly. “Hidden blades? Loose stones?”

  “Not yet,” Sid said. He sounded annoyed by the fact. “They bring water twice a day. Food once. Same two elves, all armor, no talk. No one close enough to grab without losing an arm for the trouble.”

  Sire Klod shifted. “We’ve been waiting on you,” he said. “You’re the one with the writ, remember? Maybe they’ll be kind enough to let you read it to them.”

  Kay huffed a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. His head pounded. Before he could answer, a sound cut across the dim murmur of the other cages—boots on stone, light and even. Conversation guttered down around them. Men straightened out of habit more than hope.

  An elf stepped into view at the end of the row. He wasn’t armored like the raiders had been. His hair was black pulled back into braids and bound with metal trinkets woven in. His clothes were a layered weave of dark green and gray, fitting close, marked here and there with faint lines of silver thread that caught the glow from the ceiling. Two other elves flanked him, these in the seamless dark armor Kay now hated on instinct, their strange blades at their hips—identical to the Toby carried around, yet these glowed ever so faintly, like the fog followed their command.

  The unarmored elf walked up to their cage as if he were approaching a table in some quiet hall. He stopped a pace away, hands loosely clasped behind his back, eyes with soft red irises and black pupils taking them all in. Up close, there was nothing monstrous about him. That was the worst part. His face could have been carved from calm stone.

  “Welcome,” he said, his voice smooth and accented but understandable, raising his hands out wide in grandeur. “To Hekaxar.”

  The name meant nothing to him. Where on earth was Hekaxar, and why had it never been mentioned in his family’s historical records? The elf inclined his head a fraction, as if in greeting to peers rather than prisoners.

  “I,” he added, “am Jaonos Rodi.”