Chapter 57
I was kept in a cage near the exit to the guard’s barracks until the Lyr had enacted changes in the Palace’s towers. He caused the Guards’ Tree to grow another room – a cell complete with running water, sewage lines and it had no other access in or out. He had it literally grown around me, a living coffin of wood that held me immobile. I think I went mad when I realized I could not move let alone escape and my mind was too distraught to let me spiral down into my fantasies. I could no longer sense Arianell or any other mind, no creatures or humans came to me in my madness. I beat on the walls of wood around me and the living flesh of the tree gave slightly. Yet, it was my hands that bore the brunt of my frenzy and not the tree.
I couldn’t imagine how they would feed me if indeed they even intended to do so. Or how I was going to relieve myself. There was enough room for me to remove my breeches. I ran my fingers over my flesh and realized I was naked. I shivered in fear and horror that they weren’t going to let me out to use the rest rooms, I was intended to shit inside this living coffin and let the tree remove the mess. Even as the thought came, a warm fluid seeped out of the tree’s veins and washed me. Some entered my gaping mouth and I swallowed involuntarily. It tasted sweet; I drank knowing that this was my food and water. After that, my stomach full and my thirst satisfied, my heart heavy with despair I spiraled into madness that left me alone without any conscious awareness. If time passed, it did not touch me nor was I cognizant of how long I was immured in the living tree.
All I knew was that suddenly, a compulsion came upon me, so deeply ingrained that I could not ignore it no more than I could stop breathing. Blackfin ordered me to escape and kill the Lyr. I clawed at my prison until my hands were bloodied and splinters pierced my fingers and tore my nails. Yet, the tree stubbornly refused to acknowledge my existence.
Blackfin spoke into my mind exhorting me to escape. In halting words, I managed to explain my predicament and that I was no longer an yfed gwaed so was without any powers. No longer could I call animals to my bidding, influence men under my glamour or even compel the tree to obey me.
He cursed me, seized my mind and reminded me that magic was all around me and mine for the taking. I conjured spells with my mind and my voice, subtle things to start – like making the tree bring me extra food and water, carving a bigger space around me, creating a window out on the skies so that I could see something besides the red after image on my eyelids. As I achieved that, I made the tree take me down deep into her roots but leaving behind a simulacrum of myself buried inside my former coffin. Once in the roots, I had the tree grow her way into a buried cavern and let me free. I was still lost in the darkness, still buried but for the first time I was not mired in despair. I knew I could get free.
It took a long time for me to find my way back to the surface. I had only the magic of Wyche lights and they were too feeble to do more than provide a few candles worth of light to guide my feet between the spires of rocks that grew up from the floor and down from the ceiling. I never could remember which were stalactites or stalagmites.
I exited the caverns in a small branch of woods near a village just outside the Lyr’s Palace. These homes weren’t grown in the trees but were small cottages composed of rocks and bricks in pleasing rose and mellow gray hues that complemented both the foliage and the grass around them. White cobblestone lanes connected each home to a main avenue and that avenue led straight to the downtown of the Lyr’s capital city.
I walked boldly through the center of the village and no one noticed me as I used magic to mask both my appearance and the knowledge that I was present. The spells were minor ones that triggered no alarms to anyone with the ability to detect the use of magic. Not that its use would have been unusual anyway. All the Elassai used magic to make their lives easier. So, it was relatively simple to make my way unobserved down the main street even though I was stark naked and barefoot.
I ripped pants, shirt and over tunic off the first clothesline I spotted with garments hanging in the late afternoon sunshine and dressed hurriedly behind a barn full of cattle and sylphs. For footwear, I found a pair of wooden pattens in the feed room. Those and a stolen pair of socks carried me all the way into the city.