Sunrise

Chapter Two: Novelty

The silence of the dungeon pressed on her ears like a pair of deafening hands. The darkness was complete, the cells in this level having no grate to admit even a speck of light. It was as suffocating and black as a sack over your head. One could get used to dirt and spiders and even being alone, perhaps, but the silence and darkness, never. 

She had no intention of getting used to any of it, however. As soon as she was certain Achren was not going to return, she dropped to all fours and scrabbled in the dirty straw underfoot, throwing it aside until she reached the stone floor beneath. She inched her fingers along the seam of one flagstone until she felt a tingle run up her arm, an indescribable sense of knowing.

This one, she thought at the castle, felt the subtle shift in its essence. And slowly, the stone seemed to...soften? No, that wasn't it; she never could describe even to herself how it felt to have solid stone part around one's fingers like water; she'd certainly never been stupid enough to ask Achren, who had no inkling of her ability, how it worked. It was something she'd discovered some years ago by accident, some trick combined of her own latent power and the castle's curious, unwilling sympathy towards her. She'd had many opportunities to be grateful for it before now.

The stone shifted as she worked it loose, got both hands into the widening crack and silently commanded up. It labored up, scraping its thick sides, and she puffed as she pushed it over its neighbor. She wondered how much it weighed, certain, from the acrid taste of magic seeping into her mouth, that she wasn't moving it with her unaided strength alone. It didn't matter, of course, as long as it worked, but she wished she could do it without touching the stone at all. Her hands were always stiff afterwards, for hours.

A waft of slightly less stale air brushed her face from below, and she felt for the edges of the floor where the stone had been removed, braced her hands against them, and lowered herself into the hole left behind. Bare earth met her sandaled feet and she ducked down, paused to get her bearings, and set off into the darkness in the direction that felt right.

She'd never traversed the maze under Spiral Castle without her bauble, and had to admit now that it was an uncomfortable business. Not that she had any doubt of her direction, but the floor was treacherous, and several times she tripped over obstacles and turned her ankles on loose stones. A few times she had to feel her way along a wall, and tried not to think of what else she might touch besides stone and earth. Who knew what lived down here that usually disappeared down dark cracks when her bauble's glow came along?

She must retrieve it and return to her cell before Achren came back, but truth be told, it was only half her reason for picking her way toward the upper-level dungeons. She intended to satisfy her curiosity about that assistant pig-keeper as well; how convenient that he and her bauble were both in the same cell.

Why had Achren imprisoned him? What was his interest in the other prisoner? Where had he come from? Perhaps he'd be able to tell her something of the lands beyond the forest. She had never heard of any Caer Dallben, and wondered how far away it was, and whether it was large or small, and if there were more people her age there.

It took over an hour, fumbling along in the darkness, and a long moment of thinking hard, impatient thoughts at a certain door until it stopped pretending to be a wall. But at last she found the tunnel just below the first cells. She paused, examining a mental map of the labyrinthine innards of the castle. Left, then right, then right again...yes, the boy's cell should be just above her. She groped upward in the darkness and found the cold stone over her head.

Once again stone molded like wax around her fingers, the paver shifted, then...stopped. Up, she thought, irritated, up, blast you. Something was wrong; some weight on the stone that wasn't stone, one she had no power over, and she realized the boy must be sitting on it.