He continued, “Chances are, Isabeau has thrown you in here to rot, and if nothing else happens, she’ll forget about you, but you can’t count on that. One day, she might want to see for herself how miserable and sorry you are. If anyone asks how your hands got healed, tell them the truth—you don’t know. You fell asleep, and when you woke up, you were healed. You don’t know how it happened, and you don’t know who did it. That’s all. Don’t offer them any information. I’m assuming they know you don’t have magic?”
“Yes.” She should let go of him, but she couldn’t seem to make her grip loosen.
“Good. Isabeau is one of the most bigoted racists you could ever meet. She equates a lack of magic to a lack of intelligence. If she finds out what happened, she’ll be furious that someone defied her orders enough to heal you, but it won’t occur to her that you might be able to evade her truthsense.”
Now that the panic had lessened, she was able to think again. His strategy was also the only way to protect him from Isabeau’s anger. What Sid didn’t know, she wouldn’t be able to tell anyone.
“Okay,” she whispered. “I understand.”
At that, his grip loosened. He would have let her go, but she held on.
“Why have you helped me?”
He sighed. “It’s too dangerous to tell you anything. I know it must be very nearly impossible, given the situation you’re in, but if you can, just try to trust this one thing: I mean you no harm, and I will help you as much as I can.”
He seemed to have forgotten that she still held his hand, and she wasn’t about to let go. Thinking back to the beginning of this whole nightmare, she said slowly, “I was kidnapped by a creature that wants to cause damage to the Light Fae.”
“You talked to him?” His whisper sharpened.
“Yes. He was strange-looking, like a thin teenage boy, until you looked into his face. And he could shapeshift.”
This time the man’s sigh sounded heavy. “I know who he is.”
“He ambushed my car, and we crashed. While the others were either hurt or unconscious, he took me,” she whispered. “And when I gained consciousness again, he cried. I thought he’d been stalking me, but he said he had been stalking someone else. A man, he said, that kept going to my concerts. Since this man was interested in me, the creature took me and gave me to Isabeau. I thought he was insane. But he wasn’t, was he?”
Through her grip on his hand, she could feel the tension in his body. “No. Robin is dangerous and very damaged, but I don’t think he is insane.”
He knew the creature by name. She swallowed past a thickness in her throat. “Are you the man he was talking about?”
“Don’t ask me that question, Sidonie.”
The man’s use of her name, when she hadn’t told it to him or to anyone else in Avalon, sent a fresh shock through her system.
She had already known the answer before she had asked it, because who else in this godforsaken demesne would care at all about what happened to her, heal her hands, bring her food, and offer comfort?
Squeezing her eyes closed, she concentrated on trying to breathe evenly, while tears slipped down her face and she held the hand of the man who was responsible for everything terrible that had happened to her.
When she could control herself enough to speak, she whispered, “So, you like my music?”
“Like is not the right word for it.” His words came slowly, his unwillingness to answer evident. “Your music hurts, the way sunshine hurts when you’ve existed for a long time in darkness.”
She thought of the unbearably fierce torchlight when the guard came. Even though she knew it was unlikely he could see her, she nodded and wiped her face. Okay.
Her grip loosened, and she let him go.
There was a slight rustle of clothing as he moved around. He must have stood, because when he spoke next, it was from above her head as he pressed the water bottle into her hands. “Drink as much as you can. This, along with what is in your cup, is going to have to last you all day. I’ll get the grapes and bread. I doubt anyone is going to bother coming into your cell, so if you lie down on the cot, you should be able to hide them between you and the wall. If you’re worried about them for any reason, you can either eat them before the guard gets here or throw them down the latrine.”
He was getting ready to leave. She didn’t know how she felt about him—she hadn’t had any time to process the fact that he was the reason why she was in this hellhole—but the thought of him leaving her alone again brought the panic back. It beat through her veins, shook through her body in tremors, and shortened her breath.
She couldn’t force herself to swallow any water until his hand came down on her shoulder and he held her again in the same kind of steady grip as before. It grounded her in a way that helped to beat back the panic. Then she upended the bottle and drank until it was empty. When she was finished, she handed the bottle back to him and hugged herself.
“I will come back, Sidonie,” he said.
“You’re sure you won’t just leave me here?” Her voice shook as badly as the rest of her.
Because he could. He could walk away and never come back, and while it was an unbelievable miracle he had healed her hands, she was still trapped in the cold and the dark, still caught in this unending nightmare.
“I promise you, I will never just leave you here.” He stepped closer until she could feel the brush of his clothing against her arm and feel his body heat. In the calm, confident way he had reassured her about everything else, he said, “It’s nearly dawn, so I must go for now. In less than a half an hour your cell will lighten, and the guard will come through with food and water. You need to start throwing the food they give you down the latrine, or they’ll expect to see a dead body in here eventually. After the day passes, and they have come through on their evening rounds, I will be back. I will not abandon you.”
Breathing hard, she focused on soaking up his words. When he was finished, she forced herself to say, “Thank you. For everything.”
She was rather proud that she had kept herself from pleading for him to stay, since he couldn’t anyway, and she would not let herself sound so irrational again.
“Don’t thank me.” His whisper turned harsh. “It’s the least I can do. See you this evening.”
But what if he didn’t come back? People promised things they couldn’t deliver. What if he changed his mind? What if, through no fault of his own, he was detained?
The way her kidnapper, Robin, had talked, this man and Isabeau were responsible for a great many deaths. Just because he had helped her didn’t mean he was a good man, or trustworthy.
Clenching her fists, she pressed them to her temples. The doubts and worries were going to drive her crazy.
There was another slight rustle of clothing, and the smallest creak of metal. The air around her changed and became cold and empty, and she knew he was gone. Carefully, she held the food he had given her.
One small loaf of bread.
Thirty-two grapes. Thirty-two.
Thirty-two.
* * *
The pain from the new knife wound in Morgan’s side was unrelenting as he eased his way down the prison tunnels. Sidonie had gotten in a few solid blows. He was glad she had so much fight in her. She was going to need it.
Despite the darkness, he could see well enough to pick out where he was going, and he knew the route like he knew the back of his hand.
Isabeau’s castle had been built on a rabbit warren of natural tunnels that had been turned into a prison over a thousand years ago. Some parts had been filled in, while cells had been carved out of others, and shafts had been dug in order to provide ventilation. Without the indirect daylight from those shafts, Sidonie’s cell would never lighten to gray and she would have been in perpetual darkness.
The prison guard rooms and barracks lay just above the cells. That area had several openings to above ground. He avoided it altogether and wound his way farther down, to a tunnel passageway that had been part of the area that had been originally filled in.
A very long time ago, when Morgan had begun to realize he was not going to break free of the geas, he had turned his efforts to creating his own private spaces in Avalon.