Her mouth crooked up. She might not be able to believe she’d hold Cullen again, but she could argue with him in her mind just fine. And the annoying man was right, even if he was just her imagination. She did need to put down the poetry and do some thinking.
Suppertime had come and gone. Lily’s bowl of rice-and-whatever sat in one corner of the cell, waiting for her return. So did the second mat and blanket the guards had tossed in. There was no light left outside; a single mage light bobbed in her cell. That was Alice’s doing; Cynna couldn’t use her own magic for a damn thing. Alice had arranged for the guards to provide a mage light every evening. Cynna sat on her mat as darkness gathered and thought about her plan for removing the be-damned magic cage. She thought about the questions she hadn’t had a chance to ask Lily before they took her away, and about how Cullen was still alive, dammit, and that however endless the last six days had been for her, Ryder had only experienced about one day without her momma and daddy, plus Ryder had Toby with her so she was not feeling terrified and abandoned. Cynna thought, and did not give in to despair.
Been there. Done that.
They couldn’t damage Lily, right? They needed her body and brain in good shape to give to the Great Bitch. Pain magic was out, too, since it wouldn’t work on Lily, so whatever was happening shouldn’t be too horrible.
It wouldn’t be good, though. She knew enough about the spawn to be sure of that. But it did no good to try to guess what particular kind of nasty might be happening, so she thought about what she knew and what she needed to know. What she wanted to ask the next time she got a chance. She thought hard and did not pray. She hadn’t prayed since she watched Dick Boy kill that little boy. She couldn’t pray when she spent all her time wanting to kill . . . not that she was going to fantasize about that anymore. To hell with that shit.
Though God knew she still wanted to. She wanted the spawn dead, especially Dick Boy, and preferably by her hand. She wanted to personally rip apart the two people—a dragon spawn and the avatar of an Old One, a goddamned self-proclaimed goddess—who’d stolen her baby. But fantasizing about murder just sank her deeper into the frozen pit where she’d spent the last few days. Fantasy didn’t do a damn thing to get her out of that pit. Or this cell. Fantasy just kept her mind busy, kept her from thinking about Ryder every damn second. Thinking about Ryder hurt more than every other pain in her whole life rolled into one. It was bigger than she was, a swallowing emptiness. So she’d fantasized about murder and hadn’t even noticed that she’d given up. Until Lily came limping into the cell, she hadn’t realized that she had fucking given up.
Lily never gave up. She didn’t know how.
Cynna thought of Lily as a bullet. She didn’t mean that in a bad way. Lily had killed, yeah, but she wasn’t violent the way Cynna could be—used to be—back in the bad old days. Even after she started turning her life around, on bad nights she’d still gone looking for a fight. Nothing else seemed to help, and she hadn’t known why she was so angry, or how to let go of her anger, or even that she’d used anger to protect herself. Except that it hadn’t. It had only left her unbearably alone, making her angry all over again at a world that shut her out. Angry at herself for being too flawed, too wrong. For screwing up. For, in the end, shutting out the world.
Lily didn’t have that kind of anger. She wasn’t a bullet because she was violent, but because she shot for her goal. Period. It never seemed to occur to her that she might not reach it. Maybe “guided missile” was a better description. If Lily rammed into something she couldn’t get through, she immediately started figuring out how to get around it.
Cynna couldn’t see how they were going to get out of this cell. She didn’t see how they could rescue Ryder and the rest of the children with six dragon spawn and an entire realm trying to stop them . . . then somehow get the children to safety. Somehow stop the Lady’s enemies from doing something godawful with that magical construct. Somehow get back to Dis at the right time to save Cullen and Rule and the rest of them . . . and go home. That had to be the final goal, to get home again. Doing all of that—shit, doing any two out of three—was clearly impossible. Thinking you could do the impossible had to be a fucking delusion.
It was a delusion Cynna meant to hold on to with both hands, both feet, and her teeth. She just wished she had better teeth to clamp down with, like a wolf’s or a tiger’s or—
The bar lifted on the other side of the door. She sat up straight. Lily?
But it was one of the guards silhouetted against the light from the other side of the open door. “Come,” he said.
The guards all seemed to know two English words: “come” and “stay.” Which, give them credit, was more than she knew of Chinese. She was not good at languages. She could order beer or curse in Spanish. That was about it. And Chinese had to be the weirdest-ass language ever, as she’d figured out when, curious, she’d looked up some stuff about it online. What seemed like one word was really lots of words depending on how you said it, but it wasn’t like the difference between “caw” and “cow.” More like the difference between “cow” and “cow,” only you put a bit of lilt into one and left the other flat. Or stressed one more, or said one faster, or something. She couldn’t tell. She didn’t have the right ears for Chinese.
Not that she’d been trying. The last six days, she hadn’t tried to do much of anything.
She grimaced and got to her feet. It hurt. Mostly her arm—broken bones hurt a lot more, a lot more continuously, and for a lot longer than she’d realized—but also all along the side of her body that had bounced off that stone wall. She had a fine set of bruises, but her arm was the only thing that had been broken. Or ruptured. Organs could do that, and hers hadn’t. That probably meant she’d been lucky. She probably ought to be grateful.
Hell with that, too. Slowly, moving like she was an old, old woman, Cynna left her cell.
A scattering of mage lights bobbed along the ceiling. The guard who’d summoned her joined three more in standing around, looking stuffed and official. They couldn’t sit at the big table like they usually did because Alice Báitóu was sitting there. So was a woman Cynna hadn’t seen before. The new woman had the kind of round, chubby face that doesn’t wrinkle much with age, but her skin had that tired look skin gets after a few decades if its wearer hasn’t invested in some dermatologist’s retirement plan. Her black hair was streaked with gray.
“Join us,” Alice said, nodding at a stool across from her and the new woman.
Cynna lowered herself carefully to the stool and sighed for her aches. “Hello again.”