Hands of Fire: Interlude
She thinks it’s been two days since the Laughing Woman visited her. Two times the light made its slow journey across the stone floor, but neither she nor her shadows know how long she slept off the poison. She just knows her hunger is an angry, yowling thing in her stomach, and her head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton. The stone is cool beneath her cheek, her shadows a shield from the rats who share her chamber. And she sleeps, and she dreams, and snatches of a lullaby haunt her waking thoughts as she begs the winds to tell her her name.
It would be easy to give up now, she thinks. Easy to lie here and never move again. Easy to refuse what little food comes, to stop drinking the stagnant water, to let her shadows smother her until her bones sink into the floor.
But she doesn’t.
And when her shadows hiss that the tower door is opening, she pushes herself up on arms thin as willow reeds and leans her head back against the wall, eyes fixed on the spot in the darkness where she knows the door stands.
One, two, three, four . . . She counts each lumbering step as the Laughing Woman ascends the thirty-seven stairs to her chamber.
Not alone Mother not alone the Woman comes Mother she comes. The girl’s index finger twitches, muzzling her shadows, wrestling the leash over their heads until they submit.
Not yet, she thinks.
Her door groans open on rusted hinges. The Laughing Woman stands in the opening, silhouetted by the light. The girl can smell the food in her hands even from across the room.
“Are you hungry, Umbra?”
She keeps her body very still, her breathing even. The shadows pull and fight against her hold like a pack of dogs, but the Laughing Woman can’t see them, can’t feel their wrath, can’t hear their snarls as she steps closer.
Not. Yet.
Those gnarled hands lift her chains, dragging her into the light. Her skin scrapes across the rough stone, the sharp sting piercing through the haze in her mind for one lucid flash. And just when she’s close enough for the Woman to touch her, to croon a name that isn’t hers in her ear, she lets go of the leash.
The shadows spring, cresting over the Laughing Woman’s head in a wave. The girl closes her eyes, opens her mind, and she feels each tendril as if they are parts of her. She feels them rush over the Woman’s body, poking into the folds of her clothes, under her arms, in her mouth, searching searching searching where is it—
There. Something dull and curved and metal with jagged teeth on one end. Something that is not flesh or hair or cloth or shadow. Something hidden away in a small leather pouch at the Woman’s hip, a pouch oozing with magic that makes her shadows hiss and recoil.
The key to her chains.
This time when the Laughing Woman pours that bitter potion into her mouth, the girl doesn’t fight back. She looks up into those watery eyes and she swallows and she smiles.
Because this will be the last time the Laughing Woman touches her. This will be the last time she poisons her with mage bane. This will be the last time she tries to brand the name Umbra into her soul.
When the Laughing Woman returns, the girl will escape.
And she will find her name beyond these walls.