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Eighteen

CIANA

“ C iana,” a gentle voice called softly. “Wake up.”

I tried. I willed my eyes to open, but it didn’t happen. Awareness of my surroundings was slow to filter into my mind, and my body refused to obey. I hardly even felt my limbs. For a moment or two, I felt weightless—incorporeal—which made me wonder if I was already dead.

Maybe I no longer had a body at all?

“Try to drink some water,” the voice coaxed.

A few drops of lukewarm liquid dropped on my lips, causing a sting of pain. At least now I knew I had lips. And they must be cracked for them to sting from contact with water.

I couldn’t be dead then, could I?

Parting my chapped lips, I allowed the kind person to drop more water into my mouth.

“That’s good,” the woman praised my feeble efforts. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re alive.”

I wasn’t sure if I shared her sentiment. My muscles hurt. A massive headache pounded inside my skull. And my stomach was in so much pain, it felt like a knife was cutting through it.

“You must be hungry, but I have no idea when they’ll feed us next,” the woman said. “I saved some soup for you from our last dinner, since you couldn’t eat it then.”

Who was she?

How did she know my name?

And where the heck was I?

The rim of a cup or a bowl pressed to my lips, then a warm, fragrant liquid poured into my mouth.

I drank it as fast as I could swallow. My stomach had long forgotten what having food felt like, making me acutely aware of every drop of the warm liquid landing in it now.

Thankfully, the fuller I got, the less it hurt.

I drank so fast that I ran out of breath and gasped, jerking away from the bowl. Then I was finally able to open my eyes.

“How are you feeling?” A young woman crouched next to me, holding a clay soup bowl in one hand and supporting my head with the other.

I flinched, pushing myself into a sitting position.

“Like I’ve been buried alive in hot sand,” I croaked.

“Which likely isn’t far from the truth, judging by the condition they brought you in last night.

” The young woman sighed, placing the soup bowl onto my lap.

“There are still some pieces of…um, something left in here. Meat and a root vegetable, I think? You should eat them, too, to help you regain your strength.”

I peered at the gray sludge left on the bottom of the bowl and a few pale pieces in it.

“It doesn’t look like much,” the woman admitted. “But it doesn’t taste too bad, aside from the lack of any salt or spices of course. Oh, and they don’t have any spoons or forks. From what I’ve seen, they only eat solid food. They cut it with a knife or a sword, then eat it by using their hands.”

Who were “they?” I had no idea. But the pieces on the bottom of the bowl smelled appetizing, despite their slimy appearance. I fished them out with my fingers and ate them all.

The meager amount of food didn’t satisfy me at all. It actually made me only more aware of how ravenously hungry I was. Kurai’s magic used to make the hunger much more manageable while we were connected…

The memory of him slammed into me, and the harrowing sensation of loss gutted me. I climbed to my knees, bending over, ready to retch.

“Ciana? What’s going on? Are you sick?” The kind woman caught my braids, holding them back, and gazed in my face with concern.

I swallowed, managing to keep the contents of my stomach in.

“Where am I?” I kept still, folded into myself and afraid to move.

“I…I’m not sure what exactly this place is,” the woman replied. “We’re in the desert somewhere. They keep bringing people in, then taking them elsewhere. They’ve given us food and water. I haven’t seen them hurting anyone, but they don’t let anyone out of the cages unsupervised.”

The cages?

I looked up. From my bent-over position, I saw the thick wooden sticks that served as the bars of the cage we were in.

There was barely enough space for the other woman and me to sit or possibly to lay down on our sides with our legs bent, but not enough to stand up or stretch out.

A sheet of metal served as the floor of the cage, with an old blanket tossed over it.

There were more cages around us. Some had people in them.

Others seemed empty. Boards, rags, and sheets of metal had been thrown over the cages, creating some sort of a shelter with all of us inside.

Outside of the shelter, a storm raged. Wind howled between the boards, tossing sand against the metal with a scraping sound.

“Gosh, I did not expect to see you here,” the woman gushed. “Though we figured out eventually that the shadows took you, just like they did us. You’re Ciana, aren’t you? Dawn’s cousin?”

“Do I know you?” I snapped my attention to her.

She seemed to be about my age, with round cheeks, wide gray eyes, and dark wavy hair pulled into a messy ponytail.

She worried about my state, but she didn’t look much better herself.

Her face was sunburned and smeared with dirt.

Her lips were cracked too. And every time she pulled her gray fuzzy cardigan tighter around her shoulders, small clouds of dust emerged from it with sand raining down onto the blanket that covered the floor of our cage.

I wondered if we met me in the sarai in Kalmena. Though, I certainly didn’t remember her.

“Oh…” She awkwardly slid a finger up the bridge of her nose as if fixing the glasses that she wasn’t wearing.

“I’m Elaine, Dawn’s friend. Of course you wouldn’t recognize me.

It’s been years since I saw you last. I was still a kid when you were taken.

I hardly recognized you too. I’ve lost my glasses and can’t see people’s faces clearly without them.

But your hair…” She smiled. “When they brought you in, I figured it’d be too much of a coincidence to have another human woman in this world with the exact hairdo you had back when…

you know, when you were taken from our world. ”

I tried to keep up with what she was saying.

But a lot of it didn’t make any sense. How did she know what hairstyle I had when I was taken from my aunt’s house if she’d just admitted not having seen me for years?

It’d been barely a couple of months since I arrived to Alveari.

But she said she was just a kid when it happened.

And Dawn? My little cousin Dawn? How did this woman know her? I didn’t even remember if Dawn had any friends who weren’t her age.

Or was she talking about someone else? She must’ve confused me with another person.

“I’m sorry…I’m afraid I don’t understand. I?—”

“Oh, of course. Things have been rather crazy, haven’t they? You’ve only ever seen me as a twelve-year-old. But it doesn’t really matter. My point is that Dawn was looking for you. She thought you were…dead. We all thought so.”

“Dawn is looking for me? Here?” My insides chilled, despite the hot stuffy air under the makeshift shelter over the cages .

Did my baby cousin end up in this place too? But how?

Voices came from outside. Someone was coming to the cages.

“She was looking for you,” Elaine spoke in a hurried half-whisper. “But I’m not sure if she’s still here, in Alveari Kingdom. We were trying to get back to our world through the portal when these guys took me?—”

A fae flung the cover off from our cages, and Elaine stiffened. Some humans whimpered. Others crawled deeper into their cages.

“Ah, this one is awake now,” the shadow fae said, pulling his scarf down from his face to uncover his thin lips and sharp fangs.

He yanked the top layer of his tattered garment down from his head, revealing his pointy ears and his long, black hair tied back into a ponytail that had a few more ties along its length.

Instead of chest armor worn by the shadow fae of the royal court, this one wore a few mismatched belts wrapped across his chest. A cluster of withered yellow flowers was trapped between them.

“She looks good, doesn’t she?” he asked the several other fae, who came with him and were dressed in equally mismatched and weathered outfits.

A fae woman on his right spat through her teeth, giving me a long, assessing stare. “I wouldn’t say good, Watrat. She looks like she digs in the sand for worms for a living, all covered in soot and probably with a bunch of wool fleas in that hair of hers.”

My head itched at her words. Fleas or not, I sure had collected enough sand in my hair to build a sandcastle by now. The liquid smoke from Kurai’s severed tendrils left my arms smeared with black.

My heart ached at the thought of him. I wished I’d asked Elaine if she’d heard anything about him. But I didn’t dare ask the fae. If they’d forgotten about him, there was no need to refresh their memories and possibly put his life in danger. I prayed that he still had a life at all.

Watrat smirked. “No one will care about her fleas, Piara. She’s a Joy Vessel. That’s all that matters. Where is that tea?” He turned to the rest of his entourage .

“Here, boss,” another man held up a metal tea kettle with a wooden handle. “Sweetened with the hyacinth syrup brewed by the mage’s recipe.”

“May his murderous spirit rejoice in the afterlife ,” Piara muttered under her breath. “Do you want this one to drink it first, Watrat?” She pointed at me.

Watrat focused on me for a moment, and it felt like the longest moment of my life. I shrank into myself, pressing my back to the bars of the cage and drawing my knees up to my chest.

“She doesn’t look so good,” he concluded. “I don’t want her passing out again. If she dies, we’ll lose a lot of money.”

Elaine exchanged a look with me. Hers was relieved, mine was probably mostly confused as I tried to figure out what exactly was going on.

“This one.” Watrat pointed at the human man in the cage next to ours. “He seems strong enough to take it. Give him some of that tea, Tazm.”

Stepping closer, Tazm shoved the tea kettle’s spout through the bars of the man’s cage.

“Drink.”