Chapter 075: Prison

"Out of sight, out of mind,

Leave it out, leave it behind,

Out of reach of all family,

All friends..."

A Way Out - Peter Hammill

    Through dreams of bright suns on glittering pools I drifted, aunt Flora surfacing, glistening wet, telling me I can have it anyway I want, but there's still a price, always a price to pay, then Miss Fabre, Janice in her skin-tight cat burglar outfit, asking me why I won't stay a bit longer, it needn't be all business now, it's only a small price, and I don't know why, perhaps I should have stayed with her or with one of the others, one of the many others, but I had to know, and I'll pay for all my sins, my errors, my mistakes, my trust...

    It was dark when I awoke, and cold, and a bit damp. There was also a foul smell that I couldn't quite place. I felt slightly groggy and there was a nasty bump where my head must have hit the ground, but apart from that I seemed to be okay. I had no reason to feel glad about this, though, for when I fumbled around to find where I was I discovered the nasty surprise that had been waiting for me. The cell was about two by two metres with rough stone walls and a cold tile floor. In one corner there was a hole, the purpose of which wasn't too hard to guess, and off to the other side there lay something that was supposed to pass for a mattress, which was filled with straw. There was a door, thick and wooden and unbudgeable, with a slot at the bottom, presumably for the distribution of food and drink, and a tiny barred window, through which I, stretched on tiptoes, could barely make out a dim light a long way further down the corridor, possibly a solitary torch. Images of uncle Corwin's by now legendary imprisonment flashed through my mind. Well, came my first thought, at least she hasn't seen fit to burn out my eyes like they did to him. Or simply kill me. Perhaps she should have.

    I sat down on the mat and commenced the long wait. I was still wearing the remains of my Quendorian suit, but of course I had been searched and had been disposed of my Trump deck. Very carefully I cleared my mind and tried my only other obvious route of escape, dreading the worst. My fears quickly came true: instead of the familiar feel of the Pattern there was a large hole in my mind, a gap that couldn't help me in any way. Vaguely I sensed something else there, but there was no way I could catch hold of it, for it kept on drawing back well beyond my mental reach. I had to take a deep breath and steady myself against the sudden rush of despair. I had no idea where I was, how long Flora was planning on keeping me here, or what she had done to me to bar me from using the Pattern. No idea, save from an overactive imagination that was quite capable of conjuring up some very frightening scenarios. Hugging myself for comfort, I really felt very close to crying, but at that instant I managed to hold it back.

    Suddenly I realised the absence of something else and this time I cursed aloud. My voice boomed harshly through the oppressive silence, but I was too angry with myself to care. Stupid fool that I was! All this time I had been carrying my half of Brand's notes around with me in a convenient little pocket Shadow, but now it was gone. Whatever Flora had done to block my Pattern must have also shorted out the pocket's energy flows, delivering the papers right into her hands. It had only been one half, of course, but now through my own carelessness it was irretrievably lost. As I calmed down, however, I chillingly realised that this might well be among the least of my problems.

    I was so much caught up in my misery that I didn't notice the soft footfalls drawing nearer along the corridor until they stopped right in front of the door to my cell. With a creak something was shoved through the slot in the bottom and the footsteps moved on. It turned out to be two bowls, one filled with water and the other containing some kind of bean stew. This would be my diet for my entire imprisonment, supplied regularly - I'd estimated something like twice a day - and bland but nourishing. At least it was better than stale bread, the traditional prison fare. As for the guards delivering my meals, after a day or two I managed to catch a glimpse of them, standing near the bars just as they passed. They were a cold and menacing looking bunch, all dressed in some kind of tight black combat outfits, and the only reaction my calls got from them were tersely barked orders to shut up. Their appearance did give me one little bit of information, though, for I had seen them, or rather others like them, before. They looked exactly the same as the assassins we had faced at the fairground in Quendor, the ones that Melusine's mother had sent after her. Well, this at least confirmed certain suspicions I had had concerning Filigree's true identity, yet I couldn't help feeling that I should have gone to less trouble to seek this confirmation. There seemed little point in finding out the truth while being in no position to act upon it.

    Time passed, more slowly than ever. There was nothing much for me to do but sleep, eat twice a day, and do a lot of thinking. I didn't take me very long to start feeling really lonely. Never before in my life had I been so alone; even during my foray into Taureth's Trump prison Fiona had been with me, in spirit at least. I thought about Taureth and his siblings, about Ornach and the aeons he had spent chained to his rock, about uncle Corwin and his four years of blindness. As far as I knew he had never really told anyone how he had managed to escape, and experiencing imprisonment first hand made it seem all the more a miracle. Considering my situation I guessed I was lucky, since I was still in one piece and I did have some hope of rescue, even though I would have to depend on Murlas for this. It was hard to feel lucky, though, alone in the darkness. I wondered about the time my mother had spent in other Realities after her fall into the Abyss; I had never really asked her about it, sensing that it might be a bit too traumatic to talk about. Now I wished I had taken the time to talk about this and about so many other things. Or that I had spent more time with the children. Or with Diana. There had always seemed to be so much time for that later on and so much more urgent things to take care of first, but from where I was sitting now so much time had been wasted on lesser, inconsequential things. If only I could speak to all of them now.

    I had been in my cell for a day or five, when I finally discovered that I was not the only prisoner in this part of the dungeon, wherever it was located anyway. I made this discovery during one of my attempts to get something more out of the guard who brought me my dinner (or breakfast, as the case may be). Blinking my eyes against the sharp brightness of his torch, I made out a second pair of bowls with stew and water on his tray. Listening carefully to his footsteps, I heard him stop a little bit further down the corridor, and the by now familiar creak told me all I needed to know. Immediately I started calling out to this other prisoner, desparate for some kind of human contact. There was no reaction, however, save for another shouted warning from the guard to be silent. The look I caught from him was totally devoid of any kind of mercy, and I found myself shutting up despite my needs.

    A few minutes after the guard had left, however, my hopes lifted as I heard an inquiring whisper echoing down the corridor. I hurried back to the door and called: "Yes! Hello!"

    "Shh," came the whispered reply. "Softly." It was a male voice, sounding fairly youngish to my ears.

    "Okay," I said, lowering my own voice. "Who are you?"

    "Fabian, of House Twilldain. And you?"

    "Dorian. Of Amber." I added the last bit cause I recognized neither his first name nor the name of his House, so I was fairly certain that we had not met before. My answer came as quite a surprise to him, though.

    "That's from all the way on the other side," he exclaimed, his voice a bit louder than before.

    "The other side of what?" I asked.

    "Of the universe, of course. You do know where Chaos and Amber are, don't you?" So his was a Chaos House. Must be one of the Minor ones.

    "How did you end up here?" I asked, glad to be talking to someone again.

    "I don't really understand it," Fabian confessed. "I was ambushed by some people, but I don't know why. I thought it must have had some political reason, but you're not from the Courts and you're a prisoner here as well. What year is it?" Already feeling some trepidation, I still gave him the correct date, and sure enough he was truly horrified. "That can't be!" he sobbed. "It can't be that many years! I must have gone round the bend. It can't be true! It simply can't!"

    "When were you captured?" I asked soothingly. I didn't know whether I really wanted to hear this, but it was the only way I could think of to calm him down.

    "According to the Amber calendar? Wel, I'm not an expert, but..." The date he mentioned was well over twenty five years ago, even before the Patternfall War. I had been very young at that time, and of course my heritage had not been officially announced, so it was no wonder that Fabian didn't recognize my name either. It could be that his House had all but perished during the War, with him the sole survivor. Why would Flora have imprisoned him, though?

    "I reckoned I had been in here a few years," he said, "but it can't have been that long, can it?"

    "I'm afraid to say that it is possible." If this dungeon was in a relative slow time Shadow. It was not something I liked to think about. "Was your House very important in the Courts?" I asked, trying to find a reason why he was here in the first place.

    "No, not at all. I'm not important in any way. What do they want from me? They didn't even talk to me, they didn't even ask me anything. Why have they not simply killed me? Why am I here?" I heard him sigh. There was nothing I could offer him by way of an explanation. "Why are you here?" he suddenly asked me. I hesitated but a fraction of a moment.

    "I have no idea," I said, hating myself for the way I let my paranoia dictate my response. The setup was just too convenient, though: a pitiful fellow prisoner, a friendly voice to break the cold loneliness, an easy way to learn all of my secrets. Bad as I felt about my glib reply, my latest brush with betrayal was far too recent and had cut far too deep for me to trust any stranger that easily. Fabian swallowed my lie gladly, though.

    "I haven't talked to anyone for so long," he sighed. Then he suddeny thought of something. "Did you have dreams too?" he asked. "Could that be it? Maybe they want to keep me from warning them."

    "Dreams? What kind of dreams?"

    "Everything will go entirely wrong," was his cryptic answer. "It will all end tragically. In my dreams I see a battlefield..."

    "Do you know where it is?" I couldn't help but be intrigued.

    "In Chaos. All the Houses are there. Two armies face one another: Chaos and Amber. I tried to tell them that they were coming, I tried to warn them, but they just wouldn't listen. They said they were going to destroy Amber, but I don't think they will be successful."

    "No, they weren't," I said quietly.

    "You mean it already came true? It all seems so long ago. Can you tell me what happened?" I just gave him the general facts about the Great War, leaving out all the internal plotting and scheming that had taken place in Amber back then. Sigh. Random had wished to put an end to that kind of infighting, I knew, and it was sad to think that nothing had really changed since then. My tale also upset Fabian again, for it reminded him of the staggering amount of time that had passed outside.

    "It can't be!" he exclaimed. "How could it be possible? I tried to keep track, I kept count of the number of times they brought me my meals. I'm certain it was six hundred and forty five times and not one more, really I am." Which would amount to less than one year. I sighed.

    "Unfortunately, time is quite variable in Shadow." There were some further mutterings of disbelief before he fell silent. I felt for the guy, if his story were really true that is. If not, he was a pretty good actor, but he wouldn't get anything out of me. Oh, I would continue to talk to him; it was either that or start talking to myself, and I wasn't that far round the bend yet. However, I would keep my conversations well away from any information that I figured was classsified, and I certainly wouldn't let on that I was aware of our jailor's identity, for that would stir up too many awkward questions.

    I reflected that if Fabian's story was true, I might not have to wait too long before people came looking for me. Murlas knew that I had gone to see Flora, as did Miss Fabre, and given enough time they would certainly alert some others. With such a large time differential, it might only be a matter of days till my release. It was a hopeful thought, and far too good to be true as I was soon to find out.

    Some more days passed, and Fabian and I got into the habit of regularly exchanging a few words, mostly when the guard had just been round with our meals. For the first few times our conversations generally turned to the War and the things that had occurred afterwards. Slowly, Fabian came to accept that what I was telling him had really happened, but he couldn't help but wonder how his dreams had all come true. It was indeed very strange, so I asked him whether he had ever had any other precognitive dreams or visions.

    "I really don't know," he said. "I once had an accident while pit diving, and since then I've never felt the same, as if my mind was a bit out of focus. Sometimes I see bits and pieces, short fragments, but I'm never sure what they mean, or whether I'm seeing past, present, or future."

    "Are there any specific things that you can remember?" He remained silent for a while, before he started again, his tone a bit more distant.

    "There is a woman with a child," he said. "I've never seen either of them before. She is quite beautiful, her hair is long and red. I believe the child is her son... Sometimes I see fighting, battles..." He sighed. "But no one ever believes me."

    "I'm afraid that there is at least one person who did believe you," I said.

    "You think that might be the reason why I'm in here?"

    "Maybe." It stood to reason, but why keep him in here after all this time? Had Flora simply forgotten about him, or were there still some things he might dream that she didn't want anyone else to know? Questions, questions, and no answers, as usual. It might become my fate too, I realised, rotting away in this cell for all of eternity, while everyone else was running around too busy to wonder at my absence. From high to low, from hope to despair to self-pity, the path was all too easy. I shouldn't give up, I knew, but it was hard, it was so very hard. I had survived my confrontation with my own inner demons when I had put an end to the Shadow storm in Svarta, but that had been... different. More direct. More intense. One single moment of do or die. This prison cell was torture of an entirely different variety: the slow waiting, the sheer boredom, the loneliness, and above all, the terrible uncertainty. It was hell, and sometimes I found myself really wishing that Flora would have just done away with me when she had had the chance.

   There was one thing that initially I had rather worried about, but which turned out to be not nearly as bad as I had dreaded. I am of course referring to the Curse. This should have been a worst case scenario, even for one such as me whom It didn't mark as strongly as It marked others. Alone in a cell like this, with no one to help me release the pressures inside, I should by all rights have been going stark raving mad in only a week's time, and in my darkest periods during those first few days I frantically checked myself for any signs of having crossed the line. Yet, curiously enough the Curse stayed dormant. Not that I didn't feel any longings or didn't have any sexual fantasies that came creeping up on me, but these longings weren't nearly as strong as they should have been, and I found that I was able to overcome them far more easily than I had imagined. A bit of `self-help' now and then seemed to suffice at first, and after a while I even stopped bothering with that, since the satisfaction derived from the act was too little compared to the frustration an hour or so afterwards. The only explanation why the Curse wasn't affecting me in Its usual way that I could think of was that whatever Flora had done to sever my link with the Pattern had also shorted out the Curse's vital link to the Logrus. Perhaps she had heard some rumours of my involvement in the repair of the Logrus and had figured that I might be able to use Its powers besides my usual array of tricks. If it was true, her thoroughness had actually helped me in this regard. Still, the problem would never have arisen if she had not locked me up like this in the first place. By the way, that strange feeling I had had ever since my business in Svarta had been with me when I first awoke in my cell, but after a while it seemed to subside. I still didn't know what it was or even what caused it, but it somehow seemed that the cell effectively shielded me from all possible outside influences, good or bad. It was as if I had been completely cut off from te rest of the universe, and at that point I had no idea how true this thought actually was.

    Sounds travelled far in this quiet, absolute darkness, and it didn't take long to get used to the regularly recurring patterns of the guards' rounds along the corridors and Fabian's softly whispered conversations. Any sound that didn't fit in the immediate routine would be cause for attention. Was it a sign of someone coming to release me? Or would it be aunt Flora finally stopping by to see how I was doing and perhaps to explain herself? Yet, most times it simply wasn't anything at all, just some random echo from somewhere else in the building (castle? I didn't even know what this place was, let alone where). Or, worse, it had just been another figment of my imagination. Scared as I was of really going crazy, I soon became slower and slower in my reactions to these anomalous noises, so by the time the sound of footsteps did persist and gradually seemed to draw nearer I didn't even hurry to the door anymore but cast an anxious eye towards the bars, fearing that once again something would fail to materialize. However, the sound did not go away, and it soon became clear to me that someone was slowly moving in the direction of my cell, stopping now and then as if to check something along the way. Was it my imagination, or was there really some light there too? Suddenly a torch flared before the grate, temporarily blinding me. I blinked and half turned away, but I still tried to make out who my surprise visitor was. A familiar voice softly called my name. Surprised, I got up and moved to the door to face her.

    "Melusine?" I asked.

    "I'm sorry," she said, holding the torch a bit further away from the door. In the shimmering twilight that followed I could just make out her face. She looked different than before, although it took me a while to figure out what it was. A bit sad and weary, it seemed, and less determined than I'd ever seen her, even when we had saved her from her mother's assassins. "How are you?" she asked, and her tone was oddly timid.

    "Well, what do you think," I sneered, perhaps a bit more savagely than I'd intended. "I'm having the time of my life: partying every night, exquisite food, excellent wines, dancing girls, the works." She sighed.

    "Look, I'm sorry..." She made it sound as if I was being unfair in blaming her, and perhaps I was.

    "Forget it," I muttered.

    "Listen, there isn't anything bad going to happen to you, you'll just have to stay in here a while."

    "A while? Until the whole thing is well and truly on its way to hell?"

    "It's not like that," she retorted, but she sounded miserable rather than angry. She looked away. "I don't want my mother to die..." An uncomfortable silence ensued. What could I say? I realised that I didn't want to see Flora dead either, despite what she had done to me, but Melusine apparently felt there was a serious threat somewhere. Flora had to have known what she had been getting herself into, however.

    "I don't exactly know the what, or how, or why and wherefore, or the role your mother is playing in all of this, or how she got caught up in it in the first place," I blurted, "but I do know that she's made her own choices and that she'll have to face the consequences by herself."

    "I know. I think she'll let you go when her choices have all become public knowledge. You'll just have to wait until then."

    "She'd better not wait too long," I replied hotly. I might be enclined to forgiveness at this point, but the longer I had to stay in this cell, the likelier my feelings were to change.

    "I'm sorry," she sighed once again. She was apologizing so much that I'd almost start feeling sorry for her. "It isn't anything personal. And I do think she could have locked you up in more comfortable surroundings, but she's probably very anxious about you escaping or something." I didn't know what kind of hold Flora had over her, but it was clear that Melusine wasn't going to go against her mother's wishes. She was a far cry from the rebellious spirit I'd witnessed on the Overshadow.

    "Did you come here for any specific reason," I said sharply, "or just to say you're sorry?"

    "Maybe just that," she replied lamely. "Look, this wasn't my idea!"

    "But you go along with it all the same!"

    "What else can I do? She's my mother! I must support my mother. Don't you understand? I tried to oppose her, but that was wrong. It was wrong... It's no use. She's all I have."

    "What about Martin...?" I asked softly. Very quietly she started to cry.

    "He shouldn't have forced me... He shouldn't have forced me...," she sobbed.

    "What? To make a choice?"

    "Yes..."

    "So you made your choice." My tone was level, but I did pity her now. In the end she hadn't been able to break away from her mother completely, and it had cost her. It had been clear that she and Martin had been more than just friends. Breaking up with him must have been the hardest thing she'd ever had to do.

    "It doesn't matter anymore anyway," she said. "And all because of that damned fool!"

    "Who?"

    "Algo, of course! He was the one, he should have been... He was always her number one."

    "What should he have become?"

    "King!" I laughed in disbelief. Algo? King? She had to be kidding. No one seemed to be less suited for the job than he was. Melusine was not amused, though. "It was her grand project," she said. "Algo is Eric's son." Oh. That explained it a bit.

    "So, I take it he's not your brother, or...?" I ventured, not daring to voice the posibility. After all, I had two Amberites for parents myself, or may have, since I had still not put the question to Deirdre directly.

    "No, I'm only Flora's daughter," Melusine spat in disgust, dispelling my unvoiced notion. "I was just supposed to help with everything while King Algo would rule in Amber. Oh, it all started out pretty well. He grew up under her care, she taught him all kinds of things, and she really thought she had everything under control. And then Random turned up.

    "She truly hates Random, do you know that? She hates him! She claims it's all his fault, that he ruined Algo for her, that he turned him into what he is today. Well, you know Algo. There wasn't anything she could do about it. He'll never be King in Amber. Serves him right, too." Hmm, I didn't think Algo would be very bothered about it, though. Apart from not seeming very fit to rule, I'd also tag him as one of the least likely even to set his sights on the throne. Of course, I hadn't seen the younger version of Algo, before he had met Random, but I'd say that he had never been very good king material to begin with.

    "But if her grand project as you called it failed, then what is she still up to now?"

    "She simply couldn't accept Random as King of Amber," Melusine sighed. "She spent years and years building up a power base, looking into all kinds of things to find something, anything... She had me, of course. I was to be her secret weapon, her unknown ally. She got into contact with people like Galoran, Dalt even, with all kinds of people." She swallowed and hesitated.

    "She poisoned Vialle. Not enough to kill her, but enough to cause a miscarriage." My blood went cold. So this was what Random had been referring to when he had announced that his children wouldn't automatically inherit the throne. To sink as low as that, to kill off an unborn child... I just couldn't comprehend it. Her hate for Random must be a terrible, terrible thing. I could now also understand why Melusine feared for her mother's life: if word of this got out, some if not most of my relatives would be far from forgiving.

    "At a certain point she simply began to lose it," Melusine continued. "Random had been on the Throne for far too long, and his grip on matters was getting too strong for her. I don't know how she got into contact with them. I think through the Nexus, so perhaps Galoran arranged it for her. I don't know. She is afraid you might have talked to someone else and told them about her, so she's trying to cross over to the other side." She gave me a sad and pleading look. "I can't say that I agree ith her, Dorian, but she's my mother. She is all that I have." I held her gaze for a long time. Poor girl. Part of me wanted to reach out through the bars and comfort her, but I knew I couldn't do that. I had to harden my heart, to let her know that she was wrong, that all of this was wrong.

    "No," I said, at long last. "She is all that you've chosen." It was hard, keeping my expression neutral in the face of her deep and apparent misery.

    "I couldn't betray her," she simpered, "not even when she... I'm really very sorry... Is there anything I can bring you? Perhaps something to make you a bit more comfortable?" I turned away, dejectedly. As bad as Melusine felt about her current position, she still clung to her mother with the desperate strength of a drowning girl. I had hoped to persuade her to help me escape, but if Martin had not been able to change her mind, what chance did I have?

    "No...," I muttered. For the moment it seemed as if nothing would be able to lighten my spirit. "Maybe you could look in on that poor fellow in the next cell," I suggested, shifting the subject away from my problems.

    "I don't know who he is, or why he's in here," she said.

    "From what he told me, he's already been here since before Patternfall."

    "That's not that unlikely. It is before Patternfall here." The shock made me jerk around and face her again. "You're in an alternative Reality," she explained. "I think Mother brought you here because she was afraid you'd otherwise be able to use the Pattern. She didn't know any other way to shield you from It. This Reality is very similar to ours, you just cannot use its version of the Pattern. It won't hurt you either, though. As for the War, it hasn't happened yet over here. And like I told you, I don't know why this other guy is in here." Well, now I did. If the War was still to happen like it had in our Reality, I could understand people not wanting Fabian to spout his precognitive dreams around the Courts. Poor guy. And here I had been telling him he had been in jail for well over twenty five years.

    "Well, I guess he hasn't been in prison as long as I thought," I said. "Perhaps you could reassure him for me." She shrugged and moved away. I heard her walk to where Fabian's cell door had to be. For a moment there was silence, then I caught a barely suppressed gasp of surprise.

    "What is it?" I called.

    "I... I don't think I can tell you."

    "Melusine," I said sternly. If there was anything odd about Fabian, I had to know about it.

    "No... I don't know why, Dorian. This is her affair." I thought a while in silence, but ultimately there wasn't much I could do. Putting Melusine under even more pressure than she already was wouldn't solve anything. I shrugged dejectedly and plunked down on the mattress again. I didn't even look up when she reappeared at the grate.

    "Are you sure there isn't anything you want? Perhaps I could bring you some light and a few books to read?" I just shook my head. "Well, bye then..." She hesitated a moment, waiting for me to say something, anything, but when I didn't she moved away, in a not much better state than she had been in when she first arrived.

    The things Melusine had told me explained a lot, and I guess I should be grateful for her taking the trouble to come and talk to me down here in the dungeons. After all, she could easily have ignored me. Yet her visit had also been for her own benefit; she needed a patient ear to listen to her problems and I was a convenient audience. I still felt for her, yes, but if she wasn't able to make the right choices by herself, there wasn't anything I could do to help.

    Flora... How could she have become so obsessed? Why had she kept her hate inside all this time, where it could fester and grow? And how she had fooled us all! That was the really hard part to swallow: I simply couldn't believe that the Flora we'd seen all these years had been nothing but a sham, a fake hiding her true intentions. I found some comfort in the fact that she had not killed me after all, for it indicated that she at least cared a little. Whatever it was that she was planning to do now, I couldn't see her original plans for Algo coming to fruition anymore. Would she still go for the throne, this time for herself perhaps? Suddenly I recalled that Algo wasn't Eric's only child. And Rhiane had been missing from Amber for quite a while now.

    I would have liked Melusine to tell me more about her mother's allies, but I had not wanted to push her too much. Besides, she had seemed to know little about them. Somehow I didn't think that their goals were the same as Flora's, though. What was it they stood to gain by helping her? What was it they were really after? Too many questions, still, and never enough answers.

    Contemplating Vialle's miscarriage was rather painful, but my thoughts kept returning to it like prying fingers to a scab over a wound. It made me fear for my own children, and once again it drove the point of my helplessness home to me. If Flora had been responsible for the death of Vialle's first baby, though, was she also the one behind Llewella's strange attempt on little Ruby's life? Could be. Thinking back to another near-murder, I settled on a different likely suspect: yes, Melusine seemed to hate Algo in sufficient amounts for her to have tried to poison him. And so hate begets hate, until we're all at one another's throats.

    Flora must really have been livid over Melusine's relation with Martin, I reckoned. And how pleased she must have been when her daughter came back to her of her own free will. Poor Melusine. I hoped she would return, but perhaps that was too much to hope for. If only I could make her see reason, make her see that Flora's course was headed for disaster. And no, I still didn't want to see her mother die either, no matter what anyone else might think. I just couldn't imagine an Amber without Flora. Maybe if I could try to convince Melusine of this, then maybe she would let me out of this cell and together we could try and find a way to save Flora from herself. Maybe...

    Ah, who was I kidding? I would only get out of here when Flora decided it was safe to let me go. If. No matter that Murlas or Miss Fabre knew about our confrontation, no matter that they would come looking for me, for how would they ever be able to find me here in an entirely different Reality? That had been a master stroke. And despite Melusine's reassurances, I couldn't help but dread the possibility that Flora had no intention of letting me go at all. And then no one would ever find me...

    How different things might have been if I'd paid a bit more attention that first time she hadn't been truthful with me. Her mask had shown that time, but for the sake of our mutual good relations I had acquiesced and had ignored my suspicions. Now, with nothing much to do but ponder, my mind again carefully approached the matter I had neglected for so long, and almost immediately I came to regret it. Of course, Flora must have known that Elayne was being held captive in her old villa, why else send me on that errand in the first place? But she hadn't been the one that had put Elayne there, at least not according to the story Charles had told me. That had been Caine... Had he and Flora been in league at that time? And were they still? Caine had been one of Eric's main supporters during the War, so it wasn't at all impossible. But did this mean that her allies were his too? I could only hope otherwise, but hoping I did, desperately. After all the trouble we had been through to get a deeper understanding of one another, I didn't want to find myself at cross purposes with him ever again. If I would, the subsequent rift could very well be far more permanent.

Previous Chapter

Next Chapter

Back to the index