waited till the last possible second, then flung them at Melisande’s face and dashed for the entrance.
I must have gotten her right in the eyes, because it took her some moments to come after me. By then, I was shooting straight back down the tunnel again.
I took the other turn at the fork. This time, thankfully, there was no dead end, but soon the path curved, and the light dimmed. Another bend, and the light disappeared entirely. I faltered. I couldn’t run full tilt into oblivion. And yet the footsteps were coming closer.
“Over here,” a voice hummed on my left.
I froze. Was that Pressina?
“Over here,” it insisted. “Come, or she’ll get you.”
Behind me I heard a shout: “I’ve trapped her in here!”
It was Melisande, calling out to an ally. My heart pounded.
“You must come now,” the voice breathed.
I followed it, touching my hand to the rock wall for guidance. There was a gap there.
“Yesssss,” said the voice.
I pressed myself into the gap—and a tentacle wrapped around my wrist.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
RESISTANCE
As I opened my lips to scream, another tentacle closed over my mouth—a slippery, sticky gag pressing against my lips.
Pressina.
I thrashed as wildly as a fish caught in a net. Panic drove every rational thought from my brain.
“Be still,” the voice hummed. “We will not hurt you. But you must not scream, or they will find us.”
There was something deeply reassuring about that hum. I stopped thrashing. Whoever this was, it wasn’t Pressina.
The tentacles tugged at me, pulling me deeper into the gap. But now that my mind was calmer, I noticed that in addition to being sticky, the tentacles were velvet-soft, and their hold on me was a gentle one. My wrist wasn’t sore, and I was able to breathe.
We rushed downward through the darkness. My feet didn’t touch the ground. After many twists and turns, we slowed, then stopped.
“Success?” a voice murmured from above.
“Yes,” my rescuer said.
The tentacles thrust me forward and released me. I fell to the ground, and something rattled behind me. I put out my arms and felt the hard and bony outlines of a latticework cage.
Panic surged again. I was a prisoner once more.
Before I could get to my feet, my captors seized the cage and whisked me down through the ether with them. I clung for dear life to the latticework, completely disoriented in the darkness. No longer caring who heard me, I shouted, “Let me go!”
“We can’t,” one of my captors hummed anxiously. “Sorry. Sorry.”
Sorry?
“Who are you?” I demanded.
Another few darts to the left, and a shaft of malachite light gave me my answer. My cage was held by a lemon-yellow creature with twenty octopus-like arms. Nearby was a spotted starfish with a dozen eyes, all of which were fixed watchfully on me.
What on earth were these creatures?
My fear only deepened as the octopus-like one tugged me down toward the source of the light into a cavern full of beings even stranger than the ones I’d already seen: giant sea horses with fronded tails, striped fish with hundreds of fins, scaly eels with rows of jagged shark teeth. What unnerved me most of all, however, was the way they kept changing, moment by moment—shifting color, shifting size, shifting shape. Deep purple slid into black-and-white stripes and cherry-red dots. Fins stretched and compressed. Eyes widened, then disappeared—then reappeared, looking straight at me.
Pretending a calm I didn’t feel, I looked right back at them. “What do you want with me?”
As one, the creatures began to babble. With a wave of its arms, the yellow octopus creature silenced them and put its single giant eye level with mine.
“We want your help,” it said.
I looked at it warily. “And that’s why you put me in a cage?”
A ripple like fear moved through the whole company, and they shifted even faster.
“It is necessary,” the creature assured me, sounding regretful. “At least for now.”
For now? “Who are you?” I asked again.
The octopus creature answered, seemingly for them all. “You have many names for us, I think. The fae, the faeries, the Others, the naiads, the good folk, and dozens more. You humans like names, do you not? If you must have one for me, you may call me . . . oh, shall we say . . . Odo. But do not let names get in the way of understanding. What matters is that all of us here—including you—are on the same side.” To the others, Odo explained, “This is Viviane’s daughter. The Chantress Lucy.”