The slide clattered shut, then abruptly opened again. 'There is a bucket of water and a dipper at the rear and to the right of this room. There is an empty bucket in the left. Food and water will be left here when you are sleeping.'
The slide clacked shut, leaving her alone in the dark.
Panic rose in her, and she gave it room to run for a while. That was something she had learned from Lily; when things were at their worst, if you had the space, let the panic run out. Besides, they were expecting this. If she were calm, they would suspect her of being strong, or of having some secret way to get help. If she acted like one of the helpless things they expected, they would underestimate her.
That, she had learned from Siegfried.
So she screamed, cried herself hoarse, permitted herself hysteria.
The stone cell echoed with the noise of anguish. She sobbed helplessly as she felt her way around the stone cell on her hands and knees and begged the Huntsman to let her go. She offered immense bribes, and cried some more.
She knew he was out there, listening. She could hear him moving occasionally, or laughing quietly. And when the hysteria ran out, when her eyes were so raw she could hardly see, she felt her way to the pallet she had found and lay down on it.
She hadn't recognized the language that Desmond had used for his spell-casting...but that didn't actually matter. Lily had not been teaching her narrowly defined or restricted magic of the sort that those tied to rituals did.
Lily had instead been teaching her how magic worked.
She had learned how to see the constructions that magic made around the person or object a spell was cast upon. It was entirely appropriate to say that a spell was 'woven,' because that was what such things looked like, an intricate interlacing of something between thick yarn and thin rope. Desmond had been very careful and very clever not to weave any powerful magic back at the Palace, nothing that he could not have been given by some tame wizard to help him with the trials, or she and Lily would have seen it. Probably he had made arrangements to meet the Huntsman in the forest. Now, however, he was free to weave as many spells as he cared to.
She strongly suspected that The Tradition had a great deal to do with spells working. If it were only following exact ritual that worked, then how could the improvisational magicians get anything done? Yet exact ritual was much, much more powerful than extempore work.
Unless you knew the principles behind how magic worked. And unless you could see completed spells.
'There are many more magicians who work by what they have memorized than there are those who work by knowing the principles of magic,' Lily had said. 'There are plenty who can't see it, and rely on the ritual to do the manipulation for them, rather like a blind person threading a maze that he has memorized. All the Fae can, which is one reason why Fae magic seems so unpredictable to many human magicians. If they need to, the Fae can cast and unmake spells without using any sort of ritual at all!'
Lily did use spells and cantrips all the time, she said — and certainly Rosa had seen her do so. Was that because it was easier? Or was it because The Tradition said that they worked, so — they worked? Did it even matter? No it doesn't. My mind is spinning in circles again. The point was, she could see magic. With patience, she could unravel it —
Or maybe, apply what Siegfried taught me about squirming out of a hold. Don't resist, look for the weak point, then duck under it...Oh, bless you, Siegfried! If magicians thought, well, like humans, they would model their spells, whether they knew it or not, on how humans bound things — grappling, ropes. Ropes could be unwound. The grappling arms could be squirmed out of.
She just had to keep her head...
Desmond had frozen her in place, then had the Huntsman carry her — up. She did her best to conceal her shock when she realized that underneath the cosmetic changes, she recognized that he had carried her up through the cellar to what had once been the Dwarves' cottage.
It had been heavily fortified somehow. Given how beautifully the stonework fit together, it had probably been the Dwarves themselves who had been forced to labor on it. She recognized the kitchen immediately, although it, and the huge table and stools around it, had been cleaned until the wood of the furniture was a clear gray and the stone of floor and walls was almost white. The blackened beams of the ceiling remained, but the plaster between was snowy. The windows were gone; the entire ground floor had been encased in a layer of stonework, the original door replaced by a new, thicker one.
That door stood open on what had been a garden, and now looked like a tangle of wicked thorns as long as a man's arm. As she looked for magic, they all glowed; they had been magically grown, then.
Oh no...Thorns? Tower? He was using The Tradition, too! The thorns that guarded the Beauty Asleep! No wonder he kept her sleeping most of the time! No wonder the Huntsman had laughed about awaking her with a kiss!
Everything but the table in the kitchen was gone, replaced by new fittings and utensils. The Huntsman carried her up a new set of stairs built along the outside wall in what had been that storage room to a second and much more luxurious room. The original cottage was now the base of a fortified tower.
In the center of the room on the second floor was a chair, covered, rather ominously, with engraved signs. The Huntsman put her in that chair — of course she still couldn't move, but as soon as she got over the shock of recognition, she began trying to see the bonds of the magic that held her. As she began to make them out, she saw that they were like heavy shackles, one on each arm, one on each wrist, made of braided bands of power. Experimentally, she tugged a little on one of the ends.
It loosened.
Yes! She could do this —
Then heavy footfalls above warned that someone was coming down. Her chair faced the staircase that slanted down the outer wall, and she knew it was Desmond from the moment she saw the too-shiny boots.
The genial manner was gone, replaced by a complete lack of expression. She had seen statues with more animation. By now, she had managed to ease herself free a little, and he didn't seem to have noticed, so she kept quiet and acted as if she was still paralyzed.
