bailed out

Footsteps on the stone, steady and familiar. Zane’s ears twitch.

Two sets, it sounds like. He can hear the distinctive click of hooves on the ground, too frequent to be only a single person. That isn’t terribly unusual; people pass by all the time on their way from one end of the prison to another. There is typically only one guard on patrol in each hallway at a time, but on occasion a pair will walk together. Sometimes it’s a guard and a prisoner, but Zane doesn’t hear the distinctive rattle of chains. Whoever is out there isn’t cuffed, so they probably aren’t a prisoner.

They get louder as they approach. Zane waits for them to get quieter again.

Instead the door to Zane’s cell opens, and a sliver of yellow light spills from the hall into his eyes. He squints against it, unmoving from where he lies on the floor — eight years in a cell has taught him that there really isn’t a point to wasting his energy before he knows what’s coming next. He gets nothing but rest, and spends his life exhausted anyway. Not enough to stimulate his mind, so he turns it off.

There’s a person outside the open door, a cor with head high, haloed by the hazy light of the hallway. Most definitely not a prisoner, not with the way she’s holding herself. Her eyes find Zane, and her head tilts a few degrees, but nothing on her face changes. There is something about her — an aura, a gravity, some sort of feeling — that makes her seem larger than life. Commanding attention, like something radiant.

People like this don’t come to the Prison of Teledo for social calls. He’s seen the type before: rich, powerful, and adored. Surrounded by people who can’t look away. Zane assesses her in a glance, and decides that there is something deeper to her: something that looks at him right back, exactly the same way. A person who knows people: knows how they tick and what to give them to make them do what she wants. The type of person to which the world is a game board, and everyone else is a pawn to be played.

He thinks that’s what he sees, at least.

Zane used to be good at reading people. It’s a muscle he hasn’t had much opportunity to stretch in prison, where the two types of people he meets are prisoners and guards. Maybe it’s the chance for his mind to finally chew on something new, but he finds himself curious, his attention immediately caught: who is she? Why is she here? And why is the Warden following her like a nervous dog, hovering indecisively in the cell entrance like it’s his first day on the job?

The Warden does slip past the stranger after a moment, growing back his spine, and he unlocks Zane’s cuffs with practiced efficiency. He shoots Zane a look that Zane doesn’t even bother to interpret, focused instead on getting to his feet and stretching out his limbs. His joints ache, stiff and cracking. When he shakes himself, the crystals growing through his skin click together, stone-on-stone. He resists the urge to scratch at them or to shake harder, like he can get rid of them. He rolls his shoulders, relishing the freedom of movement.

He even loses the muzzle, but he elects to keep his mouth shut for the time being. 

“C’mon then,” the Warden says, gruff and impatient, jerking his head to indicate the door. “Don’t keep ‘er waiting. There’s more work to do around here besides—” he cuts himself off, shaking his head. Probably stopped himself from saying something unforgivably rude about the stranger in the hall. “Just go.”

It still isn’t entirely clear what’s going on, but Zane is uncuffed and walking freely for the first time in years, and he isn’t about to ask why. He joins the stranger in the hallway, noticing when he makes eye contact that she hasn’t looked away from him for a moment. There’s an intensity in her stare — is she sizing him up? Judging him? Looking for a particular quality?

Did she find it?

As soon as he meets her eyes, she turns her back and starts down the hall, back the way she came. It’s clear enough that she expects to be followed, so Zane does. The Warden trails behind Zane, still on his guard, though Zane can’t imagine why he would try to run back into the prison when it seems he’s being led to freedom.

There is no other way to describe the following ten minutes except that it feels like a half-remembered dream. The Warden and the stranger discuss paperwork that has already been submitted and Zane’s nonexistent possessions while Zane sits in the corner. Not a single eye is on him; not a single guard is in the room to threaten him into submission. When his stranger gestures to him to follow and leads him outside, when he steps outside the prison and into daylight, when his feet fall on soft green grass…

For a single moment, it’s overwhelming. He doesn’t know why he’s here, but it’s too beautiful for him to care. He hasn’t had a breath of fresh air in years, and now he’s surrounded by sky on all sides. Something rises in his throat that he swallows down. His eyes burn with an emotion he could never have imagined feeling, and he blinks it away.

There’s a catch. There must be. After a moment of staring off the edge of Postinen, into the great blue ahead, he follows his stranger down the only marked path. At the end of it: a teleportation station. As he ascends the stairs to the building, it finally starts to feel real: Zane is out of his cell, out of the entire prison, and the world is stretching out before him. The only question now is what his stranger wants from him in return.

He clears his throat, and she turns her face in his direction. “Not that I’m ungrateful,” Zane says, and then he needs to clear his throat again to make his voice work. It sounds disused and scratchy — probably because he hasn’t spoken more than a few words at a time in months. Years. “But who are you?”

She is silent for just long enough that Zane wishes he had waited until they were through the teleporter to ask. It’s been too long since he played cards; he shouldn’t have revealed his hand so soon. If she got him released because they were friends once, or if she expected him to recognize her, there’s still time for her to change her mind and return him to prison. But she just… looks at him. There’s something about her, and those looks, that Zane doesn’t know how to read.

“Caeles,” she says. “Of Glouis. Priestess of a temple of Zoïta.” Zane is about to accept that as the only answer he’s going to get — this Caeles seems determined to remain mysterious — but after a pause, she continues. “If you’re expecting to recognize me, don’t bother. We’ve never met.”

That’s a relief, not that Zane intends to say so. “I’m Zane,” he says. “I’m sure you already knew that, though. With the paperwork you had to get through to get me out of there.” He still doesn’t know how it happened; he still doesn’t want to think too hard about it, just in case he wakes up.

Caeles lets out a huff, barely more than a breath, but it’s the furthest thing Zane has found so far from her blank indifference and it feels like a small victory. “I know who you are,” she says, and then they’re too close to the teleporter to continue the conversation. It leaves Zane thinking, though, because he did manage to hang on to some basic skills while rotting in prison. Criminal skills, of course: he was never more than that. If things had gone differently, maybe he would have been.

But he remembers debt. Whatever Caeles wants from him, she has his whole life to hang over his head: whatever he owes her for this favor, it is not going to be cheap. But it shouldn’t be — what price can be placed on sunlight? On wind? On the way the mere idea of freedom plants a seed of Zane’s forgotten hope in his chest? The glow of the teleporter surrounds him, and the last thing Zane thinks is this:

Whatever her price is, I’ll pay it tenfold.