Tethys is desperate to share her secrets. I think I can easily manage to convince her how to tell me to escape without having to take her with me, though I am not sure that would be the moral choice. If she is a prisoner here, does she not also deserve freedom? Don’t they all?
This kid is not my problem. Not by a long fucking shot. This is Sithren’s brat, and he should be dealing with her. But hell if I don’t sympathize with her.
“Won’t the other ladies and moms in the harem see us and report us?”
“There’s nobody there anymore. It’s empty. Come. See.”
She takes me by the hand and tugs at me. I slide out of bed, wrap a sheet around me, and follow. I know Sithren will whip me again if he discovers this disobedience, but I cannot lose this chance to find out what is happening here.
Tethys leads me down the hall, through a smaller side-passage and then underneath a low set arch. These feel like they were made for altogether smaller creatures. Women? Or something else?
I feel a breeze on my skin as we pass through several sets of silken curtains. Every veil becomes lighter and shearer, allowing more of the glow of the moon in, until I find myself standing outside in what must have once been a communal garden. I say once, because the flowers and plants now grow riotously out of their planters and boxes. They are thriving, but they do not look tended. Sweet floral perfumes scent the warm night breeze. This is a place that could be very romantic if one wanted it to be.
Tethys says nothing. She just looks at me with her big eyes, waiting to see what conclusions I come to, I think.
The gardens open up onto various wings of what feels like an elegant boarding house. These spaces were clearly intended to house and entertain many dozens of women, but they stand empty and open on a moonlit Dinavri night, eerily silent. I can feel the absence of the inhabitants. A particularly creepy sensation begins to make its way down my spine, as the hair on the back of my neck stands erect. There is something wrong here. Something deeply, terribly wrong.
As I wander through the chambers, the sense of wrongness grows. There are belongings here. They have not been packed up. There are personal items, combs, dishes, jeweled goblets. There are beds left unmade, albeit with a light coating of dust across them.
“Where are all the women?”
“Gone,” Tethys says.
"And the other children?”
“Gone,” she says. “It is just me now. I want to go too. I want to find my mother. I know she's out there.”
“What happened to everyone here? How long ago did they leave?”
“Uhm. Maybe three years ago? They all started leaving, one after the other. Sometimes they took their babies with them. Sometimes the babies stayed here for a while and then they went too.”
This does not make sense. I cannot see Sithren letting his family traipse out into the world willy nilly over a period of years. Tethys, like all young people, is an unreliable narrator. She is telling me what she knows truthfully enough from her own perspective, but that perspective is sadly warped through the eyes of inexperience and youth.
“This is the way out,” she says, tugging my hand again. She wants to go.
“Let me put some clothes on,” I say. I can’t escape in a sheet. I need something to cover my body and my feet. Fortunately, these rooms contain everything I need.
I find some simple dark robes which will not stand out in the night and also boast a hood to cover my face. I also find some sleek dark boots that fit nicely too. I am stepping into the very shoes of the oppressed women who Sithren once held prisoner. I feel a weight in my core as I do so. Did they too, yearn to escape his tyranny?
“You have to be quicker,” Tethys whispers impatiently. “They’ll come check soon. If they find my bed empty, they’ll send up an alarm. We have to go now.”
So we do go now. The escape exit is through a great deal of winding undergrowth, and then out through a worn away cracked bit of wall that surely should have been fixed by now.
“This the hard part,” Tethys says, ahead of me.
I crawl out to understand why the wall isn't fixed from the outside, at least. The exterior land drops away into a big fucking abyssal ravine the likes of which I did not know existed here. Like a sink hole, of sorts, it is just a massive opening into a void of what might as well be eternity. The moon is high above, and even her glow fails to illuminate most of what is inside.