When Lirenna regained consciousness, she was in the cage with the two men, her head in the lap of one of them who was gently wiping the blood from her forehead with a damp rag. Her head was splitting with pain, but it was a different kind of pain from the kind she’d become accustomed to lately. It was the kind of pain caused by a stunning blow rather than dehydration. There was a damp rag in her mouth, which the men had kept wetting with a water skin and which had fed moisture into her mouth by capillary action. It had been a dangerous thing to do, as she could easily have choked even on that tiny quantity of water, but the alternative would have been to just watch her drying out until she died from dehydration.

     It had saved her life, but she was still light headed and feverish from lack of water and she grabbed the water skin and drank deeply from it, every cell in her body crying out in rapture as her strength flooded back. Only when she'd drunk her fill did she stare around at the cage, wondering where she was and why she was in it, and it was several more moments before full memory returned, making her sit up in fear.

     The cons had returned to their positions around the cage, lazing around and dozing while one or two gnawed at bones, trying to pick off the last bits of raw meat. Nearby lay a bare, bloodstained human skull, and the full horror of her situation came home to her.

     “They’re going to eat us,” she said in flat hopelessness.

     “Yes, I’m afraid they are,” replied the man. They were both dressed in clothes made of leather and homespun wool and had thick, bushy beards. They reminded her of the wild mountain men who inhabited the wide, deep glacial valleys of the Copper Mountains a couple of hundred miles north of Haven, with whom her people had occasional contact. They lived rough but were trustworthy, and the comparison comforted her. They must be renegades, she thought. People who’d fled the city to live freely in the caverns.

     “How do you feel?” asked the other man. He was taller than the first but looked as though he might have been a member of the same family. His brother, perhaps.

     “About as well as could be expected,” replied Lirenna. “I don’t suppose there are any more of you around, are there? Any chance we might be rescued?”

     “I’m afraid not,” replied the first man. “Nobody knows where we are, and even if they did, they’d think twice about attacking a con encampment. There’s just a couple of families in our band, you see, and they have to think about the safety of the children. What about you?”

     “No,” replied the demi shae. “My friends are either dead or dying. I was supposed to be looking for help.” Suddenly she collapsed in tears, and the man hugged her gently as her tiny, fragile body was wracked with sobs.

     When she had no more tears to shed, she spent some time talking to them. There was nothing else to do. They were called Richard and Henry Briarson and they were the grandchildren of a man and his wife who’d fled the city fifty years earlier after being accused of treason by Lord Dynas, patriarch of House Rautha. They hunted the grey gibbons that the Agglemonians had brought up to Kronos and released to breed in the caverns as an emergency food source in case the Lifegiver failed, and the agile apes provided them with everything they needed to live. Overhunting had made them scarce in the caverns near their home, though, so the two of them had gone further afield looking for more, taking with them Daniel Amberd, the son of the other family with whom they lived.

     “Is that...” began Lirenna, looking out at the bones that the cons were still gnawing, and the two men nodded sadly.

     Lirenna then told them her story, or began to, but the two men stared at her in astonishment, obviously thinking she’d become crazed with grief. “You’re from where?” asked Richard, sharing a concerned glance with his brother.

     “Tharia,” repeated Lirenna. “I know, you think it’s an uncivilized, barbaric place, that no-one like me could ever have come from there.”

     “It’s a known fact,” said Henry firmly. “The only people still living on Tharia are, are, like them.” He indicated the cons outside.

     Lirenna shook her head, though. “Look at me,” she said. “Look closely at me. Look at my eyes, my ears, my skin, my hair. What do I look like to you?”

     “Beautiful, I won’t deny that,” said Richard. “If I weren’t married already...”

     Henry, however, had taken her hand and was examining it closely. He looked at her narrow, short clipped fingernails. He spread her slender fingers to see the delicate webbing between, and felt the softness of her palms. Then he looked closely at her eyes, ran his fingers through her hair and touched her pointed ears. “She’s right,” he said at last. “She’s not like any girl I ever saw before. What are you, girl?”

     “I’m shayen,” replied Lirenna. “Well, mostly. There’s a little human blood in me.”

     “Don’t be silly,” retorted Henry. “The shae folk are just...” His voice broke off as his eyes fell on her ears again.

     Richard repeated the examination, and then the two men glanced at each other. “All right, let’s say we believe you,” said Richard, “but it doesn’t really help us much, does it?”

     “No, not really,” agreed Lirenna, and she slumped to the ground in despair. She looked at the branches from which the cage was made and began picking at the vines binding them together, but Richard told her to stop. “Why?” she asked.

     “Because if they see you doing it they’ll bite your fingers off.”

     Lirenna jerked back her hand as if she’d been stung and looked at her fingers. “But they’re going to eat us anyway, so what have we got to lose?”

     Richard shrugged. “Okay, go ahead then.”

     Lirenna reached a tentative hand out towards the bindings again, but a con opened a lazy eye, looked at her and bared its teeth in a savage grin. She pulled back sharply. “What are they anyway?” she asked.

     “They say they were human once,” said Richard. “The Agglemonians had a penal colony up here, a place for the worst of the worst. The most violent, most depraved. Why they didn't just kill them, I don't know.”

     “My dad said it were political,” added Henry. “They were from powerful families or something.”

     “Well, whatever it was, they got sent up here and they were left behind when the Agglemonians left. The convicts had to fend for themselves as best they could, but after three hundred years of inbreeding they’ve degenerated into, well…” Richard gestured out at the creatures outside the cage. “Into that. The city sends patrols out every now and then to wipe them out, but a few always get missed. There are just so many tunnels, it's impossible to search them all, and the survivors just breed all the faster to make up their numbers, becoming even more inbred in the process and degenerating even further.”

     Lirenna glanced back out at the bestial creatures. Her initial shock was beginning to fade, to be replaced by a strange numbness as she contemplated the fate that lay ahead for her. “So how long do you think we’ve got?” she asked.

     “Who knows?” replied Henry. “They’ve all stuffed themselves on poor Danny so they won’t be hungry again for a while, but sometimes they like to play with their captives.”

     “Play?” asked Lirenna, swallowing nervously.

     “Don’t ask.”

     Lirenna slumped in black despair, her grief weighing in her stomach like a big, cold stone. Images of her friends, by now surely dead, swam in front of her eyes. Shaun and Matthew being scolded by Diana for some piece of trivial naughtiness. The two brothers hanging their heads in shame but grinning at each other once her back was turned. The cleric combing her long, chestnut hair while softly singing prayers of praise to Caroli. Jerry making some mildly obscene joke at her expense, and Thomas. Thomas poring avidly over a pile of old books, enraptured in fascination and oblivious to the rest of the world. Thomas holding out his arms as he cast a spell, his eyes blazing and his hair flying as the power surged through him. Thomas squeezing her hand, gently tickling her behind the ears and brushing his lips against her cheek. She closed her eyes and tears squeezed their way between her delicately lashed eyelids, floating away in tiny, quivering globules.

     Beneath her delicate, fragile beauty, though, there was a core as hard as iron, and the hopeless grief slowly began to give way to a steadily rising anger, that these monsters should hold her here while the lifeless bodies of her friends were lying in a tunnel, probably already being gnawed by the rats. She knew she was going to die, and that she would almost certainly die screaming, her last shreds of dignity torn away as she begged for her life, but she was damned if she was going to die alone. She had enough magic for two firebolt spells. Not enough to help her escape, all hope of escape was gone now, but when they came for her one, maybe two of them would die. Afterwards she might beg and plead and scream when the rest got her, but two of the degenerate monsters would go before her to the afterlife. Her eyes gleamed hard and cold as she made the pledge.

     In the meantime, though, the cons seemed content to let their last meal go down, so she relaxed against the branches of the cage and spent some time just thinking about the things she’d done and the places she’d seen. The good times and the bad times. The two renegades seemed to be doing the same, and so the three of them sat in silence as the light faded and darkness fell and the birdsong was replaced by the rustling and chittering of insects.

     The cons lit fires and placed them around the cage as darkness fell, so they could see if the prisoners tried to escape, and Lirenna stared in surprise at the way the flames behaved in the low gravity. Tom should have seen this, she thought sadly as she watched the almost spherical balls of light and heat, throwing off waves of smoke in all directions, not just upwards. They glowed dully, only a fraction as fierce as Tharian fires as oxygen struggled to reach their interiors, not being drawn in by convection currents as it would have been if there’d more gravity, but that meant that the fires would last much longer, unless the cooler, slower burning fire just went out.

     Gradually, having recovered from their feast, the cons began to grow more active, getting restless. This is it, thought Lirenna. They’re going to want to ‘play’ with us soon. Make their own entertainment. She brought the words of her spells to the forefront of her mind and prepared herself as heads began to turn in their direction and long, yellow teeth were bared in savage grins. The renegades also got ready, balling their hands into fists, for all the good that would do against teeth and claws. They shared a long, meaningful look with the demi shae, and then the three of them turned their attentions back to the cons, determined to die well.