“Who are you to decide that you’re in charge?” Brad asked mildly. His tone wasn’t challenging at all, but his eyes might as well have had lasers in them.
“I represent the Council.”
“The Council only governs wizards. We have our own leadership.”
“Your leadership is why we’re here. We all seem to have been caught up in your people’s power struggle.”
“So you admit it is our business.”
Owen took a slight step backward, giving off clear “I’m not with him” signals.
“Would you just listen to my ideas before we start arguing over who’s in charge?” Mac bellowed.
“I am very much interested in hearing your ideas,” Brad said.
“Okay, then,” Mac continued, “I think our priority has to be getting out of here, and the way to do that may be to take them by surprise. History’s full of uprisings where the prisoners attacked their captors.”
“And how many of them were successful?” I couldn’t help but mutter. I could tell from Owen’s face that he was thinking it, but he didn’t dare challenge the Council representative. When Brad gave me an appreciative look, I felt like a kindergartener who’d received a gold star for my drawing.
“It sounds like a good way to get ourselves put back under the spell or to get put in a real prison that’s not as comfortable,” one of the other elves, a pixie-haired woman named Doris, said.
“You want to stay here forever?” Mac asked. “That’s a lot longer for your people than it is for mine. How else do you think you’re going to get out? We have to force them to let us go, and that means forcing them to listen to us. Now, I figure that anyone here that we don’t know is either an illusion or is working for them. The illusions seem to be like the extras in movies. They’re just part of the scenery. They don’t talk, they don’t interact. They just go about their business. Everyone else is probably in on it, working to maintain the illusion. Those are the people we can grab. I’m sure you’ve all got someone in your day-to-day lives who’s like that. If each of us gets one or two, then we’ll have taken out most of their people, and then we can fight back.”
“What do you mean by ‘get’?” Earl asked.
“Not killing, not unless you have to. But immobilize them, certainly, lock them up.”
“They have magic. How can we bind them so they can’t just free themselves?” Earl asked. “We don’t have your fancy silver chains here—unless they left them with you when they brought you here.”
“Don’t you have any binding or memory spells?” Mac asked. “Do to them what they’ve done to us.”
“Have you considered any alternatives?” Brad asked.
I thought Owen would explode. I was pretty sure he was actually twitching. But if he couldn’t talk, I sure could. “We think we’ve discovered the portal they’re using to bring people here. At the very least, we’ve found a way out of the neighborhood that doesn’t loop back on itself.”
All of Brad’s attention turned to me, and I felt I might swoon. “Where is this?” he asked. He knelt and drew on the floor. A map of the prison neighborhood appeared, made of softly glowing lines. It looked like we hadn’t been the only ones surveying our surroundings.
I circled the map, orienting myself, then pointed to the far end. “There. It’s the park on what should be the boundary. If you go up the sidewalk or the street, you’ll loop back, but if you go through that gate, you wind up in a big, park-like space. We couldn’t go too far because a lot of the guards were there, having some kind of meeting.”
“Do you mean the elves wearing gray?” Brad asked.
I glanced at Owen to see if he would speak up, but he remained resolutely silent, even as his jaw clenched so tightly that I thought I could hear his teeth grinding. “Yes, those guards,” I said. “They come and go through that gate at around eight thirty at night, about eighteen to twenty at a time.” I gave Owen another glance and then plunged forward. “We thought maybe we could infiltrate that group and find out what’s on the other side.”
“Unfortunately, it would require illusion for us to look like elves,” Brad said.
“But you are elves,” I protested.
“We’ve tried, but we can’t seem to shed this disguise they’ve given us, perhaps because the spell works on everyone’s perception and is therefore beyond our control. Our elf illusion, were we to don one, would likely be more effective than that of a human’s, but it would be just as much an illusion.”
