Aubrey woke in a dim room. She lay curled in a small space, blinking up at a dusty ceiling. Sunlight from narrow, papered windows touched the crate tops surrounding her. She watched the light glitter and tremble, watched the dust dance in the sun’s rays.
Pain crept over her, grew with her consciousness. She hurt everywhere: her belly, legs, shoulders, arms. She sobbed. The pain reached her hands, fingers, jaw; everything about her ached and burned.
She thrashed, moaned for the pain to end; it had to end, it wasn’t possible to continue like this.
The pain subsided sluggishly. She lay on her back, panting, seeing the same sunlight and crates through tears. She could move but preferred to soak up a few moments of stability. The world unblurred. She could see wooden slats and lids marked Provisions. Then level with her eyes, thin black lines. Wires.
Aubrey sat up. In one dizzying moment, she realized that she was in a cage and naked. She folded her arms across her chest as she heard herself whimper, sob.
I wasn’t. I was—
—at a ball, being served punch from Lady Bradford’s huge silver punch bowl and then—
Running, trying to escape, a long, gray creature close to the ground.
She huddled, rocking against the memory of distorted senses, incredulous cries. The cage trembled.
From the other side of the boxes, a voice called, “Awake, puss?”
A face loomed over the box tops; a man of fifty-odd with scraggly gray hair stared down at Aubrey, jaw slackening.
“Who? How did you—?” And then, almost reverently, “You are her? Aubrey St. Clair? Yes? Yes?”
“Yes,” Aubrey said faintly. “What’s happened?”
She couldn’t cover herself and the old man would not stop staring. She hunched forward, legs against her chest, trying not to imagine what he might see.
“Human,” the man said. “A reversion. I knew it.”
“Where am I?”
“I guess Academy magicians don’t know everything.” He sidled around the boxes, knelt before the cage door and untwisted a wire. “Come on. Get out. You must be hungry.”
She whispered, “I haven’t any clothes.”
He laughed and she cringed.
“Nice thing about animals: no putting on airs. Come on, come out—”
His hands reached for her. She hated those hands, feared them, but let them haul her upright and drag her out of the room.
They crossed a hall and entered a small parlor. A young man sat at a table, reading, the book in his hands bent to the light from an oil lamp. A handsome young man with dark hair—and she was naked and couldn’t stop him from seeing her.
The old man said, “She’s human.”
The young man rose abruptly, the book tumbling to the floor. “The spell broke—”
“I was right. I knew I was right.”
Aubrey gazed about uncomprehendingly. She didn’t know these men. She’d never been in this place before. The parlor with its faded rug, worn antimacassars, and peeling cheap wallpaper was nothing like her friends’ elegant parlors or even her family’s furnished apartments.
She said, “May I have a blanket, please?”
The young man fetched one from a divan and draped it over Aubrey’s shoulders, his eyes creased by a smile. The older man pushed aside chipped tea cups on the round table. Watching him, Aubrey thought, I know him, his mannerisms: the queer way he jerks his hand back before he touches an object, the soft whistling between his teeth.
