“Doesn’t seem to bode well,” I mumbled. My tongue didn’t work right. My lips didn’t, either. The words came out a slushy mumble.

“Excellent,” rasped the voice. “I told you he had strength enough.”

My thoughts resonated abruptly with another voice, one that had no point of contact with my ears: WE WILL SEE.

What had my godmother said at my grave? That it was all about respect and…

… and proxies.

“The eyes,” rasped the voice. “Open your eyes, mortal.”

My eyelids were in the same condition as everything else. They didn’t want to move. But I made them. I realized that they felt cooler than the rest of my skin, as if someone had recently wiped them with a damp washcloth.

I opened them and cried out weakly at the intensity of the light.

I waited for a moment, then tried again. Then again. On the four or five hundredth try, I was finally able to see.

I was in a cave, lit by wan, onion-colored light. I could see a roof of rock and earth, with roots of trees as thick as my waist trailing through here and there. Water dripped down from overhead, all around me. I could hear it. Some dropped onto my lips, and I licked at it. It tasted sweet, sweeter than double-thick cherry syrup, and I shivered in pleasure this time.

I was starving.

I looked around me slowly. It made my head feel like it was about to fly apart every time I twitched it, but I persevered. I was, so far as I could tell, naked. I was lying on fine, soft earth that had somehow been contoured to the shape of my body. There were pine needles—soft ones—spread about beneath me in lieu of a blanket, their scent sharp and fresh.

There was a dull throb coming from my arms, and I looked down to see…

There were… roots or vines or something, growing into me. They wrapped around my wrists and penetrated the skin there, structures that were plantlike but pale and spongy-looking. I could barely make out some kind of fluid flowing through the tendrils and presumably into my body. I wanted to scream and thrash my arms, but it just seemed like too much work. A moment later, my leaden thoughts notified me that the vines looked something like… an intravenous fluid line. An IV.

What the hell kind of Hell was this supposed to be?

I realized that something rounded and unyielding was supporting my head. I twitched and moved myself enough to look up, and realized that my head was being held in someone’s lap.

“Ah,” whispered the voice. “Now you begin to understand.”

I looked up still farther… and found myself staring into the face of Mab, Queen of Air and Darkness, the veritable mother of wicked faeries herself.

Mab looked… not cadaverous. It wasn’t a word that applied. Her skin seemed stretched tight over her bones, her face distorted to inhuman proportions. Her emerald green eyes were inhumanly huge in that sunken face, her teeth unnaturally sharp. She brushed a hand over one of my cheeks, and her fingers looked too long, her nails grown out like claws. Her arms looked like nothing but bone and sinew with skin stretched over them, and her elbows were somehow too large, too swollen, to look even remotely human. Mab didn’t look like a cadaver. She looked like some kind of nearly starved insect, a praying mantis smiling down at its first meal in weeks.