Installment45

**

I spent the whole day being hungry, really hungry. The apple had been good, but a couple of crackers and an apple didn't constitute a snack for me, let alone 3 meals. I moped about the castle, had a nap in my room, read a little, but all the time was being shouted at by my stomach. Eventually, I decided I could take no more. I had to get out of the castle, into the village, where real food still existed. Janet was elsewhere; I didn't know where. She'd gone away after I'd snapped at her over nothing in particular. It was one of my lovely little quirks. Hunger made me a bitch. Tiredness made me a bitch. Tired hunger made me strangely weepy, but not before I'd bitten the heads off anyone who dared try to speak to me.

It was getting to late afternoon when Brin poked his head round the door.
“Hello,” he said.
I looked up, my eyes half closed, “What do you want?”
I expected him to react to my aggression, but he just answered the question as if it hadn't been spat out, “I'm not entirely sure, to be honest, but I get the feeling you're going to help me with that.”
“I don't understand.”
“You,” he said, flicking his head in my direction, “You know things. You understand things; things my mother doesn't. How? You're not a faerie and you're sure as hell not one of them.”
I shook my head, “Human. At least, I think so.”
He grunted and nodded, “Mortal, anyway. Don't know all that much about human. Seems a made up thing that changes depending on what you're thinking that day.”
“What does that mean?”
“You call each other animals, monsters, …, not always human; always mortal.”
“That's just talk.”
“Talk?”
“Yes, of course. What else?”
“Hmmmph... I don't know. Strange creatures, mortals. You live, you die, seems half your life is about making it longer than other peoples'.”
“That's not true.”
“No?” he shrugged, “Just an observer, me.”
“Yeah, well, things aren't always what they seem, you know? Surely you're not so stupid to think that you can understand everything just by looking. You have to understand the context of things and the cultures and values and...” I ran out of words at about the time that I ran out of steam, “y'know. That stuff...”
He smiled, it was almost a sneer, but not quite. It was as if he'd spent his whole life sneering and now didn't know any other way to smile.
I watched him for a while. His awkward stance and unnatural looking facial expressions. He looked like a mannequin which had been wrongly posed and just left with the clothes hanging off his body, not quite part of the scene where he'd been placed.
“What are we going to do?” I asked him after a while.
He didn't speak for just long enough to make the silence noticable, then said, “We need to get out of here.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
“What?”
“I mean, that's kind of obvious, but how? Arianwen won't let us leave.”
“Has she enchanted the castle?”
“She... I... I don't know.”
“How do you know we can't leave, then?”
“Um... Janet told me.”
“What did she say?”
I looked around the room, trying to remember the exact words. They didn't come to me, “Um... she said that Arianwen was holding us prisoner, or something like that.”
“Don't look much like a prisoner.”
“No,” I said, “I guess I don't.”