Free The Office of Shadow by Matthew Sturges Page B

a fence of pure
Motion that would stop her in her tracks, and unpleasantly so, were she to
take more than a few steps into the lawn. That the small animals could come
and go through it while she could not was some small comfort to Sela. The
part of her that was them, at least, was free. This was something she knew
intellectually, but could not bring herself to feel. Not in this place. Not with
the Accursed Object wrapped around her arm.
    The Accursed Object was a band of cold iron, three inches thick, that
encircled her upper arm, resting snugly against her skin. It was coated with
the barest plating of silver to keep it from burning, but its presence disrupted
her re enough that she could barely think, let alone employ her unique skills.
    Some others in Copperine House attempted to escape from time to time.
Horeg the Magnificent, a mestine of some great former renown, once chewed
off his own arm at the shoulder, but the attendants discovered him bleeding
to death halfway to the road and dragged him back in. All the way he shouted
to them that he had a performance at the Principal Theater that could not be
missed. Once it was all over, the attendants had whispered in Sela's hearing
that the Principal had been closed for over six hundred years, and Horeg the
Magnificent wasn't that magnificent. He was only forty-five.
    Panner-La, a military commander, had been able to dig a tunnel forty feet
long beneath the house before he was caught. He'd managed the feat by whittling away at his own Accursed Object just enough to use Elements to turn
the earth to air, an inch or two a day, over the course of twenty years.

    Many attempts at escape had been made, but Sela didn't know of any that
had succeeded.
    The cold iron bands kept most of them in check, but there were some
whose Gifts were so strong that they could not be fully stifled. There was
Brinoni, the daughter of a courtier in Titania's court, whose Premonitory Gift
was so powerful that she lived her entire life in the future, several hours ahead
of reality. Her body jerked and dragged as she attempted to move in time
with her future actions. Her speech was so much nonsense, always responding
to words as yet unsaid, and thus disrupting her own visions. Brinoni lived in
a future that no one else would ever experience, the future that would have
been had she not been there to see it.
    Some of the patients' Gifts were so extreme and so dangerous that there
was nothing for them but to keep them sedated at all times. Prin had once been
a Master of the Gates, but had been caught between worlds and lost his mind.
Left fully conscious, Prin was capable of transporting the entire house and a
good portion of the countryside to another world entirely, or to one of the dark
places, or of spellturning the house into itself. Sela thought his case was unbearably sad, and would have put Prin out of his misery if she'd been able to work
out a way to do it without being caught. Because even with the band around
her arm, Sela could feel Prin's anguish despite the drugs they gave him. His
misery ran so deeply that she'd almost managed to form a thread toward him.
But not quite. There hadn't been any threads in quite some time.
    In Sela's case, the band was highly effective. Her talent required concentration, and the Accursed Object kept her just off-kilter enough to render her
essentially powerless. Of all the patients at the Copperine House, Sela was the
only one who was not mad. Nor was she a danger to herself. What kept Sela
at Copperine was the simple fact that nobody knew what else to do with her.
    Sela understood that she could not be allowed free. Or at least, she understood that her keepers believed that to be the case. Sela knew-or remembered knowing, as her mind was one of the many things that the band hampered-that, if free, she could find a way to be of no danger to anyone. But
given her history, it would be difficult to convince anyone of