My feet don't even touch the ground. The former eagle manages to throw me in a room so dark I can't see my own hand in front of my face, let alone what the room actually is, before I can actually explain that I have no idea what's going on. I can't even ask what's so special about a squirrel.
"Never mention the squirrel again," she yells at me as the door slams.
Who am I going to mention it to?
"So much for my imprisonment being just and legal," a man says.
I recognise the accent but can't place it.
"Who are you?" I ask.
I also, quietly as I can, push myself away from the voice. I do not want to be in a confined space with an unknown man.
"Don't worry," the man says and he sounds like he has the kind of smirk that makes me itch to slap him senseless, "I can't get to you. I'm behind bars. You are, too, you just haven't found them, yet."
I hear him rattle metal against metal just as I find myself pressed against what I can only assume are the bars he mentions.
"That Eagle. Thinks she knows everything. She was happy for me to be her informant but one little chew of bark with an old friend and suddenly I'm the biggest criminal in the universe."
"Bark?" I ask.
I'm not happy that I'm locked in here with someone else. I need to be sure the bars are between me and him, that eh can't get to me. I feel my way slowly around the bars.
"Yeah. I was catching up with a friend of mine. You might call it a stag do. Anyway, we had a bit too much of the old tree bark and, before you know it, we killed the damned tree. I mean, yews are supposed to be more resilient than that!"
If I haven't gotten totally disorientated, I'm in a box only a couple of metres wide by a couple of metres long. Give or take. At least he's definitely not in here with me.
I stare at the darkness in the general direction of the voice. "You eat yew trees?"
He laughs. "'Eat'? Well, not exactly. She has infra-red cameras, by the way, so whatever you do, she can see."
I have no doubt he does lewd or crude things in the dark, just so the former eagle can see it and be wound up. He sounds like that kind of man.
"Do... Do you know how to get out?" I ask.
It's unlikely, otherwise he wouldn't still be here, but I have to ask.