The Hostage Prince

by Jane Yolen

  The captain turned his hard gaze next on Snail.

  “You. Girl,” he said in his commanding voice, the worm scar on the move again. Then he crooked his pointer finger at her.

  Snail felt her knees weaken. She stiffened and locked them so as not to fall. When she felt her hands ball into fists, she willed them to open again, one stiff finger at a time. Something sour spurted up from her stomach into her mouth. She didn’t spit it out, but swallowed it down instead. It burned hot and hurt coming up and going down, but not as much as she would be hurt if she hadn’t the right answers for Master Geck, of that she was sure.

  Realistically, she knew she had no choice but to go with the captain. But she glared at him as she went.

  Better angry than afraid, she thought.

  The glare didn’t seem to affect him at all. In fact, he seemed somewhat amused by it.

  * * *

  THEY WALKED SLOWLY down the hall. Actually, Snail would rather have walked quickly. Get in. Get it over with. Get out. Whatever it was. She refused to think ahead because that meant thinking about the ogre, his teeth, his bad breath, his nonsatisfaction with her answers. She couldn’t think about her answers at all. She didn’t know what the questions would be.

  Instead she looked down and counted how many steps she took to get where they were going.

  Thirty-seven.

  That was all.

  Thirty-seven steps.

  Not even as many steps as she had from her bedchamber to Mistress Softhands’s, which was forty-two, counting bed-to-bed as she often had as a child waking from an awful dream.

  Thirty-seven steps. Then she thought, And still only sixty steps to outside. But thinking that no longer helped.

  They turned to the right and faced a dark oaken door with a wooden latch.

  “After you,” the captain said. They were the first words he’d spoken since they’d left the dungeon room. He opened the door and stepped aside for her.

  She knew this was not from politeness. It was to make sure she had no way to escape.

  So she walked in head up, shoulders squared, through the open door, trying to keep herself calm. But at that very moment, as if it had been planned, Yarrow began screaming again, her voice bouncing off the stone walls.

  And to make it worse, all three of the wolf’s heads began howling.

  The door slammed behind Snail but didn’t cut off the sound. If anything—a trick of the dungeon layout or magic or both—the sound was doubled. Suddenly she had no courage left in her. She turned to ask the captain to stay, but he’d already left.

  She could hear him calling out to the others, “That cursed girl won’t be stopping her bloody noise any time soon. Best we eat now back at the guard station where it’s quieter. My men, you can start on the ale, and you—Red Cap—scramble up those stairs and get us some bread and cheese. Oh, and bring the wolf three bones.”

  And then with a scuffling sound, they were all gone past the dungeon master’s cell, most of the torches with them. Except for a small candle in a sconce near the cell door, she was now in the pitch black. She’d never had good Unseelie eyes to see in the deepest dark and wondered if they knew that and had withdrawn the light to make her even more frightened.

  Someone—something—huge in the small dark room she’d just entered, cleared its throat. Or maybe it growled. She couldn’t tell the difference. But her heart sank all the same.

  ASPEN FALLS

  The girl’s screams tweaked Aspen’s princely instincts—his Seelie instincts—and he took two steps toward the sound before stopping abruptly.

  “What am I doing?” he asked the darkness. He received no answer. “I have to escape, not rescue damsels in distress. If she is screaming that way, there is more than one tormentor involved. And I am out of time!” Those were Unseelie thoughts, but he didn’t acknowledge that aloud.

  Besides, he thought, picturing all the horrid creatures that made up most of the Unseelie Court, the screamer is unlikely to be a damsel. It could be a banshee or a wolf girl or a morrigan or . . . He turned away from the screams and headed back toward what he hoped was the midden pile and freedom.

  The screams faded and finally stopped. He tried not to think about whether he was just too far away to hear them anymore or whether they’d stopped because the girl—creature! he told himself—could no longer draw breath. He tried not to think of himself as a coward.

  “I could not help her,” he muttered, then corrected himself again. “I could not help it. Whatever it was.”

  The stench of the midden pile was strong now, and the rock wall he dragged his hand over was rougher with occasional patches of moss. All signs that the corridor had turned to tunnel and the exit was near.

  “At last.”

  The flight from his room, the long trek in the dark, the screaming creature—he was afraid that, all together, they had finally fractured his nerves. He needed to get outside in the fresh air and pull himself together. Even if the fresh air holds the stink of the midden.

  He still had a long night ahead, and he had to find the Water Gate before whatever Old Jack Daw had done to “indispose” the guards wore off and he was then left with no means of escape. Stopping for a moment, he pulled a handkerchief from his sleeve to cover his nose—the smell of the offal steaming in the nearby midden was suddenly enough to burn his nostrils. Briefly he wondered how the midden lads stood the smell, then shrugged because it was an unprincely thought. Besides, they were bred up to it, as he was bred up to . . .

  His mouth twisted with the next thought. As I was bred up to be a hostage.

  He was not making a good job of it.

  From up ahead, between him and freedom, Aspen heard talking.

  “I hates the ones that screams likes that.” The voice hissed and sputtered like a wet torch.

  Aspen stuffed the handkerchief back in his sleeve and looked around desperately for another route to the outside. It was a remarkably futile gesture, for the passage remained pitch-dark and he still couldn’t see a thing.

  “But they all scream when Master Geck puts the questions to ’em,” a low reply growled.

  “And I hates them all,” the first replied, not distinguishing whether he meant the screams or the dungeon master or someone else.

  Aspen tried to back quietly away, but when he heard the voices again they were closer. Much closer. If the voices belonged to trolls or drows or woodwose, they’d smell him out in another few steps, even with the stench of the midden up their noses. Trolls and drows and woodwose, who made up most of the castle guard, were scent hunters. If he’d been worried before, he was terrified now and thought he could hear his heart thudding madly, nearly bursting through his tunic. He wondered if they could hear that, too.

  He tried to think of a bluff, something to say to them, something to silence them with the Princely Voice, full of authority and snark. Usually, the underfolk could be cowed that way. But he doubted if anything but a squeak would come out of his mouth now, and they’d be on to him—and on him—in an instant.

  Think, Aspen, think! he warned himself, but he was beyond thinking.

  “It’s not their fault they screams,” said the growler. “Master Geck hurts them sumthin’ awful.”

  “I don’t blames them. I hates them.”

  I have to get away! Aspen thought. But quietly.

  For a moment, he felt proud for having a reasonable thought in such circumstances. But putting that thought into action was proving difficult. He turned to sneak away and in the darkness didn’t realize how close he was to the wall. The tip of his sheathed sword scraped against the stone. It wasn’t terribly loud. Just the soft swoosh of leather against stone. But it was loud enough.

  “What’s ’at?” the hissy voice asked.

  “Halloo?” growled the low voice, sounding a bit like leather against stone itself. “Halloo?”<
br />
  Aspen froze.

  “Halloo?” the low voice called a third time.

  The hissing voice had gone quiet.

  Suspiciously quiet, Aspen thought.

  Then he heard a sniff, as if the guard, whatever creature it was, had gotten his scent, and after came the sound of the lightest of footsteps closing in from behind.

  Aspen ran, taking off liked a scared rabbit running from a wolf, racing back into the sightless dark. He tried to keep his hand on the wall, but it was hard to do while running, and painful, too. It felt as if he left a pound of skin on the corridor stone every time he reached out to try to stay oriented. With every charging step, he feared he’d crash into a wall or trip over an unseen obstacle, and he knew he would surely be overtaken by whatever horrific creature the hissing, sniffing hater was.

  They will probably take me to Master Geck for questioning. He caught his breath. When he breathed again, it was painful. And I will probably scream, too.

  Despite the short length of the conversation he’d overheard, Aspen now knew quite enough about Master Geck to realize he didn’t want to be questioned by him, and so he forced himself to run faster.

  Suddenly, there was another scream.

  More of a yell, this time, he thought, and definitely a different voice.

  Thinking about the scream rather than his running made his feet tangle up on their own, and he fell.

  “There!” he heard hissed from not nearly far enough away. “We has him!”

  Aspen felt a little woozy as he came to his feet. I wonder if I have hit my head. There was no time to worry about it, though. He had to keep going.

  Reaching out for the wall to help himself stand, he felt something protruding outward and knew it at once.

  A torch!

  He pulled it from its sconce with the vague idea that light might help—if not to hide, then at least to keep him from falling again. And the torch could always become a weapon. Most Unseelie folk hated fire, just as they hated water. Perhaps he could keep the two hunters at bay with the torch fire long enough to kill them with his sword.

  And maybe I will grow wings and fly out of here.

  He knew that was a ridiculous thought: the royal Fey hadn’t had wings for thousands of years.

  But I don’t need wings to light a torch! It was a simple matter for a full-blooded prince of Faerie to light a torch. So simple that it didn’t even require words. Aspen took a deep breath, formed a single fiery thought, and focused on the torch, and it burst into brilliant flame.

  Which presented a new problem. Because no amount of magic could prepare his eyes for the sudden bright light after being so long in blackness. If the creatures were blinded, he was, too, as blind in the light as he’d been in the dark.

  And now he was dizzy as well.

  Definitely hit my head when I fell.

  He reached for the torch’s empty sconce to steady himself. But instead of finding a firm handle to hold onto in the now-spinning corridor, he felt the sconce suddenly give way beneath his grip, almost like a lever.

  Aspen staggered in surprise. There was a sound of stone grinding on stone and then a puff of wind that blew the torch out.

  His next thought was: Exactly like a lever—as he plunged into darkness and a wall that was no longer there. He couldn’t tell which way he was facing or even which way was up, and when he took another step, his foot, too, met nothing but air.

  For a moment he hung there by one arm over the black pit and heard the two sniffers laughing, as the hissy one said, “That goes straight down to the dungeon, that does. Let’s head down there and watch the fun.”

  For a second he could make out their outlines—hairy things about his size, looking like weasels, with long pointy noses.

  The bigger one kicked out and connected with Aspen’s stomach, and the surprise of it made him let go of the lever.

  Boggarts! he thought, and then—with nothing to hold on to and nowhere to stand, he tumbled away into darkness. But at least he didn’t scream.

  SNAIL SPEAKS TO THE OGRE

  Mistress Softhands had often said, When speaking to ogres make your sentences small and direct. Say things plainly. They are not subtle creatures.

  She’d neglected to say that in a darkened dungeon room, surrounded by damp walls coated with a kind of phosphorescent fungus that turned everything a vomit green, ogres smelled like death.

  Snail tried not to sniff aloud, tried not to weep, tried not to fall to her knees in fear. She managed two out of the three. However, tears coursed down her cheeks unchecked.

  “Girl,” came the rumbling voice, “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Somehow, she didn’t believe him.

  Somehow, she refrained from saying that. She refrained from saying anything at all. She didn’t want a trembling voice to give her away.

  But she held on to what Mistress Softhands had said. If ogres were not subtle, then perhaps he was speaking the truth.

  Perhaps. Seven letters that spelled out the possibility of life.

  “But,” rumbled the voice, “I do have some questions.”

  And I have lots myself, she thought. She didn’t say that aloud, either.

  In the dungeon’s dark, she couldn’t see him. Not really. Though she had a vague sense of something big and hulking moving in the shadows. The only light was a thin sliver of moon from a very high and very tiny window, which shone down on a plain wooden stool. Snail wondered if she’d be asked to sit.

  “I understand, Master Geck,” Snail said finally, her voice a shadow in the dark room. That it hadn’t trembled was a miracle. The Unseelie didn’t believe in miracles, though of course everyone believed in magic.

  “I don’t need understanding,” the voice rumbled on, sounding a bit testy.

  Snail didn’t like testy. She wanted the low rumbling back.

  “What do you need, Master Geck?” she asked as politely as she could. This time her voice shook. But only a little.

  “Answers.”

  “I have answers,” she said. “I have lots of answers. Any kind of answers you want.”

  “I want the right answers.” Rumble. Grumble.

  This isn’t going well, Snail thought, and we haven’t even really begun.

  But evidently they had.

  There was a shift in the air, and suddenly something grey, like a sliver of moon with fangs, smiled above her.

  It has to be the ogre grinning, she thought, since it was just a little below the actual sliver of moon shining behind the bars of the single cell window. She couldn’t begin to imagine why his smile should shine so. Surely an ogre wasn’t interested enough in personal grooming to brush his teeth. Or perhaps he brushes them with luminescent moss. She wondered what he used for a brush. A twig? A carved stick? A finger bone?

  She shuddered.

  “Are you frightened, girl?” the rumble asked.

  She realized that in fact she’d been thinking about brushing teeth and not about being eaten, an improvement of sorts, though both led in the same direction.

  “I’m considering right answers, Master Geck,” she said.

  It was a kind of lie and somehow he knew. The grey smile loomed lower, broader, not at all jolly.

  “Speak true,” the mouth warned.

  “I was thinking about tooth brushings,” she said.

  He began to laugh, and it was as if two people were laughing at her, one higher, one lower.

  Fascinating, Snail thought, for a moment forgetting to be afraid. But she remembered again quickly when the ogre abruptly stopped laughing.

  And a second later the other voice, the sort-of echo, stopped laughing as well.

  “Tell me,” Master Geck said, the grey grin and clean fangs appearing suddenly inches from her face. “Why did you try to kill the queen?”

  “I
didn’t . . .” She tried to look the ogre in the eye, but he was gone now, stepped back into the darkness. “She isn’t . . . ?”

  Before she could finish her thought, there was a hot breath on the back of her neck and a rumbling in her ear that made her jump in shock.

  How does something so big move so fast? And so quietly?

  “Then whose idea was it?”

  Turning to face the ogre, Snail said, “Wait. It wasn’t anybody’s idea . . .” but he was gone again.

  “Best tell me soon, girl.” From behind her, once more. Snail spun again, knowing it was futile, and was rewarded with a dark empty space and a low voice in her ear. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  This time Snail didn’t stop herself from speaking. “I don’t believe you.”

  Master Geck loomed up in front of her, close enough now so that he was outlined in the single candle’s light, and even in the darkened room—the sliver of moon gave no light—she could finally see all of him. Even for an ogre, he was big. He was shirtless, his flesh a deathly grey green. Though he was grossly fat in the belly, his arms and legs bulged with impressive muscles. Lank hair hung over his giant ears and protruding brow, obscuring his eyes, perhaps to hide how surprisingly small and beady they were. He wore only a leather kilt held up by a straining belt from which hung no less than ten knives of various sizes. None of those sizes was small.

  She shuddered. Those were not knives for mumblety-peg or sharpening a quill. They were skinning and boning knives. Those knives belonged to a butcher.

  “But,” the ogre said, bending over so that his face was directly in front of Snail’s. He smiled widely and she could see that the rest of his teeth were as clean as his two long fangs. “I am getting awfully hungry.”

  As if to emphasize his point, he reached out a hand, and with a pointy black nail poked Snail hard in the stomach.

  She supposed he meant the poke to send more shivers down her spine but it didn’t. She hated being poked anywhere, and especially in the stomach. It didn’t make her afraid. It just made her furious.