by Rob Preece
When Tadas wasn't trying to discourage her, she searched her pockets for a tool or weapon she could use to pick her lock or cut the chain. She came up empty.
Her dimension gems and her book had vanished. Her katana was probably in Sergius's treasury. She kicked herself now for not being more suspicious when the guards had insisted that she leave her weapons behind.
At any rate, she found nothing: nothing but a brutal sadness that she'd lost the few things that had connected her to her parents. Along with Mark's betrayal, those losses were a double blow.
Her book, sword, and jewels were reminders of home and the tools she'd used to carve out her position here—tools she could have used to free herself from her captors. Without them, she had nothing to remember her parents by, no friendships that meant anything, and had made no real difference to the country she'd adopted. Because without the parliament, she realized, it didn't really matter who was King of Lubica.
On the second day, she managed to grasp a sharp stone between her toes when the acolytes had taken her to relieve herself.
It was a forlorn hope, but she was pretty sure she remembered the pattern she'd used to come here. She didn't have the dimension stones, but she wasn't absolutely sure stones were necessary. Someone had made them in the first place, hadn't they? She used her rock to knock out bits of wood from the wagon and then used them to create the pattern.
She told herself that she felt the magical pressure, saw the purple sparks of magical potential—but she wasn't convinced and she certainly didn't cut through the dimensions and return to Earth like she'd hoped.
After that failed attempt she went to work on the oak slab that her chain had been secured to. She tried to sleep as much as possible during the day. At night, once the caravan had settled into sleep, she scraped and carved at the hardwood.
A sharp rock makes a dangerous tool. She sliced deep into the tendons of her hand and bled everywhere until she finally tore a strip of her tunic off and used it to wrap around the stone.
After that, things went a little better. She cut deep into the wood, carefully gathering the scrapings. Each morning, she used saliva and the shavings to create a makeshift wood dough which she stuffed back around the staple to hide evidence of her work.
Since they didn't let her bathe, and since the cart's previous passengers had apparently been pigs, nobody bothered to inspect the inside of the wagon too closely.
* * * *
It took a couple of nights to work her way through the wood but she finally succeeded in yanking out the staple at about four in the morning on the fifth day of her imprisonment. She gathered the heavy chain in her arms and listened.
Outside her wagon, guards moved around, but they were more intent on outside threats. They didn't know how completely abandoned she'd been.
The wagon's solid wooden slats would have been trouble for most captives. But Ellie wasn't most captives. She'd broken her first board about the time she had learned to walk and had practiced smashing boards, bricks, or concrete blocks almost every day as she'd worked in her father's dojo.
The wagon's roof was too low for her to stand upright, so she lay on her back and kicked.
Board-breaking is a matter of speed and technique. Power matters, of course, but less than most people believe. If you hit hard enough, quickly enough, a board won't have time to bend and will break instead. Ellie kicked quickly enough.
The breaking boards sounded like a flurry of musketshots and the guards must have thought that was what it was because they dove for cover.
Ellie took advantage of the confusion, slipped out of the wagon, and ran.
There was no moon. Her bare feet caught on thorns and sharp stones but Ellie wasn't going to let little obstacles like that stop her.
Behind her, an uproar told her that the camp had discovered her escape. She heard the harsh roar of musket shots fired into the darkness, but nothing hit her and she didn't even hear the ricochets. They were firing blindly into the night.
Ignoring the pain from her feet, she intentionally took the roughest trail, heading upward toward some rolling mountains that marked the barrier to Rotterwood province. She was heading out of the frying pan toward the fire, but she didn't have a lot of choice. If she went back to Sergius, he'd just turn her over to the Rissel again. And next time, they might not bother waiting for a full church trial. Besides, her pursuers would probably guess she'd head south, back toward home.
The stars gave her just enough light to avoid running into the occasional tree and she kept moving until dawn sent her icy light into the sky.
Before the sun actually rose in red and purple glory, there was a moment where Ellie could see but the sky remained black and the stars faded but weren't completely driven from the sky.
She looked behind to make sure she wasn't leaving a bloody trail, then continued.
She was exhausted. The chain, still linked around her foot, probably weighed fifty pounds—it felt like two hundred. Her body hadn't fully recovered from the beating she'd taken at the hands of Sergius's bodyguards and she'd barely gotten any sleep since she'd recovered consciousness. She needed a place to stop, to hide and regain her strength. But she needed someplace safe. Someplace where Tadas and his guards would be unlikely to find her.
A nearby farm showed she'd passed through the hills and into someplace with people. That was both a danger and an advantage. She looked across a field and saw that the farmers had already begun gathering hay in vast mounds—unlike the neatly rolled hay of California fields. A soft bed of hay sounded tempting indeed—and by burrowing into it, she could hide.
She shook her head. Haystacks were too obvious.
She rejected the farmhouse for the same reason and also because she didn't want to get any more peasants killed. Besides, she didn't know whom she could trust.
The sun was nearly all the way above the horizon when she stumbled down a bank and into a narrow creek. Her chain added to her momentum pulling her off balance, until she rolled uncontrolled, into a shallow pond.
She sputtered to the surface, then waded to the edge.
Despite her need to keep moving, she knelt and drank deeply. She'd been on the run for hours and was suffering from dehydration as much as from fatigue and this entire kingdom seemed devoid of large rivers. She needed to take on water when she found it.
As she drank, Ellie could almost feel the cold water seeping into her body, rehydrating her muscles and giving her strength, some return of her ability to think.
She hadn't heard any dogs but she decided to follow the streambed anyway. Its water-tumbled rocks were smooth and far more comfortable than the rough brambles she'd been walking over for the previous several hours.
She almost missed it when she passed it. A clump of bushes not much different from a thousand other clumps almost completely obscured a dark shadow. From any other angle, at any other time of day, it would have been invisible. But she'd gotten lucky.
Ellie figured it was about time she had some luck and investigated.
The small cave in the side of the creek bed wasn't natural. It had been deliberately carved there.
She crept into it and discovered treasure far more valuable than gold. Hidden inside were a couple of blankets, tinder, flint and steel, and a fishing rod. Some neighboring teens had created themselves a hideaway. And if it were hidden from their parents who knew the area, it would almost certainly be hidden from invading Rissel as well.
She didn't dare take a chance on fishing now, let alone a fire, but she wrapped the blankets around her tired and bruised body and collapsed.
* * * *
Ellie awakened to a sense of danger.
Some part of her subconscious had heard something and flooded her body with adrenaline.
She peeked out the cave opening.
It was late afternoon and the sun cast long shadows that would further hide the cave's opening.
She listened, heard only silence.
Logic told her to stay
, to wait until dark before moving again. But Ellie's father had taught her that logic was just a tool, one of many—that there were times when it was better to trust her feelings than rely on the cold blade of logic.
She glanced at the blankets reluctantly, but decided to leave them behind. She didn't have a pack and didn't want anybody talking about someone stealing things from the neighborhood kids. And they would talk. In a pre-industrial society, fabric was precious.
She did steal one of the hand-carved fishhooks. It had been whittled from some fine bone and was almost a work of art. She felt a little guilty about taking it, along with the a strand of the line from the fishing pole, but she hadn't ever hunted, didn't know the local berries, and didn't have any of the dehydrated camping supplies she'd brought from Earth. The carefully wrapped hook, along with the flint and steel made a handy bulge in the pocket she'd had sewn into her tunic.
If she survived, she'd find a way to repay her unwilling hosts. For now, though, she had to hope they'd understand.
The forest around the streambed was uncannily quiet. No birds called, no squirrels chatted amongst themselves. The quiet decided her. Her refuge had become a trap.
She gathered the links of chain, wrapped them around her waist in an attempt to keep them from getting tangled on everything and to let her keep her hands free, and stole from her temporary hideout.
She hadn't been able to see the previous night but now it was apparent she'd arrived in the low foothills of the Rotterwood Mountains.
Farms crept up the narrow valleys of the hills, but there were plenty of untouched mature forests as well, broadleaf trees gradually merging with evergreens as they climbed mountain slopes.
Ellie moved carefully, as silently as she could, staying well away from any inhabitation.
Not for the first time, she wished her parents had settled on something a bit more rural than the L.A. suburbs to raise their adoptive daughter. She could have dealt with a bit more woods-knowledge.
Still, she wasn't in a hurry. She crept from tree to tree, avoided the open fields, and kept moving upward, away from the roads, away from any concentrations of people.
She tried to walk on leaves or rocks rather than on grass or bare ground where her feet could leave marks. She thought she was being pretty successful but she remembered reading about trackers who would notice a bent twig or the way a pebble was turned. She didn't know how to be careful enough to avoid that kind of hunter. And she suspected the Rissel were angry enough that they'd bring in their best trackers.
Twice, she thought she heard something and scrambled into a tree.
And waited.
The first time, she waited a good quarter hour before deciding it was a false alarm.
The second time, she barely made it into the tree's upper branches when a pair of guards appeared, accompanied by a local. The guards were speaking the language of Lubica, but their markings made it clear they were in the hire of the Rissel.
"What a waste of time,” one of the guards complained. “We should just start killing villagers, one an hour, until they bring her in."
His fellow, a balding man with a paunch picked a flee off his arm and crushed it between fingernails. “What if they don't know where she is?"
"They'd be motivated,” the first guard answered. “Right, Humberto?"
Humberto seemed to be the local guide. He didn't answer the guard's question but he did glance directly into the tree where Ellie was hiding.
She froze. Since she could see him, it was certainly possible that he could see her. Next time, if there were a next time, she'd try to keep track of which nearby trees have the thickest foliage before climbing into one.
She was still new to the escape business.
"Catch more flies with honey than with vinegar,” the second guard took a moment to eat the flea he'd crushed. “They're probably just waiting for Tadas to up his reward."
The local led them past her tree. He was looking everywhere now, Ellie noticed, except at her tree. He must have seen her, but he said nothing.
That had to mean something. Ellie wished she knew it meant something good.
She considered climbing down the tree and attacking while she had the advantage of surprise. She'd gathered up a stout stick, which would do for a quarterstaff or bo. Neither of the guards moved like a trained martial artist and she suspected she could defeat them if she needed to. But that assumed they stuck around to fight. With her bare feet, she wasn't going to run anybody down and, if either of them got away, she would soon have a lot more than two enemies to deal with.
Once the local had led the guards out of sight, Ellie had another choice. She could climb down and continue her voyage, or she could wait and see what happened next.
A combination of fatigue and curiosity persuaded her to stay put. She knew the local had seen her. Since he hadn't told the guards, that could mean he simply didn't want to turn her in. But it could also mean he had other plans.
Ellie hoped it was the latter. Her own plans hadn't worked so well lately so she figured it was about time for someone else to come up with some ideas.
* * * *
When the sun descended behind the mountains and plunged the world into a darkness almost unmitigated by the pinpricks of light from remote stars, Ellie gave up and climbed down.
She hadn't eaten in over twenty-four hours and her stomach complained loudly, but she wouldn't starve for a while. If she survived until morning, she'd try to find a stream to camp by and see if her fishhook would work. If worst came to worst, she'd once seen a T.V. show that claimed most bugs and grubs were edible. In an old-growth forest like this, there had to be enough grubs to fill an army of stomachs.
But she wasn't that hungry. Not yet. Especially not in the dark when she couldn't be sure whether she was eating grubs or something even worse.
Without a moon, and with no clear idea of how to use the stars to navigate, it only took Ellie a few minutes to lose all sense of direction.
Even her idea of heading for higher land backfired. She found herself on the top of a low rise, exposed to anyone with sharper eyes than she had.
Or exposed to anyone with magic. She'd been thinking about magic as something she should use to help her escape. But even if Tadas didn't have any mages with him, he could certainly round some up. And they could track her down no matter where she hid.
She wanted to sit down and cry but something inside her wouldn't give up. She picked a direction on a gut feeling and pushed on.
"Come this way, lady. The boss wants to talk to you."
She practically jumped out of her skin and whirled around, her staff held above her head in a blocking guard.
"Don't attack me, lady. I'm just a messenger."
The kid shouldn't be out this late at night. He looked to be about ten, weighed maybe seventy pounds, and was armed only with the small knife everyone in Lubica used for eating, a tool, and only incidentally as a weapon of last resort.
She lowered her staff but kept it in a ready position. “Messenger from whom?"
"I'll show you.” He turned and started away from her.
"Not so fast. I've got questions."
"The Rissel are out searching. Do you want help, or do you want them to find you?"
Ellie wasn't comfortable with the situation. On the other hand, the kid was right. She needed someplace to hide and she needed help. If they'd been completely unfriendly, they could have turned her in.
"You'd better hope this isn't a trap, kid.” She did her best to sound threatening, although she didn't think she could actually go through with hurting a child.
"Hurry. The Rissel are getting closer."
Although she could never have found it alone, there was a path through the forest floor. Her bare toes still stubbed into tree roots and sharp rocks mangled the bottoms of her bare feet, but they certainly made better time than she'd been making on her own. Since she didn't know where she was going, it was hard to tell if that was good news or bad.
Chapter 15
She noticed the smell first.
An almost overpowering stench of unwashed human, untreated human sewage, and rotting food. No military camp, whether Rissel or Lubica, would put up with that lack of hygiene. Centuries of military experience taught that a camp without hygiene breeds disease and death.
Whoever camped here, they weren't the Rissel army. But there were a lot of them and this wasn't a town that appeared on any map.
"You'd better tell me what's going on now,” she hissed to the kid.
"Welcome. We've been expecting you."
It wasn't the kid's voice. A man, not much taller than she, stepped from behind a tree. He carried a bow, strung and notched with an arrow. His smile exposed two missing front teeth and one of his eyes was the hazy blue of a cataract. He was probably only in his thirties, but deep furrows marred his face. A blackened knob was all that remained of one of his ears. The other stuck out at a sharp angle from his bald head.
"I've been trying to get my young friend here to tell me who you were,” Ellie said. The kid, she noticed, had taken advantage of the distraction to vanish.
"His job was to bring you to us, not to share our secrets."
From the stench, Ellie didn't guess they had too many secrets from anyone living nearby. And if this man was any example, they figured to be the worst Lubica had to offer—criminals, brigands, cutpurses, and other outlaws who fled to the forests in a no-man's land between Rissel and Harrison territory.
"If you aren't Rissel, I'm happy to be here. I suppose you know that they have a price on my head.” She might as well be honest.
"Funny you should mention that. The gang is trying to decide how you could be most valuable to us. The Rissel are offering plenty."
"The chances of actually collecting and keeping any Rissel money are slim."
The man nodded. “We were wondering what better offers might be made."
"I'll bite. What kind of offer are you looking for?"
He gave her a gap-toothed grin. “At least you're not like most nobles. I'm Lart."
