by Peter Plasse
They all jumped to their feet. They knew right off that they were completely at their mercy.
One of them took a few steps forward, looked at Andar Gall, and demanded, “What is your name?” His tone was as menacing as the snarl that twisted his face.
“I am Andar Gall,” he said.
“And these two?” he asked.
“This is my wife, Isandora, and my son, Ubri.”
“I see,” said the Troll, his face relaxing and his tone softening. “And may I ask the age of the youngster?”
“He is sixteen, Sir.”
An officer entered through the destroyed doorway. “My name is Commander Wartius Ugg,” he said. He looked around. “This is a marvelous place you have here.”
Andar Gall looked nervously at his wife. Neither dared to move or speak. Commander Ugg motioned for the Troll private to continue.
“All right, then,” the Troll said. “He is hereby called into the service of Leopold Malance Venomisis, Emperor of Slova. He will serve him in the military in our war against the Humans, Dwarves, and Elves of Ravenwild.” He looked Ubri up and down. “Not that he will do us much good, by the looks of him, but we will find some use for him.”
“Sir,” pleaded Isandora, “is he not too young to serve in your military?”
In answer, he drew forth a massive battle-axe, took two steps forward, and cleaved her in two.
“No!!!” screamed Ubri,” and charged the Troll, pummeling him with his fists. Two others easily subdued Andar, grasping him forcibly by the arms and hauling him back away.
“Ha,” said Commander Ugg, “He is a scrapper. Perhaps he will be of more use to us than I thought.”
“You monsters!!!!” screamed Andar. “You bloody monsters!!!!”
Another came forward and seized Ubri, dragging him from the inn.
Moments before he exited through the destroyed doorway, the one who had introduced himself as the commander bent to the ear of one of those holding Andar and said, “Burn it to the ground.”
The one holding Andar merely nodded, a small smile coming to his face.
Sobbing, Ubri was led to the back of one of their own carts from the woodshed to which he was chained.
The only other thing he would remember of that day, for years to come, was seeing Bramwith. Leaning up against the wall of the inn, he was smiling.
The captain sat in his tent drinking his spirits alone. He hated drinking alone, and part of him regretted having busted the lieutenant to the rank of private. He could get away with a lot as captain of this field brigade, but he didn’t figure he could get away with drinking with a private. “Well, no matter,” he thought, as he drained the last of the bottle, not bothering with the glass. They were well over halfway back to Ghasten now, and he would soon be in the company of plenty of officers with whom he could lift a glass.
In her own tent, Daria was worrying. She knew that they had covered a lot of ground to this point, and it would be a matter of days, a week at the most, before they arrived at the castle gates in Ghasten, and after considering everything she could think of, she had not an inkling as to how she was going to escape, let alone how she was going to rescue Erik. She hadn’t seen him up close yet, having only caught a few brief glimpses of him, all from a distance. Nonetheless, she had demanded by right of ‘Captor Primerus’ that he not be harmed in any way. He was her prisoner after all, and besides, she had pointed out to the captain, she knew the Emperor would be decidedly upset if even a hair on his head was disturbed before they delivered him. The Emperor, she had said, would want any punishment to come directly from him, and she didn’t want the captain to blow his chances at being promoted to general on the spot. In fact, he would undoubtedly be pleased if the Prince was delivered to him fat and happy. That way if he decided to make a meal out him, he would taste all the better.
The captain had swallowed it all hook-line-and-sinker, which was good for the time being, but it was time that was her most pressing concern. She wished she knew where they were keeping him.
“Think,” she said to herself. “Think.”
The only thing that seemed to weigh in their favor for a chance to escape was that the captain had split a small group of them away from the main brigade, taking an assemblage of only around thirty in order to make them capable of traveling more swiftly. The sooner they got there, the captain had reasoned, the sooner he would get his promotion to general.
Running through different scenarios in her mind, she realized all were flawed in one way or another. Try as she might, she could not come up with any reasonable strategy that looked to have a glimmer of hope for success. Finally the mental strain of it all overwhelmed her, and she fell asleep leaning over the table at which she sat. Her dreams came in waves of terror. The first thing she saw was the Prince in one of the giant cook pots, screaming in agony as the oil came to a boil. Next, the Emperor was seated at his elegant table, happily gnawing on one of his extremities and thanking her for having given the order that he be kept well fed on their journey back to the capital city. Then one of the palace guards entered the room and ratted her out, saying that he had been there when they had launched from the cliffs, and that she had been in on the escape from the get-go, and she found herself in the exact same cooking pot that they had used to cook the Prince.
She screamed herself awake as the heat of the oil became unbearable.
She went to the tent flap and pulled it back. It was now a thoroughly wretched night, with a driving rain pouring down as if the Old One intended to wash their entire small camp from the Slovan Plains. Under her breath she cursed herself for having fallen asleep before the weather had turned, for now she would have to go out into this miserable storm to do her nightly. She put on her wrap and stepped outside, the howling wind threatening to tear it right off of her. Wrapping her arms tightly about her, she turned to the right, away from the soldier’s latrine and towards the cover of the nearby woods. She never used the soldier’s latrine. It was disgusting, and being the only female in the camp, she had made it a habit to relieve herself in any area, other than that one, that afforded her privacy. She glanced around. There was not a soul out and about. The perimeter guards that she passed on her way out of the camp hardly looked at her as they hunkered down against the storm as best they could.
She entered a small copse of trees and did her business. She was about to make her way back, thinking only of the warmth and shelter that her tent provided, when she heard a soft nicker. At first she thought that it was nothing more than the wind playing tricks with her ears, but when she looked in the direction from whence the sound had come, there stood Spirit and Cloud, not twenty feet away, their silhouettes crisp when a sudden flash of lightning lit the sky.
“Well, I’ll be,” she said softly.
Slowly, almost as if they knew the importance of keeping quiet, they approached, until they all stood together in the downpour.
“Spirit, Cloud,” she whispered. “It is you.” She hugged each in turn.
She looked towards the sky, the rainfall streaking her face, and added, “Thank you for this,” after which Cloud took a step forward, put his head in the small of her back to the left of the midline and pushed her gently, causing her to turn, then pushed her forward.
“Are you taking me to Erik?” she whispered over her shoulder.
He pushed her forward gently again, and it was all she could do to suppress a laugh. “I’ll take that as a yes,” she thought, and began to walk. They guided her slowly back behind the tents, any sounds they did make covered by the sounds of the storm.
About halfway down the line, these two equine shadows, like phantoms back from the dead, stopped. Cloud gestured, nodding his head up and down.
“Is he in there?” she whispered directly into his ear.
He nodded again. She took one step towards the tent and stopped as the thought struck her that she had no knife. There was no way she would be able to cut through the tent without one. Besides, he was sure
to be bound tightly with ropes, if not chains, so she knew it would be futile to attempt anything without one. Cloud, as if he had read her mind, took a step forward and pushed her back towards the way they had come. She looked at him quizzically and took a few more steps in that direction, then turned to see his reaction. He nodded his head up and down, while Spirit took a step backwards.
She retraced her two steps and whispered in Cloud’s ear, “So, you’ll wait for me here?”
He nodded up and down and then gestured with his head as if to say, “Go on now.”
She patted his neck and retraced her steps back to where she had first seen them. She turned and started back towards the camp, passing the guards on her way. One of them stood abruptly and walked towards her. Her heart began to pound.
“You there,” he called. “Halt.” She stopped.
He came within a couple of feet of her and stopped as well. “ W e s a w you pass by earlier,” he said. His tone was gruff, hostile. “What were you doing?”
“I was visiting the Old One’s latrine,” she said, gesturing with her arms in a broad, circular, sweeping motion.
“Then why did it take you so long?” he asked.
She held her arms further out to her sides, again motioning at the great outdoors surrounding them. “Do you mean to tell me that we are going to stand here, in all of this, and discuss my bowel problems?” The other two guards, still hunkered down, laughed crudely. “I’ll tell you what, why don’t we go and wake up the Captain, and we can all discuss my difficulties.”
“How do I know you weren’t trying to pay a visit to that friend of yours, the Prince?”
“What? How can you?” The tone of her voice was angry, incredulous.
“Are they sheltering him in the trees now? I don’t know where he is being kept. Nor do I care. And don’t you dare refer to him as my friend. He is an enemy of the state of Slova and is on his way back for the punishment he deserves. The Emperor, on the other hand, is my friend. So you either draw that sword of yours and strike me down, or let me pass. I have had enough trouble this night just doing my nightly. My backside is raw and bleeding, and I want to get back to my tent and out of this weather. Or,” she paused dramatically, “as I said, we can all go wake up the captain and discuss the details of my bowel habits.”
The other guards guffawed again, relieving the moment of enough tension so that the one in front of her felt he could let her pass without feeling his authority challenged. He too laughed crudely with his comrades.
“Pigs,” she thought.
“I’ll be keeping an eye on you,” he said.
“Do that,” she said, “but for now, remove it from my bottom, would you?”
Again the guards all laughed, and she continued on her way.
Walking at a brisk pace back to her tent, she went inside, retrieved a sturdy knife, cut a slit in the back and slipped through it. She crawled her way back into the trees behind, found the game trail up which they had minutes before walked, and maneuvered her way along it until she came once again to the tent of the Prince, where Cloud and Spirit waited. She motioned to them that she was going to cut her way into it. Each nodded.
Barely twenty feet away, out in front of the tent, two Trolls stood guard. Using the rumble and growl of the thunder to cover up any sound of the knife, she sliced the tent’s canvas-like material and wormed her way inside. It was only thanks to the occasional flashes of lightning that she could see anything. But using them to her advantage, she found him, bound and gagged. Crawling over to him, she clamped a large hand firmly over his mouth to prevent him from crying out as she shook him awake. He awoke with a start, his eyes wide with fear. She dared not as much as a whisper, waiting instead until another lightning flash illuminated her face, which she held close to him, smiling. At the same time, she gently caressed his head with her free hand. He nodded in recognition, and she released her hold of his mouth, putting a finger to her lips in the universal sign of “Shhh.”
She freed him from his fastenings. Thankfully these were thick ropes, not chains. He rubbed his hands together furiously to restore the circulation while she rubbed his feet. When he could move everything, he nodded. They slithered back out of the tent and crawled slowly to the trees. When another flash of lightning lit the sky, he saw the two horses standing right in front of him.
He suppressed the almost overwhelming urge to cry out in delight at seeing his two beloved animals, rubbing each warmly on the neck. Each responded by nodding their heads up and down as if to say, “Let’s get moving. We don’t have a lot of time here.”
Daria helped him mount up and they silently stole away.
They pushed hard for the rest of the night. The storm, which had started out as a severe thunderstorm, now turned into a hurricane, with vicious winds that drove sheet upon sheet of blinding rain in their faces as they worked their way farther and farther away from the Troll encampment. They soon lost all sense of direction, depending entirely on that of the horses to guide them. By sunrise, they had made it about halfway to the Slova River. Daria, with her thick Troll fur, was holding up all right, but Erik was now in a state of hypothermia as he clung tenaciously to the neck of Cloud, drawing what little warmth he could from the back of his faithful horse.
Coming up beside him, she said softly, “We must seek shelter.”
Too cold to answer, finding his mouth would not work, he shook his head as best he could from side to side. He knew their only hope was to cross the river. Only then would they be safe from the Trolls that they both knew would be after them as soon as their absence was discovered.
On they pushed, mile after mile, while Erik gradually slipped into a semiconscious state.
They made it to the river as the sun was slipping down towards the horizon. Erik was now completely unresponsive. Daria tried several times to shake him awake with no success.
“We have no choice,” she said aloud. She motioned for Cloud to go first. Gingerly, he walked in, being careful to not stumble. He knew that if he did, Erik would fall off and drown. Once he started swimming, Daria mounted up and followed on Spirit, who strained mightily under her weight. It was the hardest thing she had ever done. She knew if she lost her seat she would die, but they had no choice. So she gritted her teeth, hung on, and they kept going. All went well until they reached the far shore, for as Cloud struggled up towards the riverbank in the soft bottom he lost his footing and Erik slid from his back. Without hesitating, Daria vaulted from the back of Spirit into the river.
Fortunately, she found there was enough water that she could stand. She hauled Erik roughly out and up onto the back of Cloud, where he straddled the horse’s back like a boneless cat. With nothing to bind him in place, she walked alongside of him, rearranging him to keep him from sliding off every dozen or so steps. It was frustrating, but the simple task of keeping him atop of his horse kept her mind from some of the more urgent and vexing problems before them, now that they had crossed over into Ravenwild. She was, after all, unmistakably, a Troll and would be killed instantly if they happened to run into any Ravenwild soldiers, a risk that would increase exponentially as they made their way deeper and deeper into the land of Humans, Dwarves and Elves. Added to that, she walked in the company of the heir apparent, and she knew that no amount of explaining, if he remained unconscious, would ever convince potential captors that he was her friend and she his guardian du jour. No. Anyone of right mind would conclude that he was her prisoner and, again, she would most likely die.
But none of that mattered now. What he needed was warmth, or all of her efforts to deliver him from the clutches of Malance Venomisis would be meaningless.
They continued on, she pausing every once in a while to drop to her knees and get a drink from one of the many puddles that dotted the trail on which they walked.
Then, she smelled it. Smoke. Coming from up ahead. Smoke meant fire, and fire meant warmth, and warmth meant a chance that she could bring the Prince back from the dead, with whom h
e was most assuredly right now cavorting. She stopped, moved several paces off of the trail into some bramble, and eased Erik off Cloud and onto the forest floor. Hastily, she gathered some fallen pine boughs, cleared a spot, and rolled him onto them, trying to keep him as dry as possible. Then she covered him from head to toe with more pine branches, leaves, and some sticks, as best she could. She noticed he was breathing, and his respirations appeared unlabored, but they were decidedly shallow. There was not a lot of time. “Stay with him, both of you,” she ordered the horses. Each gave her quizzical looks as if to ask, “What can we possibly do to help him?” They remained behind as she worked her way out of the thicket and back onto the main trail.
Silent as the grass grows she moved along, all of her senses directed at detecting the danger she knew might lie ahead. She came to a small creek, and a clearing beyond that. On the far side of the clearing was a small hunter’s cabin, a one-room affair. She spied nobody out and about, but the smoke rising lazily from the chimney spoke clearly to the fact that it was occupied. Ordinarily she would have waited the requisite amount of time, no matter the wait, to determine if it was safe to approach it. But time was not a luxury she had. Erik was dying and every minute counted. So she forded the shallow creek, Herculean for a Troll, and started across the clearing, bold as polished brass. Somewhat surprised that she made it to the door of the cabin undetected, she entered without announcing herself. It was empty!
The interior was as rustic as the exterior, appointed with only a small bed for one, a cook stove, a rough-sawn table and bench seat, and the fireplace, in which the remains of a fire smoldered. It looked to have been generously stoked earlier so as to have a good supply of coals still burning for whoever tended it when they returned.
