by Shae Hutto
“Don’t just stand there, ogling me, you pervert!” she snarled at him. “Give me a hand!” Roger looked at her and at the chains she was trying to snare and then back at her, admiringly. How was he supposed to help? He slowly grinned and began a slow clap. He gave her a hand. She frowned at him in disapproval. “Very funny, Rog,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’ll do all the hard work. You just stand there making puns.”
Roger watched as she repeatedly slung her clothes across the floor, in multiple, futile, angry attempts to snag something in the pile of junk in the corner. God knew what she was going to do with any of that stuff even if she managed to hook any. He grew bored both with watching her efforts and with trying to catch glimpses of her bare flesh through the bars. Instead, he studied the bars in his own cell. He felt of them experimentally and noticed one slat was a bit more corroded than the rest. It was also slightly loose. He kicked at it half-heartedly and smiled at the little shower of rust flakes that resulted. With sudden, explosive force Roger kicked the slat with his boot heel and felt it give slightly as it gave out a mighty ‘clang.’ He kicked it again and again and was gratified when a broken piece of iron flew off the cell grating and clattered against Claire’s bars. She stopped throwing her clothes around and looked at the piece of broken grating.
“Don’t just stand there, Roger,” she hissed anxiously. “Hurry up before all that noise brings someone to check on us.”
She had a point. Roger kicked again and the slat broke, creating a gap that might let him slip through. He eyed the opening dubiously. It was going to be tight. He bent down and tried to squeeze through but he quickly realized that it was not going to work. The opening just wasn’t big enough. He also realized that he was stuck with his head and both his arms outside the cell. His shirt was hung on part of the broken slat on the front and the other broken end was digging painfully into his back. His leg was beginning to cramp up from supporting his weight in such an awkward angle. He put one hand on the floor to help support himself. The door to the dungeon opened to reveal an alarmed soldier with a ring full of big iron keys and Roger’s sword.
The guard rushed into the room, ready to deal with the escaping prisoners but slowed to an astonished halt when he realized that his prisoners weren’t exactly escaping. One appeared to be attempting to get a tan from the one meagre lamp and the other was trying to become one with an iron grating. Neither looked particularly comfortable with their current pursuits. The guard burst out laughing; a great roaring sound of genuine mirth that exposed brown, rotting teeth and loosed a small cloud of halitosis vapors.
“My goodness,” he said in between guffaws. “Isn’t this a sight! You look adorable.” This was directed at Claire. “All that white. And red,” he mused while blatantly staring at her. She resisted the urge to try and cover herself with her hands. She knew it was no use and just glared back at him, mutely promising murderous revenge. “And you, sir,” he said to Roger, poking him in the chest with his own sword for emphasis. “You look positively tortured. Getting an early start on it, eh?” He laughed uproariously at his own wit. Roger shifted his weight, trying to either relieve the pain in his leg or in his back. He failed at both and the guard laughed at the grimace of pain that crossed his features before he could stop it.
“Keep it up, gobshite,” snarled Roger and grabbed for the guard’s leg with the one hand that wasn’t helping to support his weight. Roger didn’t pose much of a danger to anyone but himself at the moment and couldn’t have done anything if he had succeeded in his grab, but by pure reflex the guard stepped backward, his back coming up against Claire’s bars. He realized his mistake too late to stop Claire from wrapping her clothes rope around his neck and hauling back with all her might. He dropped the sword as both his hands flew to his throat in an attempt to relieve the pressure of the improvised garrote, his nasty teeth exposed through his snarling lips. One of his legs flew up as he struggled against Claire’s strangling grip on his neck. Roger caught the man’s boot and pulled it toward him. The boot was tightly fastened and didn’t come off. Instead, Roger pulled himself a little farther through the hole in the iron bars, tearing a strip of flesh off his back in the process. He could feel a trickle of blood running down his side. He kept pulling. It was excruciating.
The guard was making horrible strangling, choking sounds as he struggled and kicked spasmodically and turned a ghastly shade of purple. Roger pulling his leg was speeding up the process. Claire was screaming a long tirade of incoherent invective and Roger was adding to the din with an inarticulate groan of effort and pain as he continued to strip off a section of his own hide. As he inched his way out of the cell, he was able to shift his grip from the guard’s boot to his belt and then his hips popped through the gap, freeing him to fall on the unyielding stone floor, his shirt ripped down the back and blood streaming from a long angry scrape from his shoulder blade to his waistband. Grimly he reached down and picked up his sword the unfortunate guard had dropped and realized that he didn’t need it at the moment. Claire, currently indistinguishable from a screaming mass of red hair and white skin stretched over wire taught muscle, was effectively holding up a dead guy by the neck; a dead guy that she had just strangled with her pants. Roger wasn’t sure how to break the news to her. Roger figured that the knowledge that she was so directly responsible for the very hands-on death of someone would have negative consequences for her self-image. He also figured he better hurry before she popped the man’s head clean off and made the situation worse. She had run out of breath and instead of screaming, she was now making a disturbing high pitched keening sound, her eyes squeezed tightly shut. There were times when adventuring in other worlds, that events didn’t seem as real to the mind as they should. Their very outlandish nature insulated the brain from them. Roger thought this was probably not one of those times.
“Redser,” he said tentatively, reaching through the bars to grasp her wrist. “Claire, it’s over.” She didn’t react to this, so he reached farther into her cell and gently put his hand on her flexed, diamond-hard bicep. It felt to him like satin stretched over marble. “Mavourneen”, he said softly. She opened her eyes and looked at him, her mismatched eyes wild with terror and excitement. “Let him down now, Claire. ‘Tis over.” Slowly, she relaxed and her pants slipped out of her hands, allowing the guard to fall to his knees and topple nerveless to the side. She caught her breath and blinked stupidly. He tried to look as encouraging and supportive as he could.
“What the devil does ‘mavourneen’ mean?” she asked. Roger looked at her in surprise and hid his sudden blush by pulling his hand out of her cell and bending down to retrieve the keys from the floor where the guard had dropped them.
“Naught to worry your ceann over it, dearie,” he said unconvincingly as he fumbled with the keys and the lock to her cell. She smirked at him as he swung the door open as far as the corpse on the floor would allow and she stepped out into the full light of the lantern, revealing many square miles of tan resistant skin. With studied unconcern she began the process of disentangling her clothes from the rope structure into which she had tied them and the dead guy she had strangled with them. Roger tried to not look at her, or at least to not be noticed looking at her. He went to the door and looked out. There was nothing outside but dark hallway, barely lighted by lanterns hung on the walls, with a stone stairway at the end.
“Oh, Roger!” exclaimed Claire from behind him. “Your back is bleeding.” Roger feigned ignorance of his immensely painful wound and looked over his shoulder with mock surprise, trying to maximize cool points.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” he said nonchalantly. “I’ve had worse on a playground.”
“No doubt,” she said as she zipped up her cargo pants. “But it’s gross. See if you can cover that up or something.” Roger looked at her and frowned at the total dismissal of his wound. Cool points minimized. He bit off a sharp retort and mumbled something under his breath.
“What was that?” she asked. “Did you
say you found our gear?”
“Not exactly,” he replied. He had actually threatened to shove his boot in her ear, but quietly. “I’ll go have a look around and see if I can spot our kit.”
“I’ll come with you,” said Claire from way closer than Roger was expecting. He jumped and turned to find her right behind him, fully clothed and her hair up in a ponytail. “No reason for us to split up. Let’s stick together.”
“How did you-,” he was going to ask how she had gotten dressed so quickly, but decided that might lead to an argument. “get the wrinkles out of your pants?” he finished lamely.
“I didn’t,” she replied, gesturing to her horribly wrinkled pants while looking at him like he was an idiot.
“Right,” me murmured and started off down the hallway, cautiously looking for traps or people hiding in shadows. Claire briskly walked past him as he skulked slowly through the pockets of darkness. She snapped her fingers at him as she zoomed ahead.
“Try to keep up,” she said without looking back. Roger hurried after her, hoping they didn’t fall down a trapdoor or have boiling oil dumped on their heads by a hidden tripwire. It was like this girl had never seen any of the Indiana Jones movies. The stairway only led up one floor and ended at a massive wooden door that looked like it had been old when Rome was founded. It was locked. Roger was dismayed and was trying to figure out how he was possibly going to be able to break it down when Claire snatched the keys out of his hand with a disgusted sound and unlocked it with a ‘thunk.’ Roger was embarrassed. He just wasn’t on his A game ever since… Well, ever since he had seen Claire practically naked murdering someone with a pair of cargo pants. He gave himself a good mental shake and vowed to get a grip on himself.
“You coming or what?” asked Claire from a few feet on the other side of the door, apparently less affected by her actions than he was. Embarrassed again, Roger followed Claire into another hallway. This one looked less like a dungeon and more like the interior of a castle. “We need to find our stuff. Any thoughts?” Claire asked him.
“We will have to search every single door we come across,” he complained.
“It might be in the first door we open, Mr. Pessimist,” she said jokingly.
“It’s always in the last place you look, redser,” he countered playfully. Claire thought about it for a moment.
“Well, of course it is,” she said. “Why would you look anyplace else after you found what you were looking for?”
“Uh,” he said, stumped. “Right. Let’s check in here.” He stopped and opened a small door that looked like some sort of storage closet. It was a storage closet, filled with nothing more interesting than spare linens. “Ok, next,” he said, shutting the door.
“Let’s think about this,” said Claire. “If we were the Evil Queen, would we just throw our enemy’s valuable gear into a storage closet?”
“No,” said Roger slowly. “I would burn it in a bloody fire.”
“Well,” teased Claire, “that’s just because you’re a pyromaniacal savage, Roger. Let’s hope the real Queen is less wantonly destructive. If I were the Queen, I would put the stuff someplace safe where I would have time and privacy to go through it myself.”
“So, she hid our kit in the jacks?” asked Roger, slightly confused.
“If ‘the jacks’ refers to a toilet,” responded Claire, “then no. I’m sure she did not hide our stuff in the crapper. But thanks for playing. I’m thinking she stashed our gear in her own personal chambers, though.”
“Close enough,” argued Roger. Claire rolled her eyes at him.
“Now the question we have to answer, is where would the Queen’s bedroom be?”
“Don’t fairy tale folk live in the tops of towers and such? At the top of some spirally stairs?” asked Roger. Claire’s face lit up with pleasure at the suggestion and she kissed him on the cheek, leaving him in a state of mild shock.
“Of course she lives at the top of a tower, you beautiful, pyromaniacal, savage genius!” she exclaimed. “Let’s go!” She grabbed his hand and started leading him off in search of some winding, spirally stairs. Unfortunately, stairs, spirally or otherwise, to the top of towers were in short supply, and hard to find. By the time they had found their way out of the basement dungeon areas, they were starting to see people walking about, engaged in various domestic errands. They thought it was necessary to hide to avoid attention and spent a good deal of their time ducking into doors and behind things in an effort to not be recognized. One door they hastily burst through was some kind of linen storage closet. There wasn’t any light in the closet and without her wand, Claire couldn’t conjure any up. As she felt of the cloth piles on shelves, she thought they might be clothes. When the coast was clear, she opened the door and found a lantern. Roger looked on with bemused curiosity as Claire sorted through maid and footman livery stacked neatly on shelves and smelling of camphor. He abruptly realized what she had in mind.
“Really?” he asked in exasperation. “Tell me you’re just winding me up, lass. I’ll never be wearing that trash. I’d look a right prat.”
“How’s that different than now, you silly spud eater?” she teased him with a straight face. “Besides, you’re not the one who has to wear this awful French maid outfit,” said Claire, holding out two sets of clothes; one with a short frilly skirt and apron. She eyed him in open appraisal. “Or, I suppose you could. You pulled off that tutu pretty well, didn’t you?”
“Very funny, you evil beour,” he said, grabbing the costume without a skirt.
Several minutes later, they emerged from the closet dressed as a footman and a maid. Claire’s hair was inadequately stuffed under a ridiculous cap, with wisps of bright red escapees poking out at a few improbable angles. She kept pulling down the impractically short skirt to cover her seriously white legs. She despaired of ever having to bend over in this hideous getup. She also had no shoes that looked like they remotely belonged with what she was wearing, so she was barefoot. Roger’s uniform was much more serious and practical, except for his sword which he had shoved down his pant leg, giving him a horrible limping gait. His combat boots were also not a match for his uniform, but he wore them anyway. They were both anxious that they would be noticed, stopped and questioned but they passed several people and nobody batted an eye. This raised their confidence considerably. Now overconfident, they made the mistake of not ducking out of the way when someone they recognized came walking down the hall toward them. Too late, they realized it was Rackles, the Queen’s personal butler.
“Hey, gimp,” he said in a tone far more aggressive and gravelly than he had used when they were guests and he was showing them to their rooms. “The Marquise has just arrived a day earlier than expected and they need a hand with the luggage. Get your crooked ass out to the stables and help unload the coach. Then take care of the horses.” Roger stood there, stunned, and Claire was sure he was about to explode into terrible, violent action. Rather than have Rackles’s blood used as finger paint on the castle walls, she surreptitiously grabbed Roger by the wrist and stomped on his booted foot with her bare one.
“Yessir, right away, sir,” he replied obsequiously, touching the brim of his uniform cap and turning to limp away.
“The stables are that way, lackwit,” said Rackles imperiously, as he gestured over his shoulder. Roger stopped and clumsily reversed direction.
“Yessir, very good, sir,” he said and started off in the indicated direction.
“You, girl,” Rackles said to Claire who was trying to not let the man see her mismatched eyes. “Go and get the Daisy Room ready for the Marquise. Off you go, now. Be quick about it.” He then made a critical mistake and patted Claire on her barely covered bottom. For approximately half a second, Claire considered letting him get away with it. Then she spun on one heel and kicked him square in the junk. When he bent over in pain, she punched him in the face with a vicious uppercut. Rackles sprawled across the floor, sending an urn on a pedestal on a one-way trip to
oblivion with a cacophonous crash and pulling an ancient tapestry off the wall.
“Oh, I see,” said Roger icily. “You’ve no heartburn with the rawny shaper calling me a gimp and a lackwit, but let him pat your bum and you hand him a batterin’.”
“Feel free to kick him while he’s down,” she said as she looked around for a place to hide the handsy butler.
“I’m not one for layin boots,” he said but was interrupted by Rackles sitting part way up and trying to yell for help. “On the other hand,” he said and literally kicked the man while he was down. Hard. In his already damaged face. Claire unceremoniously grabbed the unconscious man by the ankle and dragged him to the nearest door, leaving a thin trail of blood from his nose. The door was locked.
“Crap, the door’s locked,” snarled Claire as she hit the door with the flat of her hand. She used her left hand, because her right was sore from punching out Rackles. Roger dug some keys out of Rackles’s pocket and unlocked the door with what was obviously a master key. He winked at Claire smugly as it was his turn to look like the smart one. He looked that way for all of five seconds. He tripped over Rackles’s head as he attempted to enter the room and his sword ripped his pants leg from the hem all the way to the knee. He grinned sheepishly at Claire.
