“Grab her!” shouted a strong voice. “Don’t let her get away!”
The men broke rank, half a dozen chasing after Sara while a few moved nervously around their captain, searching the low lit forest for danger. I knew it wouldn’t be long before they realized I hadn’t fallen along with their comrades.
When one stepped too close, I took my chance. As Sara was caught and surrounded by men, and a fury took hold inside me. I rose to my feet and grabbed his crossbow. He cried out, as I’d expected, and I kicked him as I stepped back toward the willow tree. Before I ducked back into the darkness, I fired off a shot at their captain, missing by a whisker.
Crossbow never was my strongest weapon, but it had the desired effect nonetheless. The other guards turned, mistook the standing silhouette for their enemy, and the man I’d just tackled fell with two bolts in his back.
“There’s more than one of them,” said the captain of the Queen’s Guards. “I saw another shadow before that one fell. Fall back. We don’t know how many.”
Shit. They grouped up fast, training kicking in, protecting their captain—and now Sara—as they moved together toward the edge of the meadow.
I couldn’t fire into the group without risking hitting her, so I hung back, but when one of them broke rank I took my chance. The bolt sailed over the meadow and hit its mark square in the chest. A little ripple of triumph flitted through me: crossbow wasn’t so bad after all.
Unfortunately, I’d given away my location in the process, and they wasted no time using that to their advantage.
I ducked as crossbow bolts flew above me, thudding and creaking as they slammed into the tree’s trunk and branches. I watched as the group moved away, cursing that there were so many of them, and I wasn’t, as they believed, one of a group.
Still, there was nothing else for it. Sara needed me.
I was just rising to me feet, preparing to go after them, when a stray bolt slammed into the branch above my head, drawin my attention.
I lept sideways but wasn’t fast enough. As the branch came crashing down, I fell into a deep trench, disguised by leaves and branches. It was a trap left for animals and as I struggled against the side of the dirt wall, the branch hit it’s mark, and everything went black.
Sara
Once the guards carried me into the castle, everything became a fast-moving blur of stone stairways and gargoyle faces.
I had seen such carved stone faces before, on the corners of our chapel in the village, but these faces were angry and menacing, like the stuff of nightmares. They streaked past, grotesque and unkind, mocking me in their imitation: screaming as I screamed, crying as I cried.
I tried desperately to keep track of where we were going, in case I had a chance to find my way out to Bors, but one hallway turned into another and one spiral staircase twisted into the next until I didn’t know north from south or east from west, but only had the sensation of moving down, down, down.
I fought the guards with all my might, but they were too powerful and too experienced for my panicked fury to have any effect. Most of them left, dismissed to their daily duties, while the remaining two carried me on, but I was no match for even two trained soldiers. I had the feeling this wasn’t the first time they had carried an unwilling person through these hallways and secret corridors, nor would it be the last.
“Please,” I begged in a brief pause while the guards opened yet another massive oak door and locked it behind us as we went. “Take me to see the king. I wish no one any harm!”
They gave no reply. They never made eye contact with me, nor gave any indication that they knew who I was or wasn’t. As they dragged me along, it was strange to think that I had, perhaps, been somewhere in this massive castle once before. But I had been too young to remember, of course.
From what Bors had told me, it was a lifetime away, as if it had happened to a fairytale version of me, and not the real me at all.
The guards came to a halt in front of a curved doorway, with huge iron bars locking it in place.
The oldest guard, gray in the beard and temples, took hold of the huge latch by its handle and tried to wrench it free, working against years of scaly orange rust. Wherever we were, it had been an age since anybody had passed through this door. And that realization filled me with terror.
The second guard made as if to help him, but with one quick maneuver, the oldest guard dropped to his knees with a gurgle. I looked down in horror to see a gaping, hemorrhaging wound at his throat.