by CW Thomas
Efrem brought the prisoners some water in a leaky brown bucket, which he kindly served to them from a wooden ladle.
Brynlee noticed that he took his time when it came to Othella. His attentive eyes watching her as she tipped her head back and emptied the contents of the ladle.
“You like?” he asked.
She nodded and thanked him.
Cadha pushed her way toward Efrem. “Could we have some blankets? It’s getting cold.”
Brynlee knew that the girl was lying. None of the girls had complained about being cold that she knew of. Cadha was up to something.
Efrem politely dipped his head and walked away.
“What are you doing?” Othella asked.
“None of your business.” She sat down to wait, her hard features scowling at the floor.
Efrem returned a short while later, waddling behind Captain Fess with a pile of blankets in his arms. “P–please, my lord. They won’t be worth anythin’ to Mungo if they sick when we get to Perth.”
A third soldier walking with Efrem said, “He’s got a point, my lord.”
Fess waved a dismissive hand. “Do whatever you want. I don’t care.” Then he stomped off.
The soldier looked at Efrem and gestured with his head for him to follow.
Brynlee tensed when she heard Cadha whisper, “Get ready.”
“Blankets,” Efrem said, his eyes brightening when he looked at Othella.
The soldier escorting him, a man who didn’t look like he cared at all about anything, chewed on his lower lip as he unlocked the door. Consequently, when Cadha kicked him in the chin his teeth drove through his lip, nearly biting it off. He fell on his back, clutching his bloody chin and bawling in shock and pain.
“Come on!” Cadha shouted. She jumped out of the cage.
Eleven of the fourteen girls poured out and scattered into the woods as fast as their chains would let them. Brynlee watched, terrified, as they shoved past a confused looking Efrem and dashed for the trees.
She felt Scarlett’s tiny hands clutching her dress in panic.
Some of the soldiers took notice of the fleeing prisoners and gave chase.
“I’ve got this one!” said one of the men as he raised a crossbow.
“No!” Brynlee shouted.
But the bolt had already been set free. It found its mark in the middle of a girl’s back, sending her face first into the ground in an explosion of dirt and old leaves.
“Follow me!” Efrem said. He motioned them out of the wagon. “Hurry! Hurry!”
Together, with Scarlett and Othella, Brynlee slipped out of the wagon. She followed Efrem along the backside of the cart and down an embankment, petrified that an arrow might pierce her from behind.
The four of them wove their way through the trees, putting more distance between them and the camp. The sounds of the shouting soldiers and the screams of the girls grew increasingly faint until Brynlee couldn’t hear them anymore.
Efrem stopped on the downward side of a steep ridge and ushered them to take cover behind the towering root system of an overturned maple. Brynlee crowded back against the tree, heart exploding behind her ribs. She took Scarlett and pulled her in close.
“We should keep moving,” Othella said.
Efrem waved his hand westward. “No more that way. The Divide too hot.”
When Brynlee looked to the west, the sight made her jaw drop. The land open to her gaze looked as if it had suffered a week’s worth of wildfires, but there wasn’t a single tree trunk or barb of underbrush left. There was nothing but barren wasteland stretching as far as her eyes could see, brown and black and fading into mist.
A short fieldstone wall sat just ahead of them, running north and south—the border of The Divide.
Brynlee flinched when the sounds of footsteps rushed toward them. It was Cadha. She shuffled down the embankment, past the overturned tree, and toward the wall.
“No, Cadha!” Brynlee said. “Wait! Stop!”
The girl scampered over the wall. “Sard off, Brynlee!” She hopped down onto the grass on the other side of the wall and plunged forward into The Divide. Brynlee watched in horrified wonder as the girl’s figure grew smaller and smaller in the expanse of black earth. The fog moved in, shrouding her behind a wall of gray. Soon, Cadha Rose had disappeared from view.
Efrem lifted a small hammer and nail and said, “For shackles.”
Starting with Othella, he tapped out the bar holding the shackle in place on her right foot. Then he attended to her left.
“Thank you,” she said, after he had pulled the restraints free. “You are very kind.”
Othella held out her shackled wrists.
But Efrem just shook his head. “No. I am not kind man.”
Efrem’s demeanor had darkened. His mannerisms had become slower, methodical, almost menacing.
“What do you mean? You helped us escape. We are almost free. Thanks to you.”
Efrem squeezed his eyes shut and wagged his head, like he was fighting conflicting principles in his mind.
He crawled up toward Othella and put his hand on her throat.
“I have love for you, my lady,” he said, his voice shaking.
“What are you doing?” Othella asked. Her hand shook as she tried to push him away.
“You make my eyes happy.” He made a move to kiss her, but Othella resisted.
Brynlee had seen her father kiss her mother on multiple occasions, but kissing, as gross as she considered it to be, never looked like this.
As Othella begun to fight even harder, Brynlee went over and grabbed Efrem by the arm. “Stop it!”
His fist sent spikes of lightning through her brain and the next thing Brynlee knew she was sprawled on her back with a pounding wail going off in her head. Struggling, she sat up, and realized that the wail was not between her ears. It was Othella. The girl thrashed about on the ground, powerless to break Efrem’s grip. He had his pants around his ankles, and his boy parts were long and stiff, like a horse. He bunched Othella’s dress around her waist and forced himself between her legs. She pounded his shoulders with her fists and screamed, a chilling sound that made Brynlee cover her head and shut her eyes.
“Please stop,” she muttered, her stomach twisting. “Please stop. Please stop.”
She curled into a ball on the ground and imagined her father crashing through the woods, grabbing Efrem and yanking him off of Othella. Her father would come. He was always there to protect her.
And then there were footsteps. Black vipers. They were drawn by Othella’s screams. When they saw Efrem and the girl struggling on the ground they sheathed their weapons and laughed. Some of them whistled, chattering about Efrem’s pale backside. Their other remarks didn’t make any sense to Brynlee, crude encouragements filled with vulgarity and slang that she had never heard before.
Brynlee’s head spun so violently from the pain in her face that she felt sick.
Efrem rose when he was finished. His face glazed with sweat and looking crazed and drunk. The soldiers slapped him on the back and congratulated him.
Relief filled Brynlee at first, relief that it was over.
And then the stocky soldier who had been leering at Othella for days took Efrem’s place.
“I was going to wait until tomorrow night, lassy, but this seems as good a time as any.” He climbed on top of her and then the thrashing began again.
One of the soldiers grabbed Brynlee and jerked her to her feet alongside Scarlett. “Back to the wagon you two!” he barked.
As he dragged them away, Brynlee looked back at Othella. The girl was hidden behind the fallen tree. A group of three soldiers closed in around her, unfastening their armor and leering down at the helpless girl who had long given up her protesting screams.
By the time the soldier shoved Brynlee back into the wagon cage, her right eye had almost swollen shut. Her lip felt puffy too. She pulled Scarlett close to her and held her tight, crying tears for Othella.
The
sky darkened. The moon rose higher.
Captain Fess looked furious as his soldiers searched the area for the escaped prisoners.
“I want them back before midnight!” he shouted. “We must cross The Divide before sunup.”
Seven more girls were found and returned, including Maidie, who climbed into the wagon cage on shaky legs, a large bruise on her cheek. She sat down in silence and curled herself into her maroon dress, which was filled with a dozen new tears and rips.
“Maidie, are you all right?” Brynlee whispered.
The girl didn’t answer.
Brynlee hugged Scarlett close, fighting the horrifying images that lingered in her mind of Othella and Efrem. She hated Efrem now. Hated Captain Fess. Hated the Black King. Hated the wagon cage and the whole army of soldiers. She shut her eyes and wished for home, her mother’s warm voice and her father’s protective embrace.
The shuffling of tiny feet on the forest floor prompted Brynlee to open her eyes. She looked to the torch-lit darkness in the west and saw the shape of a small girl stumbling through the shadows. She walked like she was in pain, with slow, short steps, her shackled wrists held out away from her body.
“Cadha?” said Maidie.
The girl was burned from head to toe, her brown skirt and tunic in charred rags. Blood seeped from peeled rolls of burnt skin that hung from her face, neck, and arms like shreds of old fabric. She walked up to the cage, wheezing. She’d lost some of her hair and her eyebrows were gone.
“What in all the hells?” whispered one of the girls.
“H–h–help,” Cadha said. “H–help.”
One of the soldiers walked up behind her and spun her around. “There’s the little instigator.” His words came mumbling out through a white strip of fabric tapped across his split bottom lip. “Walked too far out into The Divide, did you? Serves you right, you filthy whore!”
Cadha yelped as he lifted her up over his shoulder.
“Rope!” he barked.
Soldiers gathered around, unrolling a long coil of rough brown cord. They fashioned a noose and fitted it around the girl’s neck. After looping an end over a tree branch they lifted her body into the air. Cadha kicked and wheezed, but was already too far dead to put up much of a fight.
Brynlee’s stomach lurched. She averted her eyes, fighting down the waves of panic and nausea that wafted through her little body.
“Behold the cost for trying to escape!” shouted a furious Captain Fes. He rode up next to the wagon cage on his regal black stallion. “This is what will happen if any of you try anything like that again.” He clicked his horse’s reigns and ordered the company to move out.
Brynlee pushed back the fearful lump in her throat, despising the hopelessness she felt burgeoning inside her chest. She sank to her knees, face pressed against the bars of the cage, desperately wanting to be someone else, someone stronger, someone, anyone, other than the terrified little girl she was.
LIA
Just as the wild dog’s sharp yellow fangs bit into her arm Lia’s entire body jolted and she awoke with her face in the sand. She pushed herself up, coughing and gasping, her entire body sore and damp. She checked her right forearm for teeth marks, but no dog had bit her. Only a bad dream.
When Lia rolled over onto her back, shielding her eyes from the blinding sun overhead, she realized that she had woken to a whole new nightmare. It all came back to her in a sickening rush—the death of her father, the attack on Aberdour, the pursuit of dozens of refugees through the eastern woods by savage soldiers of the high king. She shivered as her mind recalled the echoes of attack dogs and the high-pitched screams of the young children they ripped to pieces.
Lia sat up and held her head with her hands. She licked her lips and groaned at the briny taste of the sea.
She stood up on stiff legs and saw Khile lying face down on the beach, eyes closed, unconscious. He still lay atop the section of broken boards from the trade ship, the faithful planks that had kept them afloat through a vicious storm that, as far as Lia could tell, had claimed the lives of everyone else on board.
She walked over to Khile and tried to wake him. He groaned, but wouldn’t rise.
Lia plopped down on her rump in the sand as panic threatened to overcome her. Ahead of her she saw nothing but rippling ocean with the peaks of its waves glittering in the sun. A narrow strip of beach ran along each side of her, stretching endlessly to the south and rising up over a grassy hillside to the north. At her back a hill capped with leaning shade trees and shrubbery rose steeply.
Khile groaned again, and Lia noticed that below his right knee his leg bent at an unnatural angle. She lifted his pant leg and saw, about halfway down his shin, the broken bone pushing out against the inside of his flesh.
She found a couple pieces of wood and a bit of torn sail on the shore and made a splint. She knew little about making splints other than what she had seen done to a castle guard named Koal when he fell down the front steps last summer. A doctor had bound his leg between two boards and wrapped it tight with fabric to keep the broken part of the leg from bending.
By the time she finished the crude splint, Khile, to her relief, had not yet regained consciousness. He needed to be moved though because from the look of the wave patterns on the sand the tide would soon wash over them. It took a great deal of effort on her part, but she managed to drag him off the beach to the shade trees up the hill. She placed his head on a patch of grass and then sat down with her back to the tree to catch her breath.
Water and fire. That’s what her father used to tell her. Were she ever lost in the woods the first two things she would need were water and fire, water to feed herself and fire to keep her warm. She had never liked starting fires, and without flint it would be almost impossible, but water, she knew, was essential.
She gathered some dried driftwood and put it in a pile next to the tree. Then she left Khile lying under the shade of the foliage and ventured east to the next ridge where she looked at the countryside. Without her boots, which Khile had removed before the ship went down, she had to tread carefully over the rough terrain.
Once she was beyond the reach of the ocean breeze, mosquitoes found her and began nipping at any exposed pieces of flesh they could find. She walked for some ways swatting at the air before she came across some purple and pink aster. Abigail had once shown her how to use it as a bug repellent and so Lia picked some and smeared it on her skin. She tucked some into her pockets for later use. It didn’t keep all the bugs away, but it did seem to help.
She perused the inland hills for some time, scouring the earth for plants and herbs, including some thistles and winter savory.
She was drawn to the next hill by the sight of a massive chestnut tree. Its high sprawling branches and thick leaves made a crater of shade under which was an abundance of chestnuts, some still in their spiky pods. Lia couldn’t believe her luck. She knelt and began gathering the ripest nuts.
Another sight caught her attention on the ground just two steps away, an imprint of a giant paw—or was it a hand? The ground around the tree, she noticed, was rife with imprints, some human like, others more akin to hooves, but all of them were big enough to swallow her whole. Troll? Dragon? She had no idea what sorts of creatures roamed this part of the land.
Abruptly, she stood, and glanced around. She hoped that whatever creature had stomped over this hillside was long gone. She wondered if it ate chestnuts, or, more importantly, ten-year-old girls.
Lia decided not to explore ahead any further. The giant paw prints had spooked her, and it was getting dark.
She gathered as many ripened nuts as she could fit into her pockets and left the hillside.
Then she caught a glimpse of something large and brown moving across a field in the distance. She studied it for a moment before concluding that it was a horse and wagon. There was a road out there beyond the forest. She estimated it would take a half-day to hike there, but it was there nonetheless. Civilization. Hope.
Lia returned to the beach and followed it north, picking through the various piles of scrap wood and debris she found along the shore. She unearthed a leather water satchel that was, unfortunately, empty, and found a leather belt and a torn shirt washed up in a trunk with a broken lid. The rest of its contents, she guessed, were strewn along the bottom of the ocean.
She froze when she noticed something floating in the surf just ahead of her, face down, limbs sprawled. A corpse. He was a sailor by the looks. She stood and approached the body as waves pushed it back and fourth on the cushy sand. The skin of the corpse had grayed and was beginning to bloat. Lia left the body on its face, too timid to roll it over and see the lifelessness in its eyes.
Holding her breath from the stench she patted down the pockets, finding nothing. She reached under the corpse, feeling along the belt, until her fingers touched hard metal. She yanked the belt around, tugging on what she hoped was a weapon casing.
“Please don’t be empty. Please don’t be empty,” she muttered.
The handle of a small dagger protruded from a dull brown copper casing. She unfastened the belt and removed the sheath. When she pulled out the dagger she found a shiny silver blade sparkling in the sunlight. Whatever kind of man this corpse had once been, he had cared for the weapon well. She smiled, satisfied.
With her arms full of her trophies, Lia left the beach.
When she finally returned to Khile she found him awake and struggling to stand.
“What are you doing?” she asked, hurrying up to him.
He looked at her, appearing relieved. “There you are. I was afraid you’d run off and gotten captured.”
“Captured? By who?”
“Black vipers will soon be all over these shores,” he said. “We shouldn’t stay here.”
He sat back down with a great deal of effort and stretched his busted leg out in front of him.
“Thanks for this,” he said, tapping the splint.
“How is it?”
“Unfortunately we have to take it off. The bone isn’t aligned properly.”