by Jill Barnett
"I am Glenna Canmore," she said. "I am the king's daughter."
He was still as a rock, then he laughed loud and hard. "Aye. The king's daughter...a horsethief. A lying horsethief." He picked up his goblet of wine and drank, leaving his words to do their work.
"I am Glenna Canmore."
"You aren't even a good liar. The king has no daughter, or son." He set down his the goblet and said, “Lock her in the pit cell.”
The man set his hands on her shoulders.
“And do not stop for your own pleasure, Jock. I will check on her.”
His man angrily pulled her from the chamber, shoving her down narrow hallway with his hands on her buttocks, stopping to squeeze and fondle her, and she stumbled away and hit the wall. He pinned her with his body, pressing his hips against her. “I can give you this. Munro will never know.” He forced his fetid mouth on her and bit at her lips. “I can ride hard and long, wench.”
She wanted to fight. She want to knee him. She wanted to wretch. He would no more believe who she was than Munro had so she pressed her chest to his and said breathily, “Wait. He will catch us.” Like a hungry tavern maid, she licked her lips provocatively.
He bought it and seemed to think she had a point and dragged her by the arms once again into another room, an interior room most likely toward the rear of the manor, with four rounded stone walls dotted with lit candle pricks.
She thought he would ravish her and looked for some kind of weapon as she backed away from him and the hungry look in his dark eyes. Her leg hit something and she looked behind her.
Then she saw an open trap door in the ground. She looked down into a small and narrow black hole and panic hit her. The pit cell. She turned back to him. “Please. Wait. Do not put me in there…please.”
He paused thoughtfully, as if he might actually give in. His hand went between his legs, massaging suggestively the weight of his genitals. “I will give you this when I come back…later.” He grabbed her by the hair. “You can suckle me…hard.”
Suckle him? Oh God… He meant…. And before she could quite comprehend, he shoved her down inside the pit and slammed the trap door.
Damp dirt crumbled down from above her into her hair and face.
“Come back!” she shouted, panicked. “Come back!”
Overhead she heard the bolt slide closed and the distant, muted sound of his footsteps.
* * *
Glenna blinked, trying to make her eyes adjust. The pit was dark as a rook’s feathers. She touched the walls, which were jagged stone and hard clay-like soil. Raising her arms, or even her elbows, was not possible. She had perhaps only a hand’s breadth on each side from her shoulders to the walls. It was as if she were being buried alive.
A sob escaped her and she sucked in a quivering breath. The air was small and tasted and smelled of dank dirt. She could kneel but her shoulder caught on the wall the space was so narrow, but it was slightly wider on the lower half. Like a blind woman her hands slowly swept over the ground, where there were deep-angled divots as if left from the shovel used to dig the pit.
Standing took some work in the small space and she tried to quell the fear that overwhelmed her. Above her was the trap door. She jumped upward trying to hit it, but her fist barely tapped the surface of the wood.
With every breath she took the air changed. A great and powerful fear raced through her, soaked deep into her very bones, and she felt a panic so intense she could only scream and scream and scream, until the shaking stopped and her voice was raspy and almost gone, then she collapsed into a knot on the dirt, knees wedged to her chest, toes against the opposite wall.
She lay her head on her knees and she tried to breathe calmly, breathe slow breaths. The air was getting hotter yet she was shivering as if she were exposed in the dead of winter.
Footsteps sounded, soft thuds coming closer. If the guard was coming back could she get away? Mere minutes had passed…or was it hours? She pushed up the walls, the only way she could actually stand and the trap’s bolt shot.
The door opened, blinding her from the change of light. Munro stood above her. She could feel his aura of evil before his face appeared.
“Well, my dear, how do you find your new home? Looks to be a perfect fit,” he said, laughing. “I have brought you company.” He stepped back.
One of his henchmen came close to the edge. Over her head, dangling from a hook in his hands, was a twitching snake. She could catch glimpses of the distinct pattern on its back and she stopped breathing.
“Drop the adder!” Munro ordered, his face intense.
The snake fell on her, still twisting in the air, its cool skin across her neck and shoulders and she panicked, flailed in the pit and scratched her arms on the rough stones sticking out of the walls. She began crawling up the wall, desperate to get away. She heard the snake hit the dirt just as the light disappeared and the trap door had closed on Munro’s vile and wicked laughter.
"I am Glenna Canmore! I am Glenna Canmore! My father is the king!"
The footsteps didn't stop....
"I am Glenna Canmore!"
....They merely disappeared.
She hung her head for a hearbeat, then kept crawling upward, her back pressed to one side of the pit and her feet against the other. Her heartbeat thrummed loudly in her ears and in her chest.
Below was the adder. She could hear it moving in the dirt.
Above was the bolted trap door. Trap…trapped. It was so dark her eyes could not adjust to see anything. Her back ached from the pressure of the jagged rocks, but she dared not relax, wedged as she was she was safe from the adder.
She took long deep breaths and focused on her position. In time, her mind wandered. If she fell, how many snakebites would it take to kill her?
If only…if only…
Her concentration broke and she slipped a bit, but pressed so hard against the wall the rocks felt like knives in her back. She gripped her knees, willed away the pain in her back, and prayed for the strength to stay as she was, prayed for the power of lust to overcome the guard who had promised to come back.
* * *
Lyall adjusted his rough woolen hood and shifted, tugging at the tight peasant’s tunic that pulled at his arms and chest whenever he moved. He snapped the reins and drove the heavy, creaking wain stacked with firewood up to the posts of the manor.
“Where is Cam?” The sheriff’s man asked casually.
“Broke his arm, he did. I am Frang, his brother,” Lyall said, his hands tightening slightly on the reins of the ox team pulling the wagon. Cam was, in truth, tied to a tree up on the rise above the glen.
“Pull your wain to the side and stack the wood there,” the guard said without question and he pointed beyond the gates and around to the back side of the manor house.
Lyall steered the team as told, his gaze darting, taking in the number for guardsmen, the rear gates, lackeys and workers moving about. A groom lugging buckets of water to the stables. The hot iron smell of a smithy. Baying, barking hounds in the kennels and screaming peafowl in pens next to the chickens. He jumped down from the wain as a tall, willow-thin older woman came outside from the open kitchens, eyeing the load of firewood and then eyeing him.
“Where is that Cam?” she said and held up a hand not waiting for an answer. “Foolhardy he is. The mon cannot hold his beer.” She placed her hands on her hips . “Ye look brawny enough to carry wood, mon. Stack it there. When yer done ye can bring some logs inside and stock the wood boxes.” With that, she disappeared inside.
He needed to find Glenna. But the yard was bustling with guards and workmen. Lyall grabbed the woodman’s gloves from the plank seat but they did not fit his hands, so he tossed them aside and unloaded the wain barehanded, stacking wood, watching and studying the place until the bed was almost empty and his hands and clothes were filled with splinters, wood dust, and dried flecks of old moss.
As he brushed off his tunic, he looked up. A milkmaid with her milk pails ha
nging from a wooden yoke was coming towards him. As she passed by him, she struggled and milk sloshed onto the ground. She gave a soft cry, her creamy skin flushed and her eyes panicked. He steadied the yoke, lifting it easily off her shoulders before she spilt the whole lot of it.
The maid thanked him sweetly and looked up at him as if he were God Himself, and Lyall thought he had found his means of information. He had watched them bring Glenna in, but where they were keeping her?
“Where is Cam?” The maid asked shyly, eyeing him up and down.
“Broken arm,” Lyall said and changed the subject. “Where do you want this milk? I shall carry it for you.”
“Here,” she said, opening a large oaken door. “Follow me.” She went down some stairs that led to a cold room beneath the ground floors. He carried the milk and set the buckets down.
Inside the dark room, Lyall easily got the information he wanted from her. A poached chicken, a hound, and some lad the sheriff tracked down in the high forest. One relief--Glenna’s guise was safe--until the maid went on about how she pitied the young boy who would be used so cruelly by the sheriff.
“I heard the boy is locked in the pit,” she told him.
“The pit?” he asked. “What is this pit?”
“ ’Tis a dirt hole with trap door.”
“Have you seen it?” Lyall asked.
“I saw it once, not much bigger inside than an ale barrel, and ‘tis in a round room deep inside the manor, close to the master’s chambers. Some say for his convenience.” She paused. “I am not allowed inside, except in here and the kitchens.” She looked down, clearly ashamed of her limits.
“Were I sheriff, a pretty lass like you could roam the whole of my manor,” he said kindly.
Her expression was open—the sweet, carnal invitation in her eyes. There was a time when he would have taken this maid because that was how men proved their manhood. A youthful ideal—one that changed drastically when he stared down at the broken body of his young wife.
He reached out and touched her jawline. “You are a lovely lass.”
She cocked her head and looked at him with an odd expression, curious. Then she smiled tenderly. “Another holds your heart.”
Her words made him immediately uncomfortable. He shook his head, denying what she thought.
" 'Tis the truth. Whether or not you choose to believe it.”
“Hullo! Worthless woodman! Where are ye?”
“ ‘Tis the cook,” she said. “Go. Hurry. No one should see us.”
Lyall went up of the stairs. The cook stood near the woodpile with her arms crossed. “There ye be, mon. Come. Fill yer arms with wood.” She clapped her hands impatiently. “Come. Come!”
He carried in armloads of wood to stock the kitchen fire boxes, before he volunteered to take wood to the rest of the manor and into the master’s chamber, receiving for his good offer, exactly what he wanted: directions to the sheriff chamber inside the manor. Arms piled with wood, he moved toward the chamber.
Munro was slumped in a chair, his chin resting on his chest, either asleep or drunk or both.
Lyall quietly lay the wood near the hearth and he left the room, moving down the opposite hallway until he opened the door and found the round room.
A red-haired man lay face down on the floor, dead or unconscious. Lyall caught the rise and fall of his shallow breath. Unconscious.
He crossed the small room to where the trap door was open and grabbed a candle from the wall prick. He knelt down, holding the candlelight and he looked down into the pit, where a snake stared back at him with yellow eyes.
19
Glenna hung down from the manor wall, her arms scraping against sharp stones as she dangled there. Looking down, she adjusted her hands, her weight pulling and making the stones cut into them, too.
Take a deep breath and let go. The ground looked far, far away. The guards walked slowly around the manor but still she had little time.
Let go…
She could feel her hands began to slip and closed her eyes, praying for courage. The sound of Munro’s wicked voice echoed in her head and she saw the vivid image of a coiled adder in a dank pit.
A moment later she hit the ground hard, her bones ringing on impact, and then she was running across the grassy field and sliding down over the next slope, tumbling out of sight and rolling over rocks and into bushes, numbed by fear. She got up running her heart beating in time with her swiftly moving feet and her breathing grew harsh.
Behind her, no shouts came from the manor for the guards to run after her, but she kept her ears sharp, expecting with her next breath to hear them shout and begin the chase.
Still, there was no sound but the pounding of her feet and heart. At the arc of another hill and where the terrain went flat, she turned and glanced back, then stumbled on a willow root and fell hard, biting her tongue. Pain shot up her ankle and she tasted blood, but she scrambled up and hobbled toward a skeletal copse of trees ahead of her.
With the cool, dark shadows of the rowans around her, she bent down, hands on her knees as she tried to catch her breath. Soon her lungs had filled and stopped burning, and she slowly straightened, resting her hand on a tree trunk with rugged bark. Nerves raw, she looked back.
No guards streamed out from the gates. In the distance, sheep calmly grazed, the mill’s waterwheel slowly turned at the river beyond, and the valley looked quiet and peaceful and nothing like the place of evil she knew it to be.
She took a long deep breath. It was over, yet her heart still beat like the drums of Morris dancers and in her mind she could still taste the dank scent of the pit; she could still feel the presence of that snake almost as if it were there with her now; she could still feel Munro’s voice. The shaking overtook her, uncontrollable; it started with her hands. She stared down at them as if they belonged to someone else.
You escaped… The words echoed in her head like a monk’s chant. You are free…you are free….
Laughter boiled up and out of her. Relief. She stumbled deeper into the woods. Away. Farther away, and her frantic, odd laughter was the only sound around her. She sagged back against another tree as if her bones had turned to eel jelly.
Eyes closed, she leaned her head back, and her laughter suddenly changed and she was crying, hard, shuddering, wracking sobs. She wrapped her arms around herself, sliding down the tree into a puddle, and just sat like that, crying in the woods as she rubbed her ankle and rocked and hiccupped and silly tears spilled shamefully down her face like water from the mill wheel.
It lasted a long time—her misery, her fear, her relief. Rampant emotions she couldn't control
Soon her crying slowed and she sat there, aware she was completely alone. She closed her eyes. Fergus.... And she started crying again, giant sobs that wracked her body.
Looking up, the huge crown of the tall trees made her feel small and lost. She took long, deep breaths to calm herself.
He was a strong hound. Perhaps....
Haunting her was the image of him wounded yet trying to get up to protect her. She could see his sad eyes as she told him to stay. Was he alive still? She had to know.
“Foolish hound…stealing chickens,” she muttered miserably, rubbing her ankle. And Skye was most likely still tied to a tree, she thought. Sitting there crying was doing no good. They both needed her and she needed them.
With a sense of determination she stood and dusted the leaves off her trouse, and she began to walk, hobble really, since she accepted that she could not run, at least run well. She had been walking a while before she realized that her ankle no longer sent shooting pains up her leg and the dull ache was waning.
The shed was far up into the forest on the opposite side of the valley and below a tall ridgeline of granite that stood to the south. Keeping to the woods kept her hidden, but how long before they discovered she was gone? Could she still run if she were forced to? She had no pain and she could walk.
Be thankful, Glenna, for that, she though
t. She trudged on, looking up at the sky through the trees to judge the daylight, aware there was still more than half the day left. She could make it before nightfall. One step in front of another over leaves and mulch as the sun slowly moved across the broad blue sky.
Eventually she crossed into a clearing with hard-packed ground that made her ankle ring with dull pain. The trees grew thicker and needles covered the ground and less and less light shone through to the forest floor. She licked her lips, which were as dry as her throat and tongue. She needed water, but she moved on. There was water in the shed. She’d pulled it from the stream near where she had tied Skye.
Fergus…please be safe. Please be alive. She concentrated on walking…walking…. walking…walking…. Mouth dry. She just needed to get there. She had to get there.
A sharp, distant sound broke her focus. She glanced up to see nothing, then quickly darted behind a nearby tree and paused only a rapid heartbeat before she moved to another with a low branch, swung up, scrambling higher and up into the thicker branches, into heavier leaves, hugging the trunk before carefully settling quietly into a crook. Her heart was thudding in her ears as she tried to listen.
For a long time there was nothing. She slowly counted. Waiting. Listening.
The noise sounded again. The softest of sounds…just a barest crushing of a step. A horse? Boots?
Suddenly as quickly as it had come, the sound disappeared and there was a strange almost heavy silence, as if all the birds had flown away and there was no life in the forest but hers and whomever was out there.
Again she held her breath, ears sharpened, listening. There was nothing. She dared not move and she took short shallow, quiet breaths, afraid to give herself away.
There it was again…so close this time: the softest of footfalls.
Someone was below the tree.
She heard him breathe.
Oh Lord… She shifted ever-so-slightly to try to look through a small opening in the thick leaves.
“Hallo?” came the voice of Montrose.
Lud! Glenna’s heart jumped into her throat.