Captives of the Fern Queen

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Captives of the Fern Queen Page 3

by Sarah G. Byrd


  A number of lambs had gone missing on the southeastern border.

  “Stolen,” one of the men growled.

  The shepherds of Mount Pasture did not take kindly to the idea of someone stealing their lambs. King Luff had a worried expression on his face as he urged them not to point accusing fingers without proof.

  Janna stifled a yawn, and when the meal was over, she managed to stand, though she wobbled a bit. One of the shepherds spoke pleasantly to her, and she responded with a nod and a monosyllable. It was the best she could do under the circumstances.

  “Let’s go sit in the breezeway,” suggested Queen Berta.

  The shepherds declined, going their way after prolonged, though undoubtedly heartfelt, thanks for their supper. Janna waved goodbye weakly and followed her father to the breezeway, where she collapsed into the nearest chair.

  Most houses in the Kingdom of Mount Pasture had a breezeway, a delightful room with windows specially designed to catch whatever breezes might be blowing. People wandered in and out of the small room or sat to rest a few minutes if they wanted to share being comfortably tired with other people.

  Berta joined them as soon as she’d shown the shepherds to the door.

  “Oh, Janna, I forgot to tell you that we saw a friend of yours today. Alland was moving his sheep to another pasture and dropped by to say hello. We insisted that he have a bite of lunch with us.”

  “I’m sure he dropped by to say hello,” said Janna in an insinuating tone of voice. “Everyone in Mount Pasture drops by to say hello at either lunch or supper.”

  “We were delighted to have him,” her mother scolded, then paused and started over again. “I haven’t had a chance to hear about your morning at school.”

  “It was dull. Not even the teacher wanted to be there.”

  “It’s always that way the last day of school. Did I tell you that your teacher is retiring?”

  “About time. She’s old.”

  It was obvious that her mother was trying to give her a reprieve from scolding, but Janna didn’t want the difficult parts of her day ignored. They needed to talk about them, not chitchat about everything else going on in Montaland. She would have begun the conversation herself, but the words wouldn’t come. Without warning, she found herself wanting to burst into tears and hide her head in her mother’s dress.

  Janna shifted positions uncomfortably. Twelve-and-a-half-year-olds did not hide their faces in their mothers’ dresses—and this made three times today, she’d either cried or wanted to. She rarely cried. What was happening to her?

  “Who’s old? Are you ladies talking about me?” asked her father from the depths of his chair.

  As usual, he had not been listening to the conversation and had only caught the last word.

  Berta smiled at her husband and opened her mouth to reply, but Janna beat her to it.

  “My teacher, who should have quit teaching ages ago.”

  “She is old, Pound Cake. It happens to all of us. Even I’m two or three years older than I was fifteen years ago.”

  Janna knew her father was hoping for a responsive laugh to his stupid joke, but she wasn’t about to give him one, especially after he’d used that nickname.

  When the silence got heavy, Luff added, “But you can still be happy when you’re old.”

  “We’ll have to invite her over for a good meal. She could use some fattening up,” Berta chimed in.

  That got a response.

  “Fattening up? Haven’t we got enough fat of our own without working on everyone else in the kingdom?” Janna asked incredulously.

  “I meant no harm,” scolded her mother again. “She’d enjoy a home-cooked meal.”

  Janna frowned, feeling overweight and helpless to do anything about it. How could she ever get control of her eating when her mother was determined to cook an unending stream of company meals! She glanced at her father, who was staring at the floor again. Obviously, he had gone back to thinking of the missing lambs, so Janna concentrated on her mother.

  Ask what’s bothering me. Ask. Just ask.

  Actually, her mother did have a thoughtful expression on her face—and she was looking in Janna’s direction. Janna looked back, too out of sorts to speak first. When Berta opened her mouth, Janna leaned forward hopefully.

  “What about chicken and dumplings with corn pudding, stewed tomatoes, fresh green beans cooked with bacon, fried potatoes, biscuits with butter and honey, and nut cakes with caramel cream sauce for dessert?”

  Janna stared at her in disbelief, and her mother explained, “For your teacher, dear.”

  Janna continued to stare, her body as still as her face. She felt like the storm that had passed through Mount Pasture a week ago. Minutes before it arrived, the winds had stopped but not in a calm way. The air had felt tight, as if something meant to get out.

  Her mother turned uneasily toward Luff.

  “Or do you think that’s a little too fattening?”

  “Huh?” Luff said blankly.

  “Why, what Janna said, dear. Perhaps we should pay attention to our weight. I’m afraid that I’m getting pudgy.”

  “Not a bit of it. At any rate, no more than I am,” Luff added, and they smiled merrily at each other.

  The storm struck as Janna sprang out of her chair and screamed, “That’s it! That’s absolutely it! I can’t take it any longer! Neither of you can carry on a real conversation and let me tell you something you don’t seem to know. The three of us are fat, F-A-T, FAT!”

  She ran from the room, wanting to be by herself. Someone would drop by soon though. People were always dropping by in the evenings to visit with her parents or stroll in the garden—there was only one place guaranteed to be private. Janna rushed out of the castle and around the outside of the garden wall.

  It was fortunate that she had remembered this place before supper. No one would think of searching for her in the narrow strip of land between the wall and the hill. In fact, she remembered a mound of dirt in the middle of the strip that would serve her purposes particularly well. The mound went a third of the way up the wall. Above it was a boulder that jutted out from the hill. In between the top of the mound and the boulder was a hiding place no one ever went to, a dark hiding place, the type of place only an exploring child would find interesting.

  Janna darted under, over, and around the rocks and hummocks in her way. She was wheezing when she finally got to the top of the mound. With a heavy thump, she threw herself down and immediately wished she’d gone somewhere else.

  It was not very appealing, this gap between the wall and the hill. Evening had brought cool reviving breezes to the hills of Mount Pasture, but they didn’t reach here. It was private; that was the one positive thing that could be said about it. However, there wasn’t anything but dirt, and the dirt was full of small, hardened clods of earth. Janna wiggled about, trying to find a smooth place to sit.

  A twinge of guilt stirred inside of her.

  They’ll say I was rude. I know they will, and I wasn’t. Besides, even if I was, they deserved it. No one ever talks to me about anything important.

  All Janna wanted out of life right then was an uninterrupted period of time in which to sit and think and completely justify herself—but she couldn’t get comfortable.

  “Sheep’s wool,” she said out loud. “How can I think with dirt clods poking me?”

  Flouncing to another spot, she sat down hard.

  With nightmare suddenness, the earth gave way beneath her, and she found herself falling, the mound of dirt caving in on top of her head. In a panic, she struck out, pushing her way through the dirt. She couldn’t see, she couldn’t breathe, and the only thing she could touch was soft, suffocating dirt. The heavy mass on top of her wouldn’t budge, so instinctively, she dug sideways to where she could breathe.

  She could breathe, but she couldn’t see.

  It was dark where she lay, so dark that she wouldn’t have seen her hand if she had waved it in front of her face,
but Janna didn’t move her hand. She was afraid to move anything in case she caused another avalanche of dirt. Tears ran down her cheeks, and before long, sobs shook her body, though it frightened her to move even that much.

  Only one person knew where she was. The old stories agreed that he always knew where everyone was. Nobody could hide from him. Eventually, she remembered.

  Chapter 4

  Darkness

  “Help me, help me, help me, help me,” Janna mumbled, wanting to scream the words but not daring, because the sound might make the roof cave in again.

  It made sense not to scream, which could have indicated a reassuring level of self-control, except that the words wouldn’t stop. They kept pouring out of her mouth and that frightened her on top of everything else. Then a small quiet began to grow inside her, and her mind calmed enough to make her mouth quit mumbling. The Maker must have heard her. He must have sent the quiet.

  Unfortunately, the first thought she had was that supper had ended only thirty minutes ago. It would be hours before her parents realized she was missing, and even then they wouldn’t know where she was. At that, Janna panicked again, her fears as dark and heavy as the air surrounding her.

  “Help me, help me,” she began again, but this time the sense of quiet came quicker. Panic was waiting on either side, so Janna kept her mind in the middle of the quiet and refused to think about anything else.

  Pushing up cautiously, she found that she could sit without bumping her head, and sit she did. The minutes dragged past. Her breathing sounded loud in the darkness. At least, nothing else terrible happened to her. In fact, nothing happened. She didn’t let herself wonder where she was. She spent quite a long time not wondering about it.

  At last, she started to explore the darkness. There was a dirt floor underneath her with walls on either side that she could reach from where she sat. The ceiling wasn’t far from her head, much too low to allow her to stand. A mass of dirt was directly behind her, but she couldn’t possibly dig her way out. It was too soft; it would collapse on top of her again.

  There was one direction left. Tentatively, Janna reached forward. Empty air met the tips of her fingers even when she stretched her arms as far as they would go. She took a deep breath. Then she rolled forward onto her hands and knees and started to crawl.

  Don’t think about it, just do it.

  Her skirt was getting in the way. Awkwardly, Janna tucked it into the waist band and continued crawling. When her hands and knees rubbed raw, her body began trembling, though she wasn’t cold. In fact, she was sweating. It had to be shock. Her lips were trembling too, but she didn’t think that was shock.

  For the first time in her life, she found herself saying, “I’m only twelve years old.”

  “Twelve-and-a-half,” came the automatic correction, and she almost smiled.

  Even an almost smile helped. An idea came to her. She’d make padding out of her skirt. It was filthy by now, but that wouldn’t matter. Ripping long strips of cloth from the bottom of her skirt, she wrapped each knee and knotted the ends together.

  Then she wrapped one of her hands, but in order to make a knot—quickly, Janna bit down on one end of the strip and pulled the other end tight, gagging at the taste of dirt in her mouth. She had to stop and spit for several minutes before she could make herself do the same thing to the other hand. When that knot was tight, her stomach heaved miserably several times, but the job was done.

  “This is a tunnel. It’ll take me out of here,” she said with more bravado than she felt and went back to crawling.

  On and on Janna crawled, until she could hardly remember doing anything else. The darkness made it difficult to know how much time was passing. When she got tired, she slept. When she woke up, she crawled. There was only darkness and the smell of earth, darkness and the smell of earth, on and on.

  Finally, there was a difference. The shuffling sounds she was making began to echo. Janna reached upward—nothing. She rose to her feet and lifted both hands as high as they would go—still nothing. The walls hadn’t moved, but the ceiling had risen. She could walk now.

  Walking was faster than crawling, and she made more progress through the tunnel, which twisted and turned, cutting its way through the darkness. There was no noise except for the thud of her footsteps for another long period of time. Then she rounded one of the sharper turns and heard something new.

  Janna stopped short, her heart racing. The sound kept going, soft and continuous, and somehow familiar.

  “What is it?” she asked, but it wasn’t until she quit trying to think and yawned that the memories came to her, bright in another day’s sunlight, yet remote, as if they had happened years ago.

  First, she was sitting on a rock watching ripples; next, she was making a cup out of a big green leaf; last, she was leaning against a tree with a book in her hands, listening to the cheerful rush of—

  “It’s a stream!”

  She licked two very dry lips and began walking faster, but in three steps she stopped short again. The tunnel made sounds echo. That running water could be five feet away or fifty, and there was no way of knowing how deep it was.

  Janna began testing the ground in front of her before each step. She was walking up a steep incline now. Her body leaned forward, and she would have started panting if she hadn’t been going so slowly. Then one foot felt air where there should have been ground. Kneeling, she dipped a hand into the dark emptiness and touched water.

  “Cold,” she said as she drank. “Cold, but good, so good.”

  Scooping up water in the dark was hard to do. Her clothes were sopping wet before she finished her drink, but who cared about that? There was something else on Janna’s mind. She lay on her stomach and reached down through the water.

  Four inches, five, six—then her hand touched a rocky bottom.

  “Yes!”

  It was a shallow stream, not a deep river. She’d be able to cross it. Easing her feet into the water, she walked carefully across the current, feeling more on top of the situation, but her new confidence didn’t last long. At the other side of the stream, solid rock met her outstretched hands, and the rock wall rose as high as she could reach, even when she jumped. Janna splashed back through the stream, not going nearly as carefully this time. Her body began to tremble again and she bit her lower lip.

  “The tunnel turns. It turns to follow the stream. It turns.”

  She was repeating words again.

  “That’s okay. You would too,” she snapped.

  Now she was talking to a person who wasn’t there, but before she could react to that, Janna reached the bank of the stream and felt along it until her hands were stopped by another wall of solid rock that jutted out over the water. Her heart pounded as she reversed directions.

  “Yes, oh yes!”

  On this side of the tunnel, there was a pathway between the stream and the wall. Exhaling with relief, she climbed onto it and moved forward, refusing to think about what she would have done if the tunnel had ended. It helped that the path was narrow in places and demanded her full concentration. Even so, she lost her balance twice and fell into the stream.

  It was unnerving to fall in the dark.

  She stepped back onto the path after her second fall and tried shuffling forward without lifting her feet, but in less than a minute, a rock tripped her, and she tumbled once more into the water. As she wearily stood, balancing in the swiftly moving current, someone moaned in her ear. Whoever it was must be standing right next to her.

  Janna stiffened.

  There were several subjects she hadn’t let herself think about in the darkness. Meeting another person had been one of the foremost. After all, she knew who had built the tunnel—but even now Janna wouldn’t let her mind go in that direction.

  “Who’s there?” she asked and shook as she waited for an answer. The truth didn’t come to her until another moan broke the silence, slipping out from between her own parted lips. It’s me. Lamb loony. Am I los
ing my mind?

  “No! You’d moan too if you were me.”

  She lifted her chin, ignoring the fact that she was still talking to a person who wasn’t there. Right now, it was better to talk to someone who wasn’t there than someone who was!

  Feeling her way onto the path, she kept going, grateful that she wasn’t climbing any longer. That made walking a little easier. A few minutes later, her forehead bumped hard against a rock. Janna rubbed the sore place gingerly but didn’t react to the pain as much as she would have under ordinary circumstances. An unpleasant foreboding had come to her.

  Frowning fiercely, she ducked beneath the rock, moving one hand along its underside as she passed it. Sure enough, there was another rock beyond the first one, then another and another, and each succeeding rock was lower than the one before it. She bent her knees into an uncomfortable crouch and took several more steps, hoping the overhanging rocks were a brief obstacle. They weren’t. The roof of the tunnel was lowering.

  She’d have to crawl again.

  Janna lowered to her hands and knees, crawled a few feet, and then froze in place. She couldn’t go on, twelve-and-a-half notwithstanding. A whimper fell out of her mouth, and it was a pathetic, babyish whimper that would have made her hang her head in shame if she hadn’t been too frightened to care.

  What if the roof lowered until she couldn’t go on? The stream was shallow; it could easily run through a hole too small for her. Trapped in a dead end was one of her forbidden subjects, and she tried hard not to think about it, but her efforts weren’t successful this time. Her throat tightened until she found it hard to swallow. It was at that inopportune moment that something worse forced itself into her mind.

  She remembered the Stalker.

  To be specific, she remembered with sudden, terrible clarity the nightmares she used to have about the Stalker. They had never taken place in the woods. No, they had always taken place deep in the darkness of his underground home. There had been a passageway that she never wanted to take, but take it she had in every dream. A few feet into the passageway had been a turn—and around the turn the Stalker had stood, holding a dripping candle, glaring at her.

 

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