CHAPTER
1
The sudden brightness made her
face squirm and eyes crinkle in response. A hand reached into the box, grabbed her
by her hair and pulled her onto the ground. A flurry of laughter rose overhead.
With her face pressed onto the stone-cold floor, reality began seeping in her
foggy brain. Her vision cleared up and she spotted two pairs of leather boots
in immediate sight.
“Not a fighter, eh?” one of
the men said.
She felt a hand on her foot,
grasping, as it dragged her across the floor and manhandled her onto a wooden
chair.
“Change them ropes to thicker
ones,” another man said.
“Let me look at that face
first…kekekekeke.”
A finger and a thumb urged her
face up by her chin and forced her look at the men surrounding her. There were
four of them, leering in her face, exhaling odours which felt better to
anonymously read off the pages of a book than experience in one’s breath. Their
faces were scarred by time and war, darkened by the sun and an assumable
abhorrence towards water. Thick bushy hair left no pore unmarked on their
faces, in hopes of asserting dominance probably. Their beefy builds left no
room for a violent retaliation unless she wished her head to be smashed open,
in one blow, and end the nightmare before it would begin.
“She a gud one, I tell ye.”
The strange man’s hands
grabbed her by the shoulders.
The girl sucked in a breath
from that pungent, murky, damp, air.
“Show ‘em heaven, lass, eh.”
“Mee too, mee too!”
As soon as the man neared her
face with puckered lips hidden amidst the bushy mouth of his, the girl began
coughing. Violently. Her neck jerked forward but her spit reached flung
forward, reaching left, right and centre; she coughed and coughed, distancing
the men from her sickly, writhing body.
The dungeon was large, dark
and cold, encased by a stone floor and stone walls, lit up by fire torches and
lanterns. The men backed up into a corner, eyeing their captive with much
disgust as her body contoured into different angles with no breaks in the
cough-fest.
“Is she dyin’?”
“Last storm before the final
calm?”
Third of them wiped his spit
splattered face by his sleeve.
“Or is she acting?”
The fourth man scowled forward
and charged his hand for a resounding slap but the momentum of his bulky hand
reaching her face was slower than the spout of blood exiting her mouth and
making him recoil in defense.
Too late though, for his open
mouth and bushy face were now covered in blood. Certainly not a new sight but
surely a sudden one for all of them.
“Argh! You disgusting country
lass!!” the man scowled.
“Boss!”
“Bossman!”
“Sire!”
His three underlings ran up to
his side, armed with their sleeves to instantly wipe clean their superior’s
face. Though, their loyalty lasted only until they heard the words being
hoarsely let out:
“I … h-have…tub-tuberculosis,
ARCKHAHKKKHKHKHAAKHAM KHA KHA KHA, co-con-con-ARKHAKHAKHAKHAKHA-contagious.”
Heaven, Earth and everything
in between knew the woes of a long-term slow death exceeded that of being shot
by a bullet. So, in respect for their future, all the men hastily retreated to
– what one could easily assume – clean themselves up.
The girl spat the last of
blood in her mouth and fell back into the chair with an audible sigh of relief.
Her tongue dangled out to let it remain open for some cold air to seep in and
caress the open gash inside her mouth. She had bitten on her left cheek to make
the violent coughs look more convincing but heaven knew it hurt like hell.
‘Well, I survived that thanks
to watching so many dramas…but for how long?’ she
thought as she looked around the dungeon. Behind her was a prison cell against
which stood the box she was brought in. On the farther right was an empty
wooden table pressed against the wall and directly opposite to it was a suit of
armour.
An idea struck in her head as
she dropped onto her knees, from the chair, and seethed as a sharp jolt of pain
shot through her legs. The ground was rough and sharp against her knees but she
was in no situation of whining about the ill upkeep of a castle dungeon – even
though her opinion should have been highly valuable as a prisoner.
The girl crawled and managed
to reach the suit of armour at the expense of her kneecaps and threw herself
onto the metal, sideways, making it crash to the floor with a resounding THUD!
It broke its shape as the head rolled off one direction and the arms in
another.
She cringed at sheer loudness
of her actions and could only hope no one heard. Amidst the dismantled parts, she
spotted the armour’s sword laying near the prison cell. She crawled her way to
it, gasping in delight as the slightly unsheathed blade, at the rear, glistened
under the torchlights. She pressed the sheath under her foot and struggled to
pull the sword out by its hilt. Though, as she stretched her body to pull
harder, the sheath slid inside the prison cell emanating a loud drag while the
hilt remained in her hand.
Praying to the plot gods, she
began attempting to cut open the ropes on her hands.
“Ah, a dungeon escape?”
The sudden words jolted her in
the direction of the voice. She spotted a blurred presence in the prison,
dragging the sheath as he walked forward, from the depths of the cell, into the
light.
Her hands began moving faster
on the blade.
His eyes caught the glow of
the torchlight as stood beyond the bars, looking down on her with much
fascination. The buttons on his coat jacket glistened crimson and it was
giveaway enough for her to know that he wasn’t an ordinary prisoner.
He seemed to have spotted the
fast hand movement behind her back and could not help but snicker the words, “The
Isdarien Dungeon is infamous for being an inescapable labyrinth, don’t you
know?”
“I know,” she replied,
monotonous, tongue poking out the side of her mouth to let the cold air soothe
her burning gash.
“How…?” he frowned.
“Did you not say it is
infamous?” she scoffed.
“I was being enigmatic,” he
scoffed back, “Of course no one knows.”
She frowned.
“Well, now I know,” she
shrugged.
“So, don’t you consider your
ardent efforts at escaping to be futile?” he asked, eyes narrowed and neck
craning to try and get a good view of her awkwardly rubbing the fraying rope to
the sword’s blade.
“I don’t,” she replied,
nonchalant.
“Damn, are you a regular?”
“What are you in for?”
A charming laugh resonated off
the dungeon walls, intriguing enough for her to look up, momentarily. Curly
dark hair covered his forehead but did not hide the genuine crinkle of his sharp
eyes.
“I disrespected the big old
man,” he replied, a boxy smile encasing his mouth.
“Pfffft, God?” she sputtered
and looked away, afraid he’d catch her staring (though, in her current
circumstances, there was much else she should have prioritised on her
‘scares-me-right-now’ list.)
“No,” he scoffed, “Grandpa.”
“What’d you do?” she asked,
unknown to the fact that a smile was sneaking its way onto her lips.
“I laughed at his thirteenth
wedding,” his reply was hushed like a conspiracy.
The rope tore apart and the
sword jingled against the floor, once again.
“A punishable offence,” she
uttered hoarsely as a realisation set in.
He is a prince.
With her hands free, she
rotated her shoulders and wrists to feel the new-found-ease in her limbs. Her
brain pondered over the princes’ lore in the book but all she could recall was
how each died at the hands of Leonora.
“I am not a regular,” she
answered as she picked up the sword and wedged it in between the ropes of her
feet, “I was abducted.”
There was a moment of silence
as the slow drag of the sword blade tried to penetrate into the thick rope of
her feet.
“So…how do you know about the
dungeon?” he asked, audibly confused.
“I know about a lot of
things,” she shrugged in reply.
“Oh!” he neared the bars and
grabbed one each in hand as he asked, “Do you know something about me?”
As she looked up, she found a
wide pair of blazing eyes staring back into hers. An upturned smile graced her
lips, out of sheer fascination, and she replied, “Well, what I know about us is
that if I die here today, then,” she leaned closer to the prison bars and
crouched down to be in his line of sight, “An upcoming war will wipe out the
entire Royal family in five years.”
She held up hand, wiggling the
five fingers, in his face.
Maybe it was because he was
crouched, away from the torchlight, but his face darkened.
She picked up the sword to
repeat her chore when her breath hitched.
Distant thuds of footsteps
made her hand movements hasty and imprecise.
“Someone’s coming,” the
prisoner said.
“I can hear it,” she struggled
to move the sword faster but as the footsteps closed in, her heart thundered
harder in her ears. Sweat overtook her hands as she tried to grasp the sword by
the hilt to make it work faster but a sudden coagulation in her throat
compelled her to begin cough. ‘Ah! How did I forget…Runa was a genuinely
terminally sick person…’ she thought.
Footsteps closed in, the
wooden door was pulled open, she continued coughing violently until blood oozed
from her throat and splattered all over the pink dress she was wearing. Her
vision darkened as she felt a hand jerk her head by her hair.
Then, darkness consumed her
into a pool of her own expulsion.
