Just A Thief

Under my breath, I murmured the traditional, “Ouch!” as I fell onto the hard, packed earth. I didn’t notice it was ground, though, until I opened my eyes against the brightly shining afternoon sun. Unless I had slept an entire twenty-four hours, the sun should not have been so bright and there should have been heavy, dark, and full rain clouds overhead. And I definitely wouldn’t have been in what seemed to be a large practice yard, a courtyard, in the shadow of a great edifice. A closer look defined the magnificent building as a grand palace, fit for a hundred kings. I didn’t have a chance to look any closer as the quiet of the courtyard was broken by my formerly stricken company.

“Seize her!” one of the men shouted, pointing a sword at me. If it had even struck me as odd that all of the thirty or so men wore full medieval armor and had swords or pikes or whatever else in their hands, I didn’t acknowledge it. I just scrambled to my feet, casting my eyes around warily at the heavily armed men that were all around me.

“What sort of witch are you?” another man asked, standing to the back beside the first. “Who do you think you are, coming right to the King’s backdoor like that?!”

I decided at that moment, when my arms were firmly wrenched behind my back and I let out a pained sound, that this all was definitely not a dream as I’d found myself hoping, and that I wasn’t back home in New York anymore.

“I asked you a question, wench!” the man who had asked me what sort of witch I was shouted at me, spittle flying from his mouth as he addressed me. “What are you doing here? How did you even get here, you accursed witch?!”

“I don’t know!” I yelled back, struggling against the man who held me where I stood, his hands gripping painfully tightly. “And as far as I’m aware, I’m not a witch at all! Let me go!”

“Take her to the dungeons,” the first man, much more composed than his companion, stated calmly. “We’ll get her to talk later and we’ll get to the bottom of it all then.”

“Yes, sir!” came from behind me, and my arms were yanked up even higher than I had ever thought possible. A sharp cry escaped my lips at the sudden, shooting pain in my shoulders and arms.

“Hush up, there!” another voice behind me growled after I cried out, and I was cuffed ‘round the head. Rather than cry out like I so nearly did, I resorted to gritting my teeth, locking my jaw tightly so I wouldn’t smart off to them.

“Try anything funny,” yet another voice came, close to my left ear, “and you’ll be food for the sea monster what lives in the moat, after you’ve been speared by the sword what’s pointed at your back.”

A sharp prick in the small of my back just proved that the man was really holding a sword to me as a threat. I let out a barely audible gasp at the completely unexpected pricking sensation. I’d already decided that I really was not enjoying this brand new experience, which would have seemed so much more interesting than everyday life at any other time.

They began to methodically guide me to the nearest door, through which we would undoubtedly find a staircase leading downward.

I was led, poked, and prodded down a wide, well trafficked corridor, before being turned to a tight, abandoned hallway. Two men walked in front of me and two behind me, as if there were any possible way I could take them out and escape. At the end of the slim corridor was a heavy wooden door, which the first man held open for the rest of us to pass through. Beyond that door were the narrow stairs I’d expected, a cold draft wafting up the shaft from the floors below us. Without one man even explaining like he did, which I ignored, I knew this was likely to be the one and only entrance and exit to the dungeons.

“Sometimes we bring the common thieves from the prisons in and make them clean,” one man said to me. “You’re lucky that they just cleaned this morning, witch, or the stench would be unbearable for a delicate nose like yours is apt to be.”

I wanted to tell the arrogant man that I wasn’t a witch, but I held my tongue. I didn’t exactly feel like being impaled or smacked around anymore than I already had been. It was against my nature to be so quiet when goaded, but I had to be. At least for the time being.

The guards made numerous jokes at my expense as we walked down and down and down, past three other doors, until we reached the dampest, coolest part at the very bottom of the stairs. The guards kept mockingly telling me that I would be a queen among beggars down in the dungeons. I took these statements to mean that I would be the only prisoner who was a female, but I didn’t figure that beggars would be the type of prisoners I’d find here. Sarcastically, I murmured, “What fun.”

My statement earned me another cuff around the head, but I didn’t say a thing in retaliation. I let the men shove me roughly into the first cell directly across from the bottom of the stairs, with other cells stretching to the right and left of it. My arms were numb and I couldn’t control them, so I fell hard on my frunt, grunting at the impact of my chin striking the cold, solid, and unforgiving stone floor.

“We’ll be back for you in a few hours, Princess,” one guard, the one who seemed to be the leader figure of the lot, said mockingly yet again. “Get comfortable in this throne room we’ve prepared for you and just wait, Milady.”

The other guards laughed raucously at his remarks.

“Oh, I just might die from anticipation,” I made use of my sarcasm again once the cell bars had been securely fastened.

“Don’t die until we get you back upstairs, at least,” a guard with a large beard sneered at me. “We don’t want to have to carry any dead weight all the way back up there.”

I rolled my eyes as the men left, guffawing at their own ridiculous jokes. I was trying to massage the feeling back into my arms, rubbing my shoulders first, then moving down slowly. Soon, they were tingling in the mildly painful way that numb body parts do, and to ignore the uncomfortable sensation, I began to examine my surroundings. The first thing I noticed was the grubby, long haired man who stared at me from three cells to my right. In the two cells almost directly across from his, another two men in varying states of disarray were also staring at me. I turned my head to the left and found much the same reaction from the four unkempt men within my line of sight.

“If you have anything to say to me, please go on and say it,” I said, climbing to my feet and dusting myself off as best I could, acting as though nothing had happened. “I’d like to know why it is, exactly, you’re all staring at me.”

I sighed when the silence stretched, thankful that at least one man had looked away like I’d asked. He was in the cell directly to the left of me.

“It’s just…” the first man I’d seen spoke up, and I turned my attention to his rough voice, “…you’re…you’re a woman.”

“Bah!” an older looking man, to my left and four cells distant, said. “She’s but a child yet, no woman at all!”

“You act like you’ve never seen a woman before,” I remarked to the man on the right. “And I’m not a child, I’m seventeen! Besides, what does being a woman have to do with you all staring at me?”

“They don’t take women,” said the one not staring anymore. His back was to me as he continued, “At least, not down here. So you must have done something serious against the crown, or some such nonsense, for them to lock you up down here.”

“So just disappearing from my house in New York and somehow landing in the middle of the practice yard is a crime against the crown?” I snorted, making use, once more, of my sarcasm. “Great. Just great. So where do I go from here? Food for the moat monster?”

“You just…appeared here?” one of the so far silent men broke his silence. “Out of nowhere?”

“Out of a nice sleep,” I retorted, walking over to the cot in my cell and tentatively poking at it. Sighing slightly, I gave in and plopped down on the lumpy, uncomfortable thing and added, “but yeah, I guess you’d say it was out of nowhere.”

“No wonder they locked you up,” the man to my immediate left turned around to look at me. From his appearance, it seemed that he had not been down here for very long at all. His brown beard was only two days’ worth, at most, although his hair looked like he let it grow shaggy before his imprisonment. He looked to be in his upper thirties. “Maybe they think that you’re one of the real royal family. Or maybe a member of the real Royal Court. They all disappeared soon after the Captain of the Guard turned on the King and Queen and killed them, taking the throne by force. It was just a few months after the child prince was kidnapped in the midst of the night.”