Secrets of an Anarchist

Gisella roamed around the castle, desperate for something to do. She’d just finished her lessons and had nothing else on her agenda for the rest of the day. As she strolled the corridors, she thought of all the adventures she could go on. She could take the horses into the vineyard with Alessio and taste the grapes. Maybe she would find Alessio and wander through the forest. Alessio might even take her for a picnic atop the castle wall.
Gisella’s whole life revolved around dear, sweet Alessio. She had known him her whole life, as he was the head housekeeper’s son. Everything she knew about life or nature, she had learned from her best friend, Alessio. Their friendship had grown into some sort of comfortable, content love without the pressure of marriage or children. All they had to worry about was enjoying themselves.
The princess looked up as quiet footsteps approached. Her friend Gioia greeted her with a warm hug and a bright smile. After exchanging their usual greetings and inquiries of events, Gioia wasted no time in beginning the day’s mischief.
“What are we to do today, darling?” she asked with a grin of excitement. “Shall we scale the castle walls, or slay the dragon?” she joked.
Gisella shrugged. “Why don’t we ask Alessio? He always has outrageous ideas,” she offered without enthusiasm.
“Oh, nonsense; Alessio is preoccupied. Something to do with the guards again,” Gioia countered. “We’ve no need of a silly boy. Let’s do something bad. I’m sure court is in dire need of some juicy gossip these days. What do you think?”
Gisella grinned from ear to ear. “Alright, I know just what we are going to do today. However, you’ve got to be quiet; nobody is supposed to know about this place. Understand?” she asked, knowing full well that her friend certainly did not know the meaning of the word “quiet.”
Gioia nodded and followed closely behind her friend. Gisella led the way through the westernmost wing of the castle and into an old cellar that used to function as a prison cell decades before. In the far corner of the room stood a door about knee height, properly discrete as the entrance to the tunnels. Gisella looked at Gioia and gestured toward the door.
“There it is. Crawl through,” she said. “It’s filthy, so pick up your skirt.”
Gisella crawled through after her friend, careful not to scrape her knees. Once on the other side, they got to their feet. Looking around, the princess noted there’d been no change in the months since her last visit to the tunnels. She was slightly hesitant to proceed, given that she’d never been in the tunnels without Alessio. He was always the one to lead the way with his uncanny sense of direction. Nevertheless, Gisella trudged into a side tunnel she’d yet to explore in the previous years.
The pair soon came across a set of rooms. Gioia walked straight into the first one, followed closely behind by her friend. The room was packed with stacks upon stacks of boxes, each containing hundreds of letters. Gisella rifled through one box; all of the letters were from a man named William Alistair. Sorting through another box, she found more letters from the same man.
“Gioia, come here just a minute,” she called anxiously. The girl went to stand near Gisella. “Would you mind helping me? Look through some of these boxes. I think they’re all from the same man.”
A sudden noise echoed through the tunnel behind them. The two looked at each other, mild panic in their eyes. Gisella took Gioia’s hand and cautiously proceeded toward the door.
“Let’s check it out,” she suggested under her breath.
Gioia nodded and plastered herself to her friend’s side as they walked out of the room and inched down the tunnel. They followed a faint noise, not having any idea as to what it could possibly be. Nevertheless, they were supposed to be alone in the tunnels and did not like that someone else was snooping around down there.
As the pair neared an intersection, the noise grew louder. It was a scuffling and squeaking sound. When they peered around the corner to the right, they discovered a pack of rats eating something rancid off the ground. The girls sighed with relief and continued down the adjacent hallway.
The next few minutes passed in complete silence. The tunnel was bare, save the droppings from hundreds of rats. Gisella and Gioia tuned out the sounds of the rodents skittering all around them.
Suddenly, the sound of a man yelling echoed loudly through the tunnels. They girls jumped and squealed, holding onto each other in sheer fear. Slowly, they crept their way toward the man’s voice. They were led to the set of rooms where they had found the letters.
Peeking into the first room, Gisella could recognize only two faces. Her stepmother, the queen, was there standing next to Gioia’s uncle, Count Lombardi.
“Uncle?” came a confused voice from over Gisella’s shoulder. The princess shushed her friend.
“Serge, you were supposed to have done this already,” the queen scolded the count. “I gave you one simple task. ‘Kill the line.’ If you cannot do what is asked of you, I will be forced to do away with you. Would you like that?” she inquired.
The count lowered his head. “No, Your Majesty. I will get the job done,” he answered.
Gisella heard Gioia draw in her breath. Seeing what was coming, the princess frantically threw her hands over her friend’s mouth and nose in an effort to stifle it. Gioia could not hold it in. With a sharp intake of breath, she let go of the sneeze. The sounded pounded through the network of tunnels.
Cursing in her mind, Gisella slowly turned to look back into the room. The queen, count, and four burly men were all looking at the two girls.
The queen’s face burned red with anger. “Get them! Don’t just stand there. They’ve heard us,” she wailed.
Gisella grabbed the other girl’s arm and bounded toward the end of the tunnel. Dragging her friend behind her, the princess took the first left, then right and left again. The girls flew through the passageways, trying to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the men from the room.
“I don’t get it,” Gioia exclaimed. “Why are we running?” she asked.
Gisella glanced over at her friend mid-stride. “Did you not hear her?” she snapped. “She said ‘kill the line.’ She is going to kill me. My stepmother is after the royal family,” the princess exclaimed. Tears leaked from her eyes as she ran.
Gioia stopped abruptly in the middle of an intersection. “No. My uncle would not be a part of something as terrible as that. He loves and honors the royal very much,” she insisted.
Gisella realized her friend had stopped running and went back for her. Tugging on Gioia’s arm, the princess urged her friend to keep moving. Gioia hesitated, struggle plainly written on her face.
“I don’t believe it for a second,” she said, not budging.
“Fine,” Gisella exclaimed as she began to run again. “I’m not going to sit here and readily wait for my life to be taken.”
The princess took off, not looking back. Seconds later, she heard the reassuring footfalls of her friend catching up to her. Gisella smiled to herself but remained silent.
The pair quickly approached a dead end to the passage. As they got closer, they realized that there was a door. They stopped in front of it and tried to get the door to open, but it wouldn’t budge. Dry mud caked the edges of the door.
“Help me get all this mud off,” the princess cried.
She dug into the hard mud with her fingernails. Gioia pulled out the flat nickel spike that held up her hair and began stabbing around the edges of the door. In minutes, the girls had cleared the door of its plaster. Using their weights combined, the pair charged at the wooden door. It budged and they tumbled through the threshold.
Having no time to think, the two girls took every other turn they saw. Pausing, Gisella realized she heard the faint echo of rattling iron and stopped in her tracks. She ran back to the spot where there was a small grate in the floor of the tunnel just barely big enough for the girls to fit through. Gisella motioned for Gioia to be quiet and help her move the grate. The grate covered a small enclosure in the ground.
The girls climbed one after the other into the enclosure and replaced the grate above their heads. They waited for what seemed like hours. Each was exhausted beyond compare. Every couple of minutes, they would nod to sleep, only to immediately startle themselves awake again.
After what seemed like hours, a group of men came barreling down the tunnel and past the grate under which the girls hid. The two waited several minutes to ensure safety before carefully and quietly climbing back out of the hole in the ground.
Gisella sighed quietly, wiping the dirt from her hands. “I think we should head back and try to find our way out the way we came in,” she suggested. “The guards have probably figured we’ve gotten far enough, so I don’t think they’ll be looking for us near the entrance.” The princess motioned for Gioia to follow and started for the wooden door they’d busted down.
Gisella suddenly heard a whistling noise just before Gioia dropped to the ground. She turned slowly around. There stood a palace guard with his crossbow raised, prepared to shoot. Unexpectedly, another arrow came whistling by from behind Gisella and hit the guard straight in the heart.
The princess dropped to her knees and began sobbing and begging for mercy. She did not want to die. She hadn’t done anything to deserve this cruel fate. Gisella felt a soft hand on her shoulder and glanced up. Alessio stood above her, hand extended for her to take.
Gisella stood and threw herself into Alessio’s arms. Her body wrenched with sobs as she let her relief spill from her eyes. Alessio soothed her for just a moment before grabbing her arm and urging her to run with him.
The lovers fled with no choice but to leave Gioia to bleed out. They ran, Alessio leading the way. He knew the tunnels as he knew the back of his hand, finding their way toward the entrance easily. The two soon stopped and hid in the shadows, hearing the queen and Count Lombardi conversing.
“They can’t have gotten that far, Madame. I am sure our men will find them,” the count insisted.
“Nonsense,” she queen lashed. “You obviously aren’t qualified for the job. Leave; you’re presence disgusts me,” she snapped harshly.
As the two argued, Alessio and Gisella inched past them and into the adjacent tunnel. They began to run, the sounds of their footsteps pounding through the tunnels. The queen turned and immediately spotted the young ones.
“Guards” she wailed. “Guards!”
A handful of palace guards came out and bounded toward the two lovers. The pair turned to run in the opposite direction, but was trapped. The guards quickly came down on them. Gisella and Alessio lost consciousness.
* * *
Gisella jumped awake in a small, dark room. She and Alessio were bound by shackles. She looked up at her lover as she tried to free herself from restraint. It was no use.
Just then, the count walked in, chuckling. He pulled on his black gloves with a menacing look on his face. “So, here we are,” Count Lombardi began. “Finally.”
Alessio kicked in his chair. “You filthy traitor, you let her go right now or the king will have you hung for treason!” he yelled.
The count stood and approached the boy. He raised his hand and brought it down hard on his cheek, the sound sharp and loud. Alessio spat at the count, the glob landing on the older man’s cheek.
“It’s not your precious princess I want, boy. I want you,” Count Lombardi said as he wiped his face dry.
Gisella snapped her head up. “Leave him alone. Just kill me already; it’s me you want. Kill the line,” she taunted. “Go on, do it. Kill me; I’m your princess!”
The count glared at her. “Quiet, little girl, and listen to what I have to say before you start making assumptions,” he spat. “Now wouldn’t you like to know the truth about your little family, about how everyone has been lying to you your whole life?”
Alessio and Gisella didn’t say a word and just stared at the count.
“Good,” the count began. “Let’s just start by saying, Princess, that you’re really a fatherless child and Alessio here is the prince. The king and our dear late queen switched the two of you at birth in order to protect the royal bloodline from an anarchist group. We knew infants had been switched; we just couldn’t be sure which family the king had chosen.
“Now, our present queen is the daughter of the founder of this anarchist group and married the king in order to get to close to the royal family. And you know what? I think it worked,” he said sarcastically. “Because now we know who to kill, don’t we?”
The count turned to pick up his weapons and held them up, one in each had. “Which do you prefer? A dagger to the heart, or an arrow through the head?” he asked, prolonging the act.
Just then, footsteps came pounding down the tunnel. The count had just enough time to turn around before being tackled to the ground by the king. The count had no time to react and the king quickly drove the dagger into the count’s heart.
* * *
Nothing changed too much around the castle. The queen was hung for her acts of treason. Gioia was honored for her attempts to help save the princess and was missed by all. Gisella was still recognized as the princess, even without a blood relation to the royal family. Alessio began to see the king as a father figure and enjoyed having someone to teach him the important things about life. He and Gisella remained lovers and eventually got married.
By all means, anarchy did not disappear; but the palace amped up its security system, which meant getting rid of any disloyal guards. All could be pleasant then.