The Book of Deacon (10 page)

The single night in a proper bed had spoiled
her, it would seem. The clattering shutters and sudden drafts
pulled her from slumber a handful of times through the afternoon
and night. At first, she would jerk awake and look around, but soon
she tried simply to ignore them and get back to sleep. In a way,
the light sleep was a blessing. It spared her the terrible dreams
that she had been suffering. Not once in her life had she had a
recurring dream, though she had often hoped for one. Such dreams
were said to carry great meaning. The dark and frightening images
of her nightly torment did not bode well for the future.

#

After she'd had her fill of fitful slumber,
Myranda opened her eyes. The yellow light of the fire flickered on
the walls of the otherwise darkened church. This struck her as odd.
She had not fed the flames for hours. She tried to turn to the
mysteriously lively fire, but something stopped her from shifting.
Still groggy, she struggled to gain a glimpse of the tightness
about her chest, straining until she could just barely see the
cause. There were coils of rope wrapped tightly around her,
securing her to the chair. Panic gripped her as tightly as the
ropes as she struggled. Both rope and blanket trapped her hands.
Despite the maddening effort to free them, there was little
progress and even less hope of escape. In her struggle, all she
managed to do was to knock her chair to the floor. With much
effort, she was able to slide the chair along the floor to where
she had left the sword, only to find it had been taken.

Myranda regained her wits. This struggling
was getting her nowhere. She had to think. Who would do this? Who
could
do
this? All that she had of value was the sword. Why would someone
who had the skill to bind her without awakening her even do so when
they could have merely taken the sword? She tried to struggle
again, hearing the jingle of silver in her pocket. They had not
even robbed her.

"It doesn't make any sense! Steal the sword,
tie me up, and
feed
the
fire!?"
she cried in frustration. "Why would you
feed the fire? Unless . . ."

Unless whoever did this was still here. She
held perfectly still and strained her ears, fearful to even
breathe. All that could be heard was the tap of shutters and the
crackle of flames. Myranda's rattled mind shaped each of them into
a half heard footstep. Finally she gave up listening. What could
she do, even if she heard her captor? Nothing while she was tied
up. She glanced about in her limited view from the floor for
something, anything to free her. The fire! She could burn the
ropes! A second thought brought the realization that her blanket
and clothes would likely burn to ashes before the binding even lit,
let alone what would happen to her skin. There had to be another
way.

Irregularly scattered about the room were
pieces of broken wood. If she could make her way to one of the
piles, free her hand, get a shard, and work its jagged edge at the
ropes that held her, she just might be able to free herself. It
wasn't much of a plan, but it was at least more than she was doing
now.

Tipping over had slid her painfully to the
side of the chair. By alternately working her right shoulder and
right foot, she was able to inch along the floor. Each tiny slide
the chair made produced an earsplitting grinding noise. If the
captor was still near, he would most certainly hear it, but that
didn't matter. Her best chance was to try to escape. After what
seemed like an eternity of awkward sliding, she managed to reach a
handful of the wood shards on the church floor.

With her hands tied firmly beneath a blanket,
there was no obvious way to get at the shredded wood. An option
came to mind. It was foolish, it was desperate, and it likely
wouldn't work. It was also her only choice. Taking a deep breath
and tensing, she heaved her shoulder down upon the woodpile with
all of the force she could muster. The cruelly sharp edge of one of
the pieces burst through the blanket and bit into the flesh in her
shoulder. Agonizing and damaging as this was, it was the result she
had been hoping for. She cried out at the savage pain of it and
slowly wriggled her left hand beneath the blanket to the site of
the throbbing new injury. The rope permitted nearly no movement,
but through sheer effort she managed to bring her fingers to the
now-blood-soaked wood. She grasped weakly the shard and worked at
pulling it from its new home.

As painful as its appearance had been, the
shard's removal was doubly so. With the utmost of care, she pulled
the piece of wood through the tear in the blanket, out of her
shoulder, and to a point just above the topmost of her bindings. A
knife would have freed her with a few slices, but the jagged
splinter tore only a few fibers of the rope at a time. After an
eternity of patient scraping, the rope held by a tiny strand.
Myranda strained at the weakened rope and it snapped. The other
coils loosened and she was finally free of the chair.

The injured arm was the first to reach the
floor, and she had to roll quickly off of it. All of that time
bound in the same position made standing a difficult task. When she
was on her feet, she looked around her and strained her ears. She
was alone. Whoever had tied her up had left and all of the noise
had failed to prompt a return. A sharp throbbing in her arm drew
her attention. It was bleeding fairly heavily. Convinced that she
was safe from her captor, at least for the moment, she decided to
care for the wound. The blanket was ruined; it might as well serve
one last purpose. She tore it into strips and used it to bandage
the afflicted limb. The blood from the gash had seeped through her
shirt and the blanket, pooling on the floor. Looking at it
intensified the dizziness that its loss had caused.

With the most pressing of her concerns
attended to, Myranda set her mind to the task of escaping. She
assessed the situation. Of course, her pack was gone. A pull on the
door revealed it to be solidly secured from the outside. The
windows were all small and near to the high ceiling. There would be
no escape through any of those. The sole window large enough to
allow her to escape was the shattered stained glass window behind
the pulpit, but it was even further out of her reach. She had to
try the door again.

She grasped the heavy wooden handle and
tugged it with all of her strength. Slowly a tiny crack opened, one
that closed the moment she relented. It wasn't much, but it was
hope. Myranda scoured the assorted piles of wood until she found a
reasonably sturdy plank. Placing its edge between the doors, she
used it as a lever. Even with the added leverage, the doors would
only open an inch or two. After carefully wedging the lever in the
opening so that all of her hard work would not slip away, she put
her eye to the narrow portal to the outside.

It was night, and the perpetual cloud cover
kept even the slightest hint of moonlight from reaching the snowy
field. In the pitch blackness, she was barely able to make out a
few coils of the same rope that had bound her securing the door.
There was no way she could sever it in the same way she'd cut her
own, and the harder she pulled at the door, the tighter the rope
held.

"Of course!" she said, immediately clasping a
hand over her mouth.

The rope! She could use it to escape.
Hurrying to the severed bonds, she tied the ends, producing a
strong rope of considerable length. Choosing a heavy piece of wood,
she tied it to the rope. The resourceful young lady ran to the
broken stained glass window and hurled the weighted end of the
rope. A twinge of pain in her shoulder robbed the throw of some of
its strength and the rope fell short. Shifting the rope to her left
hand, she tried again, reaching the window but failing to hook onto
it. A third throw held.

After testing the strength of the rope, she
tried to climb. The injured shoulder again slowed her, but she
refused to let it stop her. With supreme effort, she managed to
pull her feet from the ground, only to come crashing down again a
moment later, preceded by the subdued but unmistakable sound of
metal biting into wood. She looked up from the ground to see a
single throwing blade protruding from the wall. Myranda traced the
path of flight back to its source, a dark form crouched on the
rooftop outside one of the smaller windows.

A scraping sound drew her gaze back to the
window. With nothing securing it the wooden grapple fell to the
ground outside, dragging the precious rope along with it. All that
was left behind was a useless length of rope no longer than her
arm. By the time she looked back to find person who had thwarted
her escape, the window was empty.

"Who are you!? What have I done!? Why are you
holding me here!?" Myranda cried out to her captor. Silence was her
answer.

Beaten, Myranda stood the fallen chair
upright and sat down, no more free now than when the ropes had
bound her, and with a rapidly stiffening right arm to remind her of
her defeat. She surveyed her prison once more. Tiny windows topped
the sloping roof on either side, they themselves topped by a
smaller roof. Above the entrance was a small room that once held
the church bell. The hole that had been made for the bell pull to
hang through now showed a few dry, rotted strands. A plank with
some stray rungs dangling from it was all that remained of a
maintenance ladder.

She trudged to the door she had wrestled
partially open. The inch-wide portal to the outside remained, for
whatever reason, undisturbed by the kidnapper. The fiend could have
easily pushed her wedge from the door and robbed her of this tiny
accomplishment, but instead it remained, whistling with the frigid
wind of the outside. Earlier that day she had prayed to find this
place and to be allowed inside, but now all she wanted was to
leave. She put her eye to the crack.

The sky to the east was beginning to take on
the rose hue of dawn, coloring the stark white snow a faint
crimson. The only soul to be seen was the captor, dressed in the
same blasted cloak as any other northerner. The stranger sat with
eyes to the east and back to Myranda. Far off in the distance, a
speck of black was moving toward them along the snow-mounded road.
As it drew nearer, it revealed itself to be a horse-drawn sleigh.
It was not unusual for such vehicles to be seen so soon after such
a terrible storm. Blizzards were anything but uncommon, and waiting
for the roads to clear was a surefire way to be caught in the next.
However, it was clear that no one had been along this road for many
months, save for whoever had looted this place. This sleigh's
appearance could not be a coincidence.

When the sleigh was near enough, Myranda
could see that the horses, the sleigh itself, and the four soldiers
who stepped out of it, all bore the unmistakable emblem of the
Northern Army. Her heart lifted. She had not been happy to see a
soldier of either side for years, but today they represented her
only chance for rescue.

"Here! I am in here! Help me!" she cried out,
beating on the door with her fists. A sharp pain in the shoulder
quickly put the hammering to an end, but she continued to call
out.

When she was certain that she had been heard,
she put her eye back to the crack in the door. The four soldiers
stood silently before the door, each in full combat armor, complete
with face masks. The first was speaking calmly with her captor
while the others looked on. They made no motion toward the door.
She strained her ears to hear what the two were saying. Only the
soldier spoke loudly enough to hear.

"The one who touched the sword? We are
charged with her return, as well as that of the sword," he said, in
response to the kidnapper's unheard comment.

The sinister figure pulled a bundle from
inside the cloak and held it out, obviously the sword that had been
taken from Myranda. The soldier took the weapon with gauntlet-clad
hands and uncovered it. After as close an inspection as he could
manage without raising his face guard, he looked to the
kidnapper.

"It seems to be the piece we require. We
shall take the girl and be on our way," he said, moving toward the
door. The captor stopped him with a hand to the shoulder.

"What?" the soldier said, irritated.

The kidnapper held the hand out palm up.

All hope was dashed away as she struggled to
comprehend the pieces as they came together. He was waiting to be
paid! The Northern Army was in league with the stranger who had
captured her! Why? And why did they want her? A thousand thoughts
of fear burned across the back of Myranda's mind and her heart
fluttered in her chest. The exchange between the conspirators
continued.

"The capture and return of the swordbearer is
the responsibility of the Alliance Army. Regardless of what orders
you may have received, your interference is considered a treasonous
action. Owing to the fact that your interference was entirely
beneficial, you will not be charged," the soldier said.

Her captor said something too quiet to hear,
but the fiend's body language betrayed more than a bit of
anger.

"I have received no word of such an
agreement, and even if I had, it would have been deemed illegal.
You shall receive no payment. I suggest you accept this fact and be
grateful we do not kill you where you stand," he said.

Her mind raced. How could anyone want her or
the sword? She had only just found it in the field a day or two
ago. It had obviously been there for some time. And how could
anyone have found her here so quickly? No one knew she would be
here, not even she, until the old man had . . . the old man. He
must have assumed she had stolen the sword, and he told her where
to go. Apparently she had not learned her lesson about who to trust
for directions. The cloaked figure must be a bounty hunter. Things
were looking grim. If the Alliance Army had come to take her away,
she might be witnessing her last sunrise. In criminal matters, only
an accusation was needed to be thrown into prison, and if the
weapon was valuable enough to hire a bounty hunter
and
alert the army, she would
remain locked away for the better part of a decade.