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"There, now you've got it."

Thank you very much. I leaned back and found that my hands
were
even with his foot.

"To the right. To the right. No, to the left."

I couldn't tell which ached more, my knees or my shoulders.

"Got it! Do you feel the flap?"

I felt the flap. I felt the thin piece of metal under the flap. I couldn't get my hand turned around. Now my fingers were beginning to ache. Upside down, I got the pick between my index finger and my middle finger and lifted it out of its sheath.

The miserable thing slipped between my fingers and hit the floor.

I groaned. Robin groaned. But I was the one who had to retrieve it. I lowered myself all the way to the floor and tried to locate the pick from Robin's ridiculous directions.

"To the left. My left. Now forward. Too far. Back about three inches. Straight. Straight, Harek."

If the guards had come in then, I would have cheerfully volunteered to be on Robin's firing squad.

I rested on my right side, panting.

"Harek...," Robin started.

I glared at him.

"Do you think you can pick it up with your teeth?"

With my teeth?

"Pull the gag all the way into your mouth, then bite the gag down between your teeth. Then you'll be able to get the pick with your mouth."

I couldn't think of anything else to do. And believe me, I tried. I chewed the soggy gag backward. It seemed enormous, but finally my teeth were free. I bent over and bit the pick, getting a nice mouthful of dirt floor at the same time of course.

Meanwhile Robin had used the toe of his left foot against his right heel and had kicked off his boot. "OK," he said, "now give me the pick."

Are you picturing this? Me with my poor aching body, on my knees with my hands behind my back and the pick between my teeth, and him dangling his bare foot in my face, flexing his toes?

Somehow we did it. I sat back on my heels, wondering,
Now what?
Robin swung his leg up like a dancer doing high kicks, trying to get the pick up into his right hand shackled into the wall. I was torn between the desire to get out of there and the hope he'd kick himself in the face and knock himself out. He got the leg higher and higher, finally almost reaching his hand before the pick flew out from between his toes and sailed across the room. It clinked as it hit the stone wall, then went
thunk!
against the floor.

"I'm sorry," Robin said, sounding close to whining, sounding ... sounding ... Well, to be honest, sounding as physically bedraggled and as emotionally exhausted as I felt. His arms had to be killing him, supporting his weight for who knows how long before I'd even come to. And those high kicks, and bouncing his heel back against the wall, and me giving him dirty looks all the time...

"You're doing a fine job," I said, more or less articulate now that the gag was in a manageable wad.

Robin looked amazed that I'd said it, which made me feel even wormier.

I went and got the pick between my teeth again and knelt in front of his foot again.

"I can't," he said, closing his eyes.

"Robin," I said, my teeth clamped on the pick. "Robin."

He could hear me, I was sure of it. Now I could sympathize with how he had felt, trying to rouse me to consciousness earlier.

I nudged his leg with my shoulder.

"Leave me alone, Harek." His voice trembled with the strain of talking.

"Robin, I'll give you the pick, then you can step on my shoulders. Get the weight off your arms."

That got his eyes open.

"Go on," I said.

He clutched the pick with his right foot, and I walked to the wall on my knees, where I slid to my feet. He got his left leg up first, the one that still had a boot. It hurt like anything, but I didn't have the heart to tell him to hang on a bit longer while I pulled it off. After he stepped on with his right foot, I could hear him take several deep breaths, the last much less shaky than the first.

"OK. Tip your head to the left," he warned me.

I closed my eyes, because I wouldn't have time to dodge if his foot accidentally came flying at me, and I didn't want to see it happening.

I felt him swing his foot—could feel that he hadn't gotten very high at all. He swung again—not much better. He was too nervous about getting out of control, was worried about knocking all my teeth out on the rebound. Either that or he was too weak, which didn't bear thinking about.

"You're doing fine," I told him. "Consider me your cheering section. Consider yourself cheered on."

"Rah," Robin muttered. He kicked up. Again. And again. He inhaled sharply, and I thought he'd lost the pick, but I didn't hear it fall. I opened my eyes and didn't see it between his toes. I raised my eyes, saw that his fist was clenched. "Got it?" I asked, barely able to get the words out of my gag-dried mouth.

As though hardly daring to believe it himself, Robin nodded.

The chains weren't long enough for Robin to cross one hand over to the other wrist, even with the slack I provided by supporting him on my shoulders. So with the pick in his right hand he worked to unlock the shackle from the same wrist, and all I kept thinking was that if I twitched at the wrong moment, he was going to drop the stupid thing and we would have to start all over. Or if his hands were half as sweaty as mine, he'd drop it without any help from me at all.

The tremor that had started in my shoulders was traveling down my legs when I heard the faint
click
of the lock. I almost dropped Robin in my relief.

"Hey!" The chains rattled as he scrambled to grab hold.

"Sorry," I mumbled.

He pulled his right wrist free of the loosened shackle.

"Could you hurry it up?" I asked as he gingerly worked the stiffness out of his fingers, wrist, elbow, and—finally—shoulder. Sweat was running down my face, trickling into my eyes and making them sting.

Robin reached over and started picking at the lock on the left shackle. By then my knees were shaking and I was concentrating so hard on not embarrassing myself by passing out or something that I didn't hear the second lock click open. But I heard Robin's triumphant, "Ta-dah!" and I said, "Coming down," and sank to the floor.

Robin must have jumped off my shoulders—for a few seconds black shadows crowded the edges of my sight and I wasn't aware of anything—but then I was on my knees, and Robin had cut my wrists free with a blade he'd gotten from his left boot. Now he was hugging me while jagged pains shot through my shoulders and upper back, pains that flashed messages to my brain:
You thought that was pain before? THAT was numbness. THIS is pain.

"We did it!" Robin said. "What a team!"

What a team, sure. We knelt there for about five minutes, trying to work the kinks and the soreness out of our muscles before we even got the strength to remember to keep our mouths closed while we breathed. I untied the foul gag and threw it to the ground. The game was a lot easier the old way, with the dungeon master rolling dice to compute the amount of damage a character took.

I checked our peek-hole and saw that our guards were still engrossed in their game. "Safe for the moment," I said. "I think we should take a couple minutes to catch our breath."

Still flexing his shoulders, Robin nodded.

"What happened?" I asked. "Back in the woods, I mean."

He jerked his head up. "What happened to you?" he countered.

"I went to take a leak behind a tree, and the next thing I knew..."I indicated the cell.

"And they say girls are always having to go." Robin shook his head. "We were attacked. These guys came tearing out of the woods—"

"What guys?" I interrupted.

"I'll get to that."

"But they were human?" I guessed, judging from the guards I had seen down the hall. "You could see whether they were human."

"They were human," Robin agreed. "And there were a lot of them. Twenty-five, thirty of them compared to—what? eight, well, you weren't there—seven? no, but Felice was in no condition to help—six?—compared to six of us. They had us surrounded before we even knew they were there."

I rested my head against my knees. "Go on."

"The only thing that saved us was that apparently they wanted us alive."

I sat up sharply. "Why?"

He gave me that look that warned I was rushing his story again.

"Well, then, hurry it up," I said.

"Marian and I were using our swords, fighting back to back. I killed two of the attackers—well, one for certain; the other was wounded, but I don't know for sure if he died. Marian must have taken out at least four, but then we got separated. People were shooting arrows, Cornelius was shooting Wizards' Lightning. The thing is, Harek, it happened so fast." He shrugged helplessly. "Whenever we've played before, it was so orderly: people would get their turns one by one, then the dungeon master would say what the results were, then we'd take another turn ... but this way..." He shook his head. "People were shouting, the horses were rearing—out of control and flailing with their hooves—and the Wizards' Lightning stank like anything and made our eyes burn, and there was all this dust and smoke so you couldn't see what was happening. Then Cornelius threw a Magic Web and caught about ten of our attackers. And me." Again he shrugged.

"They didn't stay to help you?"

"It would have only gotten more of them captured. Besides, they would have had to come back anyway for you. We figured you'd been captured already."

I was feeling pretty sorry for myself by then, and I wasn't too sure any of them would have come back for me. But Marian would see to it that a rescue attempt was launched for Robin. "So they took off without you," I prompted.

"Yeah. By then, I'd seen Nocona get hit by an arrow."

"How bad?"

"Hard to say. It got him in the leg." He indicated just above the knee.

"Bad but not horrible," I said. "Unless it severed a major artery, which would be horrible but not too horrible. Unless he passed out and the others were too busy to help, which would be—"

"Hard to say," Robin said again.

"Hard to say," I agreed.

"Thea got the creep who wounded him, and Feordin—"

"What about..." The name stuck in my throat. "Felice?"

Robin was sitting cross-legged, his elbows resting on his knees, his chin on his knuckles. He looked at me levelly for maybe seven, eight seconds and never said a word, and I couldn't tell what he was thinking. Then, just when I was ready to shake him, he said, "She did the best she could. She picked up a sword from one of the dead attackers, but that's not her specialty. And she's not well."

What was this, Noah Avila defending my mom to me? "Look—" I started, but he cut me off. "We all did our best. But we were outnumbered."

I held my open hands out, indication that I wasn't looking for a fight.

Robin didn't look convinced, but he nodded.

I said, "So Nocona was injured, you were captured, and the others..."I didn't want him to accuse me of being judgmental; what was another word for "lit out"?

"Left without me," Robin supplied.

"Left without you. Any of the bad guys follow them?"

Robin shook his head. "No, those who were left worked at freeing their friends in the Web. Course, once they got me free, they tied me right back up again. Then they threw me facedown across a horse. I saw them carry you out from the woods, and you looked like you were dead, but I figured they wouldn't've bothered with you if you were."

"I wonder why they bothered at all?"

"They're slavers. I overheard them talking. They're collecting for a ship that's coming in next week."

It made sense. A local robber baron turning his gang to commerce during hard times. "Do they have the princess?" I asked.

"Didn't sound like it."

"All right. Think you can unlock that door? Without the guards hearing?"

"Sure as my name's Robin Hood," Robin said.

"Wonderful."

He took his lock pick and started fiddling with the mechanism on the door.

"Ah, Robin?"

"What?"

"Maybe you better give me the dagger."

He hesitated, and I sure hoped he wouldn't argue with me, because I didn't know how he'd take to my pointing out that I was a warrior while he was only a thief. On the other hand, I was just thinking how I'd messed up everything I'd started this campaign, and that maybe I'd be better off letting him handle things, when he pulled the blade out of its secret compartment and passed it to me.

"Thanks."
Small, but a clean edge. Good balance.
Lucky for me, the thing wasn't iron but some lightweight alloy—made for hiding. I tried to get the feel of it in my hand, tried to let my mind go blank, to let Harek the professional elf warrior in, and Arvin—who-knew-how-to-cut-his-meat-with-a-knife-but-that-was-about-it—out. I'd have to act instinctively. If I stopped to figure things out, that'd be the end of all of us: Harek, Arvin, and Robin.

I stood out of Robin's way but close enough to see through the little barred window. I was watching the guards when the lock clicked open, and was sure they hadn't heard.

"I'll go closer," I whispered, indicating the darkened doorways to the other cells. "You stay here and create a diversion."

I slipped past him and into the hallway.
Don't look up,
I mentally begged the guards. On tiptoe I ran to the first alcove, the doorway of the cell closest to us. I leaned against the door, sure my heart was beating loud enough to alert the guards. When they didn't look up, I took a deep breath and ran to the next doorway, shrinking as far back into the shadows as I could, out of the puddle of light where the guards were playing cards.

I glanced back to where Robin was waiting. No sign of him, but, assuming he was where he was supposed to be, I waved for him to get going.

Robin gave me an instant to flatten myself into the shadows again, then went into action. He stepped out into the middle of the hall where he was illuminated by the torchlight from our cell, and pulled the door closed behind him with a rattle loud enough that the guards
had
to hear it.