Chapter 3 Boy #2
Before the aggrieved man had time to protest his lot any further, the wagon abruptly came to a stop and two guards, different from those whom they had travelled with, turned the key in the heavy lock.
Still clutching the barred window when they pulled open the door, the larger man all but fell out into a churned-up patch of wet mud.
Hoisting him by the armpits, the guards didn’t wait for him to find his footing before they hauled him off, and the last thing Boy saw before they vanished from view was a guard delivering a swift kick to his exposed flank to encourage his cooperation.
There seemed no shortage of guards, and another grabbed the woman by the ankles and pulled her to a stand. She shrieked before he hefted her up and over his shoulder like she was nothing more than a sack of potatoes, and then it was Boy’s turn.
“On yer feet, pretty boy.” The directive was simple enough, but this wasn’t either of the guards he had travelled with, and something about the lecherous sneer on his face made Boy’s stomach churn with unease.
The man clawed at him with impatient hands, and all the horror stories the woman had shared three days prior flooded Boy’s brain.
He didn’t protest when he was yanked from the wagon, nor did he complain when the guard grunted and shoved him to walk at a quicker pace.
Instead, he once again focused on what was around him.
This was the first time he’d ever been to the Royal District and… it was not at all what he had imagined.
The protective outer wall, made from rough-hewn tree trunks, was two layers thick with a walkway between them.
More guards than Boy could count, some with scarred dogs on leashes, patrolled the parapet.
He hunched his shoulders in an effort to disappear into himself, tucked his nose into the neck of his linen tunic to ward off the stench of sweat, piss, and despair, and stumbled after the guard.
When they passed by the open door to a large room for gravely injured and sick people, the sound of their suffering became quickly overwhelming.
Boy avoided looking too closely. Instead, he focused on the snapping and snarling of the dogs pitted against one another in a fenced-off enclosure to his other side.
The guard caught him looking and laughed out loud. “If you’re lucky, they’ll feed you the loser for your noon meal!”
Sick dread roiled in Boy’s gut. He didn’t like it, not at all, and was almost relieved when the guard stepped through a small entranceway and the heavy door slammed shut behind them.
He was led down a dim and ominous passageway with only narrow slits for windows, but at least they were moving further away from the squalor that existed out there.
Boy did his best to keep up in the dark, over an uneven cobbled floor and down narrow steps slippery with damp and moss, until he was shoved into an even smaller space with no window at all.
When the guard remained in the dimly lit passageway outside and silently turned the key in the lock of the equally windowless wooden door, Boy realised that this was where he would be kept while the tithe collector passed along the message from his father.
Immediately, he missed the light. Even as a child, Boy had needed the light from the moon and the stars to feel safer in the dark.
Quite probably, though, that was due to the scary tales his old brother delighted in telling him about the geist who lived in the shadows.
He stood and listened to the faint sound of retreating footsteps until he could no longer tell them apart from the thumping of his heart.
Left alone, Boy briefly wondered how long he might have to wait for the Queen’s verdict, and then decided that as he wasn’t anyone of particular importance, it might be quite some time.
So, he set about discovering his new accommodation the best he could in the pitch dark.
He learned it was a square of ten paces by ten paces, and that the daubing between the stones must have eroded enough to allow rainwater inside, because how else could the thick layer of moss and weed have overgrown one corner of the cell without there being any light?
A small, upturned wooden bucket lurked in the opposite corner, which he smartly moved away from when he found remnants of the previous occupant’s stale urine pooled underneath it.
And finally, Boy realised that the solid wooden door, which blocked him entirely from sight, could too easily encourage the guards to forget his pitiful existence altogether.
The hole in his stomach burned, and Boy tried his best to remember when his last meal had been.
They’d eaten the leftover venison broth on the fourth night and had a sparse breakfast of foraged nuts and berries on the fifth morning.
But that was yesterday, and he very much doubted anyone would bring him more food until after his fate had been declared—if they did at all.
After all, why waste food amid a famine on a prisoner who may very well be executed?
Boy had been so caught up in his visions of food that he hadn’t heard the encroaching footfalls, so he startled when his cell door was suddenly yanked wide open.
Two bright oil lamps were held aloft, and he was forced to raise an arm to shield himself against their merciless onslaught upon his senses.
Therefore, as his eyes adjusted, he couldn’t see who held them.
“All kneel for Queen Schon,” barked a disembodied voice.
A sudden and swift kick to the back of his legs dropped Boy to his knees, and he cried out in pain. His hands were too late to brace his weight as he fell.
“I said all kneel!”
But Boy was too distracted by the shooting pains in his wrists to gain any more clarity on who was speaking.
Whoever they were, they were brutal, and he wanted no more part in it.
He stayed where he was, breathing hard on all fours, as a pair of dainty feet clad in the most luxurious fabric he had ever seen stepped into his field of vision.
“So, this is the boy who can spin gold from straw? He doesn’t look very impressive.
” The Queen’s voice was almost musical. Boy had never heard anything like it.
They spoke the same language, of course, but her dialect and elocution were so very different from his that it took him a fair while to process what she had said.
He knew the lie his father had told, and his ears burned with humiliation, but he also knew the truth.
The famine that had plagued Falchovari for years now had taken its toll.
The farmers who grew the crops had had a failed yield last harvest, which meant they’d had next to no crops for his family to buy.
And no crops meant no flour, and no flour meant no trade with the bakers, nor any bounty for the Royal Storehouse.
They’d scraped enough together from their silos for last harvest’s tithe, but this time around, nothing but starved field mice had greeted them when they’d entered the barn.
Heavy boots from what must have been a guard clomped close by his head as they passed his left side and came to a stop somewhere behind him.
Boy kept his head lowered and the Queen’s shoes at the absolute centre of his focus as he steadied his breathing.
Never before had Boy focused so hard on the pattern of a fabric.
Now that his eyes had adjusted to the dim and flickering light of the lamps, he could see the material was shiny and black, but that the soles and trim were painted a blood red.
He didn’t even know that material and footwear came in those colours.
“Ordinarily, someone of your age would be conscripted into the Royal Guard. But if there is one thing I detest almost as much as imperfection, it’s deceit.
” The Queen’s voice, melodic as it was, had a brusque tone that belied her thoughts.
She knew full well this was a ruse. “You have until sunrise to spin this sack of straw into the golden thread your father promised. If you don’t, then your life shall be claimed in place of your family’s tithe. ”
Boy held his breath. His heart pounded faster than it ever had. He pressed his cheek to the cold and wet stone, hoping it would help ground him. There was nothing more he could do.
He could not spin the straw into gold; he knew it as well as the Queen did. And he would die for it.
The heavy door clanged shut with a sickening finality. However, the Queen must have left him with an oil lamp, because he could easily see the glistening damp upon the stone in front of him, he just couldn’t bring himself to move from his supplicant position.
Despite the lamp, the darkness felt more suffocating than it had before. The scent of damp and decay filled his nostrils, and the silence was almost too much to bear. Tears gathered at the corners of his eyes.
For a long while, Boy stayed perfectly still.
When he finally raised his head from the floor, and only then because his wrists and arms shook with the strain of supporting his bodyweight, he discovered the guards had also left him a dusty spinning wheel covered in cobwebs and a large sack of dried straw.
They were both tucked into one corner of his cell, lit by the solitary oil lamp placed upon the upturned bucket in the other.
Boy wished he could disappear from this nightmare.
The weight of his predicament hung around his neck like his family’s millstone. He shuffled to the wall beside the lamp and rested his back against it.
There were many hours until sunset, and yet barely any hours at all. Boy closed his eyes and exhaled.