Chapter Four The First Ray of Sunlight #2
The Prince responded with a low, mocking laugh of real amusement and opened his mouth to try to speak around the gag, but before he could do so Tomaz once more lifted him into the air and thrust him headfirst into the brine barrel.
When he was brought back up, he found himself hanging suspended in the air, dripping foul-smelling water.
“ARGH!” was the only response he could make through the gag, which was now soaked with a disgusting mixture of salt water, saliva, sweat, and dirt.
“No no,” said the big man, small black eyes twinkling, “my name is ‘Tomaz,’ not ‘Argh.’ Please try to get it right next time.”
He dropped the Prince to the floor—which, from the height of the big man’s arms, was quite a painful distance—and turned back to the girl.
“The Council expects us back in a month,” he said. “Is there any way we could shave some time off of that?”
The girl shrugged. “Using the main roads like we’d planned, a month was reasonable with the horses.
But we’ve got to go more than a thousand miles, hauling a reluctant Prince along the way.
We can try, but if we get too close to any of the major cities, he’ll make trouble if the rumors don’t,” she said.
The Prince almost grunted his approval of the statement, but received a warning in the form of a raised eyebrow from Tomaz and stopped himself.
Once he realized what he’d just done, it only made him angrier, both at himself and the Exile.
He was a Prince! He should be defiant to his last breath!
But… no. No, he wasn’t his brother Ramael, the Prince of Oxen, to fight something head on and win by brute strength.
He would never be able to overpower the big man, particularly not in close quarters like this where he couldn’t maneuver and use his speed.
He needed to bide his time. Let them take him where they would until he was free to strike.
“Tomaz, it may take longer, but think of it. We’ve got the Prince of Ravens!”
“So you don’t want to kill him anymore?” the big man rumbled dryly.
“I know how you feel about that, ashandel,” she said. The Prince had the feeling she was choosing her words carefully. “But it’s my job to think from every angle. It’s a viable option.”
“He’s just a boy,” Tomaz reminded her softly. The Prince saw the girl’s eyes narrow and her jaw clench in anger, but she let the moment pass. They shared a short, unspoken conversation, and then they turned to look at the Prince of Ravens as if contemplating what lay ahead of them.
“If you say it’s the shortest time, then it’s the shortest time,” the big man said decisively, in a way that spoke volumes about his utter trust in the girl’s planning. “Now,” he continued, rubbing his hands together eagerly, “do you want to tie him up or shall I?”
The girl chuckled. “Go for it.”
Barely an hour later, the Prince had been properly bound and gagged, tied to a horse, and disguised as a member of the Commons—a particularly poor and shabby one, at that.
They had removed his undershirt and forced him into a stained sack-like tunic that smelled of some kind of animal, and also twisted his feet into a pair of uneven, over-large boots.
For a time, he still had hope that when they passed someone, they would be alerted to his plight by his bound hands and feet, but the Exiles threw a large dark brown cloak over him that hid the tightly cinched restraints, and then pulled the hood up high enough to hide his face.
He was left with just enough visibility to see what was directly in front of him, and enough range of motion to use his knees to steer the horse onto which they’d tied him.
“Comfortable?” the big man asked cheerfully.
He was not, but his gag was still firmly in place, and he could make the point no more eloquently than with muffled, inarticulate invectives.
There were two horses—the first, an enormous black charger with wild eyes, clearly belonged to Tomaz.
The second was a pack horse loaded with supplies.
The Prince had no desire to go anywhere near the charger, and the feeling was apparently mutual.
Luckily, it was onto the pack horse, after redistributing some of the supplies, that they had tied him.
The girl didn’t seem to have a horse, and he wondered if maybe she just rode the pack horse when she had the need.
The Exiles did not seem at all concerned for his welfare as long as he stayed on the horse, and between the restraints and the hot, scratchy cloak, he knew the ride was going to be decidedly uncomfortable.
The beast they had tied him to also appeared to be none too smart, and the Prince had the sneaking suspicion that the girl, who was holding the reins, would make a point of leading it over the rockiest and most uneven patches of terrain.
Yet despite the situation, he could not help but take in, for the first time in his life, the beauty of the world in which he found himself.
They were certainly far away from the Lucien, the capital city of Lucia, and the most incredibly striking evidence of that was the large white-yellow ball of fire that hung in the sky.
When the Exiles moved him from the inside of the wooden shack out to where the horses were tied, he gawked at it, open-mouthed.
The shack stood at the edge of a circle of small wooden buildings, possibly an abandoned town, located in the center of a small clearing.
The clearing was surrounded by plants as tall as buildings, plants that could only be trees, which he’d seen in memories of other men but never truly considered real. They towered up into the sky.
And the sun! It was there, right there above him!
It shone through the trees, casting deep green shadows over the clearing and in some places breaking clean through the canopy in straight, spearing shafts of brilliant gold, brighter than anything he’d ever seen.
The colors of the landscape were more vibrant than he ever could have imagined, and more stirring to something deep inside him than he ever could have guessed.
“Keep moving, princeling,” the Exile girl had said, pushing him forward. He’d stumbled over a floor that was not stone or packed dirt but a mixture of soil and grass and growing things. He’d felt as though he were walking through the incredible landscape of a madman’s fantasy.
As they left the clearing, the Prince realized that the trees went on as far as he could see through the narrow vantage point of his hood. The sheer size and scope of the area—the forest, he thought excitedly—astonished him. It was nearly as big as a city, if not bigger!
Soon after leaving the clearing, they moved into a long narrow corridor of rock cut through the forest. The rock was uncarved but for the work of the elements and the passage of time, and it too was beautiful in a stark, harsh way.
Loose bits of gravel crunched under the horses’ hooves, and the sounds echoed and bounced around the pass.
The pass took them higher up what the Prince soon came to realize must be a mountain.
They rounded a jut of stone, a break in the high wall of the pass, and a gust of wind threw his hood back.
He immediately turned to look out over the side of the mountain, and his breath caught in his chest. Green hills stretched out all the way to the horizon, and above them was a blue sky scudded with white and gray clouds.
Blue. The sky was blue.
But as the day wore on, the novelty dried up, and the Prince returned to brooding upon his situation.
The Exile girl, seeing him look around so avidly, had pulled the hood of his cloak all the way up and tied it more tightly in place, effectively narrowing his world to the horse and the earth passing beneath him.
The saddle began to rub him the wrong way, and he felt blisters forming on his backside.
He had ridden a horse before, of course, but never for so long.
The swaying of the beast soon made his back unbelievably sore, and after a few hours his legs began to pound with a dull, insistent ache.
But even all of this the Prince would have been able to endure, had not insult been added to injury.
Sometime past midday the Exile girl led the horse around a rather large boulder stuck squarely in their path, and the horse swerved too quickly; the Prince’s momentum kept his body going forward, and with a muffled shout of surprise, he tumbled off the side of the beast as a strap gave out with a loud snap.
As if this wasn’t enough, he couldn’t even fall to the ground with dignity; since he had been bound to the saddle, the saddle went with him, and he ended up riding inverted beneath the horse for at least ten paces, his shouts and cries muffled by the gag, before the girl noticed and burst into raucous laughter.
Finally, Tomaz, also chuckling, had come back and righted him.
They stopped when the sun set, and the Prince was untied from the saddle and deposited under an overhanging outcrop of rock.
He threw his head back with a jerk and the hood fell off to reveal that they were at the bottom of a ravine filled with trees and spiny purple-flowered bushes.
The big man came over and, after allowing the Prince to relieve himself, tied him to a scraggly tree growing through the cracks in the rocks, with just enough slack to lie down.