He wasn’t sure what happened next. All he could remember were brief flashes of images, scents, and sounds. He’d wake to see glimmers of light, and then blink and find himself in a shadowy world of darkness. Flames from torches once, and then a sickening blow to the head that caused the world to heave and spin. He smelled horse sweat and the stink of unwashed bodies. Felt something on his wrists, keeping his hands from moving. A pounding in his head, a sickly-sweet scent in the air, and salty, metallic stickiness on his lips.
He opened his eyes and found himself in a strange new world. It was a forest clearing, of that he was certain, though he’d only seen pictures such as this in books and dreams. He was laying on… grass. He couldn’t see the green color of it—green, yes, grass is green, I’ve heard so—because it was dark, but he could feel it, could feel the dirt at its base, could smell it—what a smell! He heard water flowing past him somewhere to his right and saw a deep ravine cut roughly into the ground, at the bottom of which must be flowing water… a river. He tried to turn his head, to see more of what was around him, more of this impossible world, but a bony hand reached down and forced him to look the other way, not letting him move.
Fear seized the Prince, true terror, for perhaps the first time in his life.
The hand was rough, with nails that were filed to look like claws and that dug painfully into the side of his head. The other hand reached down and roughly pulled at the front of his robes. There was a prick of something being stuck rudely into his skin, and he let out a gasp of pain as fire flooded his veins. It cleared his mind momentarily, and he looked up.
The clawed hand was gone, and a group of men were moving away, disappearing into the distance on horses. There was one man left, watching thePrince with amusement. The Prince, not knowing what to do, started to crawl toward the man, pulling himself forward with jerky, half-formed motions. He tried to speak, but a choking, gasping sound was the only thing that managed to escape his throat.
The man laughed. He stood up, came toward the Prince, drew back a heavy booted foot, and smashed it into his chest.
The Prince cried out in pain as a rib broke. The boot pulled back once more, swung forward, and again red-hot daggers of pain pierced his body, shooting up and down his limbs in time with the poison quickly killing him.
Killing him. He was going to die.
Darkness closed in as his vision narrowed. The boot swung back once more, the man still laughing. Instinctively, the Prince grabbed the leg as it swung into him, and clung to it.
He wasn’t sure how he hung on, but he did. And slowly his shoulders and chest began to itch, as if with a heat rash. The fire searing his veins seemed to pause, questioningly. There was a cry of pain from the man, and the Prince pulled on the leg; the man overbalanced and fell to the ground. The Prince, with a jerking, unseeing grope, found the man’s throat, and began to squeeze. The fire in his limbs began to recede, flowing quickly back to the point where it had entered his body as the breath and life began to drain out of the man beneath him.
But the Prince wasn’t strong enough, and with a harsh kick the man succeeded in dislodging him, and the fire of the poison returned with a vengeance. The man staggered away in a shambling half-run, but before he’d gone more than a dozen paces, he tripped and fell into the partially hidden ravine. He screamed, but the cry was cut off by a harshcrack!
The Prince lay there, gasping for breath, his chest heaving but his lungs unable to fill properly. His shoulders and back burned as he reached desperately through the Raven Talisman in the hopes it would save him. Hetried to rise, but the effort sapped his remaining strength, and he fell back to the ground, colors swirling senselessly about him before fading to the gray-black shadows of unconsciousness.
***
He next woke to a dull ache in his head and too bright of a light shining on his closed eyelids. He rolled over to hide his face—and rolled right off whatever he was sleeping on and onto a rough wooden floor.
His eyes sprang open, and he immediately regretted it. Breath hissed into his lungs, cold and crisp, and a lancing stab of pain shot from his eyes to the back of his head, down the length of his spine, and all the way to the soles of his feet, before returning to pound like a mad carpenter on the inside of his temples. The sensation made him shudder and gasp like a drunk doused in a bucket of ice water, and he quickly shut his eyes again.
“Good morning!”
The voice that called to him was very deep, and it entered his head and rattled around the inside of his skull, eliciting a pitiful moan.
“I would offer you breakfast,” the voice went on to say, its deep rumbling quality continuing to twist into the Prince’s skull like a rusty screw, “but dillixi venom does not react well with food. And when I say does not react well, I mean you’d start vomiting all over me and then you’d die. Highly unpleasant for me, at least, whatever you might think.”
The Prince managed to open his eyes again, keeping them to narrow slits, and then tried to find the source of the voice. He also tried to find his own voice, which seemed to have gotten stuck somewhere around his stomach and refused to come out of his mouth no matter how hard he tried to force it.
The first thing he noticed was the floor, because his nose was pressed up against it. It was made of rough-hewn planks of wood fitted poorly together and warped by the elements into curving, twisted lines.
He managed to raise his head slightly, despite a nasty throbbing ache in the back of his neck, and saw that the wall, barely a foot in front of him, was in the same state; indeed, it was so warped that he could see brief flashes of light from outside, though his eyes wouldn’t focus enough to allow him to discern definite shapes.
“Here,” said the voice. An enormous hand descended on the Prince and yanked him into the air. His stomach twisted violently, and he was almost sick. The hand deposited him unceremoniously into a rickety wooden chair, and when the world finally stopped spinning, he gaped at what he saw in front of him like some country yokel seeing a city landmark for the first time.
The man to whom the voice belonged was not a man but a giant—there was no other way to describe him. The Prince had to tilt his head back to look up into the man’s face, which was broad and rough, with a square, well-kept black beard that was so thick it almost looked like an extension of his chin. He was no stranger to giants—he’d been surrounded by Guardians, the elite fighting force of the Empire, since his infancy, all of whom were no less than seven feet tall—but this man would have towered over even them. He was so tall that he had to stoop inside the wooden shack lest his head bang against the ceiling.
He was not dressed at all like a Guardian, though, and perhaps that was what was so shocking. He wore Commons clothing—simple homespun in brown, gray, and green—that was strangely bulky in places. The long sleeves and pants were worn at the cuffs, and his boots—enormous leather affairs that looked as if they had consumed the entire side of a cow—were old and well-worn, creased and splashed with travel stains.
The Prince, who had never seen such a sight in his life, could make no sense of it, and for a moment questioned his sanity. But the strangest thing wasn’t thetowering hulk of a wild man holding him captive in a shack. The strangest thing was that this towering hulk of a wild man who was holding him captive in a shack was bustling around a makeshift kitchen brewing tea.
“Who are you?” the Prince managed to croak. He looked down and saw that his heavy palace robes had been removed, and that he was now dressed in a simple off-white shirt—his undershirt, he realized—and a pair of heavy brown pants he’d never seen before. “And where are my clothes?”
The behemoth of a man ignored him and instead reached over and placed a small, battered tin cup full of some steaming liquid in front of him.
“Drink,” he said firmly, his deep voice implacable. The implication seemed to be that if the Prince did not drink, drinking would be thrust upon him.
Still disoriented and unable to decide whether this was all a dream, he reached for the cup and downed the liquid contents.
As the liquid hit his throat, it began to burn, causing him to choke and gasp. The feeling of pins and needles being pushed into his skin burst into life at the tips of his fingers and toes before the sharp, stabbing sensation behind his eyes gave one final parting throb and all the pains disappeared together. The man chuckled as the Prince continued to cough and splutter, and he reached over with an arm as thick around as the Prince’s entire torso and thumped him on the back, nearly knocking him off the chair and onto the ground.
