I hadn’t meant to sleep, but the next thing I knew, I was waking up to a bright autumn sunrise spilling in through the tent flap. The two blankets were still covering me but Baron’s bedroll was empty and our chain trailed outside. I folded the blankets and placed them back on Baron’s bed, noticing as I did so that the only remaining blanket was a particularly thin one.
I poked my head out of the tent. Baron had stoked the fire to a roar and was adding some of the heavy firewood. He noticed me. “Good morning! It looks like you didn’t burn down the tent last night after all.”
“I thought about it,” I countered quickly, but then my frosty demeanor melted. Whatever his reasoning, Baron had been kind to me. The least I could do was show gratitude while I continued to plot his demise. “Thanks for the blankets,” I mumbled. “You can have them back.”
Baron poked the fire with a long stick. “That’s okay. I have my big fat body to keep me warm.” He grinned good-naturedly at me. “You should be warm too, and you’re skinny enough that you need the blankets more than I do. Oh, and that reminds me. Here.” He tossed a thin piece of fabric at me.
I caught it, confused.
“To put between the collar and your neck. I thought it might help it be slightly more comfortable.”
I instantly understood what was going on. He was going for the villain/hero routine. The sheriff was supposed to be the bad guy, and Baron was to portray the heroic knight in shining armor, rushing in to save the damsel in distress—me. They wanted me to swoon over Baron’s sculpted muscles and goodness and become putty in his large hands. Well it wasn’t going to happen.
“Right,” I huffed contemptuously. I could see my breath puff into a little cloud. My father would come for me. I didn’t need the false friendship of someone who had held a knife to my throat only a few days before. But nevertheless, I accepted the fabric and wound it around the collar so it wasn’t quite as bad as before. At least now, there was a barrier between the metal and my neck.
The next few days of solid meals followed by a few nights of sporadic sleep under Baron’s blankets did wonders for restoring my ability to think critically, and though I had finally succumbed to occasional bouts of sleep, I still found that Baron stayed awake most of each night as he continually monitored me for any signs of suspicious behavior. The only sleep he got wasbroken fragments when he was unable to stay awake any longer, sometimes at night, and sometimes during the day. Once, he burned the dinner when he nodded off and we had to eat what the cook had prepared. Baron had been right. It was awful.
The cook, a fat man with a bald head and bushy mustache, was one of the only people who ventured near our campsite. But he only did so to drop off ingredients to Baron each morning and would hurry away immediately after. In addition to staying awake more than anyone should have, Baron still had his regular duties and physical training to tend to during the day. He went and took reports from captains in whispers so I couldn’t hear, inspected troops of men as they stood at attention, and wrote up lengthy messages which he would then send to the sheriff.
By the end of the week, Baron had dark bags under his eyes that showed how utterly exhausted he was from his constant vigil. He became jumpier and more anxious every day. Sleep deprivation is a cruel taskmaster. More than once, I heard a snore that was immediately broken off as Baron snapped awake again.
He needn’t have feared. I still couldn’t figure out how to escape when I was chained to a mountain of a man. The cuff on Baron’s wrist couldn’t slide off without being unlocked, and I had no way to unlock it. Like I had pointed out to him before, it would’ve been useless to harm Baron. If he was somehow incapacitated, I would never be able to drag him. If I did manage to get my hands on a weapon, I could try to force Baron to walk out of camp in front of me, but he was so big that he would easily overpower me the first second I dropped my guard. Ropes, even thick ones, were easy enough to cut through. This chain and collar presented a whole new level of problems.
Despite that, I still continued to plan my escape.
Perhaps if the chain became weak enough, it would be easier to break apart. I searched the length of the chain in thestolen moments when Baron wasn’t looking. After pondering the situation for several days, I began surreptitiously placing the same slightly thinner than average link from the middle of the chain into the fire whenever Baron and I sat across from each other, making it look as though I had carelessly trailed the chain without noticing its whereabouts. During these times, I made sure to keep Baron’s attention off the fire, asking questions about the birds in the area, a topic he was very well-versed in.
After one particularly lengthy explanation about owl migratory patterns, Baron ducked back into the tent while I stoked the fire and tried to determine if the links were hot enough for me to break one open with a stone yet. An arrow, shot from the woods beyond, thudded between my boots, a scroll wrapped around the middle of it.
Father! Before Baron could return, I deftly snapped off the razor-sharp arrowhead, pulled off the scroll, and shoved both items into my boot as I tossed the broken arrow into the fire and hastily rearranged the burning logs to hide the arrow’s shaft. Within three seconds, the job was complete. And just as well that I hadn’t dallied. Baron poked his head out of the tent.
“Did you hear something?” he asked as he looked around.
“No,” I said casually, poking at the fire with a stick. I ignored the sharp scrape of the arrowhead against my leg as it slowly descended deeper into my boot. Baron looked towards the fire, frowned when he saw the chain in the middle, then jerked on his end of the chain so it jumped out of the fire pit. He must have decided it had been nothing and went back into the tent.
An owl’s low hoot drifted from the tree line—soft, steady, and with a familiar rhythm. My pulse jumped. Father was close by.
I kept my face blank as I bent to adjust my boot, fingers finding the thin roll of parchment hidden in the lining. No one was watching. At least…no one that I could see. I eased the scroll open beneath the shadow of my knee.
The fox flies free at noon.
A breath caught in my throat. Of course he had come. Of course he hadn’t forgotten me.
We’d built our codes together long ago for situations exactly such as these.The foxwas my code name. Andnoonmeant twelve hours ahead—midnight.
I was going to escape tonight.
I fed the note to the fire one edge at a time, watching it blacken and curl until it collapsed into glowing ash.
Could Father see the chains? He must be watching me from somewhere close within the trees, so I rose and stretched, pulling the chain to the side as I did so it would be easily visible. The link I had been regularly heating and cooling looked weaker, still red-hot from the fire. Checking to ensure that Baron was still in the tent, I picked up a heavy stone and smashed it hard against the link.
The chain vibrated and clattered more than I had expected. Brilliant. Surely Baron had felt and heard it.
I dropped to the ground and grabbed my ankle as if I’d tripped, forcing my breathing to steady.
The tent flap rustled. “What now?” Baron’s head appeared, hair tousled and eyes bloodshot from too little sleep.
“Oh, I just fell,” I said, pitching my tone somewhere between bored and offended he’d even asked. I brushed dirt from my legs, even though it would hardly be noticeable against the brown of my leggings, and winced theatrically. “The ground is uneven.I might have twisted my ankle.”
