Chapter Twenty-Four
Laila blinked a few times as she began to come around. The first thing she noticed was the smell, a terrible mixture of sweaty, drunk soldiers and damp straw and stale ale, and as those aromas struck her brain, she remembered where she was. Her eyes flashed open. It was dark, the only real light in the inn coming from the smoldering hearths on either end of the large building, full of slumbering men.
The snores were astoundingly loud. There was a balcony running around the upper floor of the building, where small rooms had been set up in a ramshackle way, but all the soldiers that had not been quick enough to claim one of those spaces were now laid out on the benches and tables on the ground floor of the inn. Her head was fuzzy and full of pain, and she felt the stiffness of her jaw where Lord Hamilton had struck her.
She blinked a few times, trying to adjust to the dim light and take better stock of her surroundings. The space was still. One of the English sellswords that were supposed to be guarding her was slouched over against the table across from her, a bottle of something clutched to his chest.
She tested the ropes that bound her hands, and while they weren’t so tight that she had lost feeling entirely, they were tight enough to be painful and completely stop her from using them. She was still trapped. There had to be a way to get these ropes off. She looked back at the slumbering knight closest to her. He had a long dagger on his hip, just out of reach. That was her way out.
“Psst,” a shallow whisper caught her attention, and she whirled her head back around to see a sheepish clerk-looking man, small in stature, with a rounded face and frightened eyes, crouching near the end of the table. She looked at him, and he began to waddle over, staying as quiet as he could. “You’re awake,” he whispered.
He looked quite out of place among the slumbering soldiers, and she found him very confusing, but her suspicions began to relax as he brought forth a water skin, uncorked it, and gently offered it to her. He tipped it back, and she tried to match the angle, getting a lot of water on herself but also managing to swallow a good amount, and the cool water was the best thing she had ever tasted, wetting the dry cracks on her lips and soothing the coarseness of her dry throat.
“Thank you,” she whispered as he brought the water away.
“More?” he whispered back. She nodded, and he helped her drink again. When he withdrew it the second time, he corked it once more.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered and then began to turn away.
“Wait!” Laila hissed. “Come back.”
He paused halfway through his shuffle, glancing back over his shoulder. She could see he was torn, caught between the morality he had that had made him offer her water and the numerous slumbering soldiers all around, all bound by Lord Hamilton’s cruelty and coin purse. He stood still for a moment longer and then turned back, looking around in what was clearly terror.
“What?” he whispered.
“What’s your name?” she asked, looking into his frightened eyes. He could have well been more scared than she was, and she was beginning to pity him. He looked around again to ensure nobody was watching and whispered back:
“Walter.”
“Thank you, Walter,” she said, keeping her voice as quiet as possible.
“I hoped it wouldn’t come to this,” he said back, sadness in his eyes.
“It’s not your fault, Walter,” she replied, glancing back at the dagger attached to the nearby knight’s belt. “Can you do something for me?”
“More water?” Walter asked, his voice growing even quieter.
“You see that dagger,” she said, nodding her head toward the sleeping soldier. He followed her eyes and locked eyes on the blade, and his face grew even more frightened.
“No,” Walter said shakily. “No, I, I can’t.”
“Nobody will know, Walter,” she whispered. “Give it to me, I’ll leave, and he will take the blame, not you.”
She saw a moment of contemplation in the clerk as if he were weighing the dangers on both sides of the scale, caught between compassion and fear, and perhaps his financial stability.
“Just reach out and grab it,” she whispered, nodding her head toward it once more. “You can do it.”
There was a clatter of a wooden bench from the far side of the hall, and Walter froze, his face going pale. “I’m sorry,” he mouthed and quickly rushed away as quietly as he could, disappearing into the darkness close to the walls.
Laila leaned her head back against the stone at her back and let out a sigh. She had begun growing hope in those few moments, hopes that the mousy little man was going to be her salvation, and those hopes, however brief, had been shattered like an icicle falling from a rafter onto a stone floor. It was crushing.
How could she have been such a fool? The same guilt and shame she had felt for running away in the first place had been replaced by the guilt and the shame of surrendering herself to such brutality. She should have known this was the sort of treatment she could have expected, and yet, once more, she thought she could fix everything herself. Now, not even Kyle was safe. She only hoped that her family was. That was the only silver lining to be found if it were even true.
She heard a bit more clattering coming from the end of the hall and squinted into the darkness to try and make out what was happening. There was a shape moving around, a large, lumbering shape of a man. It looked like he was stumbling, no doubt from all the drink the soldiers had consumed. He was likely getting up to empty his bladder, she figured, but kept watching him nonetheless, but lost sight of the shadowy shape as it moved into the darkness near the wall.
It was silent again, and Laila held her breath, trying to hear what was happening. There were the footsteps now; she could hear them again, coming closer, walking toward her. She began to feel fear as the footsteps grew closer, the misstep lumbering of a drunk man, shuffling through the dark, trying to conceal his presence.
She looked back to the dagger on the sleeping knight, trying to figure out how to get ahold of it with her hands bound behind her back, but before she could figure anything out, the lumbering shape was above her, and a large, stinking hand was over her mouth. Her eyes went wide as a shining dagger appeared before her.
