A lot of time passed in this fashion until Belle's fingernail paused upon the linen of her dress. For a moment, she thought she had heard...
There it was again!
There was a soft clang. Powerful in tone and keening in pitch. A collision of steel on steel.
A moment later, there was a loud cry. A second called back, and then the third joined the din!
Suddenly, voices could be heard in all directions. Some poured in through the barred slots at the top of the wall, others seemed to echo down the stairs that led up into the castle.
Scrambling to her feet, Belle reached for the little barred opening and tried to peer outside. Her eyes were in line with the grass but, still, she could see nothing. No boots, no horses’ hooves.
Whatever was happening, it was not occurring on this side of the castle.
Rushing to the bars of her cell, Belle latched hold and shouted toward the stairs, "Hello? Is anyone there? I'm down here!"
Ignoring the way the cold bars bit into her palms, Belle tried to press her face alongside them. The angle was all wrong, and she could not peer up the staircase.
"Dammit..." she muttered.
Looking about, she spotted a thin rod of wood and dived to pick it up. As the light of sunrise began to turn the cell a gloomy silver, she realized that the rod was once a leg. Apparently, the cell had once held a stool of some sort.
"I don't have a stool..." Belle muttered to herself. "But I do now have a bell."
And with as much force as her starved body could manage, Belle began to hammer upon her bars of confinement.
She struck them in no particular order, determined to make as much noise as possible. She bashed hard and she bashed often until she had made a crescendo of noise, with one strike feeding into the next.
When Belle started to tire, it felt like an age since she had first heard the sounds of fighting. But she dared not stop so that she could listen. She needed just one person to hear her. One person besides the Hunters to know where she was.
And then, as if the Lord himself had parted the clouds and chosen that day as Judgement Day, Belle spied a shadow growing on the wall of the staircase.
"Here! I'm down here!" she called out, uncaring at this point if the shadow belonged to ally or foe.
Instead, it belonged to a friend.
"Coira!"
"My lady!"
Belle thought she might cry at the sight of the sweet woman.
"What is happening? What are you doing? Are you alright?" The words could not leave Belle fast enough, but Coira was wasting no time on questions. She had hurried instantly to the bars and drawn a ring of keys from inside her apron. Belle could only stare in surprise as she tried one after another in her cell's lock.
"I am fine, mistress," she whispered, breathing heavily. "But we must see you out of here and away from the castle."
"Away from the castle?"
On the penultimate key, the lock clicked free, and Coira pulled hard on the gate. Belle pushed from the other side and, together, they had it open.
"The castle is under attack!" Coira explained, taking Belle's hand and rushing them toward the stairway. "Quickly! There was no one guarding the entrance when I came down because they were all sent to the grounds, but they might have returned if we're not quick about it."
The guards had not returned. In fact, the entire castle seemed oddly devoid of people.
Belle had not truly noticed all of the servants, liveried guards, and message boys that normally darted here and there along the corridors. But now, with them gone, the place was deadly quiet and felt strangely dangerous.
"What," Belle panted, after sprinting the staircase. Her head swam, and she felt a little dizzy, but she was determined to match Coira's pace. "What do you mean, the castle is under attack?"
"I mean just that, mistress." Coira paused the both of them at an archway and peered around the corner before she allowed them to hurry onward. "Laird Hunter brought soldiers here. A whole regiment of them."
