Chapter 1
Cold seeped into my muscles, and I shivered violently. My head ached, and nausea cramped my belly. Sitting up, I groaned as pain splintered behind my eyes. Stomach clenching in protest, I lay back down to wait for some of the agony in my head to subside.
Where was I?
A memory of falling flashed in my mind. Had I fainted? My mouth was dry and sour, and I wondered if I’d gotten sick on myself. The sound of my heartbeat thudded loud in my ears, pounding in time with the pain crashing through my skull.
Where was Watson?
He should have been here, rubbing his furry cheek against mine and meowing in confusion. Sometimes, if I lay on the floor for too long, he settled on my legs, or curled up in the small of my back. Surely he was somewhere nearby, wondering what I was doing down here instead of feeding him.
It occurred to me that I wasn’t in my apartment, but I didn’t have the energy to analyze that fact just yet. I would figure it out in a minute, when the pain didn’t make my thoughts so fuzzy. My muscles were stiff and on the verge of cramping from laying on a cold, hard floor.
A distant memory flitted through my mind. Once, when I was eleven, I stubbornly refused to come inside during a backyard camp-out. Temperatures had dropped down, much colder than the forecast had predicted, but I had stayed in my pup tent with only a lightweight sleeping bag and a small pillow. My father had been furious with me, but my grandmother convinced him to let me be.
I smiled at the memory, but my cheek felt stiff and strange.
Frowning, I raised a hand to my face, tracing a patch of something crusted and sticky from my temple to my chin. Blood? Alarm spread through me as I recalled tripping and falling onto the coffee table. Prodding the skin around my face, I grimaced and inhaled sharply as I found the raw edges of a swollen cut.
Running a mental check on the rest of my body, I was relieved that I didn’t notice any other injuries. My other cheek rested on a rough wet surface, and something stiff and scratchy poked my bare skin where it touched the ground. The air around me was damp and musty, as if it had not been freshened in a long while.
A cry of pain that wasn’t my own brought me fully alert. Opening my eyes, I pushed myself up with a groan, leaning against the rough stone wall to steady myself. There wasn’t much light to see by, but I spotted the source of the sound a few feet away, huddled in a ball on the floor.
“Hey, are you okay?” I croaked, surprised by how dry and parched my throat felt. The dampness in the air only made the thirst I was now uncomfortably aware of worse. Another cry escaped my companion, bringing me back to the present. The moan was low, pitiful, and full of suffering.
“Are you okay?” I asked again, louder this time.
The figure in the corner jumped at the sound of my voice, and after a long moment, rolled over to face me. In the dim light, I couldn’t tell if they were male or female, though I would have picked male if I had to guess. His clothing hung off his thin frame, and his skin was smudged and dirty, with an unmistakable jaundiced tinge to it. A dark iron shackle peeked out from beneath the ragged hem of his pants.
Something about the blunt, square features staring back at me seemed off, somehow. Aside from the yellow skin, his eyes were too close together, and his mouth too wide. Thick, wiry hair framed a face with a broad forehead, but no eyebrows, as if someone had tried to illustrate a person by description alone. He looked mostly human. Whatever was going on here, I had just described someone as mostly human. Deep inside, a rising tide of hysteria mounted quickly, and I stifled a distressed cry, reigning in my absurd thoughts.
“Are you a witch, like her?” he asked, dread thick in his voice.
“A what?” I frowned, not comprehending. “Of course I’m not a witch. What kind of question is that?”
He continued staring at me, tucked tight into himself like a cornered animal. Uneasy at staring back into those haunted, yellow eyes, I looked away. Now that my head wasn’t pounding so fiercely, I could see that we were in a prison cell. No, not just a prison cell: a dungeon.
Confusion and panic reared their heads, and I was close to passing out again. I put both my hands behind my neck, leaning between my knees to breathe. I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know why I was in a dungeon. I didn’t know who the person in the cell with me was. And I didn’t know how I would get back home.
Breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, I forced my rising panic back under control. When I lifted my head again, my companion was staring at me, alarmed. I tried smiling to reassure him, though in truth it was much more of a grimace than a grin, especially with all the dried blood on my face.
“Can you tell me where I am?”
“The dungeon.” He tilted his head as if I were daft.
“Well, duh, Sherlock,” I snapped. “I figured that much out by myself. But where am I?”
“You are in the Witch’s castle.” He turned back to the wall, ending our brief conversation.
“The what?” I echoed my earlier words.
I massaged my temples, searching for a thread of logic, for anything at all that might help me make sense of this. Clearly, I wasn’t going to get any help from my cellmate, who had returned to huddling in a ball and moaning again in pain. What I wouldn’t give for an aspirin right now.
A castle? A dungeon? This was a joke, surely; a terrible, absurd joke, but it simply had to be a joke. I looked around the rough-hewn stone walls and floor, then the iron bars at the far end of the cell we were in. This was ridiculous—maybe I was dreaming.
My steadfast denial was shot through by several all too realistic details, however. The floor was strewn with dirty straw, and the walls were dark with damp rivulets of water. The iron bars at the front of the cell were old and pitted with rust, but looked solid. From my seat on the cold floor, I could see that there was a cell across from ours, though it was too dark to see if there were any occupants in that one.
A low, rumbling growl reverberated through the stone I leaned against. I yelped, scooting backwards so quickly that I banged the back of my head against the cell bars. The growl was followed by furious snarling, interspersed with more growling. There was a strange scrabbling noise, like claws on stone, then a muffled cry before it all went quiet again.
I panted hard, wondering what could make a noise like that. My companion didn’t so much as move a muscle at the loud outburst, but remained curled up tight in the corner. Using the cell bars to pull myself up from the floor, I ignored the dull pain in my head that flared bright for a few seconds as I stood up.
My thin tee shirt and cotton pants were no match for the chill, and it didn’t help that I was barefoot. The icy cold sent a deep ache into my toes. Rubbing my arms briskly, I peered through the iron bars. The meager light in the hall was provided by large yellow candles, dripping fat globs of wax from their iron sconces set in the wall. The dark stone glistened with condensation, and more straw was scattered in the passage between the prison cells.
“Hello? Is anyone there?”
Straw rustled behind me. I turned to see that my cellmate had rolled over, eyes wide with fear. I took a step toward him, misunderstanding his concern.
“What are you doing?” he whispered. “Hush or they’ll hear you!”
“But I’m just trying to get someone’s attention,” I said.
He looked just over my shoulder, and began to sputter. Shaking his head back and forth, he pushed himself into the corner, trying to become as small as possible. I turned, gasping as I came face to face with a menacing, silent figure on the other side of the bars.
A tall man with a stern, jaundiced face scowled at me, but remained silent. He was dressed in what I might have described as military garb, though it appeared out of date and old fashioned. He wore a long, leather duster with tarnished brass buckles that covered a yellow vest. His scarlet jodhpurs were tucked into tall black boots, dirty with dust and refuse.
The silence stretched out until it felt as brittle as a rubber band about to snap. I cleared my throat nervously, and stood up straight. Certain I could explain that this was all just a misunderstanding, I squared my shoulders with false courage, and took a step closer to the bars. The guard shifted subtly, bringing his wicked, curved halberd into view. I froze, unable to tear my eyes away from the gleaming weapon, which looked like a spear, only with a blade at one end and a sharpened pike at the other.
“I d-d-demand to know w-w-what’s going on here. You have n-n-no right to keep me prisoner!” I said, my shaking voice betraying my bravado.
“Prisoners do not make demands.”
“But I don’t understand why I am even a prisoner,” I said, taken aback by his harsh tone.
“You are a prisoner because you were caught trespassing on our lands.”
“How could I have been trespassing?” I protested. “I don’t even know how I got here!”
“That’s not my problem. You can plead your case to the Witch, if she’ll see you.” He turned on his heel and marched away.
“Hey wait!” I yelled, shaking the cell bars. “Come back!”
My shouted words echoed down the stone passage, but the guard did not return. No, no, no! This wasn’t happening. I shook the bars again, then kicked the bar in front of me, remembering too late that my foot was bare. Pain exploded in my toes.
“Ahh!” I cried, hopping back to the stone wall and sitting down to nurse my bruised foot.
My cellmate just sighed and kept his back turned to me, leaving me to my confused thoughts. The guard’s formal way of speaking was not the least of the odd things that had happened in the last few minutes. I backtracked through everything that I had experienced since I woke up, but no matter which way I looked at it, I couldn’t force it to make sense.
I was half convinced that this was some sort of fever dream, a hyper-detailed illusion, maybe even an elaborate prank. It was all so realistic—too realistic—a small voice deep inside whispering that this couldn’t be just a simple dream. I focused on the last thing that I remembered clearly, falling in my living room, and put a hand to the cut on my head. I closed my eyes, trying to figure out how I got here. Between the pounding in my head, the throbbing in my toe, and the strain of being locked in a strange dungeon, I was exhausted. I couldn’t get my tired brain to chew on the problem anymore, and before I knew it, I drifted off to a fitful sleep.
